The Hideaways

Many years ago, I think when I was still in elementary school, we read a book called From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The book was turned into a movie a few years later, but I never saw the movie being only a year old when it was first released. So when I saw the movie on the TCM schedule, I decided to record it. When I watched the movie, I noticed that it had a re-release title, The Hideaways, and it was that title that showed up on screen. But the story was mostly the same, at least not much more in the way of changes than you normally get from Hollywood adaptations.

Sally Prager plays Claudia Kincaid, a girl of about 12 who lives with her overbearing parents and bratty kid brother Jamie (Johnny Doran) in one of those fairly well-to-do Connecticut suburbs. Claudia for whatever reason doesn't think she can stand to live at home any more. And she's got a really brilliant (rolls eyes) plan to run away and live at the Metropolitan Museum. She needs money, however, and convinces Jamie to come along, because he plays cards on the bus to and from school and is a whiz, having earned a fair bit of money at least by early 1970s kids' standards.

So the two set off for New York, and Sally enjoys all the exhibits and being able to have the museum mostly to herself (well, and her kid brother) at night, sleeping in various beds that are part of the vintage furniture exhibits. I know it's the early 1970s, but didn't the museum have security cameras even in those days? The pair also make a bit of extra money by removing all the change that other museumgoers throw into the fountains, something else that you think would get noticed since such change generally gets collected and given to charities.

Claudia takes an interest in one of the new exhibits, that being a statuette of an angel that was donated by the titular Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a notoriously reclusive widow. There'a a suggestion that the statuette may have been sculpted by none other than Michelangelo himself, but there's also a lot of controversy as to the provenance of the sculpture and whether Michelangelo or one of his students made it.

Claudia seems to think she knows better than all the art historians, so she takes it on herself to do as much research as she can to try to figure out whether Michelangelo is the real sculptor or not. Rumor has it that Mrs. Frankweiler knows the answer but is keeping it a secret. Claudia's research gets her in contact first with the museum's art experts and then with Frankweiler herself (played by Ingrid Bergman in a long cameo), although Mrs. Frankweiler knows the kids are runaways and is planning to send them back home.

In the book, Mrs. Frankweiler's getting in touch with the kids' parents is what sets up the climax, as the kids have to go through those mixed-up files to discover the secret before they have to go back home. In the movie, Mrs. Frankweiler simply tells Claudia the secret, and it's a change for the worse. (I will admit however, that a climax of having two kids go through filing cabinets may not be very cinematic.) The rest of the movie is reasonably well done, being a story for kids with a sense of adventure. As an adult, I can see the flaws of course, starting with the two child actors who are expected to carry the movie. That, and the sense of unreality since none of this could ever happen in real life. But kids probably won't notice this stuff.

I guess you had to be there

I never really did the summer camp thing when I was a kid, and to be honest, I've sometimes wondered how much it was a Boomer thing that's now a product of a bygone era. I couldn't help but think about that as I was watching the movie Meatballs.

Bill Murray gets his first starring role as Tripper, a head counselor at Camp North Star, a summer camp on a lake the location of which I don't think is ever really mentioned, although there were enough visual clues to make me wonder whether the movie was filmed in Canada. (It was, if you're wondering.) Tripper worked the camp the previous summer, and you get the impression that many of the counselors there for this summer did as well, as some of them try to rekindle old relationships. That's just one of many tropes that shows up in the movie.

Another running joke that appears throughout the movie involves Melnick, the owner of the camp. He's apparently a heavy sleeper to the point that the counselors are able to move him in his bed while he's still asleep and put the bed in all sorts of humorously dangerous places.

Then there's Rudy (Chris Makepeace), one of the youths at the camp. He's a bit of a loner and misfit, since his mom died and his dad is much too busy to look after him. Now, if Rudy were an adult they could have had the courage to do what Tea and Sympathy didn't and make his character turn out to be gay, but Meatballs isn't that sort of movie. Instead, Tripper takes Rudy under his wing in a completely clean way, playing blackjack and going out for morning runs with the kid, something that's going to come back for the climax.

That climax involves Camp Mohawk, located on the other side of the lake. Mohawk is the camp for the wealthy kids who aren't misfits, and one that's perceived to be "better" than North Star in so many ways. One such was is the annual "camp Olympics" in which the two camps compete against each other in a whole bunch of sports. Mohawk has won year after year, but North Star finally figures out a way to get around Mohawk's cheating.

As I said at the beginning, I never did this sort of camping; my parents weren't wealthy enough to send us kids to summer camps. We did a couple of day camps when my parents were trying to get us involved in Scouting (which I didn't care for one bit), but that's about it. The jokes in Meatballs seem like they're recycled from every other summer-camp movie and TV show I've ever seen. Some people may like such jokes, and those who actually went to summer camps may have some nostalgic remembrance of such stuff. But it didn't really move me very much.

This isn't to say that Meatballs is a bad movie; it obviously didn't hurt Bill Murray's career one bit. But to me it felt as if there was nothing original here, and the sort of movie that didn't deserve the reputation it seems to have among a certain set.

It's now a new month

We've finally gotten through another year of Summer Under the Stars on TCM, and with a new month, it means some new spotlights on TCM, some of which I'll mention later as they come up. With the new month being September, it also means the return of things like Noir Alley and the other regular programming blocks.

It looks as though Friday nights are going to be dedicated to "coming of age" movies, although I haven't looked through the entire month's worth of Friday nights. That's more because I noticed the Saturday matinee slot sees TCM bringing back the Bowery Boys movies for the umpteenth time. I wonder how long it's going to take one of the Boys' movies to surpass Casablanca as the most often-played movie on TCM.

Noir Alley also returns to its two slots, and I wanted to bring that up because the first movie this month is The Secret Fury, which I blogged about 11 years ago only for it not to show up as I put down on the schedule. So now you'll finally get a chance to watch it.

I don't think I saw anything new on FXM Retro, although that also means that block of movies is still going, almost 11 years after I said I thought it would be gone in six months.

I've got another full-length movie review coming up later today.

Flaxy Martin

Another of those movies that seems to show up fairly regularly on TCM since it was produced by Warner Bros. back in the 1940s is Flaxy Martin. The title was always enough to notice it, but for whatever reason I never actually got around to watching it. So when Eddie Muller picked it for Noir Alley a few months back, I finally made a point of recording it in order to be able to watch and do a review here.

Flaxy in the context of the movie is a woman's name, and that part is played by Virginia Mayo. But we don't see her for a bit. Instead we see Walter Colby (Zachary Scott), who's really the lead here. Colby is a lawyer for mobster Hap Richie (Douglas Kennedy). One night, Colby is called out of bed on an urgent matter. There's been a murder, and Hap needs Walter to get the guy off, since the man picked up for the murder is one of Hap's hired thugs, and guilty as sin.

Where Flaxy comes in is that she's Colby's girlfriend, although he doesn't realize that she's seeing Hap on the side. Colby goes to see Flaxy, telling her that this time is going to be it and that he'd like to become a respectable lawyer. Good look with that thanks to the Production Code. Flaxy is smart enough to know it'll never happen, and devious enough to keep it from happening. She's about to need that deviousness.

The paid witness who helped Colby get Hap's thug found not guity on the murder charge has decided she didn't get paid enough, and threatens to squawk. Flaxy goes to see her and is too obvious not to be noticed, which is one of the risks of going through life looking like Virginia Mayo. The thug also shows up, and kills the witness, but that leaves Flaxy as the one everyone's going to accuse.

And now here's where Colby gets stupid. He decides that he'll get Flaxy off by telling the authorities that he was the one to kill the witness, since he knows there's no evidence. Somehow a jury will clear him, as long as nobody double-crosses him, and you know somebody is going to double cross him. The only way Colby can clear his name is to escape from prison and solve the case himself, with the help of a Hitchcock blonde-type woman, Nora Carson (Dorothy Malone), who rescues Colby and hides him at her place just because. (Maybe she's sex-starved, although of course the Production Code wouldn't let the writers say that.)

Flaxy Martin is a hot mess in terms of the twists and terms of the story, although thanks to the cast and Warner Bros.' professional production, it's interesting enough for one watch. But it's really more the sort of movie you watch just to be a completist, and not something that would ever be considered the best movie of anyone in the cast.

Thursday Movie Picks, August 31, 2023: Female Investigators (TV edition)

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This being the last Thursday of the month, it's time for another TV-themed edition of the blogathon. And in keeping with the theme from three weeks ago, it's about women in the workplace, specifically women investigators. I could easily think of a couple of shows, but some of them I had already used, so in the end I wound up going with three shows that I've never really seen:

Police Woman (1974-1978). Angie Dickinson. Enough said. OK, maybe not enough said; I get the impression that this was considered tough back when it was made, but I have a feeling I'd have a different view of it watching from today.

Rizzoli and Isles (2010-2016). Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander play the title characters respectively, a Boston police detective and medical examiner investigating a series of cases that are copycats of a notorious serial killer, or would-be serial killer. This one kept showing up on one or another of the digital sub-channels that I'd turn on when making dinner for Dad before we moved out of the old place and moved to streaming TV.

Get Christie Love! (1974-1975). A few months back I was looking through the streaming channel guides, and saw what looked like an interesting blaxploitation movie called Get Christie Love!. It seemed surprisingly tame and the film quality looked off (and panned-and-scanned), and it was only on doing a bit of research that I discovered I was watching a TV movie that was more or less a pilot. Teresa Graves plays the titular character police detective. The reason the movie and show seem so tame is that star Teresa Graves found God around that time, eventually leaving acting all together, and wanted storylines that wouldn't be considered so offensive.

Don't Think I've Forgotten

I think I've mentioned a group blog that I read where one of the posters once a week "recommends" mostly schlocky stuff that's available to stream for free on Tubi. A few weeks ago the guy picked a movie that's so raunchy that I won't name it here. But I mention that because in looking for the title, Tubi's search algorithm gave me a documentary I'd never heard of but which sounded interesting: Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll. Naturally, being intrigued by the subject matter, I decided to watch it.

As you can figure from the title, the documentary covers the music, most of it pop, if not quite the harder rock and roll, that was developed in Cambodia in the years after it gained independence from France in the early 1950s up to 1975, when the Khmer Rouge won the Cambodian Civil War and and basically destroyed the entire urban population in their drive to create an agrarian paradise. Many -- but not all -- of the musicians profiled in the movie were killed during the nearly four-year reign of terror, and some of the surviving musicians are interviewed along with a host of other people from western historians to people who were just plain fans of the Cambodian pop of the era. Also needless to say, but a lot of that music gets played over the course of the movie.

But you can't discuss a topic like Cambodian pop music without discussing the political situation that developed the music. King Norodom Sihanouk had learned French during his childhood when the country was a French colony and had some sympathy for western culture, to the point that when he became king of an independent Cambodia after the French left, he set about trying to modernize the country which included musically, with a fusion of traditional Cambodian singing patters and western (not just French but Latin American and eventually US American) rhythms and melodic structures. The led to a flourishing of live bands, recording being a nascent thing in Cambodia until the national radio set up a recording studio.

However, politics was never far away, especially after the French left Vietnam and that country split in two. The movie charitably portrays the King as trying to walk a tightrope, and this portrayal made me think of King Mongkut from Anna and the King of Siam, a man who was trying to modernize his country against the backdrop of outside forces who want in along with a domestic elite that may not want modernization. That domestic elite doesn't seem to be quite present in Cambodia, although I would think that's in part because Cambodia had had almost a century of modernization that Siam hadn't had.

Sihanouk also officially tried to keep the country neutral between the US and France on one side, and the various Communist countries on the other, although in reality he also had some sympathy for the Communists. But his political party was officially non-Communist and set up a one-party state. However, when the army leader Lon Nol led a coup in 1970 that deposed Sihanouk, he went into exile in the PRC and supported the Khmer Rouge.

Meanwhile, Cambodian music was developing throughout this turbulent period combined with the war in Vietnam that eventually spilled over into Cambodia. Cambodian singers picking up American musical ideas from Armed Forces Radio and integrating that into the genre is mentioned and interesting, as when one of the popular singers does a mostly-Khmer rendition of James Taylor's "You've Got a Friend". The widening of the Vietnam War eventually doomed the Lon Nol regime, leading to the Khmer Rouge takeover that killed quite a few of these singers.

The documentary is fascinating, although it does have one minor problem. I was reminded of the documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time, and how it showed a bunch of clips that expected viewers to already know who the actors on screen were. Don't Think I've Forgotten doesn't go quite that far, although at times I got the impression it might have been a bit helpful to know a bit about some of these musicians before seeing the movie. As for the music, I'm generally somewhat intellectually curious in that I find shorter looks at completely different musical genres to be interesting, although I'd probably go nuts if I had to live with such a genre being the dominant style of music. Cambodian pop is definitely that way. But for the length of a documentary like this, it works, and Don't Think I've Forgotten is one you should definitely seek out.

Angie Sinned

Today's star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Woody Strode, a supporting actor in a bunch of interesting movies in the late 1950s and 1960s. I had one of those roles on my DVR, so when I saw that it would show up in Summer Under the Stars, I decided I'd watch it so I could do a post on it today. That movie is The Sins of Rachel Cade, which concludes Strode's day at 3:30 AM (so, the early hours of August 30).

Once again, Strode is not the star, and he's certainly not playing the role of Rachel Cade. That honor goes to Angie Dickinson. As the movie opens, Rachel is on a train in the Belgian Congo in 1939. Now, if you remember your history, you'll recall two things. One is that up in Europe, the Nazis are about to invade Poland, kicking off the European theater of World War II, with the conquest of Belgium not far behind. The other is that Belgium had a reputation for being even worse to the locals than other colonial powers were in Africa, but surprisingly that bit is almost entirely overlooked.

Rachel gets off in the backwater town of Dibale. She's a missionary nurse, and a Protestant American one at that, which is equally surprising since Belgium was a largely Catholic country and I've have thought the Belgians would only allow Catholic missionaries. Running the local district, or at least the town, is Col. Derode (Peter Finch), who isn't very religious and certainly doesn't think having a woman at the mission is a good idea. He knows what the locals think of the missionaries.

Rachel is about to find that out as she makes her way to the mission to meet her nominal boss, Dr. Bikel (Douglas Spencer). Bikel desperately wants the supply of drugs that was sent along with her, in part because it includes his heart medicine. But that's not going to be necessary much longer, since Dr. Bikel drops dead mere moments after he first meets Rachel. I guess Angie Dickinson's beauty was too much for the old man's heart to take. Rachel and any westerner understands that Bikel died of a heart attack.

The locals, however, would beg to differ. The locals in this part of the interior believe in a religion that has a god up at the top of a sacred mountain which Dr. Bikel tried to climb, a big no-no. As such, the local chieftain, Kalanumu (Juano Hernandez), put a curse on Bikel that seems to have come true with his death. Rachel, meanwhile, tries to go on practicing western medicine, which brings the ire of both Kalanumu and medicine man Muwango (Woody Strode in a horrendous wig at least part of the time).

What Rachel really needs is another doctor to help run the mission clinic. But with a war on, fat chance of that happening. At least, not until a miracle literally falls from out of the sky. An RAF plane crashes, and on that plane was badly injured survivor Paul Wilton (Roger Moore). Paul happens to be a doctor, and, quite surprisingly, an American (pay no attention to Moore's intermittent attempts at an American accent) who's hoping to become an orthopedic surgeon in Boston after the war. He can do basic doctor stuff while he's recovering! As he recovers, he begins to recognize his biological needs, and Rachel is the only white woman around for hundreds of miles.

You can probably guess how soapy it's going to get from here. Rachel wants to stay in the Congo even though she winds up pregnant and Paul is going to be called back to fight with the RAF, or maybe the Americans if the movie ever gets to December 1941. Derode serves as a sort of intermediary, trying to solve everybody else's problems even though he's got his own problems with that Nazi threat always on the horizon.

One of the reviews I read of The Sins of Rachel Cade suggested that the main storyline could have been set pretty much anywhere, and it would be easy to see it as a sort of early precursor to the TV show Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. The movie is a slow, plodding mess, and one where it would also be easy to see modern-day movie historians commenting very negatively on the portrayal of Africans, who seem to fit every stereotype westerners had in those days about the continent.

It further doesn't help that Roger Moore is badly miscast here, and doesn't even show up until halfway through the movie. Dickinson and Finch do the best they can to try to save the movie, but there's not much they can do.

Starting Over

Er, not quite

While looking through the movie channel listings on Pluto TV, I came across yet another movie I hadn't heard of on the 70s channel, and with Burt Reynolds in the lead, it sounded interesting enough to watch. The movie was Starting Over, so I hit the remote to start over (pun definitely intended) from the beginning.

Burt Reynolds plays Phil Potter, who at the start of the movie is married to Jessica (Candice Bergen), an aspiring singer-songwriter who has the problem that, well, she simply can't sing. Maybe she should try just writing songs for other people. But for whatever reason, she responds to her lack of success as a singer by announcing to her husband that she wants a divorce.

Phil, not knowing what to do, calls his brother Mickey (Charles Durning), who lives up in Boston with his wife Marva (Frances Sternhagen), who suggests that perhaps Phil should move closer to Boston. Phil does this, but since the movie was made well before the internet was a thing let along good enough to do work from home, Phil needs a way to make money to tide him over. He's able to get a bit of work teaching creative writing at the local community college, although he's never done any actual teaching before.

Along the way, Phil tries to get back into the swing of things by attending a support group for newly-divorced men (do such things even still exist?), which offers the movie a chance for a bit of humor to lighten the proceedings. Meanwhile, Mickey and Marva set Phil up on a blind date with Marilyn (Jill Clayburgh), who is working on her master's degree in elementary education.

Phil isn't too excited about being pushed into a blind date, but the relationship begins to blossom into something. Enough, in fact, that Phil feels comfortable having Marilyn and his brother's family all together for a Thanksgiving dinner. However, things get complicated when the phone rings and it's Jessica. Phil finds that he still has feelings for Jessica that aren't negtive, but he also likes Marilyn. Marilyn, understandably, wants to know that she'll be able to get a real relationship from Phil. The question of how Phil is going to navigate the two women dominates the rest of the movie.

Starting Over is theoretically supposed to be a comedy, although it's really more of a dramedy. The drama isn't heavy, but the comedy doesn't overwhelm the film. Clayburgh and Bergen are both quite adept at handling this sort of material; in fact, both of them received Oscar nominations. Burt Reynolds was big at the time for his previous comedies and southern-set action movies. He's somewhat miscast here, I think, although I can see why the producers (James L. Brooks and Alan Pakula, who also directed) would want to cast somebody like Reynolds since he had an obvious charm that should work here. That and the fact that the movie was intended to be a comedy. One can see glimpses that Reynolds could have real dramatic talent, something that finally showed up two decades later when he got an Oscar nomination for Boogie Nights, but a lot of the time he slightly sticks out. Not too badly, but just enough for it to be noticeable.

Starting Over isn't a bad movie by any sense of the imagination, and is definitely worth a watch. It is, however, one that probably could have been better. That and it's a bit of a product of its late 1970s era.

I prefer coffee

Another of the movies that shows up reasonably often on TCM but that I had never seen before is Tea and Sympathy. So, the most recent time it showed up on TCM, I made a point to record it in order to be able to finally watch it and do a review on it here.

The movie starts off with Tom Lee (John Kerr) returning to the boarding school where he had studied several years earlier. For some people, such years were a happy time, but right from the beginning we get the sense that this wasn't the case for Tom. As he goes into his old room, we get the inevitable flashback....

Tom is a young man whose mother died some years back and whose father is one of those people seemingly more married to his work than to his now deceased wife, so Tom winds up getting raised by his maid, which has made him somewhat different from the rest of his classmates. Unsurprisingly, his classmates pick up on this, although he's not really helped in this regard by his father Herb (Edward Andrews), who consistently thinks the point of boarding school is to turn his son into a real man, whatever that means.

In the house where Tom lives, there's a housemaster and housemistress, the husband and wife pair of Bill Reynolds (Leif Erickson) and his wife Laura (Deborah Kerr, no relation to John). Bill is the sort of athletic, on the go man who seems just like the stereotype of someone you would expect to make a man out of a boy. Laura, however, is the only one who seems to have any real understanding of Tom. She sees him as bright and kind and sensitive, and thinks he's just as much of a man as the rest of the people at the school, thinking as well that it's absolutely cruel the way everybody else treats him.

Eventually, Tom decides that there's only one way to prove to everybody that yes, he is a real man, and that's to find a woman and bed her. To that end he sees the local prostitute, Ellie Martin (Norma Crane), but she treats him cruelly as well since he's clearly so naïve about sex. Tom's reaction to this sets the film's climax in motion before the flashback ends and we go back to the present day....

Tea and Sympathy was released in 1956, having been based on a play from a few years earlier, with all three of the film's leads reprising their roles. I haven't seen the stage play, but from what I've read -- it's obvious that where the movie version is dancing around the idea of Tom "being a man", that's really just dealing with the strictures of a Production Code that wouldn't allow the movie to deal with the question of homosexuality. The movie version doesn't dance around things so well, instead hitting the viewer over the head with the central conflict. The stereotypes are so crude that the movie becomes more tedious than sensitive or intelligent.

Some of the reviews I've read suggest that because of the handling of the topic to get around the Production Code, the movie has become dated, while others suggest that homosexuality and gender stereotyping is a timely topic even today. One thing that's decidedly not explored is the stereotypical expectations that gay men have for other gay men. I happen to know a handful of small-l libertarian gays who are extremely uncomfortable with the latter day movement focusing on Ts and Qs to the near exclusion of the LGB portion of the "community" (heck, I wouldn't be surprised if they don't like the idea of an LGBTQ "community" in the first place) or the idea that everything needs to be "queered", because to them "queer" in practice means fitting into a tediously restrictive political worldview.

So in that regard Tea and Sympathy probably is still relevant today, just not in the way a lot of people think. It's just too bad that the movie is too blunt in handling the issues.

Eating Raoul

Another of those movies I had heard of but never seen, largely because I was much too young to see it upon its original release, is the extremely dark comedy Eating Raoul. TCM ran it a few months back, which gave me the opportunity to record it and eventually watch it to do a review here.

It's the early 1980s, so just before the whole yuppie thing really kicked off, but the roots of it were certainly there. Paul Bartel, who also directed, plays Paul Bland. He lives with his wife Mary (Mary Woronov) in a Los Angeles-area apartment building. The two of them work lower-end jobs but have dreams of bigger things, considering themelves more cultured than the people around them and wanting to open up a restaurant.

But things go from bad to worse when Paul tries to dissuade a customer at the liquor store where he works from buying cheap plonk; this causes Paul's boss to fire him. Mary is also facing a good deal of difficulty in her job as a nurse as she's being treated badly by both her co-workers and the patients. And then the bank turns down her application for a loan to open that restaruant.

Things can still get even worse, but there's a silver lining about to show up. Other tenants in the apartment building where the Blands live host swingers parties, which horrifies the Blands, who are so chaste they don't even sleep together. At one of those parties, a man gets so drunk that he walks out of the party and right into the Blands' apartment, where he throws himself at Mary. Paul tries to defend his wife and in doing so, accidentally kills the intruder by hittng him over the head. And the same thing happens a second time. But the couple decide nobody will miss these men, so they pilfer the cash off of them and dispose of the bodies.

It's this that gives them the idea to turn the tables on the swingers. If they can find other such swingers, they can lure those men to their apartments, go on a killing spree, and take the money which will help them to open up the apartment. The meet the dominatrix Doris (Susan Saiger), who gives them the idea to take out ads in a Backpage-style magazine that has classified ads catering to the swingers.

Things start looking up for the Blands, but they need some physical security, so the call in a locksmith, Raoul (Robert Beltran), to install new locks. They don't realize until later that he's a scam artist, who installs locks such that he can pick them later and get into the apartments and steal people's valuables. But when Raoul does this to the Blands, he's caught out and everybody realizes they've got blackmail material on each other, since the Blands are in the middle of offing another swinger.

So the Blands and Raoul decide to go into partnership together, with the Blands killing the swingers for their cash, and Raoul disposing of the bodies and fencing their other valuables. As in any crime movie, however, you have to wonder when the scheme is going to go sour and the parties are going to turn on each other....

I'm always up for a good dark comedy, so it goes without saying that I loved Eating Raoul. It's like a much darker and more twisted version of Arsenic and Old Lace. But the much more open sexuality of Eating Raoul also makes it something where I can understand how people who are into stuff from the Production Code era may be a little put off by it. If you haven't seen it before, it's one that you probably should watch.