Not always a bride

Back in June 2025 I did a post on a movie called Always a Bride. Some months back I recorded a Ross Alexander movie called Brides Are Like That. Only after watching the movie did I realize that this one and Always a Bride came from the same source material, a play from the early 1920s.

Ross Alexander stars as Bill McAllister, a wastrel playboy living with his uncle Fred (Joseph Cawthorne) presumably because both of his parents are dead. Ross went to college not to get a good education and respectable job, but to play football. Indeed, he doesn't want to work at all, which makes him a rather unsympathetic character. He's even bought an engagement ring for his would-be fiancée, but charges it to Uncle Fred's account, uncle being rich from his shipping business.

Said girlfriend is Hazel Robinson (Anita Louise). She's the child of orchard owner John (Gene Lockhart) and his wife Ella (Gene's real-life wife Kathleen). They understandably wish their daughter to marry somebody respectable, and indeed Hazel does have just such a respectable person pursuing her, in the form of a doctor named Randolph Jenkins (Dick Purcell). However, Bill is just so charming that he's able to convince Hazel to break off her relationship with Dr. Jenkins in order to marry him.

Bill's uncle and Hazel's parents both have the good sense not to want to support Bill directly financially, although Hazel is able to get her father to agree to a somewhat reasonable compromise: he'll find a job for Bill, and Bill should agree to take it. Bill is just so obnoxious, though, that he basically refuses this, instead deciding to tinker around and work on some invention that will allow apples to last longer in transit. The only thing to his credit is that he really is working on this and has been talking to another distribution company about testing the device, which is a fancy thermos box, and something you'd think wouldn't work.

Meanwhile, Bill is facing increasing financial difficulty to the point that Hazel's parents have gotten her this close to agreeing to move back in with them, unless Bill agrees to take the job Dad is offering him. But we know this is a movie that's going to have a happy ending, and Bill is going to come out OK in the end.

One thing that Brides Are Like This doesn't have that Always a Bride added was the political corruption subplot. This one is more about whether Bill will get a real job. Unfortunately, it's still a subpar movie, in large part because Bill spends the entire movie up until the final reel being an obnoxious jerk of the sort that you can't understand why anybody would want to marry him. A woman would never be able to have a stable life with him, and it's not as if he's that good-looking to overcome such stuff.

Brides Are Like That is decided second-tier material, and even if Ross Alexander hadn't had the personal problems that drove him to commit suicide, it seems clear that he wasn't going to become a big star, but the sort of person whose star would have faded with the start of World War II.

Death on the Nile (1978)

I've done posts on two of the four movies in which Margaret Rutherford played Agatha Christie's sleuth Miss Marple, and believe I have the other two sitting on my DVR. A dozen or so years later, there was a vogue started with 1974's Murder on the Orient Express of making movies of especially the Hercule Poirot stories, with an all-star cast of suspects. One that I haven't done a post on before is Death on the Nile. So when it last showed up on TCM I recorded it to watch, write up this post, and save it to be posted at some later date either when it airs again or when I haven't posted on a mystery movie in a while.

As with the other all-star extravaganzas based on Christie works, we meet the characters much the same way the mastermind in a heist movie rounds up the people he needs to help him commit that heist. One is Jacqueline de Bellefort (Mia Farrow), who is engaged to be married to Simon Doyle (Simon MacCorkindale). Jackie has a friend, Linnet (Lois Chiles), who has an estate that needs looking after in the UK. She's got a lawyer, Pennington (George Kennedy), who is responsible for part of her affairs, but hires Simon to look after the actual estate. Unfortunately for Jackie, Linnet and Simon fall in love, get married, and go on honeymoon in Egypt, with Jackie basically stalking them and Penning trying to get Linnet to sign some papers that may or may not be in her interest to do so.

Eventually, to get away from Jackie, Linnet and Simon decide to go on a cruise up the Nile, which is where we meet the other characters. Peter Ustinov plays Poirot, so we know he's not the killer when someone actually gets bumped off. Colonel Race (David Niven) is a lawyer who suspects Pennington is up to no good. Salome Otterbourne (Angela Lansbury) is a trashy romance novelist who wrote a book that led Linnet to threaten a libel suit; Salome is traveling with her daughter Rosalie (Olivia Hussey). Louise (Jane Birkin) had worked for Linnet at the estate, and was expecting to get a bonus after the marriage that never materialized. And then there's Mrs. Van Schuyler, one of those Americans of the 1930s who seems to know everybody or at least claims to, and also has a yen for stealing jewels, of which Linnet has a bunch. Mrs. Van Schulyer is traveling with Bowers (Maggie Smith), a woman who thinks Linnet's father duped her family out of their wealth. So as you can see, a lot of people have reason not to like one another and be suspects when somebody finally gets murdered.

Now, the one person who is apparently not the suspect is Jackie. She gets drunk and shoots Simon in the leg one night, but some of the other passengers give her a sedative which knocks her out for the night. So the following morning, when Linnet is found quite dead, Jackie is the one person who seems like the most natural suspect but also has the best alibi for not having done it.

So, then, who did it? Obviously, I'm not going to tell, but Poirot starts putting his little gray cells to the test, interrogating each of the other passengers with a little help from Col. Race. Poirot also gets a cobra in his cabin for his trouble, although there's the question of who would have had access to a cobra making it seem more like a bit of a red herring. There's also at least one more murder, so we'll be able to get rid of another person as the suspect. For the climax, Poirot brings everybody together and correctly solves the case.

To be honest, I found the actual solving of the case more unrealistic than some other Agatha Christie movies I've seen, although not anywhere near Manhattan Murder Mystery which I watched not too far apart from Death on the Nile. Then again, with these all-star mysteries, part of the point is to watch the stars as much as the story. Everybody looks like they're having fun here, but I think there's a reason that Death on the Nile isn't as well-remembered as Murder on the Orient Express.

Man of a Thousand Faces

TCM's lineup tonight is dedicated to silent screen star Lon Chaney, starting with an old documentary. The first feature film up is not a movie starring Chaney, but a biopic that aired a couple of months back when TCM did a spotlight on Hollywood biopics of Hollywood stars. That movie is Man of a Thousand Faces, at 9:30 PM.

The movie starts off mentioning that Hollywood came to a standstill for one day in August 1930 to honor one of their old stars. Irving Thalberg (Robert Evans, who would go on to become a producer) enters a sound studio that had been the filming location for films like The Unknown that starred one of MGM's early stars, Lon Chaney, who has recently died. (Phantom of the Opera was made at Universal, as was Man of a Thousand Faces, which I supposed made for some interesting discussion between the studios.) As you might guess, this is the opportunity for the film to go into a flashback, because as I mention over and over, it's a highly original way for a movie to introduce its story.

In the early 1890s, young Lon Chaney is living in Colorado Springs, as the child of two deaf parents, something that causes Lon a lot of grief because the other kids treat him terribly. But it also gave him the ability to communicate without having to speak, which would eventually become useful when he got to Hollywood. But before Hollywood, there was a career in vaudeville with his first wife Cleva Creighton (Dorothy Malone). They're working a crappy part of vaudeville, and Cleva gets them fired for her lack of punctuality exacerbated by the fact that she's pregnant with what would become Lon Chaney Jr., although Lon Jr.'s given name was Creighton.

Lon takes his wife back to his family in Colorado Springs, which is where Cleva learns that Lon's parents are both deaf, something that Lon couldn't bring himself to tell Cleva up to this point. And with good reason, since she believes in the stereotypes that deaf people are some sort of freak. Worse, she's worried that if Lon's parents are deaf, there's a very high possibility that her child is going to be deaf too. The kid isn't, but it's something that causes tension for the rest of Lon and Cleva's marriage as she still wants work of her own to help support the family. Helping look after the boy is vaudevillean chorus girl Hazel Bennet (Jane Greer). Cleva and her boyfriend think Lon and Hazel are having an affair, one of the things that leads Cleva to walk out on her and the marriage to end in divorce.

But this being the early 1910s, Lon is deemed unsuitable to raise a child by himself, so young Creighton is declared a ward of the state and put in a foster home. Lon is determined to get a good enough job to be able to get his son a stable home, leading him to head out to Hollywood. Having been in vaudeville, he knew how to play a multitude of characters, and he also has a way with the sort of Hollywood makeup necessary to personify those characters on screen. That latter is a very useful skill for Lon in trying to get work as an extra, although being an extra is not enough to get custody of his son back.

Eventually, Lon's old agent Clarence Locan (Jim Backus) also decamps to Hollywood, and, finding Lon, also brings Hazel along. Hazel is the one who has the perception to figure out that what the state wants to consider Lon a fit father is for him to have a mother for the child, even if it's a stepmother. The fact that she was somewhat in love with Lon back when Cleva thought they were having an affair helps, and Lon marries Hazel, getting custody of adolescent Creighton. Clarence is also able to get Lon a bigger job, which is the first stepping stone on the way to Hollywood stardom.

Now, of course, we know that Lon is going to die young in 1930 from the flashback structure in addition to this being a biopic. The final act, therefore, is concerned with Lon having a difficult relationship with his son, in part because Creighton wants to follow his father into acting and in part because Cleva shows up wanting to see her son. Lon isn't thrilled with the idea because, to be fair, she basically abandoned the kid, and because Lon dealt with the abandonment by telling Creighton that Cleva had died. It's less bad, I suppose, than telling a young boy that Mom abandoned them.

James Cagney, unsurprisingly, gives a good performance in Man of a Thousand Faces. There are some liberties taken with Chaney's real life, although they're somewhat less substantial than in a lot of other biopics. Showing, for example, that Hazel had an ex-husband who was a double amputee is surprising but, from what I've read, is actually the truth. The one flaw that the movie has is that it runs a bit over two hours, which is longer than the movie needs to be. I think it spends a bit too long on Lon's pre-Hollywood life. But mostly, Man of a Thousand Faces works and is one of the better biopics I've seen.

The Angel Levine

TCM last December ran a series of movies that dealt with themes of divine intervention. One that was new to me was The Angel Levine. Once again, since the synopsis sounded interesting, I decided to record it and eventually got around to watching it not long before it expired from my DVR.

Zero Mostel stars as Morris Mishkin, a quintessentially Jewish character, although that's not surprising considering that this is based on a short story by Bernard Malamud. Mishkin is a tailor who's got a mess of a life as his business had dried up; his daughter married out of the faith which in some ways destroyed him; and his wife Fanny (Ida Kaminska) is bedridden with a heart condition. To make matters worse, as Morris is in a delicatessen buying food for him and his wife, he sees a woman getting her coat stolen! Morris points out the thief, who promptely runs out of the deli and gets hit by a car in the middle of the street, dying on the scene.

Then, when Morris gets back to the apartment, his wife suffers another attack of her heart ailment, causing Morris to call for Dr. Berg (Milo O'Shea). It's all enough for a man to lose his faith, and Morris wonders to God why God has forsaken him. Morris can't even get help from the civil authorities in the form of the welfare office where he goes looking for help.

And then, while Morris is waiting for Dr. Berg to show up, Morris goes into the kitchen and finds -- a black man! This being New York circa 1970, when New York was on the trajectory to where a few years later Gerald Ford would tell the city to drop dead, Morris comes to the perfectly logical conclusion that this guy is somebody who's come to rob the house. But the man claims to be Alexander Levine (Harry Belafonte), an angel in training sent by God as divine intervention for Morris. Alexander has died recently (and in fact is the thief killed at the beginning of the movie), and is supposed to perform a miracle. Not that Morris believes this. And when Dr. Berg shows up, he can't see Alexander. And yet, Fanny seems to have had a sudden improvement to the point that Dr. Berg wonders why Morris would have called him.

Things continue like this, with Morris always uncertain whether Levine is or is not in fact an angel. Complicating matters is that Levine had a life of his own before he got hit by that car and killed. Levine had a girlfriend Sally (Gloria Foster), who doesn't know that he has been hit by a car and killed. But their relationship has been difficult, and Sally wasn't certain whether she wanted to continue it anyway. As for Morris, he still isn't certain whether Levine is an angel and whether he can perform a miracle, especially when Fanny has another relapse.

I have to point out that I haven't read the original Malamud story, so I can't comment on how much the story was changed when it was adapted for the big screen. What I can say is that the premise is certainly interesting, but the execution doesn't quite work. I think that's mostly the result of the screenplay. I'm not the biggest fan of Harry Belafonte, and as I've pointed out he's generally been the weak point in the movies that I've seen. THat's not the case here, however. He, Mostel, and Kaminska all do well, or at least as well as can be expected considering the script really letting things down in the second half of the movie.

One other interesting thing is that when this was shown on TCM, Ben Mankiewicz made certain to point out that Zero Mostel had fallen afoul of the Hollywood blacklist. However, while he pointed out that the movie's director Ján Kadár was Slovak and had directed The House on Main Street, he didn't point out that Kadár wound up in Hollywood because he was more or less blacklisted by the Czechoslovak communists after the Soviet invasion of 1968. Apparently some blacklists are OK for Ben Mankiewicz.

Bengazi

Another of those movies I had on my DVR that I wanted to watch before it expired was that late-era RKO film Bengazi, having recorded it because, as always, it had a synopsis that sounded interesting. I wish the film had turned out to be as interesting as the synopsis.

The movie begins with a couple of guys cutting some barbed wire to get at a British military installation out in the Libyan desert so that they can steal one of the trucks. One is John Gillmore (Richard Conte), who had a past in America that he apparently doesn't want to go back to. The other, Selby (Richard Erdman), had spent some time in prison. As for having stolen the truck, this unsurprisingly ticks off the British authorities, who send Inspector Levering (Richard Carlson) to investigate.

Gillmore isn't really working with Selby so much as he is with nightclub owner Robert Donovan (Victor McLaglen). They've learned that back during the unpleasantness of the war a dozen or so years earlier, a bunch of gold had been buried out in the desert to keep it safe from opposing militaries, and that this gold had never been recovered. So obviously, being able to get it would be a financially profitable deal, although trying to get it is going to be dangerous what with the legal ramifications even if you had your own truck instead of stealing one off the British army. And then getting out of Libya with the goods is going to be more difficult.

Complicating matters is that a young woman shows up. That woman, Aileen Donovan (Mala Powers), is the estranged daughter of Robert, and pissed that her father pretty much up and abandoned her and Mom ages ago. She also hasn't quite figured out how she's going to get back out of Libya either since she only had the money for a ticket there. But her presence is something that perhaps Levering can use as leverage against her father and Gillmore.

Anyhow, the three men set out for the desert to where the gold is supposedly buried, in the ruins of a mosque. They get there, but what they don't realize is that the Bedouins who do their nomad thing through that part of the desert aren't exactly thrilled with these criminal adventurers coming for what they think is their gold. They kill Selby and take the truck, while Levering is surveilling the area by plane looking for Gillmore's party.

Eventually, the plane does find our antihero, but the plane is shot so they can't escape by air. They also don't have all that much in the way of ammunition to hold off the Bedouins, so we get a very talky third act that leaves one to wonder how we're going to get an ending that isn't too tragic while also satisfying the Production Code.

Bengazi sounds like an interesting idea, but boy is it boring. It also doesn't help that Victor McLaglen's character is enough of a jerk that we don't want to be on the side of the people going out in the desert. The ending is also one that to me defied logic. The only saving grace is that, for the dying years of RKO, the print wasn't as dire as something like Glory. But, as always, watch and judge for yourself.

Briefs for end of September, 2026

I suppose I should apologize for not talking much about any upcoming spotlights or other programming features apart from the TCM Star of the Month. I as always am a couple of weeks ahead in scheduling posts here, so actually doing something like a briefs post always seems to get put off. And I still have a bunch of movies that I've watched off the DVR without having written up the post on them to schedule in the first place.

This is also the appropriate place to point out that you need to check your box guide whenever I put up a post on a movie that's supposedly coming up on TCM or FXM. TCM's full October schedule is now available, and I had to juggle a couple of things. I had written a post on the Vincent Price movie The Bat a month or so ago when I thought it was about to expire from my DVR but when I didn't yet know for certain that it was going to be part of the Halloween lineup. So currently I think the post is scheduled for early on October 30.

By the same token, when I looked through the October schedule, I saw that the Tom Hanks movie The 'Burbs is scheduled in prime time on, IIRC, October 7; I haven't yet downloaded a copy of the October schedule and I can't connect to the site I normally use. But when I went to watch it to do a post, I saw the opening scene and thought that this looked suspiciously familiar. Sure enough, as it turned out I had done a post on The 'Burbs in late 2021. Time to reschedule more posts then....

I've also posted in the past how it seemed to me that FXM really refreshed its schedule on October 1. That doesn't seem to be the case this year, although over the past year it seems as though there have been more films pulled out of the vaults for the Retro block, with films not showing quite as often. But that also means that I don't see anything suddenly showing up in October that hasn't been on FXM for years.

Finally, in some happier news, they're still finding "lost" movies. Needless to say this is one I'd never heard of, and won't be getting to see until the point that it shows up either on YouTube or one of the streaming platforms.

The Black Arrow

Another of those one-night salutes that TCM likes to run was to actor Louis Hayward, this time spotlighting his work in historical action pictures. One of the movies that I hadn't seen before was The Black Arrow, so once again I recorded it in order to be able to watch another new-to-me old movie and write up a post on it.

The Black Arrow opens late in the Wars of the Roses, which were of course fought between the English royal houses of Lancaster and York. Louis Hayward plays Richard Shelton, who had been fighting for the Yorkists before returning to his ancestral home in Yorkshire, Tunstall Castle. Unfortunately, he comes home to the sad news that his father Harold has been killed. Sir John Sedley, who lived in the next castle over, if you want to put it that way, was a Lancastrian who killed Harold and was executed for his troubles.

Since there's basically a civil war going on, Sir Richard's uncle and Harold's half-brother Sir Daniel (George Macready) gets the spoils of managing Sedley manor, as well as making Sedley's daughter Joanna (Janet Blair) his ward, although his plan is ultimately to marry her. Sir Richard and one of Sir Daniel's associates are sent through the dangerous forest to fetch Joanna and bring her back to Tunstall. I say dangerous because, like in the Robin Hood stories, there are men lying in ambush in the forest just waiting for the wrong person to try to pass through. Sir Richard is more or less innocent in that he wasn't around for any of the back story, but none of the others were, and one Sir Daniel's associate Appleyard is killed by an arrow to which there's a letter attached.

That letter argues that the arrow for Appleyard is in revenge for the killing of Sir Harold and the taking of the Sedley estates, signed by a "John Amend-All" and naming in addition to Appleyard two more of Sir Daniel's associates who have arrows coming for them. More ominously, the last name on the list is Sir Daniel himself, who if this letter is to be believed is actually the person who killed Sir Harold, not Sedley!

Sir Richard doesn't know what to believe, and Joanna doesn't exactly like him at first for fairly obvious reasons. But Richard plans to do some investigating. We learn fairly quickly that John Amend-All's letter is more or less accurate and that Sir Daniel did in fact kill his half-brother and put the blame on Sedley, with the intention of taking over the Sedley lands. Not only that, but John Amend-All turns out to be Sedley himself, who survived the execution thanks to a well-placed Bible stopping an arrow to the heart.

So Sir Richard throws in with Sedley. Also, as you might guess, he's going to fall in love with Joanna along the way. However, there's the slight problem that she's stuck at Tunstall and Sir Daniel clearly knows by now what Sir Richard is up to and that this means danger for him. So of course Sir Richard is now persona non grata at Tunstall. Yet, at the same time, we can expect that a movie like this is going to have a more or less happy ending. How it gets there is what you're going to have to watch.

The Black Arrow starts off slowly, which isn't exactly a good thing for a movie that only runs a shade under 80 minutes. It does pick up, and reaches the point that it's the sort of movie that would have pleased the movie-going public of the late 1940s without exactly being any great shakes. The Black Arrow is one of those movies that's probably best to watch with some friends and your favorite snacks.

Devil and the Deep

Not too long ago I picked up a box set of early Cary Grant movies, made when he was at Paramount. Technically I think it's two box sets, one of comedies and one of dramas, repackaged. In any case, the set had several movies I haven't yet seen, and some I'm glad to have on DVD now, like Hot Saturday. I decided to watch one of Grant's earliest films off the colleciton, The Devil and the Deep.

This is so early in Grant's career that although he gets fourth billing, he's written out after 10 or 15 minutes. Grant plays Lt. Jaeckel, who serves on a submarine under Cmdr. Charles Sturm (Charles Laughton in his first Hollywood film getting an "introducing" credit) based out of a port somewhere in North Africa. As the movie opens, Jaeckel has a note from Sturm's wife Diana (Tallulah Bankhead); apparently they danced together at some function. But the note is dropped on the floor and Cmdr. Sturm picks it up, leading Sturm to suspect that perhaps Jaeckel is seeing his wife on the sly. Now that would be a no-no under military regulations, but worse is that Cmdr. Sturm is insanely jealous as Diana well knows.

Cmdr. Sturm uses his rank to get Jaeckel reassigned to a different sub, which is why Cary Grant is written out of the movie so early. (To be fair, Paramount wouldn't have known at the time that Grant was going to go on to become a big star.) More important in terms of the movie is that at home that night, Cmdr. Sturm pretty much threatens his wife, showing why she considers him insanely jealous. Diana runs out of the house for her own safety, although she doesn't realize that she's running into danger as there's some sort of street festival going on and a crowd of lusty Arab men is not the safest place for a western woman to be. Fortunately for her, there's a western guy there, Sempter (Gary Cooper). He pulls Diana aside into one of the shops in the bazaar and, to satisfy the merchant, buys Diana some cheap perfume, which is obviously going to be a bit of foreshadowing.

This is the first time the two have met, and they wind up going out into the desert to spend an evening together. This is naturally something that would make Cmdr. Sturm even more jealous if he were to find out about the relationship. As you might guess, Cmdr. Sturm is indeed going to find out, and the perfume is going to be part of why. The reason is that Sumpter is in fact Lt. Sumpter, and he's in town because he's the replacement for Lt. Jaeckel. In Sumpter's defense, he doesn't know when he first meets Diana that she is in fact Mrs. Sturm; that only comes the next day when Sumpter goes to give his transfer papers to Cmdr. Sturm. The transfer papers bear some traces of that perfume that Sumpter bought for Diana the night before.

The sub is set to head out on a training exercise that night, and Diana goes to the sub to warn Sumpter of just how insane her husband is. She's hoping to get on the sub, warn Sumpter, and get off before the sub sets out. But when Cmdr. Sturm gets to the port, he hears from the sentry on duty that his wife is on board. So as a sign of how insanely jealous he is, he orders the sub to set out early, before his wife can get off the sub. But that's only the half of it. Cmdr. Sturm is planning to engineer a murder-suicide in which he'll sink the sub, leading to the deaths of himself, his wife, and Sumpter. Now there's also an entire crew of innocents on board the sub.

Devil and the Deep is a really interesting little movie thanks in part to it having been released in the pre-Code era. There aren't as many strong pre-Code touches as in some other movies, but it was also a time when movies still were all over the place in terms of plotting. The idea of Cmdr. Sturm being crazy enough to sink his own sub is really out there, and Laughton's oversized acting works here. Bankhead's scenery-chewing also works, while Cooper has a poorly-written character, which is one of the issues the movie has. While Devil and the Deep is certainly interesting, it's also uneven. The positives do outweigh the negatives, but there are certainly reasons why the movie isn't all that well known despite the big cast.

Take This Job and Shove It

Some months back, TCM ran a spotlight on "working class" movies. I did a post on one of the films, The Working Man, already, since it got another airing as part of a later daytime spotlight. Another of the movies was the new-to-me film Take This Job and Shove It. Having watched it, there's a reason this movie was new to me.

Frank Macklin (Robert Hays) is one of those hotshot types in the sort of corporate firm that has hotshots. The corporation is a conglomerate run by Samuel Ellison (Eddie Albert) that buys up troubled businesses, cuts out the deadweight, and turns them around, at least for some values of a turnaround for the people who still have a job at the firm. One of the businesses is a brewery run by Charlie Pickett (Art Carney) and based in Macklin's home town in Iowa. So Ellison decides to send Frank to Iowa to shape up the brewery and get production up so that it can become profitable again.

Frank heads to his old hometown, and when he gets there, everyone is at first happy to see him, since he was the sort of local boy who made good. But it doesn't take long for them to realize that things aren't going to be easy for them. After all, one of the things Frank does to increase production is to take all of the workers and put them in new roles on the production line that they haven't necessarily done before. Understandably, a lot of the assembly line workers aren't happy about it.

Complicating matters is the fact that still living in town is Frank's old girlfriend J.M. Halstead (Barbara Hershey). The see each other, and you can see why they might think about starting up their relationship again. And as the movie goes on, Frank's resuming his old friendships leads him to wonder which side he should be on in the business world. He still has a bond with those old friends, and you can make a cast that there's something to be said for loyalty.

However, the new business practices Frank introduces work to increase production and make the brewery profitable. Profitable enough, in fact, that Ellison thinks about selling the brewery to a rich guy named Hooker (country singer Charlie Rich) who sees the brewery as a sort of vanity project. He's not exactly a good businessman himself, and the brewery workers aren't necessarily thrilled with the idea of becoming employees of Hooker. Frank doesn't like the prospect either.

The idea behind Take This Job and Shove It is a good one, although once again I think it's one of those movies where the premise doesn't exactly work. I suppose it's a bit like Honeysuckle Rose in that it's showing a portion of American society that wasn't normally put up on the big screen. This was, for example, one of the first times that monster trucks broke out into the public consciousness.

It also doesn't help that the print isn't very good. It looks like it was done on videotape, with TV-style direction from director Gus Trikonis, which made me wonder wither Take This Job and Shove It was actually a TV movie. But a look at IMDb says that no, it really was a theatrical release. In any case, the final product is decidedly mediocre.

The Last Run

Other than Noir Alley, it's not all that common for TCM to run a movie twice within the same month. But there is an example of it coming up, as TCM ran The Last Run a week or so ago and is running it again at the end of the daytime schedule, or 6:15 PM.

George C. Scott plays Harry Garmes, who is living in the south of Portugal and doesn't exactly have the best life. His son died tragically young several years ago and, as a result, his wife more or less left him. As the movie opens, Harry is souping up a car, in preparation for a job. Harry had worked in the past as a driver for various criminal elements, now living off of what he'd been able to save up. But he's willing to take up one last job, in part in the hopes that he'll be able to have a better retirement. His one friend is the retired prostitute Monique (Colleen Dewhurst).

Anyhow, the job is to drive all the way to France to pick up the escaped American convict Paul Rickard (Tony Musante) and bring him back to Spain. This was the era when Franco still ran Spain so extradition wasn't anywhere near what it is today with the EU. In Spain, Harry is to rendezvous with the people Paul had worked with and dropped him off. Paul, he's been warned, is a bit of a loose cannon. And it doesn't take all that long to discover that Paul is indeed a bit of a problem.

For one thing, he has no compunction about using violence, even when the smarter and more jaded Harry understands that tactical violence would be strategically ill-advised. There's also the fact that Paul wants to bring along his girlfriend Claudie (Trish Van Devere) even though this will enormously complicate things. She doesn't have any sort of criminal record so it would be easier for her to travel solo, but no; Paul wants what he wants, and why should he care how this is going to inconvenience the people around him.

The three of them have no issue getting back into Spain and making it to what is supposed to be the drop-off point. Except that when the time comes for the transfer, they learn it's a trap and that the men who were paying Harry to deliver Paul in fact want to kill Paul for reasons that are never really explained. In any case, it means that the three are going to have to try to make it back to Portugal unseen by the men who had hired Harry. After all, they still want Paul dead. And since Harry helped bollix that, they'll have no issue with killing Harry too. Harry's idea is to get the three of them back to Harry's home in Portugal, and then come up with a way of getting Paul and Claudie to Africa where they can start a new life. Harry, for his part, does have the option of going back to America. But there's also the issue that Paul doesn't always trust Harry, and with good reason; how is Paul supposed to know whether Harry is really working with the men trying to kill him or not?

The Last Run is another of those movies that has a good idea behind it, but that is ultimately beset with a poor script. The whole thing has a "been there, done that" feel to it, along with a relative lack of character development. One doesn't really care all that much about Paul. Perhaps the movie's problems are also caused by the fact that John Huston who was originally set to direct dropped out halfway through production. The one bright spot is the location photography, but that's not enough to save The Last Run.