TCM Guest Programmer November 2013: Simon Helberg

Those of you who, unlike me, watch a lot of episodic television, may recognize the name Simon Helberg as one of the stars of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory. Helberg sat down with TCM host Robert Osborne to present four of his favorite movies, and those movies will be airing tonight. It's an interesting set of movies, even if none of them are particular favorites of mine.

First, at 8:00 PM, is Peter Sellers playing an Indian actor who mistakenly gets an invite to The Party; comic complications ensue.
Peter Sellers returns for a triple role at 9:45 in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. This is another one that I have problems with, mostly because I find the Dr. Strangelove character so intensely irritating with his physical mannerisms.
Then, at 11:30 PM is Brief Encounter, a little British movie from 1945 in which housewife Celia Johnson meets doctor Trevor Howard in a train station, and proceeds to have a brief but intense love affair with him. It's a well-made and high quality movie, but I find it veering into chick flick territory. (In looking to see whether I'd blogged about Brief Encounter before, I see that I made more or less the same comments about it back in January 2012, although I haven't done a full-length post on the film.)
Finally is Modern Romance at 1:15 AM, with Albert Brooks as a film editor with a complicated love life.

TCM says Dr. Strangelove and Brief Encounter are available for purchase from the TCM Shop; I didn't check the Amazon availability of the other two.

Thursday Movie Picks #283: Super Long Titles

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week the theme is "Super Long Titles", which I presume means movies where the name of the movie is long, not the movie itself (see Erich von Stroheim and Greed) or the opening/closing titles go on and on (the closing titles of 2001: A Space Odyssey come to mind). Now, my first thought wasn't a movie, but a song:



Due to legal issues over copyright, in the US the Stars on 45 Medley had to name every song it used, so the real title is quite long. But it's a song, not a movie, so I had to think of three other things:

Joe and Ethel Turp Call on the President (1939). The Turps (William Gargan and Ann Sothern) go to Washington to see the President (Lewis Stone) after their local mailman (Walter Brennan) gets fired. How they got past security I'll never know, even though 80 years ago security wasn't quite as nuts as it is today. This is an MGM B movie, and I have to say the MGM B movies are never quite as fun as the Warner Bs.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963). Stanley Kubrick's black comedy about nuclear weapons that's quite good... until Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers in one of three roles) shows up; Sellers' mugging for the camera as Strangelove nearly ruins the movie and is a prelude to Sellers' obnoxious non-Clouseau characters he'd play in the second half of his career. Watch Fail-Safe and The Bedford Incident instead.

The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fifth with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France (1944). Laurence Olivier plays English King Henry V in this adaptation of the Shakespeare play which also serves as an allegory for the world situation at the time as World War II was raging. The movie is unsurprisingly commonly called Henry V, but that's not the full title. How this one ever got made, in Technicolor no less, at the height of World War II is amazing.

Blogger's lousy search function

TCM is showing Dr. Strangelove tonight at 10:30 PM ET as part of a night's salute to Stanley Kubrick. I didn't think I'd blogged on it before, as it's not one of my favorite movies, but I decided to use Blogger's search box to check. What I got surprised me.

The most recent entry mentions several of Kirk Douglas' movies, including The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. There's a doctor in one of the other movies I mentioned that day, but I didn't use the abbreviation "Dr." in that post.

Then, there was a post on the movie Spellbound. Here, there is strange dream sequence. Also, the Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck characters are in love. Finally, the characters have names like Dr. Edwardes and Dr. Petersson. Yet, I obviously never used "Strangelove" (minus the space, as a single word in that post.

The upshot, I guess, is that if you use Blogger's search functions, you might not find exactly what you're looking for, for which I apologize.

Point for discussion

Why is Peter Sellers considered a genius, but Jerry Lewis is much more denigrated?

TCM is showing The Mouse That Roared tonight at 8:00 PM ET as part of The Essentials, which stars Sellers as the leader of a tiny country that takes on the US, in the hopes that it will lose a war and get development aid. Sellers' movies, and his physical comedy, bet a lot of praise; notably something like Dr. Strangelove.

Jerry Lewis, on the other hand, is treated as somehow dismissible, with the like being that "the French love Jerry Lewis", with the obvious implication that the French are just different and somehow weird. However, I don't see the difference between the manic gestures of Sellers at the end of Dr. Strangelove, or any of Lewis' physical comedy in, say, The Bellboy.

I suppose it can be said that some of Sellers' work is political satire and not just entertainment, and that this would explain why those movies get praised. But, at the same time, Sellers' Pink Panther movies are nothing more than light entertainment (they're good, but there's nothing deep about them), just as light as the movies Jerry Lewis made with Dean Martin.

That BBC list

So apparently a lot of people are talking about a list the BBC compiled of the 100 greatest comedies. As always when I see such lists, my first opinion is that there's a reason why I'm not a film critic by profession.

Well, besides not being a particularly good writer. It's more that when lists like this come up, I find that I have some huge disagreements with the results. Four Chaplin movies, three Buster Keaton, and only one Harold Lloyd. Chaplin's always been way overrated in my opinion, and I can't help but think it's in part because he fought against those evil moguls in the studio system and his later visa problems with the US government.

And then there's Peter Sellers. Dr. Strangelove (#2 on the list) is pretty good until it gets to the scenes in the War Room with Strangelove himself, at which point the mugging for the camera brings the movie to a screeching halt. Even more glaring is the presence of The Party on the list at all, never mind it being up there at #23. I think I only saw one Alec Guinness movie: Kind Hearts and Coronets at #86; no Ladykillers (not my favorite but most other people seem to find it one of their favorites from that era) or The Lavender Hill Mob or even The Man in the White Suit. And where's Terry-Thomas?

The The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (#49) isn't a comedy or even particularly good. But it's Luis Buñuel (let's name drop!) making Sirk-like commentary about the aspirations of the middle class.

But you know what they say about opinions....

Robin Williams, 1951-2014

Robin Williams (r.) with Pam Dawber from the TV series Mork and Mindy

By now, you've probably heard of the death of actor Robin Williams, who was found dead in an apparent suicide yesterday at the age of 63. Most people my age and above would probably first remember him (if no longer best remember him) from the TV show Mork and Mindy, which had Robin Williams playing an alien from the planet Ork who comes to Earth to study humand and winds up falling in love with earthling Mindy (Pam Dawber). In what must have been a move to bolster sagging ratings, they even ended up having an offspring together, that being a reverse-aging Jonathan Winters. (Thedy did the reverse-aging thing decades before The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, although they didn't get anywhere near as far thanks to the cancellation of the series.)

Mork and Mindy was entertaining, nonsensical fluff for a six-year-old, but I have to admit that as I became an adult, I started to find that sort of manic humor to be tedious and a bit grating. It's not just Robin Williams; I find Peter Sellers' Strangelove character (bot not the other two characters he plays in Dr. Strangelove) to be like fingernails on a chalkboard, for example. So I never tended to be as much of a fan of his movies as other people would be, even though he did a reasonably wide range of movies. (Well, Dead Poets Society and Good Will Hunting are both mawkish, although the latter one is Matt Damon's fault; the movie won Williams an Oscar.)

That, and I also became less and less of a Disney animated feature fan as I grew up, especially of the contemporary, so things like Aladdin weren't quite my thing either. Not that this lessens anybody's talent. I did radio in college reading the news, and I know from experience doing live reading and sounding good is difficult; much more so than you'd think. Oh sure, anybody can read words off the page, but doing it while sounding the right way (serious but not grave for news; the whole range of emotions for animation)? That's where it gets difficult.

And then there are the movies that I ought to reacquaint myself, such as Moscow on the Hudson, or the entertaining if completely implausible Dead Again.

Lolita

Shelley Winters' turn as TCM's Star of the Month continues tonight at 8:00 PM with Lolita.

Lolita is one of those movies that starts off at the end. Humbert Humbert (James Mason) shows up at the house of Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers). Quilty is a dissolute man, at least from the looks of his house, with a table tennis table in the main room covered with all sorts of junk, and a generally slovenly look to the whole place. But Humbert is really there to shoot Quilty!

Flash back four years. Humbert Humbert is a British professor of French literature who has gotten a job at one of those small liberal arts colleges that dot Hollywood movies, this one being somewhere in Ohio. But Humbert decides he's going to spend the summer before he has to go out to Ohio working on a book, so he shows up in the town of Ramsdale, NH, looking for a place to rent a room for the summer. The one he gets is in a house owned by Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters).

Haze is a widow with a teenaged daughter, Dolores (Sue Lyon), who has the nickname Lolita. Lolita is beginning to learn about boys, and don't you think she doesn't know the power that she has over them, what with her good looks and their hormones. She even pursues Humbert, who finds himself falling prey to her charms. But Charlotte is also in need of a man, not that she's going to be as direct about it as her daughter.

One night at a dance ostensibly for the teens, Charlotte and Humbert meet Clare Quilty, a screenwriter also in Ramsdale for the summer. Humbert keeps finding that he wants to be alone with Lolita, but this is obviously not morally acceptable, so he comes up with the next best solution, which is to start up a relationshp with Charlotte as a ruse to be able to be near Lolita. Charlotte, being in need of a man and not realizing what Humbert is up to, agrees to marry Humbert.

But then she reads Humbert's diary and learns the truth, which causes her to go nuts and run out in the rain, where she gets run down by a car and killed. Lolita is off at summer camp at the time, so she doesn't know what happened. And Humbert is too stupid to tell her the truth for several days after picking Lolita up from the summer camp!

On the way back from summer camp, they run into Quilty at a hotel, Humbert not recognizing him from that dance back in Ramsdale. But Quilty certainly recognizes Humbert and Lolita, and starts plotting a way into Lolita's life, as we see when he shows up at the Humbert house in disguise claiming to be a high school psychiatrist! He's also written a play just to get Lolita cast in it and near him. Humbert tries to get away, while Quilty keeps following.

I had two big problems with Lolita. One was with the characters. None of the four main characters was particularly likeable. Humbert lies for no good reason; Lolita is nastily manipulative; Charlotte is a shrill clingy harpy; and Peter Sellers is in post-Strangelove obnoxious mode even though this one was made a year before Dr. Strangelove. The other big problem is with the director, Stanley Kubrick, who decided that the best way to handle the material is to have it drag on for over two and a half hours. It's way too slow, I think.

Interestingly, the one thing I didn't have much of a problem with is the whole idea of a much older guy with a stepdaughter who may or may not be of legal age. That idea is handled reasonably well, in part because the Production Code hadn't been completely dismantled yet (even though the movie was made in England, Kubrick was obviously going to have to conform to the Code to get the movie shown in America). So everything is handled in a somewhat more circumspect manner than it would have been half a dozen years later.

There's also a 1990s version of Lolita, which I haven't seen, so be careful if you're looking for a DVD.

Not Dwayne Johnson

During one of the previous free preview weekends, I had the chance to record the movie The Rock. Recently, I finally watched it in order to be able to do a review on it here.

Ed Harris plays Brigadier General Francis Hummel, who at the beginning of the movie is seen at his wife's grave vowing to do something in her memory, and it's not long before we see what that something is. Hummel is the leader of a section of the Marines that does super-duper secret missions, so secret that when the marines die, their families aren't even compensated, because that might break the secrecy of these operations. So he and his mean break in to a naval weapons facility and steal a bunch of chemical weapons.

Meanwhile, back in Washington DC, Dr. Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage) is one of the few honest people in the FBI, at a time when the FBI hadn't redeemed itself in the eyes of Hollywood by going on a politicized extralegal campaign against former president Trump and his supporters. Godspeed is the head of a department within the Bureau that investigates chemical weapons, so it's obvious that he's going to get called in by the people closest to the President when Gen. Hummel puts the rest of his plan into action, and it's not going to be long before that happens.

That plan involves making their way to Alcatraz, taking one of the tour groups hostage, and threatening to blow up rockets that have the nerve agent as warheads over various places in the San Francisco Bay Area, killing tens of thousands of people. Goodspeed's job is going to be to disable the weapons, since he knows what to look for.

Of course, there's a pretty big problem: how to get on the island of Alcatraz in the first place. Gen. Hummel is no dummy, and has communications and radar and whatnot set up, so he and his men will pretty much seen anbody trying to get to the island by air or the surface water. But how to get there from below the surface? Well, it shouldn't be that difficult to send in some frogmen, but in theory they'd be noticed when they surface having reached the island. Perhaps there might be some subsurface way into the facility?

There's only one person who knows that, since the blueprints aren't that detailed. That person is Capt. Mason (Sean Connery), a member of British Special Forces who was imprisoned at Alcatraz for reasons that will be explained toward the end of the film, although those reasons turn out not to be germane to the plot. Mason escaped from Alcatraz, only to be recaptured and held in some secret location for the past 30 years. But now the FBI needs his knowledge to get back in to Alcatraz in order to deal with Gen. Hummel and his men.

The operation goes wrong, with all of the regular-duty FBI agents getting killed, leaving only Goodspeed and Mason left to carry out the operation, which as you can guess they are somehow able to do because otherwise we'd have the sort of profoundly sad ending that you wouldn't expect Hollywood to give us in a movie like this. A few dramas (Fail-Safe and The Bedford Incident) and parodies (Dr. Strangelove and The Day the Fish Came Out are movies that come to mind) have done it, but not an action movie with an obvious hero.

Michael Bay directed, so if you want special effects, non-stop action, and explosions, you'll get those in spades. And chances are you'll be highly entertained. But I found Bay's direction to be one of the problems with the movie, as a lot of the camera angles and editing didn't work for me, making the movie longer than it needed to be (131 minutes before the end credits begin to roll). You'll also have to suspend a lot of disbelief to watch this one. But if you can do that, you'll like The Rock.

TCM's schedule page isn't always right

I see that TCM is running Beyond the Poseidon Adventure again overnight tonight at 2:00 AM as part of a day of Slim Pickens movies in Summer Under the Stars. (Dr. Strangelove is thankfully not part of the lineup.) I noticed that there was a "Buy the DVD" link that led to the TCM Shop, and a Warner Archive DVD that was first released back in April 2014.

I first mentioned Beyond the Poseidon Adventure back in 2015, pointing out at the time that I didn't know if it was in print because the TCM schedule didn't have a link to buy the DVD. Obviously, it should have been available in 2015 if it was released in 2014 and is still available form the MOD scheme.

As for the movie itself, it's fun if flawed. Failing tugboat operator Michael Caine happens on the overturned hull of the Poseidon at some point after the sinking and the victims were rescued in the original movie. I don't think the movie mentions exactly how long after, but you'd think there would be more rescue crews and a salvage operation or something there. Anyhow, Caine gets the idea of robbing the safe in the purser's office. But at the same time, another boat captained by the mysterious Svevo (Telly Savalas) shows up with its own agenda trying to get something else off the Poseidon. And they find more survivors (Slim Pickens among them).

Beyond the Poseidon Adventure isn't particularly good, but it is entertaining.

After the Fox

Another person who was honored in Summer Under the Stars this past August was Peter Sellers, which gave me the chance to record a couple of his movies that I had not seen before. Among these is After the Fox, which I recently watched.

After an opening credits sequence that confirmed my suspicion that the titles were designed by Maurice Binder, we get into an establishing scene to set up the main part of the story. Among the great heists ever committed is an Egyptian bullion robbery, masterminded by a man named Okra (Akim Tamiroff). However, having robbed the bullion, there's a problem: How do they actually move it so they can get the money that it's worth? Interpol is on the case, and they know that the robber is going to need somebody to get it into Europe. The criminal who would seem to have the greatest capacity to do it is Aldo Vanucci (Peter Sellers), nicknamed "The Fox", but he's currently in prison.

Not for long, His gang breaks him out, and he goes home to his mother and his sister Gins (Britt Ekland, who was Sellers' real-life wife at the time). There, he finds out that his sister has a scandalous job -- she's an actress, horror of horrors! However, this and another event helps give Aldo an idea.

Aldo has decided to take on the job of smugling the bullion into Europe because he wants to give his sister a respectable job, yet doesn't know how to do it until he sees another actor, Tony Powell (Victor Mature). Tony is the stereotype of the American who is better known for his name than being a truly good actor, and going to Europe for the big pay check. When Tony goes out on the streets of Rome, he's mobbed by Italians who are fans of old Hollywood movies and have seen Powell's work. (The movie actually uses snippets of one of Mature's old movies, Easy Living to show Powell's old work.)

Aldo, having seen this, realizes that he can smuggle the bullion into Italy under the guise of making a movie about smuggling gold! Everybody else involved will think that they're acting out a scene from a movie, not knowing that what they're handling is real gold and not prop gold. Posing under the name of Federico Fabrizi, Aldo goes to a small seaside fishing village where the boat carrying the bullion can anchor offshore, and gets pretty much the entire population of the town to play extras in the movie. After all, they're so star-struck that they want to be in the movie. Likewise does Tony Powell, who thinks it will be great to be in something so avant-garde.

The only person who realizes the obvious is Tony's agent, Harry Granoff (Martin Balsam). You'd think that the residents of this little Italian town would have heard of a "Federico Fabrizi" if there were an actual famous director by this name and recognize that this is an impostor. But for whatever reason they go along with the con, with only Harry suspecting Fabrizi might not be real. The question then becomes whether those Italian authorities from outside the village, not involved with the fake movie, will find out what's going on and catch Aldo before he can get away with robbery.

I've long felt that from Dr. Strangelove on, a little bit of Peter Sellers goes a long, long way. That's certainly the case here. The comedy is designed to be mostly a farce, with a bit of social commentary courtesy of director Vittorio De Sica (who even appears as himself) about greed messing up "art". But Sellers has a tendency to be too forceful in his comedy to the point that for me at least, it can become grating and obnxious. Martin Balsam follows along in this line. Perhaps surprisingly, the acting honors go to Mature, parodying his own image. Like Broderick Crawford a decade later in A Little Romance, Mature looks like he's having a blast skewering the idea of the Hollywood star.

After the Fox may not be for everybody, especially if, like me, you're not the biggest fan of Peter Sellers. But if you do like Sellers' work, then I think you'll enjoy After the Fox.

Briefs for June 19-20, 2020

Today marks the 90th birthday of actress Gena Rowlands, who is the widow of John Cassavetes and starred in several of the movies he directed. I have to admit that some of these are movies I've tried to get through and find a bit difficult, such as Husbands. But Rowlands was also in Lonely Are the Brave, which I had forgotten, and I see she was in Light of Day, which I remember because of the Joan Jett title song, not actually having seen the movie.

Dame Vera Lynn died yesterday at the age of 103. She wasn't an actress but a singer, probably best known for her rendition of "We'll Meet Again" that went out to all the Brits serving in World War II. The song was rather memorably used in Dr. Strangelove:



Also dying this morning is Sir Ian Holm who earned a Best Supporting Oscar nomination for playing the trainer in Chariots of Fire and also had a really good starring turn in The Sweet Hereafter as an ambulance-chasing lawyer who tries to get a small town to sue after several students died in a school bus crash. Later in life, Holm played Bilbo Baggins in some of the installments of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit series. Holm was 88.

I notice that the TCM Shop changed its appearance recently. I still don't understand why certain movies from the Warner Archive MOD scheme show up as on backorder some days and available on others, but it always wreaks havoc with deciding what movie to watch.

Thursday Movie Picks #167: Just Not Funny Comedies

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of "Thursday Movie Picks", the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is "Just Not Funny" Comedies, and the ones I've picked aren't quite as old as my normal picks. (Well, I suppose I could have gone with the Ritz Brothers.)

Dondi (1961). David Janssen plays a World War II soldier who takes pity on an Italian orphan and wants to adopt him. Of course, bringing him back to America in the first place is going to be a problem. The kid playing the orphan is monstrously obnoxious and unfunny, and the story isn't particularly good either. This was based on a popular comic strip.

The Party (1968). Peter Sellers plays a Hollywood extra who is supposed to be blacklisted for incompetence, but accidentally winds up on the list for the swankiest Hollywood part ever. At some point around Dr. Strangelove (excluding some of the Pink Panther films), Sellers became almost unwatchable and cringe-inducingly unfunny. The bizarre party he attends here is apparently supposed to be hippie-inspired or something, but it's just tedious.

Neighbors (1981). John Belushi's final film has him as a suburbanite with a wife (Kathryn Walker) whose lives get turned upside down when a new neighbor (Dan Aykroyd) moves in. IMDb opinion is sharply divided, but I fall into the negative side, finding it stupid. It probably doesn't help that the first time I watched it I was probably too young: there's a joke about edible underwear that I was definitely not mature enough to get back then. (This was in the VHS era; I was only nine years old when it was released and did not go to see it in the theater. I think we got a copy from my movie-theater manager uncle.)

Bank Shot

Some of the channels on the Pluto TV service show a fair number of movies I haven't heard of before, mostly because they have a totally different library from what TCM can most easily get access to. Seeing as the movies on the 70s channel are pushing 50 years old, they're getting to be in the "classic" range, even if they're not all great movies. The new-to-me 70s movie for this post is Bank Shot.

Clifton James plays Streiger, warden at a prison in California and the character that provides some of the narration for the movie. One of Streiger's most notorious prisoners is Ballentine (George C. Scott), a career criminal whose heists always seem to be beset by bad luck. But he's got a "friend" in the form of Al Karp (Sorrell Booke), who has come up with yet another can't miss heist scheme, this time to rob a bank.

This thime, the scheme is interesting in that the bank is a sort of temporary bank, a new one that's currently housed in a trailer while the real bank facilities are being built. In some ways security is less because of the limited space but in some ways more since the bank isn't in the normal place that a business would be. That, and the bank company realizes the security threat and has invested in a safe that's a lot more difficult to crack than the normal safe.

First, Ballentine needs to break out of prison, which he does with the help of a motorcycle, riding to a house where Eleonora (Joanna Cassidy) is waiting for him. Ballentine doesn't like the idea of having a woman in a heist, mostly for the practical reason that one of the guys is liable to fall in love with the woman, complicating matters. In this case, however, it's Eleonora who winds up falling in love with Ballentine. And it's her money that's financing this caper anyway. Worse is that Karp has brought his nephew in to be part of the gang, and the nephew is particularly incompetent.

So they case the bank, and figure out that the best thing to do is have an audacious heist that involves connecting the trailer to a semi tractor and taking the whole bank away. But how to get the bank guards out and how to conceal the trailer? Well, they eventually think of ways to do those things. Meanwhile, Streiger is leading the team of police chasing after Ballentine and his gang.

George C. Scott didn't do much straight-up comedy, apart from Dr. Strangelove, and here he's more of the straight guy while other people around him are supposed to be funny since Bank Shot is more of a comic heist movie than anything serious. Scott is actually pretty good at being the straight guy. The rest of the movie, however, is not quite as funny as I think it could have been. In runs a brief 83 minutes, which is surprisingly short for a movie with a star of this caliber from the 1970s. A lot of the time, it feels like it's that short, as though things needed to be fleshed out a bit more.

None of this is to say that Bank Shot is a bad movie. Not by any stretch, and it's an entertaining enough 83 minutes. But I also think there's a reason why Bank Shot isn't as remembered as a lot of other 70s movies.

Thoughts on James Earl Jones, and other obituaries

So James Earl Jones died yesterday at the age of 93. I was thinking about his most famous roles, and wondering what TCM could show for a programming tribute. It was a bit surprising to me that there's a relative paucity of movies, with a lot more TV and straight-to-video stuff. Jones provided the voice of Darth Vader, but I don't think there's any way TCM could possibly get Star Wars now, even if it did get aired once several years back when TCM did a salute to 20th Century-Fox. I recall being quite surprised at the showing, since it was after Disney acquired the Star Wars franchise. Jones also provided his voice to The Lion King, but Disney animation is going to be a giant no go for TCM any more. Even when they had Leonard Maltin doing the Treasures from the Disney Vault series, feature animation was mostly non-existent.

So what could TCM show? There's certainly The Comedians, which without looking it up I'm pretty certain is MGM; if my memory serves it's one of the movies mentioned in that hilarious Lionpower promotional short. He was also in Dr. Strangelove. I'd love to see TCM show Sneakers, in which he has a smallish but important role, as well.

It was a week ago that James Darren died. I didn't realize quite how many movies Darren was in as a young man, although he was under contract to Columbia. TCM seems to have some ability to get the rights to run those pictures, although it's not quite as easy as stuff from the old "Turner library". I haven't seen anything about a tribute to Darren, although it wouldn't surprise me if he's the sort of person that gets a movie in December when TCM has its night saluting people who died over the course of the past year.

And, finally, I should probably mention the pasing of Will Jennings, who died last Friday aged 80. If you don't recognize the name, it's because he worked behind the camera. Or at least, off-camera, since he was a songwriter so technically not quite so directly involved in the movies. Except that he won two Oscars, for writing "Up Where We Belong" from An Officer and a Gentleman and that horrid "My Heart Will Go On" from the equally horrid 1997 version of Titanic.

John Goldfarb, please stay over there!

When I blogged about Dondi back in April 2011, I had nothing but bad words to say about it. A movie that gives Dondi a run for its money in sheer awfulness despite having stars and presumably a big enough budget is John Goldfarb, Please Come Home!, which is airing on the Fox Movie Channel tomorrow at 3:00 AM and repeated at 11:00 AM.

John "Wrong Way" Goldfarb, played by Richard Crenna, is an Air Force pilot, whom we see at the beginning of the movie running into journalist Jenny Ericson (Shirley MacLaine) in a government building in Washington. She gave him the nickname "Wrong Way" some years back when, as a college football player, he ran the wrong way on the football field. However, he's had a series of similar incidents in his career since then, and he's none too happy about running into Jenny. Goldfarb is being asked by the CIA and its head, Heinous Overreach (Fred Clark) to go on a U2 reconnaisance mission over the Soviet Union. Jenny, for her part, is trying to get info on the US relationship with the Arab oil sheikhdoms. In a plot twist, Jenny's editor decides the best story for her to get involves going undercover in a harem in one of those countries, taking clandestine photos and using US diplomatic channels to get those photos out.

Jenny gets sent to Fawzia, which is run by King Fawz (Peter Ustinov). He's got a son, Prince Ammud, who is going to college over in the States -- specifically Notre Dame -- and has taken up football. So King Fawz has decided to use hsi petrodollars to help start a football program to be Ammud's plaything, although the longer-term goal seems to be getting Notre Dame to come over to Fawzia to play a game.

Thanks to John Goldfarb's nickname, and the title of the movie, you can probably guess what happens next. He has problems with his plane, and instead of going over the Soviet Union, he ends up over Arabia, being forced to make an emergency landing... in Fawzia. Imagine his surprise when he first meets Jenny as a harem girl. The authorities back in Washington are trying to figure out a way to get John Goldfarb back to the US without creating an internatinoal incident, which is tough since they don't even know where he landed! Meanwhile, Goldfarb and Jenny, who aren't exactly the best of friends, are trying to figure ways out of their predicaments. Goldfarb's has been made much more dificult by the fact that King Fawz has learned the Goldfarb played football. Fawz makes him the coach of the "University of Fawzia" football program, and expects him to lead the team to victory over Notre Dame -- or else.

Where to begin with how this film fails spectacularly? I think I'd pick Peter Ustinov, who shows up before the other problems. I've never been a particularly big fan of Ustinov's work, as I've always gotten the impression that someplace just below the surface, there are antics about to break out. Those antics break out here, and in a very bad way; he's far more irritating than the worst Jerry Lewis parody, or even the tic-ridden Dr. Strangelove character (in Peter Sellers' defense, the other two characters he plays in the movie are done well). Fawz's harem looks like it's taken out of one of those Bob Hope movies from the same era: somebody's stereotyped misconcetion of what a king's harem would be mixed with an attempt to be hip for the 1960s. Some people might find it offensive; I only found it dumb. And then there's the football game that climaxes the movie. Here, it looks like the filmmakers were trying to take what the Harlem Globetrotters do in basketball, and transfer it to the football field. A lot of Hollywood's portrayals of football are unrealistic; this one is simply an insult to viewers' intelligence, regardless of whether those viewers are football fans or not. The closest part to a redeeming aspect of the movie is the government flunkies back in Washington. In addition to the already mentioned Fred Clark, there's Richard Deacon from The Dick Van Dyke Show as the Secretary of Defense; Harry Morgan from M*A*S*H as the Secretary of State; and Jim Backus of Gilligan's Island as the State Department's Middle East expert. Even here, though, these characters are used for the standard tropes about US incompetence in foreign affairs.

All in all, John Goldfarb, Please Come Home! is terrible on so many levels. But, as always, you might want to watch and judge for yourself. I don't think this one is on DVD, so you'll have to catch the FMC airings.

Another pair of obituaries

Richard Davalos (l.) and James Dean in East of Eden

Richard Davalos died on Tuesday at the age of 85. He started his film career with a bang playing Aron Trask, brother to James Dean's Cal, in East of Eden. He also had important roles in Cool Hand Luke and Kelly's Heroes among others, as well as playing a German cadet in The Sea Chase, but never really became a big actor.

Sir Ken Adam died today aged 95. Adam was one of those people who don't get enough mention, a production designer. Adam may be best remembered for his work on several of the James Bond movies (the last one he did was Moonraker), as well as for designing the war room set in Dr. Strangelove, but he won his two Academy Awards for other movies: Barry Lyndon in 1975, for sets of 18th century England, and 1994's The Madness of King George, which is set in early 19th century England.

Should I file this under Fox?

Tonight on TCM brings this month's Guest Programmer, actor Michael J. Fox. To be honest, two of his four selections aren't my favorites, and one I haven't even seen before. But I'm sure there are people out there besides Fox who would enjoy his selections.

I've intimated that I don't particularly care for Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb which kicks off the night at 8:00 PM ET.
I haven't seen Local Hero, at 10:00 PM, before, and so can't comment on it.
I find a lot of the 1970s conspiracy theory movies to be tedious and predictable; such is the case with Fox's third selection, The Parallax View, at midnight.
The one of Fox's four picks that I really enjoy is Kind Hearts and Coronets, at 2:00 AM.

Henry Orient's World

I think I've argued here before that the scene in Dr. Strangelove where Peter Sellers finally shows up as the mad doctor is the moment where his career takes a turn into becoming obnoxiously self-indulgent in his performances. That's probably a bit unfair, however, since he could still be tamed into not being overbearing even when he's the nominal star of a movie such as The World of Henry Orient.

Of course, it should be stated that while Sellers gets the title role, he's not really the lead character. That honor goes to two teenaged girls, who attend the same private school in New York. Val Boyd (Tippy Walker) is the new girl at school, getting let out early every day to see her shrink, although that's only mentioned via a third party. She quickly makes friends with "Gil", short for Marian Gilbert (Merrie Spaeth). Val's parents are constantly busy traveling the world on business, while Gil's are divorced, and she lives with her mother (Phyllis Thaxter) and Mom's "friend" Boothy (Bibi Osterwald).

The two young ladies still like to act immature from time to time, going through Manhattan and just generally having a good time. However, Val can be a bit of a drama queen. One day, the two are in Central Park, and Val peers over a stone. She accidentally catches a glimpse of two lovers sharing a kiss. One of those is Henry Orient (Peter Sellers, as I mentioned), a temperamental concert pianist; the other is married Stella Dunworthy (Paula Prentiss), not married to Henry and worried about her husband finding out. So naturally when Henry catches Val and Gil playing peeping Tom, he's none too pleased.

It's about to get a whole lot worse for him, as he notices the two young women watching him somewhere else, leading him to believe that some brilliant mind trying to discover the affair has sent two "innocent" teenaged girls to follow him around and stalk him. Not that Val thinks of it as stalking Henry, however. She's just becoming one of those fans who is overly obsessed, but without becoming a groupie.

And like teenagers who want to think they're more grown up than they really are, Val decides to start a "secret society" with Gil dedicated to worshipping Henry Orient, allowing them to dress up and go around town basically being relatively harmless. You can, however, understand why adults might have a problem with this. And soon enough they will.

Christmas is approaching, and Val's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Boyd (Tom Bosley and Angela Lansbury respectively) return home for the holiday. Mrs. Boyd finds Val's scrapbook on Henry Orient, and unsurprisingly she's horrified, jumping to a not unreasonable conclusion that Henry might be up to no good. While he is misbehaving, it's not with the two teenaged girls, whom he'd just as soon have be out of his life. Mrs. Boyd thinks that Gil is responsible for Val's behavior, and orders Val to break off the friendship. Everybody else, however, is much more sensible. And perhaps Mrs. Boyd's overbearing nature might have something to do with why Val is seeing a shrink.

If Peter Sellers is toned down in The World of Henry Orient, it's because the role isn't particularly big. Much more attention is given to the two teenage girls, who can be irritating at times, but in the natural way adolescents can be irritating. That having been said, I wonder just how much Val and Gill would get to traipse around lower Manhattan in real life.

Sellers isn't the only one to do well with his role. Lansbury wasn't much different in Dear Heart which came out the same year, and this is the sort of stuff she was quite good at doing. If the movie has a problem, however, it's with the script, which is just too slight. This is another of those movies that really should have run around 90 minutes instead of the 106-minute run time it has.

If you want to see establishing shots of New York as it was in a more innocent time, there's some nice photography here. And if you want some competent and professional actors, you'll definitely get that. If you want something more memorable than watching it and going on to the next movie, however, you'll have to watch something else.