David Niven's crisis

Yet another of the movies that I recorded off of TCM because of how it sounded interesting, but only got around to watching not long before it expired from my DVR, was the previously unknown to me Guns of Darkness. As always, having watched it, it's once again time to write up a review.

David Niven stars as Tom Jordan, who is working as a manager at a British plantation in the fictional Latin American republic of Tribulación. There's some hints that Tom was a bit of a screw-up in his previous professional life which is why he's working a job like this. It doesn't exactly please his wife Claire (Leslie Caron) either. She'd like to have a family but hasn't been able to have kids to this point, and she's getting to the point that she's thinking of packing up and heading back to Europe.

All of this is happening against the backdrop of a New Year's Eve party all the expats and some local elites are at. What none of the expats know, however, is that outside a bunch of rebels are planning to overthrow the current government of El Presidente Rivera (David Opatoshu). The coup is successful in that Rivera winds up out of power, but somewhat unsuccessful in that Rivera escapes, if with an injury.

Amazingly, the following morning none of the expats seems to have learned that there was a coup the previous night! And they should be relatively close to the capital city considering that one of last night's party guests, Hernandez (Derek Godfrey), shows up on the balcony with the new leader to serve as the Minister of Justice in charge of finding Rivera. The expats, meanwhile, all go to work the next day and act as though they're just going to keep going to work every day with the new regime not even resulting in a temporary disruption as order gets restored!

Eventually they learn about the coup and suffer some inconveniences themselves as there are roadblocks looking for Rivera and some summary justice as the new authorities deal with the people who aren't quite on board yet with the new regime. But if everybody suffers minor inconveniences, the Jordans are about to suffer a major one. Rivera was shot and needs medical treatment, and he's found hiding in the Jordans' car! He doesn't just want medical treatment, he wants Jordan to help him escape across the border where a neighboring country will presumably accept him into exile.

Husband, wife, and ex-president set out, and find that the road to the border, or at least the one that the authorities aren't watching, involves crossing a dryish riverbed. Unfortunately it's not quite dry, and what moisture there is left has turned the area into quicksand! Worse, as part of getting across, they're spotted by a young boy who Rivera is convinced will rat them out to the authorities. So he want to kill the boy, which is brutal but understandable and even logical. Jordan doesn't want to. The road ahead is going to require them to go on foot and go through difficult terrain to keep from being found by the new president's men.

Guns of Darkness is another of those movies where there's the basis of a pretty good movie in the plot, and you can see why the stars involved might want to take on this project. The finished product, however, is surprisingly inert. The conflict between Mr. and Mrs. Jordan doesn't feel authentic, and it doesn't seem at all likely that someone as injured as Rivera would be able to make it as far as he does. So it's all a bit of a tepid misfire, but one of those movies where you'll want to watch and judge for yourself.

This movie should have been a comedy

Sometimes, a movie gets made where you think it's going to be in one genre, but winds up being something else. Another example of this that I recently watched off my DVR was The First Hundred Years. (That, in and of itself, is a rather odd title for the movie since it doesn't seem to have anything to do with 100 years of, well, whatever.)

Robert Mongtomery plays David Conway. As the movie opens, he shows up at the New York office of theatrical agent Harry Borden (Warren William). He's looking for his wife Lynn (Virginia Bruce), who is not an actress but Harry's second-in-command, and good at what she does. In fact, she's been doing it long enough that she started under her maiden name and still uses that professionally. Not only that, but she makes enough money that the couple can afford a ridiculous Manhattan apartment and fine cars and dresses and whatnot.

This kind of bothers David, who has long felt that he's not paying his fair share into the relationship. He's a nautical engineer, designing yachts. However, the good shipbuilding jobs are not in New York. He's here to tell Lynn he's got a promotion lined up that is going to bring in more money -- $15K a year, which is more than Cary Grant's Mr. Blandings reveals his salary to be a decade later in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House -- but that the job requires working out of New Bedford, MA. This presents an obvious problem for the late 1930s when the best technology could do was the telephone and there was no good way for couples to have a good relationship working this far apart.

Deep down inside, the two still love each other, but just don't know how to work through the issue, since Lynn still wants to work. Understandable by 2026 standards, although in the late 1930s this would have been seen as a bit scandalous. Further complicating matters is that Lynn, being good at what she does, is prized by Borden. She also signed a five-year contract to work with him just six months earlier, and getting out of that might be problematic. Borden certainly doesn't want her to get out of it, instead actively interfering with the help of his lawyer Walker (Alan Dinehart).

The differences between husband and wife are irreconcilable enough that the two separate, with Borden really intimating that the couple should divorce. Indeed, each of the spouses is seen with another person out to dinner at the same club, with all of them (including Binnie Barnes as David's companion Claudia) going to the other man's apartment for coffee and a nightcap. Lynn is torn between what to do with her husband, and what Borden wants her to do.

And then Lynn's uncle Dawson (Harry Davenport) shows up in New York from where he's going to be leaving on a round-the-world cruise. He doesn't know yet about the marital difficulties, so Lynn and David play at still being happy together. Dawson is no dummy and realizes something is up, and he tries to get everybody to see sense, while Borden is still trying to keep Lynn professionally. (As far as I could tell, he had no romantic designs on Lynn.) This being a 1930s movie, there is a happy ending in a way that would have made sense to 1930s audiences but may annoy audiences of today.

The bigger problem I had with The First Hundred Years wasn't the ending, but the fact that it's taking itself much too seriously. It's trying to be a drama, but the material just doesn't work, and you expect comedy to break out, especially with a lead like Robert Montgomery. Think something like The Awful Truth the previous year, which was about divorce but was nothing but comedy at heart. Montgomery was certainly capable of serious drama, but this script doesn't help him. So overall, The First Hundred Years is more of a historical curiosity that we should look at as a product of what values people in the late 1930s had.

Lawrence of Arabia

It may be a surprise, but one of those movies that I never sat down to watch all in one go, largely because of the length, is Lawrence of Arabia. Partly for that reason and partly because of my reluctance to do posts on extremely well known movies, I've never done a full-length post on it here. But to rectify that, the last time it showed up on TCM, I recorded it in order to be able to watch it in advance of the next showing. That next showing is tomorrow, February 21, at 11:30 AM as part of a day devoted to epics.

Peter O'Toole stars as T.E. Lawrence, and as the movie opens, he's riding his motorcycle to his death in England in the mid-1930s. His was a well known name, so a lot of people gather for the funeral, and a couple, such as reporter Jackson Bentley (Arthur Kennedy), basically intimate that Lawrence was an SOB, but our SOB. Since Lawrence is dead, we're obviously going to get a flashback to when he was alive.

The scene shifts to 1916/1917, which is smack dab in the middle of World War I. Britain is one of the Allies while the Ottoman Empire are one of the opposing Central Powers. The Ottomans are Turks, but a fair amount of the territory they govern is Arab, such as the Hejaz which is now a province on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness) is one of the potentates who is leading an Arab revolt against the Turks, and the British realize supporting the Arabs is a good way to destabilize the Ottoman Empire. They've already got an advisor there in Col. Brighton (Anthony Quayle), but aren't certain of what the situation is really like, so they want to send a second man in Lawrence, an army lieutenant (ultimately promoted to colonel) who speaks Arabic and has good knowledge of the region, to get more information.

Lawrence is supposed to meet Faisal, but first meets Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif), who will take Lawrence to where Faisal is. However, along the way, Ali and his men run into Auda Abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn), who is from a different tribe from Ali. Sadly, the two tribes have a blood feud that threatens to derail the whole uprising until Lawrence puts it to rest by carrying out an execution himself. Worse, he finds that he doesn't dislike killing people. In any case, the result of this is that many of the Arabs act like they've got a lot of respect for Lawrence.

Lawrence's plan is that the Arabs should attack the port city of Aqaba, now at the southern tip of Jordan. Of course, the port is well defended, but only from the sea, since on the other sides lies a desert that's thought to be impassable. Except that Lawrence figures they can cross it and surprise the Ottomans that way, which works. It brings Lawrence more glory, but to go any further he's going to have to get more help from the British back in Cairo.

The British seem none too pleased that Lawrence looks as though he's going native, as it were, and supporting the Arab desire for total independence which would clash with what the British and French have decided should be done with the Middle East after the defeat of the Ottomans. The Arabs, for their part, are looking to get to Damascus, while General Allenby (Jack Hawkins) of the British will be going to Jerusalem as that area even during the 1910s had a substantial Jewish population. (Not every Jew had left in the various diasporas, while Zionism had begun with some European Jews already moving to the region, which south of Beirut had a fairly sparse population.)

Lawrence keeps attacking, but there's some question of whether he's getting too big. Also, there's the question of whether the Arabs are going to be able to govern anything modern if they do take Damascus. The leaders of the revolt are tribal and suited to desert warfare, but Damascus is a fairly modern city. They could easily use western engineers, but that might keep them from being truly independent.

It's easy to see why Lawrence of Arabia won so many Oscars. The acting is quite good, as is the cinematography and other parts of the production design. Maurice Jarre's musical score is also memorable. However, I'd have to say that Lawrence of Arabia is another of those movies where, while it's very good, I'm not certain I agree with it ending up near the top on lists of all-time great movies. The movie runs over three and a half hours plus the intro/entr'acte/exit music; the print TCM ran is 227 minutes. And frankly, in the last hour or so the movie really loses steam. Some historians take serious issue with some of the ways history is presented here. Certain of the characters are composites (such as the diplomat played by Claude Rains), a movie which is often necessary when trying to distill a story like this down to a reasonable length, but apparently some of the timeline is wrong and the movie glosses over Lawrence's knowledge of the region before the war.

Mr. Chump

I've mentioned in the past how I tend to really enjoy Warner Bros.' B movies, but even they had some that weren't particularly good. One that unfortunately fits that category is Mr. Chump.

Johnnie Davis, fresh off his performance singing "Hooray for Hollywood" in Hollywood Hotel, gets a starring role even it if is just a B movie. He plays Bill Small, a trumpeter who likes to imagine what sort of return he'd get if he could play the stock market, which is a sort of minor genre of 1930s movies. Well, the stock market and trying to beat other people to the punch with a tip that might be skirting the law. Bill has charts and everything that show how he'd have huge returns with his system, if only he had the money to actually invest.

In real life, Bill doesn't seem to want to do much work, and is behind on the rent at the rooming house run by Ed Mason (Chester Clute) and his wife Jane (Lola Lane). Also living there is Bill's would-be girlfriend Betty (Penny Singleton). She, meanwhile, is also being prusued by Jim Belden (Donald Briggs). Jim and Mr. Mason are pretty much the only two employees at the local small-town bank, so Jim it seems might not be so bad a choice for Betty. Mr. Mason asks Bill about his system, and Bill mentions that he gets all of his information from a particular newsletter.

At this point a couple of things happen. One is that Bill gets a chance to work with a traveling band, which might give him some money to pay off his bills. The other is that Mason and Jim both decide they might like to try Bill's stock market system. The only thing is, they get the money by borrowing some of the bank's bonds, which is as always a fairly serious embezzlement issue. And wouldn't you know it, but when other people try Bill's system, it goes wrong, leaving the two bank employees with a hole in the bank's finances and a couple of bank examiners about to visit. It's prison time for sure.

With that in mind, the scheming Jim comes up with an idea to get Bill to be the one holding the bag. He joins the scheme seemingly naïve to what's happening, but he's got some tricks up his sleeve of his own, claiming he can win back the money by going out of town for a couple of weeks. He returns to the news that the bank is about to be sold, which is sure to bring in bank examiners....

Johnnie Davis didn't have a particularly long career in Hollywood, and watching a movie like Mr. Chump it's easy to see why. Davis doesn't have much of a range of emotion, and isn't quite as appealing as Warner Bros. might have hoped. It also doesn't help that the story in Mr. Chump feels terribly old-fashioned. Then again, Mr. Chump was the sort of B movie that was probably never thought about in the sense of people watching it years later.

Savage doctor

Another of the spotlights that TCM did some months back was movie adaptations of pulp literature. One of the movies they showed that I had never heard of -- and somewhat surprisingly, I'd never heard of the book series either, which had some 180 books in it -- was Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. Since it sounded interesting enough, I decided to record it, and finally got around to watching it recently.

Savage, played here by Ron Ely, was a 1930s superhero in the MacGyver or Thunderbirds mold, in the sense that he didn't have the sort of superhuman powers that other superheroes had. We first see him at some sort of fortress in the high arctic, where he's engaging in meditation before being summoned back to New York. Unfortunately, his forced return to his New York headquarters is due to bad news: his father died suddenly in the little-known Latin American country of Hidalgo. Worse, when he has a conference with his associates to talk about this, somebody tries to shoot him through the window but misses only because of the special glass Savage has installed that screws up the refraction and makes things appear where they aren't.

Doc and his men chase after the sniper, who eventually falls to his death. OK, so they won't get any information by interrogting him, but they are able to discover that the sniper is of some native tribe and has a tribal tattoo on his death. It looks like the sort of thing that may have come from one of the indigenous peoples of Hidalgo, so Doc and his team decide they'll head down to Hidalgo to claim Dad's body and figure out for themselves just how implausible the official word on the elder Savage's death is.

Once down in Hidalgo, they're welcomed by the official authorities in a way that make it seem like they want Savage to have a nice time, but where it's clear that they've obviously got a lot to hide. The unofficial authority is Captain Seas (Paul Wexler), who lives on a superyacht, the Seven Seas and travels the world doing mobile business of some sort. Captain Seas invites Savage and his men aboard for dinner, although it's clear that some sort of danger is going to await them even though they know they're going to have to take Seas up on his offer anyway. There's danger on land anyway, in the form of the "green death", a humorously badly animated glowing green snake-like creature that has a venomous bite.

Further investigation reveals that Doc's father received some land grants in the jungle, and that somebody else wants this land, probably because there are vital resources that can be extracted from the land. The deeds to that land have mysteriously gone missing, so Savage and his men set out for the jungle, leading to the ultimate showdown between them and Captain Seas' forces of evil.

It's fairly easy to see why Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze was a box-office disaster. It's played like the old Batman TV series of a decade earlier, which apparently goes against the spirit of the original books. Those were supposedly earnest rather than campy, sort of what you might expect if Thunderbirds had been live action: an extremely wealthy person using his wealth to fight injustices that governments couldn't right. Instead, we get campy, which is fun at times for how bad it is, but not what fans might have wanted. (As I understand it, the books were still in print at the time.) It doesn't help that Ron Ely isn't much of an actor.

So sit back and watch Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze to have a little bit of fun, but beware that you're not getting a particularly good movie.

A British exploitation movie

Not too long ago I did a post on the exploitation movie Mad Youth. A movie that tries to make similar warnings, only coming from Britain, is Good-Time Girl.

A very young Diana Dors shows up in the framing scenes at the opening and closing. She plays Lyla Lawrence, a teenaged girl who is brought before Judge Thorpe (Flora Robson) for getting into the sort of trouble that teenaged girls on the way to bigger trouble get into: being out way too late and hanging with the wrong crowd and stuff. Judge Thorpe decides that the best thing for Lyla would be to give her a cautionary tale about a girl who was in Lyla's situation not too long ago, but who didn't straighten her life out and suffered serious consequences as a result. Cue the inevitable flashback....

Jean Kent is the real star of this movie. She plays Gwen Rawlings, a 16-year-old girl who lives a lousy life in the years just after World War II. She's needed to get work to help the family make ends meet, working at Pottinger's pawn shop and dreaming of better things, such as getting away from her nasty father. Since people pawn nice things at the shop, Gwen decides one day that she's going to "borrow" one of the pieces of jewelry. Unfortunately, she gets caught out before she can return it and gets fired, which also results in a beating from Dad. So, she runs away.

Gwen gets a room on the top floor of a rooming-house opposite Jimmy (Peter Glenville), who works at the sort of club you wonder if it's really fully legal. In any case, Jimmy comes across as a bit of a shady character but claims he can get Gwen a job based on her looks. Max Vine (Herbert Lom), isn't quite trusting of Gwen's insistence she's an adult, but also recognizes her legs can get her tips. Red (Dennis Price), who plays in the band, kind of takes Gwen under his wing although he's married. Jimmy gets jealous, leading to his framing her for a crime she's technically guilty of if only out of ignorance, in pawning some stolen jewels.

For this, Gwen gets sent to the British version of reform school and finds that it's got the same sort of hierarchy you'd seen in the women's prison in Caged or in a boys' reform school. In any case, the place sucks and she thinks about running away. Eventually, she does escape, and goes looking for Max who has opened a new club. This isn't the best idea, although it's not as though she's got too many other options. She gets in a car with one of the patrons for a drive, but this results in a hit-and-run, and a downward spiral that we know is going to end badly or else Judge Thorpe wouldn't have a story to tell Lyla at the beginning of the movie.

Although Good-Time Girl has all of the plot stylings of an exploitation movie or Hollywood B morality tale, it's actually a surprisingly good movie. It's on par with a Hollywood programmer: better than a B movie, but clearly not an A film. The quality stems from the movie being a straight drama without trying to be lurid or over-the-top in the way that the Hollywood exploitation movies were. It's also got a pretty good performance from Kent. Definitely catch Good-Time Girl if you get the chance.

Robert Duvall, 1931-2026

Robert Duvall in his Oscar-winning role in Tender Mercies

The death was announced yesterday of actor Robert Duvall, whose long career included a string of memorable performances, several Oscar nominations, and one win for the film Tender Mercies. Duvall was 95 years old.

Duvall started his movie career as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, but it was really in the 1970s that Duval started to get his best roles, in the first two Godfather films, or in The Conversation, where he played the director of the business that hired Gene Hackman.

Robert Duvall in the middle, with Harrison Ford and Gene Hackman, in The Conversation

More good roles came, including his first Best Actor Oscar nomination for The Great Santini; in all Duvall received three Best Actor nominations and four Supporting Actor nominations, although he only won for Tender Mercies.

The Great Santini

The Great Santini and Tender Mercies are both showing up in the latter half of 31 Days of Oscar. In the meantime, there's also an early role as Maj. Frank Burns in M*A*S*H which will be on FXM on Feb. 22. (Bud Cort, who died last week, also has a small role.) I've got Apocalypse Now on my DVR and plan to finally get around to watching it and putting up a review in the near future. I assume TCM will have a programming tribute sometime after 31 Days of Oscar, more likely in April.

Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter

When the British invasion came along in the 1960s, it was a thing for some of the singers or bands to get involved with narrative movies, although the narrative stories aren't always the most inventive. The Beatles were of course probably the best of the lot with A Hard Day's Night, while the Dave Clark Five made Having a Wild Weekend aka Catch Us If You Can. Herman's Hermits were big for a few years in the 1960s and made Hold On!, but when they had a #1 hit in the US with a song called Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter, somebody had the insane idea of making a movie with that title.

Peter Noone, the lead singer of the band, stars as Herman Tulley. He lives in the sort of Victorian-era terraced housing in Manchester that looks like it's ready for slum clearance and was a staple of British-set movies of the era, together with his grandmother. Grandpa died not to long earlier, and bequeathed Herman a greyhound named Mrs. Brown, whom Herman is seen training as the movie opens. To raise money to try to get the dog in a real race, Herman has sold a share in the dog to each of his bandmates.

Herman goes straight from the track to his work at an ad agency where he and one other candidate are up for a promotion although it's the other guy who gets it because Herman bad-mouths the pink hats the company is trying to promote. Herman also loses his job for it. At least he's got a nice young girl named Tulip who loves him. Meanwhile, when Herman goes to the cemetery to water the plants on Grandpa's grave, he meets a tramp who winds up being a running plot point in the movie.

Herman is able to get the money to enter his dog in a stakes race in Manchester, and the dog wins, which means that the dog is good enough to race in London. The only thing is, that's going to require rather more money than just racing the dog in Manchester. At the race-track are the Browns (played by British character actors Stanley Holloway and Mona Washbourne) whom the dog eventually gets named after; they've got a daughter Judy who is hoping to become a model. They live in London so they might be able to help Herman out if he's able to make it to London.

As you might guess, the band do make it to London, while performing several songs over the course of the movie. The intention is, of course, to put the dog into the big race, although there are quite a few complications along the way.

Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter is more of a time capsule than anything else, looking at the UK in the 1960s as somebody wanted to romanticize it. The story here is minimal and one that doesn't really make much sense, while it doesn't help that the band can't act and the tramp character is a bit obnoxious. The songs are dated although some people may like them.

Our Dancing Daughters

A search of the blog suggests that I haven't done a full-length post on Our Dancing Daughters before. It's part of a series of three Joan Crawford films with similar titles, and I've done a post on the third of them, Our Blushing Brides, which is part of why I wasn't certain whether I'd done Our Dancing Daughters. All three aired not too long ago, but only Our Dancing Daughters received an Oscar nomination so it can be run during 31 Days of Oscar. That airing comes tomorrow, Feb. 16, at 6:00 AM.

Joan Crawford plays Diana Medford, who runs in a circle of fairly well-to-do friends who seem to be able to live the high life, although at heart Diana is a good girl. Also in the same circle is Beatrice (Dorothy Sebastian), along with Bea's mutual friend Ann (Anita Page), nicknamed Annikins. Ann doesn't seem to be quite so well off, and is really interested in finding a man with a fair bit of money, even being encouraged by her mother to do so.

Another mutual friend, Freddie (Edward Nugent, no known relation to actor-turned-director Elliott), organizes a party for the lot of them at a private ballroom at one of the night spots in the city. Showing up at the spot, although not originally part of the party, is Alabama college football star Ben Blaine (John Mack Brown), who has parlayed his college success into a lucrative career doing something, although the something is less important than the fact that he has money now. Ben gets brought in to the party, which is where he meets Diana. The two like each other, although Diana comfortable dancing with all the young men at the party, which sort of puts Ben off. Ann, however, is calculating, and put her attention solely on Ben even though she's just as attracted to Freddie. She's able to snag Ben.

Meanwhile, Bea has gotten married to the decent if slightly stuffy Norman (Nils Asther), and has kind of drifted away from the party scene. She invites Diana to come visit, and the meet a bunch of the guys from the old scene, although that's really no longer Bea's thing either. However, Diana, having lost the man she really wanted, decides she's going to go off to Europe to get away from it all and salve her wounds.

Bea organizes a big bon voyage party, and Ann is hoping to go with Freddie, since the two of them are carrying on an affair. Ben is having none of that, and is no dummy, so Ann lies and claims her mom is ill. Ben calls Ann's bluff and, having done so, decides to go to the bon voyage party where everyone finds.... well, let's say that the good people are going to have a happy ending and the not-so-good people are going to get what's coming to them.

Our Dancing Daughters is a well-enough made movie, having been done so at the end of the silent era when a lot of films now had synchronized scores and sound effects if not spoken dialog. Our Dancing Daughters is the sort of film that would have benefited from the dialog actually being spoken instead of in intertitles, although at the time the movie was made that would have screwed up the camerawork which, having not having to worry about the placement of the microphone, is fairly fluid.

Our Dancing Daughters may also be of interest to those with curiosity as to what Hollywood's view of late 1920s social values was. That too makes the movie worth a watch, even if the ending may be a bit far-fetched.

The Red Mill!

Tonight's theme in TCM's 31 Days of Oscar is movies set in France. One of the movies in the lineup had been running in the FXM rotation and, not having seen it before, I had recorded it. That movie is Baz Luhrmann's 2001 version of Moulin Rouge!, so with the TCM showing tonight at 10:00 PM, I decided to watch it now rather than wait for another showing on FXM.

Christian (Ewan McGregor) is an Englishman right around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries who, being a hopless romantic, decided to go off to Paris to write the great novel that way a lost generation of Americans would do in the 1920s. He gets a crappy room in an apartment hotel in Montmartre, not far from the famous Moulin Rouge nightclub. Not that his writing is going well, and worse for him, a man falls through the ceiling into his apartment!

That man is the Narcoleptic Argentine, part of a troupe of actors led by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo). They're trying to write a play, without much success, but Christian comes up with some brilliant idea by mouthing platitudes that would become song lyrics from well-known pop (and some other genre) songs of an era much later than the characters inhabit: "The hills are alive with the sound of music", "All you need is love", and so on, with a lot of music used. Toulouse-Lautrec is impressed and takes Christian with them to see Zidler (Jim Broadbrent), the proprietor of the Moulin Rouge.

Zidler is planning to use his courtesan Satine (Nicole Kidman), who has been the star of previous stage shows at the Moulin Rouge, as the star of this new show. But there's a catch. Zidler's desire is to turn the Moulin Rouge into something serious, and for that he needs money. To that end, he was hoping to get the Duke (richard Roxburgh) to sponsor the show in exchange for the services of Satine who, being a courtesan, may or may not be honestly in love with anybody. In any case, the Duke loves Satine, and certainly Christian does too.

Satine meets Christian and thinks he's the Duke. But since Christian, romantic that he is, really does love Satine, and because she likes the ideas for the play, she is more than willing to lead him on in exchange for his being the writer of the play. The idea for the play grows more fantastic as Christian is in many ways writing the love triangle that he, Satine, and the Duke are getting involved in, only setting it over in one of the princely states of British India.

The Duke is no dummy, especially because he's got operatives among the cast of the play, and figures out what's going on. He's also insanely jealous, wanting Satine only for himself, and being more than willing to kill Christian in order to get that. Meanwhile, Satine has been diagnosed with consumption. All of the threads come together at the climactic performance of the play Christian has written.

Moulin Rouge! received a bunch of Oscar nominations. I can see why, but I can also see why some people are really going to dislike the movie. The reasons for that I think largely fall on the direction of Baz Luhrmann. His directorial choices, in terms of lighting, editing, and camera movement, are all highly stylized, but also for me incredibly intrusive at times. The extremely fast-paced editing may not be to everybody's liking either. Other people are probably going to enjoy trying to figure out all of the music that's being used, as there's a lot of it. For me, that wasn't quite enough to overcome the issues I had with the direction, but again I can understand why that might not be the case for other people. Moulin Rouge! is a movie I'm glad I got the chance to see, but not one I'm looking to watch a second time any time soon.