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.

Only You

Over New Year's, all of the TCM presenters got together to present some movies that they hadn't seen before deciding they'd show this night's lineup and talk about it. Among the movies they ran was one that was new to me, too: Only You.

The movie starts off with an establishing sequence of a couple of kids playing at a ouija board: Faith Corvatch, her brother Larry, and Faith's best friend Kate. They spell out the name "Damon Bradley". Some years later, before becoming an adult, Faith goes to a carnival where a fortune teller tells her she's going to meet a man named Damon Bradley and marry him.

Of course, that's all nonsense. Fast-forward to where they're all adults. Kate (Bonnie Hunt) has gotten married to Larry (Fisher Stevens), while Faith (Marisa Tomei) is engaged to be married to a podiatrist named Dwayne. But we wouldn't have a movie if something didn't happen here. Faith finds out that Dwayne, who doesn't know Faith's superstition about Damon Bradley, in fact had a classmate named Damon Bradley. Said Damon Bradley is supposed to be flying to Italy that day. So Faith, being a completely rational woman any guy would want to marry, figures that the thing to do would be to jilt Dwayne and get on a plane to Italy in the hopes of finding the Damon Bradley who she believes she's fated to marry. Not only that, but she's able to get Kate to join her and leave her husband in the lurch, because reasons.

That's not much to go on, and as you might expect Faith doesn't find Damon. But it's the sort of situation that's ripe for somebody who'd want to scam her. So sure enough, she just magically runs into a guy who identifies himself to her as Damon Bradley (Robert Downey Jr.) This is of course a lie. The guy is actually named Peter, but, having seen Faith, fell in love with her, so when he overhears that she's looking for a guy named Damon Bradley, decides to claim that's his name. And for the period of time that Faith believes Peter is in fact Damon, she too is in love with him.

Now, you may be asking yourself why anyone would want to stay in love with a woman who clearly shows hershelf to be incredibly shallow. And yet Peter still loves Faith, to the point that he comes up with another fake Damon Bradley (Billy Zane) and travels all around Italy with Faith and Kate so that Faith can find this fake Damon and learn that this isn't the person she should be in love with. Complicating matters it the fact that Kate is being pursued by the sort of suave European who populates movies like this, or certainly did a generation or two earlier when travel to Europe wasn't quite so easy.

You can probably guess who winds up together in the final reel, and part of what makes Only You a bit of a slog is the fact that it takes so long to get to the predictable ending. Everybody tries, and it's not the fault of the cast by any means. They're hindered by a sub-par formulaic script that frankly insults the viewers' intelligence. There's some nice cinematography of Italy, but the movie as a whole doesn't quite work.

Road to Utopia

I've got a Bob Hope box set that has a portion devoted to the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby collaborations. It includes four of the "Road" movies. It's been over three years since I blogged about the third of them, so I think now would be a good time to put the DVD into the player and watch the fourth, Road to Utopia. (The box set has two earlier collaborations between Hope and Crosby, but sadly not the final three "Road" movies.)

The movie starts off in the present, but worse than that, with Robert Benchley giving us an intro that's really not relevant to the movie. Benchley also stops the action a couple of times to make an allegedly trenchant comment about the upcoming scene, but his presence is a minus in the movie since he's not playing an actual character. Back to the present and the action of the film, Chester (Bob Hope) is an old man married to Sal (Dorothy Lamour), when their old friend Duke (Bing Crosby) shows up. This causes the three of them to think back over forty years, to when there was a gold rush in the Klondike and all three of them were there for it.

Not that this was part of the plan. Chester and Duke are partners in a double act that's part vaudeville, part carnival barker dishonesty that's gotten them stopped by the police in pretty much every town they've been in, leading them to make it all the way to the Pacific. They have to make another quick escape, but this time Chester's decided he's had enough. He wants to go back to New York while Duke wants to go to Alaska. Duke takes all of Chester's money, so Chester gets on the same boat as Duke to try to get some of the money back.

Instead, the two lose all the money, so they have to work their way to Alaska which is how they come across a map when they're cleaning the cabin of two thugs, McGurk (Nester Paiva) and Sperry (Robert Barrat). 80 years on and that sort of treasure map is a nonsense plot device, but for some reason, people really bought into it in the old days. Chester and Duke, having stolen it, think this is going to make them rich, but understandably McGurk and Sperry want it back.

And they're not the only ones who want it. Larson (Douglas Dumbrille) is the sort of person making money not from striking gold, but from serving the people trying to strike gold. But he wants in on the gold too. Sal shows up at Larson's saloon, claiming to have information about that map. But she -- and nobody else in town -- know what Sperry and McGurk look like. So as you can guess, when Chester and Duke show up, they're going to get mistaken for the two baddies. The actual Sperry and McGurk are not far behind.

Now, since we know from the film's opening that Sal and Chester are married, we know that everybody escapes, and that Sal and Chester fall in love, which complicates things back in the Klondike. Sal's job, mind you, is to get the map for Larson, but once she falls in love with Chester, she's not so sure about it. In and around all of this there's the opportunity for the leads to sing several songs.

Apparently, Road to Utopia was well received when it was released back in 1946. Perhaps that's because the movie had been held for several years so it had been quite a while since the public had seen a "Road" movie. Indeed, in the intervening years, Robert Benchley had died, that's how long it was held up. I personally found Road to Utopia a fairly weak movie, with the jokes falling flatter. Benchley adds nothing, and the infighting between the Hope and Crosby characters is wearing thin.

A younger acquaintance

Another of the movies that had been sitting on my DVR for quite some time that I kind of knew a bit about going into it was Rich and Famous, which is not to be confused with the Alfred Hitchcock movie Rich and Strange. Instead, it's based on the same stage play as the Bette Davis movie Old Acquaintance, although the two versions have some differences between them.

The movie opens up at Smith College in 1959. Liz (Jacqueline Bisset) and Merry (Candice Bergen) are best friends and roommates, although Merry is about to drop out in order to elope with Doug (David Selby), which causes a bit of tension as it's implied that Doug and Liz may have dated in the past. In any case, Merry and Doug do run off, and since this is still the first reel, you know that happily ever after isn't going to be a thing. You also know that the movie is going to move quite a bit ahead in the future or else we wouldn't have that mention of 1959.

Sure enough, 10 years pass as Liz shows up on a college campus in Los Angeles to do a speaking engagement. Liz has become a famous writer thanks to her one novel as well as a bunch of essays of the sort that wind up in magazines for the smart set, or the people who think they're the smart set. Merry lives in Malibu with Doug and their daughter, and know a bunch of Hollywood types. Indeed, Merry, inspired by Liz's success as a writer, decided that she too should try her hand at writing. But where Liz wrote a critically-acclaimed and award-winning book, Merry writes something that Liz considers not very good writing, and incredibly trashy subject material about all of Merry and Doug's thinly-disguised Hollywood friends. Merry gets Liz to present the novel to her agent Jules Levi (Steven Hill).

As you can guess, Merry's novel becomes a trashy hit, while Liz is still suffering from writers' block as she tries to complete that second novel. On the other hand, Merry and Doug's marriage is falling apart and Doug loves Liz, something that's really going to piss off Merry when she finds out about it, which she's going to in the mid-1970s when she's in New York to do a TV appearance with Merv Griffin.

The final segment of the film comes in 1981 when Merry has finally written a novel that not only gets some critical acclaim, but short-listed for the same award that Liz won all the way back in the 1960s. Liz is on the committee to select this year's winner, and unsurprisingly Merry tries to use her friendship with Liz to get Liz to select her book as the winner. Liz's personal life, meanwhile, is going down the tubes. She's supposed to do an interview with Chris (Hart Bochner), a writer for Rolling Stone, but they end up having a bit of a romantic relationship that's complicated by the fact that Merry's daugher Debby (Meg Ryan) wants to leave home and spends some nights first on the couch in Liz's hotel suite followed by the couch in Chris' suite.

Rich and Famous is a mess of a movie, and it's easy to see why it was neither a critical nor box-office success when it was originally released. Parts of it rise to the level of trashy fun, notably Bergen's horrendous accent in the more melodramatic scenes. But it doesn't rise to the final scene of the original Bette Davis/Miriam Hopkins version.

Rain Around the Soldier

Another of the actors honored in this year's Summer Under the Stars was Steve McQueen, which gave me the chance to record one of his films that I hadn't seen before: Soldier in the Rain.

McQueen plays Sgt. Eustis Clay, an army drill sergeant somewhat reminiscent of William Holden's operator character in Stalag 17 except that, where Stalag 17 was set in a World War II POW camp, Clay was part of the peacetime draft and seems to be counting down the days until his time in the Army was finished. He's got much bigger schemes planned for when he gets out of the army. Clay serves under MSgt. Maxwell Slaughter (Jackie Gleason), a career soldier who, based on the time the film was released and Gleason's age, was probably drafted in World War II and never found anything better to do than stay in the Army after the war. He's trying to make life as easy for himself as possible before he hits his 20 and out.

Slaughter likes Clay for whatever reason, although Clay looks up to Slaughter more than he probably should. Not that Slaughter is a bad influence; it's that Clay seems like a bit of a naïf and that nobody should look up to another human being the way Clay looks up to Slaughter. Slaughter is married to the Army, and doesn't have a wife or kids, so Clay finds a young local woman off-base, Bobby Jo (Tuesday Weld) and introduces her to Slaughter.

Slaughter eventually develops a liking for Bobby Jo becaue she turns out to be brighter than she looks, although she seems much too young for Slaughter: she's presented as a high school student who's barely legal. You'd think Slaughter's superior officers like Lt. Magee (Tom Poston) would put the kibosh on such fraternizing, but apparently no.

As I said earlier, Clay is a smooth operator type who among other things is trying to pass off PFC Meltzer (Tony Bill) as a sprinter who's going to be able to run the first three-minute mile, at a time when the mile record would have been around 3:55, not that the mile is run much any more since metric distances are more generally run. This is presented as one of the comic schemes Clay is involved in, although it also leads to a traffic incident that Slaughter has to bail Clay out of.

Slaughter will have to bail Clay out for the film's climax, a much more dramatic scene when Clay finds out his dog died. A couple of MPs decide to beat the crap out of Clay at a bar for some reason, and Slaughter has to save Clay's butt.

Soldier in the Rain is one of those films that's more episodic than having a traditional full-movie arc, and it's a movie that doesn't really work. It's partly because the episodes don't quite fit together but more because Steve McQueen took his character in a direction that doesn't work. McQueen plays Clay much too broadly, as a sort of Southern stereotype. It's supposed to be broad comedy, I suppose, but McQueen's performance makes it look almost as though McQueen is a lousy actor, which isn't the case. Supposedly this was because McQueen felt like Gleason was stealing scenes or at least coming out on top, but it doesn't work and the director probably should have spotted it. In any case, it makes the movie rather grating whenever McQueen is on screen, which is a lot.

At least I've gotten Soldier in the Rain off of my list of movies to watch. But, as always, watch and judge for yourself.