True Cross

One of those movies that I had seen show up here and there in the listings, but had never gotten around to watching, is Vera Cruz. It looks like Pluto TV has the rights to it among the streaming services, and when I noticed it was one one or another of their movie channels, I decided that I'd finally watch it so that I could do a review of it here.

The movie starts off by informing us that at the same time the US Civil War ended, Mexico was going through a war of its own. The French had sent Maximilian (George Macready) to be a puppet ruler of Mexico in France's interest, and needless to say the Mexican people mostly didn't like this. Benito Juárez (not seen here), led the revolt against Maximilian. More important, however, is that a modest number of Americans, especially those who had fought for the Confederacy, streamed southward into Mexico to make a new life for themselves or to try to make a fortune to regain what they had lost in the US Civil War....

One of thos men is Ben Trane (Gary Cooper), whose horse pulls up lame after the opening titles. Ben is going to have to destroy the horse and get a new one, and he arrives at a small place owned by another American who has multiple horses, Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster). Joe is a bit wary of strangers, even if they're fellow Americans, and you wonder whether Trane is going to be safe with Erin.

Eventually, the two, with a band of American mercenaries in tow, wind up meeting Maximilian and his solders, led by Marquis Henri (Cesar Romero). Maximilian has an important job for them. The Countess Marie (Denise Darcel) needs to get to the port of Veracruz and from there to France, presumably to rally the French in support of Maxilimian. But with Juárez's men all around, that's going to be difficult. So perhaps the Americans could form an armed escort to get Marie to Veracruz. Maximilian, of course, plans to have the Americans killed which would get a bunch of his problems out of the way.

But there's more to the convoy than just the countess, and both Trane and Erin figure out what that something is. The Countess' carriage seems to have a lower clearance than expected, and when they investigate, they realize that the carriage is carrying a whole bunch of gold. That money is going to be used to get more men and arms from Europe for the fight against Juárez. It also goes without saying that once Trane and Erin find that gold, they act like they'd want it for themselves, and not necessarily to share between the two of them.

But still, they're going to have to get to Veracruz so that they can abscond by boat with that gold. And the Juaristas are going to be chasing them all the way. Perhaps they'll kill the Americans before they can turn on each other....

Vera Cruz was made by Burt Lancaster's production company, so it's unsurprising that he gets the showy part. Of course, he was also in that earlier stage of his career where, in action movies like this, he'd really mug it up for the camera. Thankfully he doesn't have Nick Cravat with him this time to be even more obnoxious. But Lancaster comes across as less likable, and for me it wasn't just the way the script was written.

Vera Cruz was also filmed on location in Mexico, which is a big plus for the production; up to this point Hollywood westerns hadn't really been filmed south of the border even if they were set in Mexico. The motley crew of American mercenaries also gave some future stars fairly early roles, such as Ernest Borgnine and Charles Bronson (still credited here with his birth name Buchinsky).

All in all, Vera Cruz is a well-made western, and not a bad one, although there's a reason why it doesn't have the reputation that some of the other westerns of the era have.

One of the FXM offerings not just pulled out of the vault

Back in 2019, I did a post on the Fox movie My Friend Flicka, which I didn't care for. The movie was popular on its release in the middle of World War II, however, and Fox decided to spring for a sequel. That sequel, Thunderhead, Son of Flicka, has been in the FXM rotation for a few months now. Being one of the few FXM offerings that I hadn't blogged about before, I decided to record it. It's going to be back on FXM tomorrow (October 8) at 4:40 AM, so I recently watched it to be able to do a review on it.

Most of the main cast of My Friend Flicka returns, with the main star being Roddy McDowall as Ken McLaughlin, son of a horse rancher. Apparently, the horse ranchers let their horses run free during the winter months, gathering them back together in spring. Ken goes out to get his favorite horse, Flicka, and discovers that Flicka has finally given birth to her foal. But that foal has white hair, which might seem odd considering that neither Flicka nor the putative father, Banner, have white hair. Ken plans to rais the foal to be a racer and win lots of prize money.

Meanwhile, Dad (Preston Foster) invites a couple of people over to talk shop: neighbor Mr. Sargent and cavalry officer Maj. Harris, who buys a bunch of the McLaughlin's horses. The adults talk about an albino horse that invades the various ranchers' herds, absconding with a bunch of mares. The obvious assumption is that this albino raped poor Flicka but didn't take Flicka with him back to wherever it is that Albino runs wild. Or ran wild, since nobody has seen Albino in years.

Ken's foal, first named Goblin, is tough to break, which lends more credence to the idea that Goblin is the son of Albino, even though Ken later claims that he took Flicka over to the Sargent place and engaged in a bit of illicit animal husbandry, getting one of Sargent's stallions to copulate with Flicka and knock her up. But Goblin can run fast, and that gives Ken the idea of turning Goblin, eventually renamed Thunderhead, into a racehorse. This goes badly, however, as Thunderbird balks midway during a race and picks up a leg injury that really ought to have the responsible adults shoot the horse dead, although they only retire Thunderbird.

That's important to the plot because, wouldn't you know it, Albino finally shows up again to lure away more of the mares for his harem. Thunderbird runs off, and one hopes that he's like Luke Skywalker looking for an Albino taking on the Darth Vader role. That's not quite what happens, of course.

As you can probably tell from my description of the action as equine rape and referring to the original Star Wars trilogy, I didn't care for Thunderhead, Son of Flicka any more than I cared for My Friend Flicka. I didn't even get into the presence of Hildy, young daughter of one of the ranch hands. She's developed into a particularly obnoxious brat stereotype, with probably my favorite exchange of the movie occurring early on. Ken asks her, "Can't you mind your own business?", to which Hildy responds, "I can, but that wouldn't be as much fun." A budding Karen in the making.

Thunderhead, Son of Flicka is supposed to be a family film, however, so all of the adult themes aren't handled anything like the way I described them. Perhaps if they had been handled that way, the movie might be more fun.

Some people would say all women are expensive

Another one of those pre-Codes that I don't think I'd heard of before the last time it ran on TCM is Expensive Women. Maybe I'd seen the title before, since it's a Warner Bros. movie, but I certainly hadn't seen the movie. In any case, I decided to record it and watch it to be able to do a review on it here.

Dolores Costello, one of those pre-Code actresses whose career didn't survive very long, stars as Connie, a woman of means who is somehow able to live in a good apartment with a maid and spend her time partying with the smart set, and continue doing this even though there's a depression going on. Not that she particularly cares for this lifestyle, as we see almost immediately when her obnoxius drunk friend Bobby shows up, trying to get her to go to another of those parties. Eventually she relents, going to a party where she meets pianist/composer/music teacher Neil (Warren William), declaring to him that she's one of those "expensive" women.

Neil can somehow afford to get invited to such parties too, but, like Connie, he doesn't really care for the lifestyle. So the two leave the party and go back to Neil's apartment, where the two talk together like Nancy Carroll and Cary Grant in Hot Saturday, wither her spending the night at Neil's place. Bobby figures out what's going on, and is a complete dick about it. Meanwhile, Bobby, Connie, and Neil keep going to the same sort of parties.

Attending one of those parties is Arthur Raymond (Anthony Bushell), who is returning from the UK after working their for a while in the company's London office. Connie falls for him too, since he's what Hollywood tried to pass off as a desirable man for 1930. He apparently knows Neil, but more importantly for the plot, he falls in love with Connie, and the feeling is soon mutual.

Even more importantly for the plot, Arthur is married, but in one of those loveless marriages where Arthur would really rather get a divorce if only his wife would let him. Well, not just his wife, but his father, Melville (H.B. Warner). Dad isn't stupid, and knows that dumping the first wife for Connie would be bad news for Arthur. Eventually, Dad forbids Arthur from seeing Connie again, and Arthur, being a milquetoast, goes along with it.

But then Bobby invites Connie to another party, and it just happens to be at the Raymond place. Arthur tries to talk alone with Connie, but Bobby finds out and threatens to gossip about it, leading to a gun being drawn, and....

Expensive Women is one of those movies that people who aren't into old movies are going to find extremely dated. It's difficult to understand some of the character motivations, and looking at things from the cultural standards of 2023, one want to take the characters by the neck and shake them until they get some sense. It's also got less of the things that make pre-Codes so seemingly transgressive. A lot of that is provided by Molly (Polly Walters), Connie's best friend. In one scene, Neil has arrived at a party by taxi, and tells Molly to patronize the driver. "Oh, he's been patronized", Molly responds. "Now he wants to be paid!" Oh my.

So Expensive Women is probably more likely to be enjoyed by people who are already fans of pre-Codes. For people who don't know so much about pre-Codes, I'd start with one of the more "shocking" ones.

More than just the two of us

I have a reasonable command of German, so I'm always interested to find more comment in German. So when came across a movie that was relatively recent by my standards, You & I, I still decided to watch it.

Jonas is a photographer who lives in Berlin and has a girlfriend whom we never see, although we hear her on Jonas' answering machine as Jonas basically blows her off. Jonas is basically planning on taking a small working vacation out to the Uckermark, a sparsely populated (at last by German standards) district northeast of Berlin and full of lakes and bucolic landscapes. Jonas spent some time in London, living there for a year with a Brit named Philip, and Jonas has invited Philip to come visit him and spend some time together on vacation, including an old manor house Jonas' uncle owns.

Philip is gay, and definitely not shy about it. You wonder if he's the sort of person who would take part in a pride march fairly undressed considering how comfortable he is letting Jonas take candid nude photos of him (think coming out of the water from skinny dipping and the like, not posed in the studio). It's to the point that you might find yourself wondering whether Jonas is really gay but in the closet, or maybe bi-curious, and that tension is part of what makes the movie tick.

And then, to make things more tense, the two pick up a Polish hitch-hiker named Boris. He seems really repressed at first, and is very uncomfortable with Philip's openness and lack of body issues. But when he finds that Philip and Jonas had spent a year together in London, he asks whether the two of them are a gay couple, which is met with laughter. It's enough for Boris to open up, and we find that he may be the one that's been in the closet all this time.

To be honest, there's not all that much going on in You & I, but for me, that's one of the things that made the movie more enjoyable. These feel a lot more like real people than the cardboard cutouts we get when people want "representation", not fitting any stereotypes. The story, what little of it there is since in some ways this is closer to a slice of life movie, intelligently asks the viewer to fill in the blanks. And the resolution of the story isn't necessarily what you'd expect.

So if you can find You & I -- I came across it on one of the streaming platforms although I don't recall right now which one -- definitely give it a watch.

Phone Call from an Amnesiac Soldier

TCM had a spotlight a couple months back on B movies, in which they showed a bunch of movies that I hadn't seen before. This gve me the chance to record them and watch, and it's only now that I'm beginning to get to them. First up is Identity Unknown.

Richard Arlen plays, well, I can't give you the name of the character because at the beginning of the movie he doesn't really have a name. The movie was released in early 1945, or in the late stages of World War II. The character was found near death in a farmhouse in France, together with three other GIs, except that the other three were dead already. They were killed by some sort of explosion that somehow knocked the dog tags off of them with the result that Army doctors can't put each set of tags back with the soldier who wore them. And of course, this was the days before they knew what DNA was, so it's not as if they could do an identification that way. (Also surprisingly, apparently none of the four had dental records.)

The other reason I can't give the name of the Arlen character is that he wakes up in the Army hospital with a fairly severe case of amnesia, such that he doen't remember his identity; if he did, we wouldn't have much of a movie, now, would we? The one thing that saves Arlen's character is that the Army has the last known addresses of each of the four soldiers whose dog tags were in that farmhouse. Perhaps after being released from the hospital and demobbed this soldier, who has taken on the name Johnny March because, well, he does need a name after all, even if it's an obviously fake one, can go to each of the four addresses until somebody recognizes him.

The train that the Army puts him on goes through one of the towns on Johnny's list, so he gets off there to try to cross off the first name on that list. Except that he hasn't been given official leave yet, so he's technically AWOL, if not being treated as a deserter. Now, you'd think the Army could have cleared this up with the MPs, but that doesn't seem happen until the end of the movie. That town in Connecticut is home to Sally MacGregor (Cheryl Walker), who was the wife of the man whose name was on the dog tags. Johnny claims to be a friend of the man, at least once he learns he's not the man in question. Sally begins to develop feelings for him, but she's also not happy about being duped.

Johnny then goes to West Virginia where he meets a boy (Bobby Driscoll) who's lost his father; the brother of a soldier from Chicago who was involved in illegal gambling; and finally the parents of a farmer in Iowa who are planning to sell off the family farm now that their son is dead. But if none of these four people were Johnny, than just who is Johnny? And how did he lose his dog tags only for them never to be found?

Identity Unknown is the sort of movie where, if you think about it, there are a whole lot of plot holes. As I was watching the movie, I thought about the Gary Merrill film Phone Call from a Stranger, which has some of the same themes but handles them a lot better. But then, that wasn't a B movie. For a B film from a studio like Republic that rarely could afford to have a large budget, Identity Unknown isn't a bad little movie. And it's only about 70 minutes, so it's you like you'll have invested too much of your time if you don't particularly care for it. But I think you'll like it.

TCM Star of the Month, October 2023: Charlton Heston

Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur (Oct. 4, 8:00 PM)

Now that we're into a new month, it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time out, it's Charlton Heston, who was honored quite a few years back. I'm not certain how far back; a search of the blog didn't reveal any previous Star of the Month post like this one for Heston, but then, in the earlier days of the blog I didn't do posts like this for every Star of the Month. In any case, Heston's movies will be airing every Wednesday in prime time on TCM, starting tonight with Heston's Oscar-winning performance in Ben-Hur.

I'll admit that I don't have that many pictures of Heston on my hard drive. One of the obvious ones was of him playing Moses in The Ten Commandments, which I used when Heston died back in 2008. This even though it was always obvious that TCM wouldn't be running The Ten Commandments considering how ABC runs it pretty much every year in the run-up to Easter. I haven't looked in great detail at the line-up of Heston movies, other than to search for ones that are currently in my YouTube TV library in order to watch them and do posts on them. That means in a week's time, you'll be getting a post on The Hawaiians (1:30 AM, Oct. 12, or late in the evening of Oct. 11 in the Pacific time zone).

I figured (correctly) that among the movies that would show is Soylent Green, since it's fairly famous and it's also a late MGM movie; as a result, I looked for a photo of Heston in it, and found a good one of him and Edward G. Robinson, this being Robinson's final role. Soylent Green kicks off the final night of Heston programming, at 8:00 PM on Oct. 25.

Four of the musketeers

About six weeks ago, I mentioned the 1970s version of The Three Musketeers, and how because the producers really made too much material, they decided to split the movie into two, even though this would piss of the actors. The second of those movies got the name The Four Musketeers (sometimes also subtitled Milady's Revenge or The Revenge of Milady), and that movie will be on tomorrow (Oct. 4) at 10:30 AM. in honor of Charlton Heston.

If you remember the first movie, as it ended the musketeers had just saved the bacon of Anne (Geraldine Chaplin), the Queen of France, who was haing an illicit relationship with the English Duke of Buckingham (Simon Ward), even though their two countries were at war. Part of that war was religious in nature, and French Protestants were in rebellion in the Breton port of La Rochelle. Cardinal Richelieu (that's Charlton Heston) had figured out that it's the queen's dressmaker Constance (Raquel Welch) who has been passing the message between Anne and Buckingham, well, with help from D'Artagnan (Michael York) who is her boyfriend. So Richelieu orders his men to capture Constance.

Meanwhile Milady de Winter (Faye Dunaway) wants to gain revenge on the musketeers as well, so she goes in with Richelieu by seducing d'Artagnan to get him away from Constance. D'Artagnan can't be bothered to think with his big head, so he takes the bait. D'Artagnan also finds out that Milady has a brand, which was a sentence for a crime she committed. It's also a sign that she had been in a relatonship with Athos (Oliver Reed), but he killed her -- or he thought he did -- when he found out about Milady's criminality.

Anyhow, the musketeers set out to find Constance, and all of them but D'Artagnan eventually do, sending her to Armentières for safe-keeping until the musketeers can do their other duties and go back and fetch her. Milady, for her part, still wants to kill d'Artagnan and Constance, and the rest of the movie is one long series of adventures and action scenes as Milady's right-hand man Rochefort (Christopher Lee) pursues the musketeers across western France.

The plot of The Four Musketeers is not hampered as much by the editing of the movie into two separate features as I thought The Three Musketeers was. That having been said, I thought the main plot was fairly thin, and more or less a hook on which all those action scenes were hung. Now, it does feel like the stars making this are having a blast doing it, since they didn't know yet they were to get shafted by only getting paid for one movie while making two. Oliver Reed is well cast; Heston is getting into the eminence grise phase, and all of the women feel slightly miscast. But The Four Musketeers is ultimately just about entertaining enough to be worth a watch.

Don Knotts takes on the generation gap

If you've seen Don Knotts movies like The Incredible Mr. Limpet or The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, you'll know that there's something quaint about them, much the way that I described the movie Yours, Mine, and Ours as an unashamedly square movie that stood the test of time much better than 1960s movies that tried to be hip. Knotts did eventually get cast in one of those movies that was trying to be hip, and that movie, The Love God?, ran on TCM not too long back.

We don't see Knotts until several minutes in. The movie instead starts with Osborn Tremaine (Edmond O'Brien), a publisher of dirty magazines that includes nearly-naked pictures of women, including his wife Evelyn (Maureen Arthur). Osborn has gotten in trouble with the law on several occasions for sending obscene materials through the mail, and as the movie opens he's before the court yet again. He gets another suspended sentence, but there's a bigger punishment for him: the Postmaster General revokes Tremaine's fourth-class mailing privleges. This is the class that allows magazine publishers to send in bulk at significantly reduced rates, and losing that privilege means Tremaine won't be able to send out his subscriptions at an economic price.

As the Tremaines are traveling back home, they enter the small town of Peacock Falls, founded several generations back by the Peacock family that is falling on slightly hard times thanks to current generation member Abner Peacock IV. Abner is an avid bird watcher and has been producing Peacock magazine, which in theory is supposed to appeal to bird watchers, but doesn't seem to have much of a subscriber base. And since it's published from an old building, the other siblings have decided to liquidate this money-losing asset unless somebody can come up with the nearly $50,000 to save it.

This gives Tremaine an idea. He doesn't want the magazine so much as Abner's fourth-class mailing permit. Osborn comes up with the ridiculous idea of buying the rights to publish the magazine and distribute it with the permit, while Abner will remain the publisher of record, since Abner has no clue that Osborn can't be a publisher. This also serves Osborn well, as the authorities wouldn't be coming after him, but after Abner instead. And to keep the authorities from coming after Abner, Osborne sends him on a wild goose chase (no pun intended) to find a famously reclusive bird in the Amazon rain forest, far, far away from civilization.

Abner returns to America, and unsurprisingly gets picked up on an obscenity charge that he knows nothing about since of course he's been in South America for months while Osborn has been the de facto publisher togther with a gangster, J. Charles Twilight. An obscenity trial is held, and an ambulance-chasing civil liberties attorne gloms on to the case. This makes Abner a national celebrity, although he vows to clear his name from the smut allegations.

However, Osborn, Twilight, and their editor Lisa LaMonica (Anne Francis) realize that Abner has to keep publishing smut in order to keep the magazine profitable and protect civil liberties. To this end, they attempt to turn Abner into a swinger, not that Abner could ever actually live like a swinger. Besides, he's got an equally square girlfriend back in Peacock Falls who is still waiting for him....

The Love God? is the sort of movie where it's easy to see why some studio execs and stars, especially those who want to be seen as adjusting to the new times without a Production Code, would think this is great material. And in some ways, casting Don Knotts is a stroke of genius, as he's about as far from a love god as anybody could cast in late 1960s Hollywood. However, Knotts turns out not to be the right person for the role, which I think needs someone who can let everybody be funny around him -- think Henry Fonda in Yours, Mine, and Ours. Instead, Knotts' nebbish persona that worked so well in previous movies leaves him looking shrill here, and the humor seems terribly dated instead.

So The Love God? is one of those movies that should probably be seen as a sort of product of a time and watched just to see how such a movie could go so wrong. But if I were recommending Knotts to someone new to movies, I'd start with one of his other movies like the two I mentioned at the start of the post.

Our Man in Havana

I've stated on several occasions before that I'm not the biggest fan of those "serious" 1960s spy movies. One (well, technically not a 1960s film) that's not quite so serious, although also not a spoof like the Matt Helm movies, is the 1959 film Our Man in Havana. I had actually never seen it before, so when I noticed it was available on one of the streaming services, I decided to watch.

The movie informs us that it was set before the "recent" revolution in Cuba finally succeeded -- the movie was made on location in Cuba but based on a 1958 book by author Graham Greene. It tells the story of James Wormold (Alec Guinness), who is working as a vacuum cleaner salesman for a British company's Havana office. You would think that this is a job that doesn't pay all that much money, and to make matters worse, James is a widower with a teenaged daughter Milly (Jo Morrow) who has expensive tastes.

Somebody in MI6 back in London, most likely spymaster "C" (Ralph Richardson) has come up with the brilliant idea that they should recruit spies from among normal people, because apparently the professional spies aren't getting the job done and all the professionals on the other side know who the British professionals are, anyway. So the head spy in the Caribbean, Hawthorne (Noël Coward), code number 59200, approaches Wormorld with a proposition to do some spying for his motherland. Wormold isn't so sure, but he could use the extra money, so he takes up the offer.

Of course, part of what is supposed to be the humor in the movie is that Wormold has no idea what he's doing, since he hasn't been given much instruction by Hawthorne. And Wormold is expected to recruit his own spies, like some sort of twisted multi-level marketing scheme. So after a bit of picking the mind of a friend, the American doctor Hasselbacher (Burl Ives), Wormold decides that he's just going to make crap up.

But for better or worse, Wormold is good at coming up with plausible secrets. The folks back in London believe the secrets, while the Cubans think Wormold has come up with something even though he hasn't. With that in mind, the British send a secretary, Beatrice (Maureen O'Hara), out into the field to assist Wormold. The Cubans, meanwhile, assassinate of one Wormold's underlings, and the Cuban authorites in the form of Segura (Ernie Kovacs) start to put the pressure on Wormold. Wouldn't it just be easier to declare him persona non grata and deport him back to the UK?

The big problem I had with Our Man in Havana is that it felt like one of those stories that was trying to be too clever by half, and as a result winds up not being all that great, despite the presence of a pretty good cast. It's not as bad in that regards as the grimmer spy tales of the 1960s, but it still didn't work for me. But because of the cast, Our Man in Havana is one of those movies you're definitely going to want to watch and judge for yourself.

Just like last October 1

I was looking ahead through the channel listings, and as I saw what's coming up on FXM I couldn't think of what I wrote just about one year ago. I've long written that FXM has a thing about taking movies out of the vault, running them to death, and then putting them back in the vault for a while. The change-up oin which movies come out of the vault and which go back in also seemed to be at the start of a month. But then October 1, 2022 came along and I noticed a much broader change in the lineup. And that seems to be happening again this year.

A couple of the movies have been around for a few months at least, starting with the first movie of the day, My Cousin Rachel, which will probably have aired by the time you see this post. But there's a series of movies later in the day that are back for the first time in quite a while, at least as far as I can remember:

Pickup on South Street at 8:30 AM;
Night People at 9:55 AM;
House of Bamboo at 11:30 AM; and
The Third Secret at 1:15 PM.

The schedule changes continue at least as far ahead as I can look in the FXM schedule, starting with Prince of Foxes at 6:00 AM tomorrow, October 2. I'll probably have a few more posts in October over some of the movies that are finally coming back out of the vaults.