The Day They Robbed the Bank of England

Some time back, I mentioned how I had recorded The Day They Robbed the Bank of England off a TCM showing. Unfortunately, there was a technical issue with the recording such that the sound was not in sync with the video, making it unwatchable. It eventually aired again and the DVR picked it up. This time there didn't seem to be any issue with the synching, so I was able to watch it and write up this post.

The movie opens with an expository presentation about how the Bank of England had some hidebound traditions about guarding the currency, and the use of royal guardsmen to accompany the gold bullion that ended up in the vaults. We then go back to London at the turn of the century. Ireland was still controlled in its entirety by the UK government, although even at this time there were people advocating for Home Rule, which was a sort of autonomy (see the Clark Gable movie Parnell), as well as people who might be more willing to engage in violent means to achieve complete Irish independence from the UK. O'Shea (Hugh Griffith), the leader of one such revolutionary cell, has come up with an audacious plan to help the Irish independence movement.

O'Shea's plan is to rob a bunch of that gold out of the vaults. For one thing, that gold is worth quite a bit, and that would definitely finance the independence movement. But there's also the big political statement it would make if Irish revolutionaries could steal gold right out from under the government's noses. But they need expertise and people who wouldn't be suspected by the British. To that end, O'Shea sent Iris Muldoon (Elizabeth Sellars) over to the US to recruit, and she's picked up Charles Norgate (Aldo Ray), a mining engineer. This is a profession that has multiple advantages. One is us an explosives expert, while a second is in dealing with tight spaces and the spatial relations of mapping things underneath the bank. There's no real way they're getting past the guards, so they're going to have to tunnel.

Of course, simply tunneling right now isn't good enough. Norgate begins what is essentially a circa-1900 version of a phishing operation. He tries to get information from the bank officers, although you couldn't just open up a bank account at the Bank of England in those days. He also befriends Lt. Finch (Peter O'Toole in an early role), an officer in the guards who guard the vaults, although of course Finch doesn't really have a clue of Northgate's real intent. Northgate also passes himself off as an architect to get people to give him information about the construction of the bank and the vaults, although the actual plans of the vaults are kept under lock and key.

To get those plants, Northgate gets help from Walsh (Kieron Moore), another member of the cell. Walsh has a thing for Muldoon, not realizing that she and Northgate had a romantic relationship during their time in the States. They've got other reasons to be in conflict, so when the time comes to actually go into the sewers and get to the location from where they're going to dig into the vaults, there's debate over how to proceed. This gets more complicated when there's a twist of the Home Rule bill being reintroduced to Parliament. Go ahead with the robbery now and there's no way the bill is getting passed.

The Day They Robbed the Bank of England is one of those heist movies where there's quite a bit of time spent on building up the preparation of how the heist is going to be carried off. And, much like the later The Great Train Robbery, it's got the added interest of being a period piece. Unfortunately, The Day They Robbed the Bank of England doesn't quite have the budget or location shooting of the later movie, so while it's certainly adequate, it also feels like there's something missing. I think you'll enjoy it, but at the same time it could have been better.

Audrey Hepburn, Native American?

Another of those movies that I recorded quite some time back and didn't get around to watching until not long before it expired from the DVR was the 1960 western The Unforgiven, which is of course not to be confused with the Clint Eastwood film Unforgiven. Anyhow, having watched it, I wrote up this post and saved it in drafts for some time when I didn't have other westerns coming up on TCM to do posts about.

The action opens with a panoramic view of a ranch somwhere in west Texas where the nearest civilization is Wichita, KS, or at least where Ben Zachary (Burt Lancaster) returns from. Before that, however, we see the only two people on the ranch at the current time are Rachel (Audrey Hepburn), adopted kid sister of Ben, and their mother Mattilda (Lillian Gish). The camera also pans to a grave stone, which is that of the patriarch, Will Zachary, who was killed by the Kiowa.

And then a strange old guy named Abe Kelsey (Joseph Wiseman) shows up, claiming that Audrey was actually stolen from the Kiowa and adopted by the Zacharys, which might have something to do with why they wanted to kill Will and why Mattilda is ticked with the presence of this man. Meanwhile, the family is working with another family in the area, the Rawlins family. They're headed by patriarch Zeb (Charles Bickford), and have a son Charlie (Albert Salmi) who is thinking of courting Rachel. Kelsey shows up again now that Ben Zachary is back, and this time Ben ticks off Kelsey. Enough so that he starts telling anybody else who will listen the story of Rachel's supposed provenance. That, and he gets a couple of Kiowa to show up at the Zachary place, looking to buy Rachel from the family, a sort of bride price if you will, except that this man says he's actually Rachel's brother.

Best, I suppose, that they marry Rachel off now, and give Charlie permission to court Rachel. For this Charlie gets himself shot by the Kiowa, not that he's actually guilty of anything. But it gets the rest of the Rawlins family pissed at the Zachary family, especially Charlie's mom who gets to have one of those big emotional scenes cursing Rachel and the rest of the Zacharys. Making matters worse is that a posse goes out to catch Kelsey, and when they catch him and bring him back, Mattilda and Ben basically engage in vigilante justice which gets Zeb to believe that the story about Rachel is actually true.

The Kiowa show up again demanding Rachel, who really ought to be allowed to make the decision herself since she's now an adult. But instead Ben and brother Andy kill one of the Kiowa, who respond by laying siege to the Zachary homestead. It's a siege they ought to be able to win because they've got time and numbers on their side. But the Zacharys seem willing to fight to the last man, and woman.

The Unforgiven was produced by Burt Lancaster's production company and suffered a troubled production including Audrey Hepburn falling off a horse and the original director being replaced by John Huston. Huston and Lancaster apparently clashed over the artistic vision of the movie, and I think it shows somewhat in a movie that takes some odd twists and turns tht don't always work. Everybody's professional and the movie is visually nice to look at for the most part, but there's always this feeling that something isn't quite right here.

Still, even though The Unforgiven is a bit of a misfire, it's an interesting misfire.

High School graduation

Tonight's lineup on TCM is a night of movies set in and around the end of one's time at high school. One of the movies happens to be on my DVR, so I watched it to be able to put up this post. That movie is Andy Hardy's Private Secretary, airing early tomorrow (May 5) morning at 4:00 AM, or still in the overnight hours depending upon your perspective and time zone.

Mickey Rooney returns as Andy Hardy, together with his father Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone), mother (Fay Holden) and English teacher Aunt Milly (Sara Haden), although his sister is absent from this installment of the series. As the movie opens, the Judge is ruling from the bench, called into his chambers because of a check with insufficient funds. As it turns out, that check was written by Andy, although Andy of course wasn't really trying to pass bad checks. Instead, Andy was trying to make up for insufficient funds elsewhere, but didn't have the money to rob Peter to pay Paul, as it were.

The original check was for the senior class' funds at Carvel. Graduation is coming up, and to deal with the expenses, the senior class has imposed a head tax on the seniors, not taking into account that perhaps there were students in Carvel who aren't so middle class like the Hardys and all their circle of society. Two such people are the Land twins, Kathryn (Kathryn Grayson) and Harry (Todd Karns). Indeed, the Lands are sort of not part of anybody's social circle in Carvel. Judge Hardy decides he's going to investigate of course, along with making certain that Andy starts to involve the two Land kids in the rest of his group of friends.

The Lands are not well off and new to Carvel because of the war raging over in Europe (the movie was released in early 1941, before the US was attacked at Pearl Harbor). Dad Steven Land (Ian Hunter) is a very bright man who can speak nine languages, and used those talents to set up a travel agency that facilitated rich people's travel once they got to wherever in Europe he was based at the time. But of course, World War II began in Europe and nobody wanted to travel and there weren't so many places safe for the Lands, so they returned to the US more or less broke.

Judge Hardy has influence, so he talks to one of his friends at the State Department. Steven Land's linguistic skills include Portuguese, and with the Good Neighbor policy, the State Department can use a man like Steven as part of one of their trade delegations. The only problem is, the delegation is leaving this Thursday, which is the day before the high school graduation. Kathryn and Harry are for some reason expected to follow their father to South America, which means they'd have to leave Thursday as well. Can't something at least be done to have the kids follow later, or better yet, start a life as adults here in the US?

Andy thinks he's doing a good deed by editing the telegram to Washington saying that the Lands are perfectly ready to leave for South America on Saturday. But since there's an entire delegation, and they're all leaving in unison, that's taken as an admission that Steven won't be taking the job, which promptly gets filled before Judge Hardy finds out what happens.

Meanwhile, there are Andy Hardy's own problems. He's on all the committees surrounding the graduation, with the result that he's stretched himself too thin. He needs help, and since Kathryn has been taking business courses it's suggested by Judge Hardy that Andy hire Kathryn on as a sort of secretary. Andy's traditional girlfriend Polly Benedict (Ann Rutherford) finds out and is none too pleased. But in addition to needing an assistant, Andy is doing so many extracurriculars that he neglects his studies to the point that he fails his English exam. This means that he's in danger of not graduating with the rest of his class.

Of course, this being a Hardy Family movie, you know that all of the personal problems are going to be resolved with all of the good people -- and there really aren't any bad guys in a movie like this -- getting the positive outcome they deserve. It's the sort of feel good movie that audiences were going to like in an era where there was still that war raging on "over there" without America, even if there was the worry that America was going to get involved. But in addition to that, Andy Hardy's Private Secretary was an opportunity for MGM to introduce its new star, Kathryn Grayson. She was more of a singer than an actress at this point, so MGM included a bunch of operatic musical numbers in the plot for Grayson to show off that operatic voice. What you think this does to the movie is probably going to depend on what you think of opera music in general.

With that in mind, I think I'd say that Andy Hardy's Private Secretary isn't particularly better or worse than the other movies in the series that I've seen; it's just got such different music that it'll influence your choice of which Hardy Family movie to watch.

Sky around the satellite

TCM's lineup for the daytime portion of tomorrow, May 4, is a bunch of 1950s science fiction. One of the movies is a film that's been sitting on my DVR, so once again I made the point of watching it in time for a post here on its upcoming TCM showing. That film is Satellite in the Sky, which airs at 7:30 AM tomorrow.

Satellite in the Sky is set in the UK, although Warner Bros. distributed it here in the US which gives the movie a bigger budget to work with. If you recall the movie The Right Stuff, before man got into outer space there was a bunch of test pilot stuff in planes that could break the sound barrier. The UK's scientists are doing similar stuff and have lost a couple of pilots, to the point that one of the commanders, Michael Hayden (Kieron Moore), plans to go up himself to make certain everything is safe in preparation for the first manned spaceflight.

Hayden's flight is successful, witnessed by the assembled press who kinda sorta know there's thoughts about going into outer space. Some of the reporters, however, aren't all that excited about the prospect because of their risk aversion, notably Kim Hamilton (Lois Maxwell). Worse, what the press doesn't know is that there's more to the mission than going into outer space. In a shocking bit of exposition, two of the higher-ups discuss these secret plans while they're in the same room as the reporters! Massive breach of security. And it's not going to be the last.

Anyhow, the War Department has the idea of testing a new sort of nuclear bomb in outer space. Prof. Merrity (Donald Wolfit) is the physicist in charge of developing it, and he's going to be on the mission to deploy the bomb since so few people know about it that he has to be the one to attach all the fuses and whatnot. Can't have it going off on earth, don't you know. Indeed, Hayden, who is the commander of the mission, isn't told about the presence of the bomb until the night before.

Meanwhile, there's a bunch of drama before the rocket takes off. In another even more shocking breach of security, Kim is able to waltz right through an unlocked gate that doesn't have anyone guarding it, and down to where the rocket is on its sloped underground launching pad. She's even able to climb into the ridiculously spacious rocket ship unseen: everybody's gone home for the evening, it seems! And then there are the two crew members who have issues with their love life: Jimmy (Bryan Forbes) was planning to propose marriage to his girlfriend who suddenly has to leave for a fashion show; Larry Noble has a wife who's fed up with his having to be away all the time because of the mission.

The next morning comes, and the rocket ship takes off just fine, which is shocking considering the extra weight that's it's carrying in the form of Kim Hamilton. Nobody's wearing any sort of pressure suit or personal oxygen system, either. Oh, and even though the ship has escaped the earth's gravity, it still has its own gravity that allows Kim to find a thermos of coffee and pour it for everybody. But the time comes to release the bomb. The plan is to set the fuse and then have the rocket head back for earth with the bomb exploding in space. But in the physics of Satellite in the Sky, the absence of gravity in outer space means that magnetism takes over in their theory of unified forces, so the bomb clings to the ship. One astronaut goes out to push the bomb away, which should give the obvious answer, but the bomb comes back. And the astronauts aboard bicker about what to do.

Satellite in the Sky is another of those movies where you can see what the filmmakers were going for, but they come up with a script that goes badly wrong in part because of the plot holes, and in part because they rely on so many tropes that it's unoriginal. It's also slow even at only 84 minutes. I'm glad I finally got the chance to watch Satellite in the Sky, but it's not particularly good.

The face that launched a thousand ships

A movie that for some reason I thought I may have watched ages ago, before I even started this blog, was the 1950s version of Helen of Troy. I had never blogged about it, and having watched it, am not 100% certain that I even had seen it before; perhaps I may have watched the 1950s version of Alexander the Great on TCM instead. In any case, Helen of Troy is getting an airing on TCM tomorrow, May, 3, at 7:45 AM, so now's the time for me to watch it and write up a review of it.

The movie is based on Homer's Iliad, although liberties are taken. We're introduced to Troy as the city that guarded the entrance to the Dardanelles between what is now the Turkish Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Troy grew wealthy by charging a toll for safe passage through the straits, although this ticked off other civilizations and mean that Troy didn't have ships of its own. Particularly the Greeks, led by Spartan King Menelaus (Niall MacGinnis), were unhappy.

Meanwhile, in Troy, there's debate over what to do, with King Priam's (Cedric Hardwicke) son Hector wanting to go on the offensive and attack the Spartans first, while younger son Paris (Jacques Sernas, credited as Jack) disagrees and thinks they should offer peace. You can always try war later, so Paris gets on a boat bound for one of the Greek harbors. Except that the ship is overcome by a storm, with Paris going up to fix the mast and going overboard when the mast snaps. He washes ashore and is rescued by a gorgeous woman who turns out to be Helen (Rossana Podestà) although she doesn't reveal her true identity who is AWOL from the palace with an old governess and her slave servant Andraste (Brigitte Bardot in one of her first international roles). Unsurprisingly, Paris falls for this lovely woman, although everybody realizes there's a problem if the Greeks were to find the guy.

Paris does make his way to the Spartan council, where Menelaus is meeting with Agamemnon (Robert Douglas), Achilles (Stanley Baker), Odysseus (Torin Thatcher), and others. Paris proves who he is by being good at combat, but then who should show up to the council but Helen? Menelaus is no dummy, and realizes that Paris and Helen have already met somewhere before. Menelaus is also insanely jealous because Helen doesn't really care for him on the grounds that she's been basically forced into a marriage and he tries to keep her captive in a gilded cage. So although Menelaus feigns talking peace, he actually plans to keep Paris hostage and ransom him to Troy.

Helen's servants inform Paris of this and effect an escape, leading to Menelaus getting even angrier, and sending soldiers to find Paris and kill him. They do find him, but there's a problem in that Helen has escaped the palace to make certain Paris gets to the Phoenician boat that's supposed to take him back to Troy. Whether the soldiers can kill Helen along with Paris is an open question, but one that Paris obviates by taking Helen in his arms and jumping off a cliff to the ocean below much like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Paris takes Helen back to Troy.

When Menelaus learns of this, he vows to go to war with Troy, using Helen as the reasonable excuse, but with as much of an intention to loot Troy and let a bunch of people bring the treasures of war back to Greece with them. Unfortunately Troy is in an easily-defensible place, and has a bunch of land behind it that's going to make it hard to surround. So instead, after the first attack is repulsed, the war becomes a largely frozen war of attrtition. Can the Greeks wait out the Trojan subjects' increasingly poor morale? Well, as anybody who knows their history will remember, the Greeks eventually came up with the Trojan horse that had a couple of commandos inside who could open up the city gates while the Trojans, drunk having thought they won a big battle, are hung over.

This version of Helen of Troy is pretty impressive to watch from the point of view of all the technical parts of the production; it was filmed largely in Italy with wide-screen color photography and what generally look like very high production values. The story and the acting, however, leave a bit less to be desired, in part because the two leads were not native English speakers. Still, I think the good parts of the spectacle ultimately outweigh the shortcomings of the story.

House Around the Woman

I've mentioned a couple of John Nesbitt's Passing Parade shorts before. They're interesting, although definitely the sort of thing a lot of people today are going to find old-fashioned. One of the shorts that I hadn't seen before until it showed up in the space after one of the features I watched to fill out the time slot is The Woman in the House.

John Nesbitt, giving his stentorian narration once again, discusses fear and how it's normal to have, especially in the time in which the movie is hitting theaters: it premiered in May 1942, about five months after the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II. One particularly odd fear is called "anthropophobia", the fear of people, and a dramatized case study of one sufferer of it is shown. That woman is Catherine Starr (not a real name if there's even anything about this story that is real, which I doubt; Starr is played by Ann Richards), a woman who hasn't left her house in 40 years.

Apparently Starr was a schoolteacher in a small English village who was enagaged to be married to a British army officer in 1901. However, a small dispute over the wedding leaves her fiancé to say that he's going to leave the house and she'll never see him again. He has to go with his regiment down to South Africa where the Boer War is being fought. Some time later, she gets a letter of the "we regret to inform you" type that her fiancé died, not in battle, but of malaria in Africa. As a result, Starr can't bear to face the world, although apparently she has money saved up for 40 years of living.

Back in the present day, or late 1941 in the UK, there's that little war going on, and the Blitzkrieg with Nazi airplanes trying to bomb British targets. Starr's village is targeted, which meand that she's going to have to be taken from her house by force to a bomb shelter. Can't they just let her die in peace? But this is just what poor Catherine needs, as she finds a couple of children in the bomb shelter who need a bit of first aid. And don't you know it, but service to others is the best way to overcome one's fear.

Oh boy is the service propaganda on display here. Yeah, there's a war to be fought, but making a short like this with such an obvious agenda came across to me, at least, as a bit cringe-inducing, largely because the message feels shoe-horned in. This isn't one of those service movies or a film set in one of those occupied people where the locals were bravely fighting the Nazis. Instead, it's ostensibly about psychiatry, and then it turns into "how dare you have a mental illness -- do your part".

I don't know if the Passing Parade shorts got put out on a box set, but this isn't the first one I'd watch off of such a box set.

TCM Star of the Month May 2026: Gregory Peck

Gregory Peck (r.) and Dean Stockwell in Gentleman's Agreement (May 2, 12:15 AM)

Today is the first day of a new month, and that means it's time for new programming features on TCM. This includes a new Star of the month, that being Gregory Peck. His movies will be airing on all five Fridays in prime time, starting tonight at 8:00 PM with his Oscar-winning performance in To Kill a Mockingbird. Note that the running times for tonight's movies may cause a bit of a problem with the starting time for following movies: Spellbound starts at 10:15 PM in a two-hour slot, but is 118 minutes plus presumably an intro and outro. The fourth movie, which may or may not have an intro, is The Yearling at 2:30 AM, which is listed as 134 minuts and is in a slot that's two hours and 15 minutes. So it would fit without the intro and outro, but since it's often been the case to have four movies in prime time with host intros....

Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger in Twelve O'Clock High

It looks as though two of the nights of the salue are more genre-specific. The May 8 schedule has Peck in several westerns, while May 22 is the start of TCM's annual Memorial Day marathon of war movies. As such, it's appropriate that that night of the Peck salute includes a bunch of the war movies he made, although not among them this year is Twelve O'Clock High.

Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck, and Eddie Albert in Roman Holiday

In fact, looking at the TCM schedule, it's a bit surprising what movies aren't airing this month. In addition to Twelve O'Clock High, you also can't see Roman Holiday on TCM this month. There is, however, a showing of The Boys from Brazil (May 29, 10:00 PM) that I've wanted to see for a while, as well as Peck in the 1950s version of Moby Dick (May 30, 5:00 AM).

Not home in Indiana

Another of the people honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars in August 2025 was Shirley Jones. This gave me the chance to record a pair of her films. One is a supporting role in the horrendously bad The Happy Ending, which I gave up on halfway through and may or may not get to before it expires off the DVR, that's how bad it is. And it's not even bad in a good way. The other film was one from early in her career, April Love.

Pat Boone is the star here, and he does sing the title song "April Love", although not over the opening credits; instead, the opening credits are over establishing shots of what is supposed to be bluegrass horse country in Kentucky. We then get Boon, who plays young Nick Conover, in a mail truck looking for the Bruce farm. It seems Mr. and Mrs. Bruce are his uncle and aunt, and he's going to be spending some time working on their farm. Not that it's much of a farm anymore, not since Jed Bruce's (Arthur O'Connell) son Jed Jr. died in Korea and Dad lost his zest for living and raising harness racing horses.

It was also Aunt Henrietta's (Jeanette Nolan) idea to bring Nick to the farm. Nick's father presumably died; Nick's unseen mom has to work to support Nick and can't be the necessary presence in the kid's life. As a result, Nick fell in with the wrong crowd, went joyriding in a stolen car in Chicago, and got probation. As part of the plea deal, Nick lost his driver's license and is getting sent away to this farm. So you can understand why uncle Jed isn't exactly thrilled. If Nick were played by someone other than clean-cut Pat Boone, you might wonder whether the plot would have Nick engaging in predations on his aunt and uncle.

While Jed is showing Nick the work he's going to have to do, including some obvious foreshadowing involving a horse that won't let anybody ride him now that Jed Jr. is dead, one of the neighbors shows up: young Liz Templeton (Shirley Jones), whose father still raises harness horses. Liz is good with horses, too, and can even ride a sulky. She falls for Nick and invites him over, although she and the rest of the Templeton's don't know just why Nick is here. And why he doesn't want to get behind the wheel of a car. Liz has a big sister Fran who interests Nick's eye, although she already has a boyfriend in college kid Al.

Part of the plot involves the good influence that Nick and Uncle Jed wind up having on each other. Nick fixes up Jed's broken-down old tractor, while Nick rescues the horse when it falls during an escape. The horse starts letting Nick get in the sulky to race him. There's also the Nick/Liz romance. And then there's the plot about Nick's probation. After fixing another old car on the farm, Liz and Fran make comments that lead to a drag race between Fran's sports car and Nick's old jalopy. Fran gets some dents in her car, and the insurance claim reveals that Nick has been violating his probation. Oh dear, he might be hauled off to prison instead of being allowed to race in the grand prize race.

April Love is harmless stuff, being a remake of a World War II-era movie Home in Indiana. The update brings nice color photography and Cinemascope, along with the songs for both Boone and Jones to sing. Other than that, the movie is old-fashioned and totally inoffensive. Nick is technically a criminal, but at heart he's really got a good heart. There's no antagonist here, and the Templetons don't seem to care when they learn about Nick's past, that's how clean-cut the movie is.

If you want something clean cut and to be transported to a past that doesn't exist any more, you could do a lot worse than to watch April Love.

End of April 2026 briefs

It's hard to believe that it's already the end of April. Then again, my current pattern of writing posts well ahead of time leads to not paying quite so close attention to how far ahead I'm scheduled, or to writing up other administrative posts like this. So once again I'll mention with the full TCM May schedule out that I've seen several movies on it that are on my DVR and will require my juggling other movies around to do the posts in conjunction with the upcoming TCM airing. As always, check your local schedule.

I learned something disappointing about YouTube TV's "DVR" (technically the cloud library) recently. While it in theory adds every showing of a title you've added to the library, the "select a version" option only shows the most recent half-dozen showings. What this means is that when TCM shows something that's popular enough (and usually more recent) to be in rotation on one of the commercial channels, all those commercial channel airings are going to wind up in the six most recent showings, crowding out the TCM showing which there doesn't seem to be a way to access. No; I specifically added the TCM showing to my library precisely because it's less likely to be edited, and certainly not larded up with commercials and pop-ups. I don't know if the metadata encoded with the programs would allow for a chance to only record the TCM showing.

Apparently the TCM Film Festival starts today and runs through Sunday, April 3. Not that I'd had any plans of going since I can't really afford it and have my elderly father to look after anyway. I don't think TCM on-air really does all that much any more either in terms of being "live" from the festival between movies, but then I've been watching a lot less live TCM. Now, the FAST services, I have to admit I've been watching a lot of stuff live that way.

Sissy Spacek, Beatnik

If you've watched enough Hollywood movies from the late 1950s and early 1960s, you may know that Hollywood had what feels like a rather stereotypical view of the beatnik. And then many years later they had the chance to show the original beatniks, only to come up with something that feels rather tepid. That movie is Heart Beat, which I recently got the chance to watch.

Sissy Spacek provides the narration, giving a stereotypical talk about 1950s suburbia and introducing us to a pair of men. One is the well-known writer Jack Kerouac, who would go on to write On the Road and get it published in the late 1950s, although as the movie opens it's the late 1940s and Kerouac (John Heard) is still living with his mother in a New York City apartment. The second man is Neal Cassady (Nick Nolte), who came from Denver where he spent a lot of his adolescence in reform school since his alcoholic father abandond him. Indeed, in this telling of the story when Cassady gets out of prison he immediately steals another car and heads to New York, which is where he meets Kerouac. The two then head west for San Franciso together with a girl.

In San Francisco, the pair meet Carolyn Robinson (that's Sissy Spacek), who's studying art at the art institute and is engaged to a guy named Dick who doesn't play all that much part in the rest of the story. Jack, Neal, and Carolyn become an inseparable threesome living in a tenement apartment and working what odd jobs they can to make the rent, although Neal ultimate gets a better job with the railroad. Eventually Jack decides to head back to New York to try to sell his manuscript to On the Road which he keeps rolled up in what looks like a grocery bag. Neal has by this time knocked up Carolyn, and Jack suggests to Carolyn that she probably shouldn't marry Neal because she's not going to be happy.

With kids and responsibility, Neal and Carolyn move out to the sort of early-1950s tract housing that was being builty to accommodate the families creating the Baby Boom, and Neal has a tendency to shock the neighbors. After several years, Jack shows up again, and takes a "room" in the attic of the Cassady house with the three living in what again seems like somewhat of an open relationship, something that really shocks the neighbors. Jack heads back to New York again, and with help from Ira (Ray Sharkey), someone supposedly based in part on Allen Ginsberg who wanted nothing to do with this movie, gets On the Road published and becomes a sensation. The fact that the main character is rather based on Neal, however, causes problems for Neal, who eventually gets busted for marijuana possession.

The last act of the movie involves Cassady's itinerance, driving a converted school bus with a bunch of hippie-like characters; Cassady would die fairly young not having published much in his lifetime, although the movie doesn't mention Neal's death.

Once again, I can see why any number of people would have felt influenced by works like On the Road and would want to make a movie based on Kerouac. (I, to be honest, have not read On the Road and have never been terribly interested in the counterculture.) The movie we get in Heart Beat, however, feels rather anodyne. These people lived what in many ways turned out to be wild lives, yet everything feels rather sanitized. I think the actors do the best they can with the material, but it doesn't work as well as one might hope.