For some values of passion

Claude Rains will be TCM's star in Summer Under the Stars coming up in a few hours, and his day concludes with a movie I didn't know about until the last time it ran on TCM a few months back: The Passionate Friends. That airing comes up overnight tonight, or early tomorrow morning depending upon your point of view, at 4:00 AM.

Rains may technically be the star here, at least the male star, as the real leading character is played by Ann Todd. She plays Mary Justin, and as the movie opens it's some years after World War II and she's on her way to a well-deserved vacation at a resort on a lake in the Alps. (The Alps scenes were filmed in France, although the plot synopses have the action taking place in Switzerland.) While lying in bed at the resort waiting for her husband, she hears a voice that sounds very familiar, and she has a flashback....

At the start of 1939, Mary is married to Howard Justin (that's Claude Rains), who does some sort of banker's work which is soon going to take him to Germany and Italy to assess the situation in those two countries with the possibility of war on the horizon. But at a New Year's party, Mary runs into Steven Stratton (Trevor Howard), a science professor. It turns out that they had known each other in the past, before Mary married Howard, and that the relationship ended in a breakup that wasn't really a breakup, something shown in another flashback.

But in 1939 with Howard away on the Continent, Mary and Steven are able to see each other again and resume their relationship, at least until Howard returns. Howard is no dummy, and figures out that something is up, and when Mary and Steven return ostensibly from the theater, Howard knows this is a lie, and forces Mary and Steven to break up their relationship again. He's not going to grant Mary a divorce.

So as we go back to the present day, we learn that it's Steven who's wound up on vacation at the same resort as Mary, who is in a day or two going to be joined by Howard. Mary and Steven haven't seen each other for years, since Mary and Howard spent the war on government business in Washington. And it's just by pure dumb coincidence that the two wound up at the same hotel together. Still, not having met each other in years, they decide to spend the day on an excursion to one of those alpine peaks you can get to by cable car. They're safe, since Howard isn't supposed to show up until tomorrow.

Except, of course, that Howard is able to get an earlier plane, which enables him to get to the resort as Mary and Justin are coming back across the lake by water taxi. If Mary had been with any random stranger, it might not have been a big deal, but it's Steven, again, which really ticks off Howard.

I, and a lot of other viewers, couldn't help but think of Brief Encounter as I was watching The Passionate Friends, as both movies were directed by David Lean. I think I've mentioned before that I'm not the biggest fan of Brief Encounter mostly because I had difficulty sympathizing with the Celia Johnson character. By the same token, I found it hard to feel for Ann Todd's character. But worse is that The Passionate Friends feels like it has an even more muddled plot than Brief Encounter. The leads here all do fine acting jobs, but they're betrayed by that story structure.

Still, The Passionate Friends has that very British quality of seeming like a prestige film on a lower budget than what Hollywood would have done with the material. That, and the fact that I always think you should judge for yourself, are things that make The Passionate Friends worth watching and drawing your own conclusions.

Operation Frankton

Another person who was honored last August in TCM's Summer Under the Stars and whose movies are getting close to expiring from my DVR as a result is José Ferrer. A movie of which I'd heard the title but had never actually seen the movie is The Cockleshell Heroes, so I recorded it to do a post on it.

Intertitles just after the opening credits inform us a bit about the history of the Royal Marines, which were founded in the late 17th century but didn't get the "Royal" appellation until April 1802. Fast forward 140 years, to early 1942. This is, of course, the middle of the European theater of World War II. The Nazis have occupied a goodly portion of the continent, and are using various ports to make a mess of Allied shipping and naval movements in the Atlantic. Maj. Stringer (José Ferrer) shows up seemingly unannounced at a British military base, since he decided to kayak in which seems like a serious military breach.

Of course, that's part of the plan. Maj. Stringer is sent to where he's going to have his office, next to Capt. Hugh Thompson (Trevor Howard). Capt. Thompson has been in the military since 1918, but is only a captain, so outranked by Maj. Stringer, which is a bit of a plot point since it implies that Thompson did something that prevented him from rising above the rank of captain. In any case, Stringer informs Thompson of his plan, which is to come up with a type of collapsible two-man kayak (they us the word "canoe" because British English considers kayaks a type of canoe) and paddle up the estuary of the Gironde to the city of Bordeaux, where the Germans have a base from which they're attacking the British. Then, the commandos will attach magnetic mines to the hulls of the ships, which should blow up and sink the ships.

Now, if you've seen enough war movies, you'll know that there are several standard tropes. One is that the first part of the plot involves preparations for the operation. Maj. Stringer brings in a bunch of Marines to see who might be most suitable for the operation, and eventually whittles the crew down to about a dozen who were able to get across Britain dressed as Nazis in a way that frankly makes the British populace look stupid. But the men don't really respect Stringer, with the result that their first practice event trying to paddle up the Thames at night is a total disaster. There is, however, one funny scene involving what is actually a live mine and the marines' attempt to dispose of it at sea dressed only in their swimming trunks. (I did, however, wonder why they trained in trunks since the real operation would have them in a frogman's swimming outfit.)

And then they head off to the southwest of France for the difficult operation. One of the boats gets damaged, and those two men quickly get captured by the Germans, although they refuse to give up any information. The others do make it to Bordeaux, as you might guess since the title of the movie is The Cockleshell Heroes. But can they escape?

As you might have guessed from the title of this blog post, The Cockleshell Heroes is based on a real operation called "Operation Frankton" that tried to destroy German ships in Bordeaux. However, the real Operation Frankton was a failure because of its secrecy: it apparently interfered with another operation that likely would have had a higher chance of success and didn't cause as much damage as the British might have liked. José Ferrer directed, and the direction feels formulaic, although that may be down to the script as well, from actor/director Bryan Forbes.

Having watched The Cockleshell Heroes, I can see why it's not so well remembered. It's by-the-numbers, but something that in the end is entertaining enough if unmemorable.

Remembering Gene Hackman: Superman: The Movie

Gene Hackman's death was announced the other day, and I mentioned that I had his appearance in the 1978 film Superman: The Movie on my DVR. So I decided to watch it and schedule it now and move some other stuff around to be able to do a review on it.

An opening establishing sequence mentions how the Superman comic book character was created in 1938, and that first issue apparently told the story of how Superman, real name Kal-El, was born on the planet Krypton a long time ago in a galaxy far away (wait, that's a different backstory). However, Krypton orbits a sun that's about to go nova, something that only scientist and prosecuting attorney Jor-El (Marlon Brando) is able to figure out. The rest of the Kryptonian elite don't want to panic the population. Jor-El also happens to be the father of infant Kal-El, so he creates a spaceship to send Kal-El to a distant planet which, as we all know, is Earth.

Kal-El's spaceship is perceived as a meteorite when it crashes into Earth near the town of Smallville, where Kal-El is found by Ma and Pa Kent (Glenn Ford and Phyllis Thaxter) and given the name Clark. They realizes he's got superhuman strengh, but keep the secret for various reasons, right up until the day Pa dies of a heart attack. Clark realizes he has to go off on a quest to figure out what his true purpose for being on Earth is.

Clark's (now played by Christopher Reeve) journey of course takes him to Metropolis, and gets him a job at a cub reporter at the Daily Planet, which is where he meets Lois Lane (Margot Kidder). It's also where he starts performing superhero feats, like when the helicopter Lois is riding in suffers a fault that leaves hanging off the edge of the Planet building. Clark Kent turns into Superman and saves her as well as doing several other good deeds. All of this brings Superman to public attention while nobody is bright enough to put two and two together to figure that Kent and Superman are one and the same. Meanwhile, Lois, despite being a modern woman, has hormones, so of course she's attracted to this big strong guy who saved her.

Superman: The Movie has a listed running time of 143 minutes, and at this point we're already into the second half of the movie without even having reached what is putatively the main plot line of the movie. That would involve supervillain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman). Lex seems to have only one employee, bumbling Otis (Ned Beatty), as well as a girlfriend, Eve (Valerie Perrine), and lives in a secret lair 200 feet below Grand Centra Station. Lex also knows that one of the things you can't really make more of is land, so land is the key to wealth. And he plans to increase his wealth in a wacky way. You'll know from your geography classes how the San Andreas fault runs through California and how it's moving Los Angeles closer to San Francisco on a millions of years timescale. The thinking is that the part of California west of the fault is going to sink into the sea, so Lex has bought a ton of land to the east so that when the west sinks into the sea, his land will be seafront land worth zillions. Now he just needs to speed things up by exploding the San Andreas fault!

Like I said, it's ridiculous, but it's also the sort of fiendish plot that allows for all sorts of special effects; remember, the all-star disaster movie Earthquake had only come out a few years prior. Lois is out west trying to get a story on the corporation buying up all that land, while Lex has discovered somehow that kryptonite is a chemical that saps Superman's strength. Lex lures Superman to his lair, puts a chain of kryptonite around Superman's neck, and leaves before waiting for Superman to die. So as you can guess something is able to save Superman, and he's able to fly off and derail Luthor's devious plot.

A lot of people give Superman: The Movie very high marks, which I guess is because it's one of the movies that really made the idea of the big-budget superhero movie a viable thing. That, and its iconic John Williams score. However, I have to say that this is a movie where if you find yourself actually doing thinking you'll see how little of it really works. The buildup goes on way too long. Many of the characters are just way too stupid. Even by the standards of the 1970s, I didn't find the special effects very good. I don't know if TCM had a bad print, but a lot of the photography looks oversaturated. And Reeve's acting isn't very good here.

However, it you don't think much about what you're watching, it's easy to see why Superman: The Movie was such a box office hit. It's certainly extremely terribly entertaining despite its flaws. And there is that John Williams score. And Hackman looks like he's having a blast getting to go way over the top with the idea of the supervillain. So while Superman: The Movie has a lot of flaws, on the whole I think the entertainment value does outweigh those flaws, especially if you don't think too hard.

Teacher O'Zhivago

Robert Mitchum was TCM's Star of the Month in January, and one of his movies that I recorded not having seen it before was Ryan's Daughter. It's on TCM again during 31 Days of Oscar since it got multiple nominations. That airing comes up overnight tonight at 1:45 AM (or early tomorrow depending upon your perspective and time zone), so I made a point to watch in order to to a review in conjunction with the upcoming showing.

The movie starts off with a woman walking along a beach somewhere in the west of Ireland. That woman, Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles), is the daughter of the local publican, Tom Ryan (Leo McKern). At the pub, we learn that it's around 1917, which would be the later stages of World War I, but before American involvement really turned the tide of war. Also, 1917 was just after the Eastern Uprising in Ireland. Ireland was still a part of the United Kingdom at the time, but a lot of people on the island wanted independence from Britain, while UK soldiers are also stationed on the island.

Returning from a visit to London is the local teacher, Charles Shaughnessy (Robert Mitchum). The first thing he does is go to the cemetery to visit the grave of his dearly departed wife. It's been a couple of years since Charles became a widower and it might be time for him to start thinking about finding another wife. Meanwhile, Rosy wants any sort of romance, just so she can get the heck out of this dead-end of a village, and when she meets Charles, she allows herself to be swept off her feet, even though for him, it's more a matter of practicality. When Rosy discovers that marriage isn't all it's cracked up to be, it leaves her rather disillusioned.

There's still another main character who has yet to be introduced: Major Doryan (Christopher Jones). He's obviously in the British Army, and served with quite some distinction on the front over in France. However, his service resulted in several injuries. One is a leg injury that's left him with a limp. More seriously, however, is a case of shell shock, which is part of why he's being sent to a backwater like this. However, he's a soldier in a uniform, and that's enough for Rosy. As you can guess, the two begin an affair.

But Doryan is English and Rosy is Irish. And this village is one of those places where the locals largely support independence from Britain, so they've been working to try to make life difficult for the British troops stationed there. At the same time, support isn't unanimous as they've got an informant in their midst. So when they try to run munitions, the British are going to find out, which is going to lead to disastrous consequences.

And then Charles is going to figure out that Rosy has been having an affair with Doryan. That also is going to have terrible consequences. Not only is Charles going to be unhappy, but the locals come to the logical conclusion that perhaps Rosy was the one informing on them to Doryan. After all, she was sleeping with the guy.

Ryan's Daughter was panned by critics at the time of its release, and it's not hard to see why. The movie runs 200 minutes, and its an incredibly slow 200 minutes at that. It's more of an intimate story than an epic, which doesn't have to be a bad thing. But here, the movie kept reminding me of Doctor Zhivago, a movie of which I'm not a fan to say the least. Part of that is the direction by David Lean, and part is the overbearing score by Maurice Jarre, who collaborated on Doctor Zhivago. While Lean made some great movies, his direction here is plodding.

As I said, Ryan's Daughter got multiple Oscar nominations, and won two. One was for the cinematography, which is the high point of the movie, and certainly Oscar-worthy, although I haven't seen all of the nominated movies to compare. The other one was for John Mills as Best Supporting Actor. He plays a character who's half Barry Fitzgerald from The Quiet Man -- the Quirky Villager who helps move the plot along at a few key times. The other half, however, is Nick Cravat, a Mills' character is for no explicable reason a mute. Either way, the character is obnoxious.

So as you can tell, I didn't particularly care for Ryan's Daughter. But as always, judge for yourself.

Technically it should be called Asteroid

I've got a brother-in-law who's a James Bond fan, so for the past several years I've been getting him DVDs of various non-Bond Sean Connery (mostly) movies as Christmas gifts. Recently, I saw another new-to-me Connery film on one of the streaming services, I think Pluto TV: Meteor.

Connery plays Paul Bradley, who at the start of the movie is participating in a boat race. But the Coast Guard approaches his boat, basically forcing them to bow out of the regatta because Bradley is needed elsewhere. Indeed, the federal government already has a special plane laid out for him to take him to Houston, and from there to Washington DC.

Houston means the headquarters of NASA, which has learned something shocking and disastrous. They had a crew on the way to Mars for the first manned mission, but sent that crew out to the asteroid belt when space events intervened. Two celestial bodies collided, sending one of the asteroids out of its asteroid belt orbit and somehow resulting in the space crew's death. But scientists on earth have calculated the asteroid's new orbit and have found that it's going to collide with earth! And that collision is going to happen in six days!

Yeah right; never mind that comets don't make it that distance in six days or that even today are generally only able to calculate probabilistic chances for an asteroid to hit the earth. This asteroid is five miles in diameter, and something that big hitting the earth is going to cause cataclysmic damage. Consider that the Tunguska event is generally believed to have been caused by something maybe 200 feet in diameter, which is less than 1% of the diameter of this asteroid.

So what is Dr. Bradley supposed to do? NASA head Harry Sherwood (Karl Malden) knows that Dr. Bradley was one of the lead scientists working on a top-secret project called Hercules. Bradley's conception for Hercules was to send a space station-sized satellite armed with a dozen or so nuclear missiles, even though this would have violated the Outer Space Treaty (I think that's the appropriate treaty), which banned putting nuclear weapons in outer space. Bradley's idea was that the nuclear missiles could be used to intercept any incoming celestial bodies, pushing them off the orbit that would have them hit earth. After all, if you can hit an object far enough away, it doesn't take much to deflect it into missing the earth.

Unsurprisingly, however, military types like Gen. Adlon (Martin Landau) took over the project since they saw the military usefulness of being able to have nuclear weapons in space pointed at the Soviet Union. He got Hercules' mission changed to one targeting the Soviets, and he'd be pissed if the Soviets found out that the US had violated this treaty. Thankfully, the President (Henry Fonda) has the intelligence that the Soviets have a similar system, and that if the two countries combined their systems, they could deflect the asteroid enough to save Earth.

Of course, this means making Hercules public and getting the Soviets to admit to their system. The Soviets send to America their chief scientist, Dubov (Brian Keith), and his interpreter, Tatiana (Natalie Wood) to assist the Americans before the asteroid can hit Earth. But since this is a disaster movie, we know that at least pieces of the asteroid are going to hit and give the producers opportunites for special effects.

The problem with Meteor is that neither half of the movie -- either the Cold War story or the disaster climax -- is given enough focus to make it work well. As a result, we get something that's talky without the payoff at the end that in theory is what the audience wants to see. It also doesn't help that a lot of the cast seem to have taken on their roles simply for the paycheck. Some criticize the special effects, but I think this is unfair, since they're not notably bad for the era. Sure, filmmakers can do things better today, but that misses the point.

Still, Meteor is moderately entertaining, and the sort of movie that's probably worth one viewing since you can stream it.

11 Harrowhouse

A lesser-seen movie coming up on FXM Retro is 11 Harrowhouse, which you can catch tomorrow at 11:55 AM.

Charles Grodin plays Chesser, and his character provides the narration as well. In the opening, he describes some people who tried to pull off a daring diamond heist at some point in the past, something much more daring than Chesser would ever think of trying in those moments he imagines himself to be like the Alec Guinness character in The Lavender Hill Mob. Those diamond thieves wound up paying for it with their lives, and little does Chesser knows he's about to get on the illicit side of the dimaond industry...

Chesser is a diamond broker traveling between the US and London, where the exchange is at 11 Harrowhouse (hence the title) and run by Meecham (John Gielgud). One day, Chesser and his girlfriend Maren (Candice Bergen) get an invitation to cisit the estate of the wealthy Massey (Trevor Howard). Of course, there's business involved. Massey has a big uncut rock that he wants cut, and he wants Chesser to do it. Chesser isn't quite exactly skilled in cutting diamonds, more in buying and selling, but this provides Chesser a chance at a big payday, so he bluffs it as agrees.

Of curse, he doesn't realize it's a ruse, as two guys waylay Chesser and Maren on their way back to London, finding and stealing the diamond. Massey ofers Chesser a chance to make it up -- but that chance involves robbing the surplus from 11 Harrowhouse! You see, De Beers in South Africa and the dealers around the world control most of the world's diamond supply, and they keep the supply artificially low to keep the price up. There's a lot of supply in the vaults at 11 Harrowhouse that would be worth billions on the market (well, never mind the possibility of a diamond glut).

Chesser has never tried a heist, but it's not as though he's got options, so he tries to learn as much about the security system as he can. Fortunately, he's got a new friend in the form of vault worker Watts (James Mason). Watts is dying of cancer, so he doesn't have to worry about any consequences of getting caught -- he'll be dead soon, anyway. But if he can get away with it, he'll be able to leave his family financially secure. So with that, they get the idea to run a small hose through the electrical conduit, and vacuum out the diamonds into a truck across the street! It's an audacious plan, but it might just work.

Of course, something is going to go wrong, and that something is that Massey is never going to let Chesser get away with it. Having gotten the diamonds, Chesser and Maren now have to run for their lives....

11 Harrowhouse is a fun little heist movie. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking here, but it's not as if there's really anything wrong either. It's just solid entertainment, with a nice amount of humor to lighten the proceedings. I have no idea why this movie isn't better known than it is.

The bad news is that the movie seems to be out of print on DVD (although available on Amazon's streaming video). The print FXM ran (at least on DirecTV; I don't know if this is an FXM problem or a DirecTV issue) was both letterboxed and pillarboxed. If you have a big enough TV, that shouldn't be too much of an issue, but I don't. Even with that said, the movie is well worth a watch.