Ivan the Terrible, Part I

Two of the foreign films sitting on my DVR are the two parts of Sergei Eisenstein's proposed three-part film on the first Tsar of All Russia, Ivan the Terrible. Only two parts were completed in part because Eisenstein died and in part because of the political reaction to the second part. Recently, I watched Ivan the Terrible, Part I.

To understand this film requires a bit of an understanding of Russian history. Before about the middle of the 16th century, Russia was rulled by a bunch of local princes along with noblemen called boyars. This internal conflict left Russia weak and subject to predation by various forces on its borders including Poland, Baltic Sea kingdoms, and the Muslim khanate of Kazan in what is now central Russia. In 1547, the teenaged Ivan rises to the throne of the principality of Moscow and pretty much crowns himself Tsar of All Russia, a move that understandably creates a whole bunch of political enemies. Russia was also, at this time, despite being Christian, very much not western compared to the rest of Europe; it wasn't really until Peter the Great went to Holland to study shipbuilding that Russia really began to become more westernized.

To deal with all of this, Ivan needs to do a bunch of things. One is to try to ally himself with the Orthodox Church and the common peasants against the boyars and competing princes. Another is to get himself married and set about creating an heir to the throne. The third is to try to unite Russia, for which a common enemy would do nicely. Thankfully for him, the wedding celebration is interrupted by envoys from Kazan. It seems that Kazan is planning to attack Moscow again, and this is the declaration of war.

Ivan is no dummy, and decides that the best defense is to attack himself, so he besieges Kazan and blows up the fortress from below, earning him a major military and political victory as well as gaining some key allies among the people who served under him. However, there's still quite a bit of opposition from the boyars, as they're going to be throughout Ivan's life. Ivan nearly dies but miraculously recovers, earning himself more allies.

But there's still opposition, including quite close to him in the form of his aunt who is plotting to poison his wife. And she actually succeeds. This emboldens the boyars, and Ivan eventually announces that he's going to go away from Moscow for a while to regroup, gather his strength with the peasants and other people allied to him, and return to Moscow triumphant. Since there's a second movie in the Ivan the Terrible story, the first one ends on a rather uncertain note.

As I watched Ivan the Terrible, Part I, released in early 1945 and filmed in 1943 and 1944, I couldn't help but think of how the movie mirrors the situation Russia was facing against Germany at the height of World War II. Indeed, Eisenstein had to decamp to Central Asia to film much of this. But more relevant here is how Eisenstein was able to make a hagiographic movie about the first Tsar against the repressive dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. Indeed, it's quite easy to look at this and argue that a case is being made for the idea of a present-day leader with an iron fist. The need to unite all the principalities is also a natural parallell to the need to unite the Soviet people against Germany.

Although I have mostly positives for this movie, there are some negatives to note, which is notably in the stilted dialogue. Eisenstein was moving away from the sort of realistic storytelling which was common in Hollywood and commercial films, instead focusing on a style that has a lot of closeups. I wonder whether part of the dialog issue is also because of the backdrop of medieval Russia and also liturgical Russian.

Holiday (1930)

I mentioned earlier in August the birth anniversary of actress Ann Harding, and how I'd come across the 1930 version of Holiday on Tubi. As it turns out, it was still there, so I finally watched it.

Now you may know the more famous 1938 version of Holiday, which I blogged about back in 2015. This earlier version has pretty much the same plot, which I suppose is unsurprising. As the movie opens, Johnny Case (Robert Ames) is being brought home to the house of Julia Seton (Mary Astor). The two of them had met on a ski vacation up in Lake Placid, and Johnny proposed to Julia knowing little about her background. Now, it turns out that Julia is fabulously wealthy, as the older daughter of banker Edward Seton (the original William Holden, not the one from films like Stalag 17). Julia has a younger daughter Linda (Ann Harding), and a cynical alcoholic brother Ned (Monroe Owsley). Julia isn't quite so certain how to break the news of her engagement to Dad, since he's morally traditional, and this sort of quick engagement is anything but.

Linda offers to help, largely because she's the one person in the family who is decidedly not stuffy, and resents the sort of buttoned-down upbringing that Dad and his social class represent. To Linda it's stultifying and takes away one's individuality. So she sees Johnny as a breath of fresh air, especially because considering taking a sort of sabbatical before finally settling down to life, again the sort of thing that Mr. Seton would find shocking.

We can see just how square Dad is when Linda announces she wants to hold a small party up in what had been the children's play-room, with an intimate dinner for a few of Linda and Julia's friends, just calling them up. She specifically mentions not having engraved invitations, so what do we see in the next shot? You guessed it, an egraved invitation. Linda brings the few bohemian friends she has, Prof. Potter (Edward Everet Horton) and his wife (Hedda Hopper), and sulks up in the play-room, for good reason.

Now, at this point, it starts to become clear that Mr. Seton isn't going to be such a good influence on Johnny, either. Where Johnny wants to take a sabbatical, having worked hard in regular work to get to where he is, Dad wants him to join the family business and use the honeymoon to go to Europe to network with some of Dad's influential friends in the worlds of politics and high finance. Johnny begins to chafe, and you get the feeling that he might be better suited going off with Linda. Not that Linda would do such a thing to Julia. She genuinely likes her sister.

The Linda character is at the heart of the biggest differences between the two versions of the movie. In the remake, Linda was played by Katharine Hepburn, who was exactly the right person for the role. Hepburn could be obnoxious in a movie like Bringing Up Baby or getting her comeuppance in The Philadelphia Story, but since the character is supposed to be a rebellious free spirit, that sort of acting from Hepburn works. Ann Harding's Linda is much more the sort of person who's suffered in silence and is only now finally going to stand up for herself, even if she doesn't quite know how to do it. It's a different portrayal, and Harding does a good job, but the way Hepburn played it makes the movie much more lively.

Not that the Ann Harding version of Holiday is bad by any means. It's more that the remake is one of the all-time classics, while this version is a good movie that has the unfortunate luck of having been made at a time when movie makers were still figuring out sound along with having to compare to the remake.

Briefs for August 25-26, 2026

I apologize for the posting schedule last week that was a bit screwed up. As I've posted on a bunch of occasions, ever since moving house and getting high-speed internet that allowed me to do streaming stuff back in 2023, I've been getting ahead in terms of scheduling posts. Last week saw Marie Windsor's day in Summer Under the Stars, and I put up a post on one of her movies, Mail Order Bride, that was airing that day. However, as I wrote more posts, I started scheduling them after the post on Mail Order Bride, not realizing that I had a couple of days where I had no posts scheduled. I think as of right now I'm good for about the next three weeks, unless I come across something that I haven't noticed is airing and is on my DVR, in which case I might wind up juggling posts around.

The TCM September schedule is out in full, and I've already found several movies in the second half of September that are on my DVR. I think that's enough where I shouldn't be juggling stuff around. On the other hand, someone famous could die -- I actually have a couple of posts written up on movies related to some seriously old people whose death notices I haven't come across yet and have been saving them in draft for that morbid occasion. To be fair, legitimate news outlets have obituaries for famous people ready to go just in case.

Speaking of that Shelley Fabares died over the weekend at the age of 82. She was in multiple films with Elvis Presley, although she's better known for her TV work. I actually went to my YouTube TV cloud DVR because I thought I had Girl Happy on it. I haven't posted about Girl Happy, and as it turns out the Elvis movie sitting on my DVR is Girls! Girls! Girls! which was the subject of a post 2½ years ago. Oops.

The Paramount/WB saga is still going on; for some reason I thought the merger/buyout had been called off. Or maybe it was another of the proposed buyers backing out. The merger ideas have been going on long enough and there have been enough proposals that it's easy to mix them up. And it's not as if I'm paying particularly close attention to it. But the news now is that A bunch of state Attorneys-General want their pound of flesh and are grandstanding about it. I'd think the barriers to entry are lower than they've ever been, but then you have to remember that politicians find it easier to control a couple of large market players than a system with a whole bunch of small players. The big players also have less of a problem with regulation than you might think since they can handle the regulation for the most part while it's that barrier to entry for newcomers. So I'll sit back and largely not pay close attention to what's going on until it has a more direct impact on me.

And in more FXM programming notes, today's Retro block concludes with Alien at 1:00 PM, which in itself is not terribly interesting because it's been in the Retro lineup before and I blogged about it almost five years back. However, Alien is followed by the commercial half of the lineup which includes the rest of the movies in the Alien series, starting with Aliens at 3:00 PM and going through to Alien vs. Predator: Requiem at midnight. Or at least, that's the last one they're showing and it's nearly 20 years old; I can't recall whehter there have been any since as I don't go to the movie theater very often. The one thing I do find curious is that I can't recall Aliens being in the Retro block. It was released in 1986, and the Retro block has certainly had stuff more recent than that show up. It's also 40 years old, which is getting to be plenty old enough. For me, I think the first movie less than 40 years old I posted about was Yours, Mine, and Ours, subject of a February 2008 post, which would have made it about two months shy of 40. If not that, than the spelling bee documentary Spellbound. And consider that when TCM was launched, 40 years old would only have been 1954. On the Waterfront would have been less than 40 years old as it was released in July 1954.

Seven Miles from Alcatraz

The star for tomorrow, August 25 on TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Bonita Granville. Once again, I happen to have a movie of hers on my DVR that's showing up in the day and that I haven't blogged about before That movie is Seven Miles from Alcatraz, at 2:45 PM, so in order to be able to do a post on it before it airs, I watched it, which means that again you get a post on an upcoming movie.

Alcatraz, was, of course, famously used as a prison on an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, a body of water with a lot of shipping traffic and difficult waters so they need a lighthouse too, although that's on a different island. Meanwhile, there's a war going on even though none of the prisoners are doing their part for America by fighting in it. Indeed, one of the prisoners, Champ Larkin (James Craig), is worried that San Francisco Bay is just the place for the Japanese to bomb, meaning there's a good chance a stray bomb or missile could his Alcatraz. Champ is having none of that, so he decides he's going to break out of the most secure prison in all of the United States.

And wouldn't you know it, but pretty much in the very next scene, Champ and his fellow prisoner Jimbo (Frank Jenks) are escaping and are able to evade all the patrol boats. They don't make it to the mainland, however, instead washing ashore on the island with the lighthouse. The lighthouse keeper, Captain Porter (George Cleveland), lives there with his daughter Anne (Bonita Granville). Also working at the lighthouse is a radioman, Brenner (Erford Gage), and the custodian Stormy (Cliff Edwards). Champ and Jimbo break in and immediately set about holding the four hostage, although there's the issue that Brenner is supposed to call in at a certain time as part of his duties. Not doing so would certainly be noticed by the authorities.

On the other hand, what the Porters and the two criminals have no idea of is that Brenner is actually working with Nazis to send and receive coded messages. There's a pair of Nazis aboard a U-boat, as well as a "baroness" on the mainland who has a whole group of fifth columnists around her, because of course there's always one ringleader with a bunch of supporters in movies like this. Anyhow, the message Brenner has been sending is that that ringleader has targeting information that will allow the Nazis to target the coast better, and needs to rendezvous with the Nazis on the U-boat to give them that information.

Now, this being a World War II movie from Hollywood, you know that the two prisoners are going to have a change of heart and be instrumental in foiling the Nazis' diaboloical scheme. But it's also an RKO B movie, which means that it's all done in a shade over an hour with RKO's lesser production values. Seven Miles from Alcatraz is a fun enough premise, if one that would be done dozens of times over the course of the war. The script is a bit of a mess to the point I was wondering whether the Porters would turn out to be part of the Nazi ring, too.

Daisy Kenyon

One of those movies that I had seen part of somewhere along the way but never got around to seeing all of -- probably on the old Fox Movie Channel since it's a Fox movie and I can't remember the last time they ran it -- is Daisy Kenyon. So when TCM showed it as part of a night dedicated to director Otto Preminger, I recorded it in order to be able finally to watch it and write up a review. Tomorrow being Dana Andrews day in Summer Under the Stars, and with my realizing that the movie in tomorrow's schedule I was going to do a post on is one that I actually blogged about four years ago (Brainstorm, Aug. 24 at 6:00 PM), I figure that now is a good time to put up this post on Daisy Kenyon even though it's not airing on TCM tomorrow.

Dan O'Mara (Dana Andrews) is a lawyer at a prestigious firm who takes a taxi to what is probably supposed to be Greenwich Village to see fashion artist Daisy Kenyon (Joan Crawford). It fairly quickly transpires that Dan is carrying on a romantic affair with Daisy. There is, however, a fairly serious issue with this in that Dan is married to Lucille (Ruth Warrick) with two kids about to become teenagers. Not only that, but Lucille is the daughter and granddaughter of the founders of the law firm. So, because of family obligations, Dan has to break off the date he had hoped to have with Daisy.

As Dan is leaving the apartment building, he runs into another man who is about to ring to be let in, Peter Lapham (Henry Fonda). Peter is also seeing Daisy, which is possibly a response from Daisy to the less-than-stellar treatment she's been getting from Dan, although to be fair, Daisy really ought to know she's going to get that sort of treatment from a man who's cheating on his wife. Peter isn't cheating on his wife, because his wife is already really quite dead, having died in a car accident some years back. That's one of the things that prompted Peter to leave his Cape Cod home and serve in the US Army during the recently concluded war. Peter is thinking of going back to Europe to serve in the occupation army. So, as we can see, Daisy is going to have to choose between two men.

But then things get more complicated. Dan is approached by a man who wants to hire O'Mara to represent a man in an important legal case: that of a Japanese-American man who served in the army in Europe with some distinction, only to return home and find he had been dispossessed of his farm Bad Day at Black Rock-style. It's important, but not exactly remunerative. It's going to take Dan away from the clients who are paying him the big money; it's going to take him away from his wife and kids; and it's going to take him away from Daisy.

So eventually Dan returns from doing some research work on this case and finds that Daisy has suddenly gotten married to Peter! Dan probably ought to admit defeat and go back to his wife and the kids he really does love despite the way he treats their mom (who, to be fair, does have enough issues where one can understand why Dan might start looking at other women). Instead, he continues to pursue Daisy, to the point that he stupidly calls Daisy from the house and Lucille listens in on the call. She decides to file for divorce and try to get custody of the kids. In theory, this would have left Dan free to marry Daisy if she hadn't already gotten married. It's also a lot more complicated because Daisy could be the co-respondent in the divorce case.

Ben Mankiewicz, in his comments after the movie, commented that the movie didn't have much of a reputation for a long time, to the point that Otto Preminger claimed many years later not to have remembered much about it. Having watched it, I can see the reason for the lack of reputation. Everything about Daisy Kenyon is competent, and definitely not anything that the cast and crew should want to forget about having made. But, at the same time, the plot is a fairly ridiculous melodrama. It's not as extreme in having to jump through hoops to satisfy the Production Code as something like The Great Lie, but there's a lot here that strains credulity. That, and it feels competent, not an all-time great. Also to be fair, there are quite a few other 40s prestige movies that aren't that well-remembered 80 years on.

So definitely give Daisy Kenyon a watch. It's certainly interesting.

Adventure Girl

Another movie I recorded off of TCM knowing nothing about it beyond the synopsis was the 1934 release Adventure Girl. After watching it and looking it up, it turns out the movie has a very interesting provenance.

The movie is narrated by Joan Lowell, who plays herself and declares in opening title cards that she had made a voyage a year before the movie was released (so, 1933) and had adventures so incredible that she had to recreate them for the screen, or else nobody would believe her. This movie purports to be that retelling of true events which, for reasons that should become clear, should have everyone shaking their heads....

Joan Lowell's father Nicholas Wagner was a seaman, retired by the time of the events of the movie, and Lowell decided to give him a sort of present by fixing up an ocean-going schooner and taking Dad down to the Caribbean along with a crew of two men, Otto and former US Marine Bill. (Neither of them were professional actors, as far as I know.) On the way south, the boat gets caught up in a hurricane, this being the days when forecasting the weather in more remote parts of the world was next to impossible. The hurricane leaves them with a broken mast but in just the right place where there are a bunch of "shipwrecks" that are half above sea level that the motley crew can scavenve for supplies.

One such ship, allegedly a Spanish ship from 100 years earlier, has an intact logbook in a strongbox. The final entry purports to be the captain having found a ridiculously large emerald in a Mayan temple but being forced to leave it there because he would have been killed trying to take it at the time. In any case, despite Dad's belief that you shouldn't plunder other men's treasure, Joan is greedy enough that she plans to sail down to Guatemala to find that emerald and retrieve it for her father.

Now, this is part of where my disbelief really kicked in. Another title card at the beginning of the film thanks the then ruler of Guatemala, Jorge Ubico, for allowing them to film in Guatemala using native actors. Yet, if this portion of the story is to be believed, why would the natives want to film a re-telling of it and let Joan get away with it? In any case, this portion of the film deals with Joan and Bill heading up river to the Mayan (well, descendants of the Mayans) village from which they'd do the overland trek to the temple, guided by a Mayan princess and surreptitiously followed by a bunch of men. To get at that emerald would involve desecration of the temple, an act which the Mayan princess says carries the death penalty. And, a bit suprisingly, Joan Lowell says that she knows what she was doing was wrong, something that very few other explorer-type characters in that era would admit. Now, we know that Joan escapes, since the premise of the movie is that this is all a re-enactment of what happened the previous year.

After having watched Adventure Girl, my first thought was that perhaps if there were any incident with natives in a Central American country, it might have been a country other than Guatemala, and that Ubico would have been happy to use Guatemalans to insult another Central American country. The reality, of course, is that this whole thing is a complete fiction. But that's not the end of the story. What audiences of the day would have known, but would be largely unknown to anybody watching in 2026, is that Lowell had already written a completely fictitious "autobiography" back in 1929 that had been easily debunked. The best guess I read is that Lowell did in fact go on a schooner voyage with her father and the other two men in 1933, and filmed establishing material reminiscent of what Errol Flynn would later do in Cruise of the Zaca. This was then supplemented by staged footage that tells the narrative portions of the story. Since the cameras on the schooner wouldn't have been set up for sound, that requires the narration by Lowell. More interesting is that, after Adventure Girl was debunked as utter fiction, Lowell decamped to Brazil and spent the last 30 years of her life there, which from what I've read might make an interesting movie of its own.

As for Adventure Girl, it's ridiculous nonsense, but interesting because it's utter nonsense.

Don't blame it on Rio

TCM celebrated director Terry Gilliam last year on his 85th birthday. They showed a couple of Monty Python films I haven't blogged about before, but unfortunately YouTube TV's glitch on how many showings of a program it saves left me with a bunch of commercial versions rather than the TCM showing. There was another of his movies I had never gotten around to seeing before, which is Brazil, so I've recently finally watched it and now you get this post.

In a not quite specified time in a non-specified English-speaking country, the country has somehow devolved into a totalitarian state, but one that has a bunch of seemingly private businesses, notably Central Services which handles things like ductwork and HVAC services. How the country never made it past antiquated-looking ducts and pipes taking up valuable space isn't mentioned. But Central Services is the target of a terrorist bombing, with this not being the first.

Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) works for a government body in the Ministry of Information that doesn't seem to do much but push papers around. It's a job that doesn't require much imagination, so Sam finds himself having a sort of Walter Mitty existence. He's got a wealthy mom (Katherine Helmond) who has been trying to get him a promotion to the more prestigious Information Retrieval, but Kurtzmann (Ian Holm), Sam's current boss, doesn't want that. Sam is just too good an employee.

And then a glitch happens in the investigation into the Central Services bombing. Much like the original computer bug, a bug gets stuck in the teletype machine, so instead of instructing the authorities to investigate Archibald Tuttle, they're told to look up a Mr. Archibald Buttle. The botched investigation results in Buttle being killed. Worse, there's another mistake made. As part of the dystopia, people are charged for their own investigation, so the mistaken identity requires a refund check be sent to Mrs. Buttle, who apparently can't handle direct deposit.

In trying to deliver the check, Sam meets Jill Layton (Kim Greist), who has reported the treatment Buttle got to the proper authorities. Unfortunately for her, the proper authorities in this case means those people who are going to turn around and investigate her because you can't go around making the state look bad, can you?

Further complicating things is that, when Sam's own AC goes on the fritz and he calls Central Services, who should show up but Archibald Tuttle? Except that he's no longer working for Central Services, and the real repairmen show up, which is obviously a problem for him and Sam. Sam is also trying to protect Jill although she seems to have disappeared into the world of the paperless....

There's a lot to like about Brazil, but for me it's also a movie that's not without its share of issues. One is a problem for me personally that may not be a problem for others, which is that it's never really explained in a lot of totalitarianism movies how we get to the totalitarian point we did. Hollywood's (or filmmakers' views more generally) view of totalitarianism never seems to match what we get in the real world, and is always more of a way to hang the social/political/moral points one wants to make onto it.

The other issue, which I think is a more general one, is that movie runs a bit too long for its own good and has an overly complicated plot that makes it hard to figure out exactly what's going on at times. But in the 40 years since its original release, Brazil has become a cult classic, so watch and decide for yourself.

Out west with Keir Dullea

Tomorrow, August 21, on TCM's Summer Under the Stars is a day of films devoted to actress Marie Windsor. While Windsor got big showy roles in movies like The Narrow Margin (8:00 PM), some of the movies presented have Windsor in rather smaller roles. One example of this is Mail Order Bride, which you can catch at 4:45 PM.

The movie opens up in Montana, with Will Lane (Buddy Ebsen) camping out along a creek on his way to the town of Congress. A stranger (Keir Dullea) shows up and treats Will like dirt but gets his comeuppance by not recognizing a drop-off in the riverbed. Both men make their way to Congress.

In Congress, Will stops by the grave of a Mr. Carey. It seems that the two were old friends, and when the elder Mr. Carey died, he left his ranch to Will but with strings attached. Those strings were that Carey had a son name Lee who really should inherit the ranch, but isn't yet a responsible enough man to run it. Will should serve as some sort of trustee to see that Lee becomes that responsible man at which point Will is to handle the ranch over to Lee.

It doesn't take much to figure out that Lee is in fact the stranger Will met in the opening; nor does it take much to see how irresponsible Lee is, as he gets drunk, cavorts with the women at the local house of ill repute, and loses his money and cattle playing poker against alleged friend Jace (Warren Oates). Will finds Lee at one such poker game, and after the fight that breaks out, Will takes Lee home. Lee, as you might guess, is none too pleased about finding out the terms of his father's will since Lee understandably expected to be inheriting the ranch.

Will realizes that Lee needs a wife who can tame him, along with the responsibility being a husband should bring to Will. To that end, Will sets off for the nearest big city, Kansas City, to find a suitable wife from the women who have been writing to the mail-order agencies. The gives the opportunity for a bit of humor with Kathleen Freeman playing a Salvation Army missionary, with Marie Windsor getting her one scene that also is some obvious foreshadowing for what the coda at the end of the movie is going to be. Windsor plays saloonkeeper Hanna, who isn't right for Lee. But Hanna has an employee who has no prospects and is in need of a husband, so offers that woman, Annie Boley (Lois Nettleton), up to go off to Montana and marry Lee sight unseen.

Now Annie, as it turns out, also has a son from a previous marriage (played by Jerry Mathers' kid brother). If Lee isn't exactly thrilled at the prospect of having a forced bride, he's definitely not going to be happy about becoming a stepfather. Annie isn't particularly thrilled herself, although she's a bit more willing to make a go of it. Lee's plan is to fake it until Will signs the deed to the ranch over to him, and then allow Annie and the kid to have their freedom.

Once again, you might guess that things aren't going to turn out that way. That's because Jace is still in the background, trying to figure out a way to get the rest of the cattle from the ranch. They're no longer Lee's to lose in a poker game, and Jace has absolutely no respect for Will. But this is also the sort of movie that's going to have a requisite happy ending, never mind the fact that the Code hadn't been completely destroyed yet.

Mail Order Bride is a little movie that isn't exactly great, but it's also certainly not bad. It feels like a predictable story where you know where everything is going to go by the last reel, but it's pleasant enough getting there. Keir Dullea isn't exactly the sort of person you'd expect to see in a western, or at least wasn't whom I expected to see in a western. This also isn't nearly as comedic as you might thing. But it's good enough to pass the time with.

Briefs for August 19-20, 2026

I suppose the first thing I should do is mention the passing of director Mark Rydell, who died last Thursday at the age of 97. He directed On Golden Pond, which I saw ages ago but have not done a post on according to a search of the blog, which means I must have seen it before I started blogging. I came across the end of Bette Midler's The Rose ages ago on the old Fox Movie Channel, I think again before I started blogging, and haven't found it since. However, looking at the list of Rydell movies, it turns out that I do have one of his films in my list of films to blog about, Harry and Walter Go to New York which aired on TCM for Diane Keaton's day. So that will be scheduled for sometime in September.

I just noticed recently that I've been misspelling "Paul Henreid" for years as "Henried", which might explain why searches for him haven't shown everything on my blog, and why the tags are a bit screwy. So I've been going through the archive of old posts and changing the tags, although the actual posts themselves are a bit more of a pain to change.

Also having died recently is actress Peggy Webber, who appeared in Orson Welles' adaptation of Macbeth as well as driving the plot of Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man. Webber was 100 when she died on Saturday.

In news of the odd, apparently grifting Meghan Markle produced a documentary on Girl Scout cookies. The interesting thing isn't that it bombed at the box office per se, but that accodring to the article it was beaten by a movie called CatVideoFest 2026. Not only that, but CatVideoFest has been going on for a decade. Then again, I'm also not in an area that would get it in its limited theatrical run.

Hattie McDaniel is being honored today in Summer Under the Stars, which means another showing of the 1936 version of Show Boat (2:00 AM overnight) which I had on my DVR from the last TCM showing but didn't get around to watching. That will be followed tomorrow by Marlon Brando. I don't think I've actually watched his version of Mutiny on the Bounty (1:00 PM) in its entirety before. There's also The Nightcomers (August 21, 2:15 AM), which I know I hadn't heard of before seeing it show up on the TCM schedule.

The Last Station

I mentioned last August when Christopher Plummer got a day in Summer Under the Stars that I was interested in the movie The Last Station because of its subject matter. Naturally I recorded it, but having recorded so many of Plummer's movies, I had to space out watching them since I didn't want to put up a bunch of posts on one star's movies in close proximity if I could avoid it.

Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) was one of the best-known writers of the second half of the 19th century, writing from his estate in the country south of Moscow. However, he had some rather idiosyncratic ideas on Christianity that displeased the Orthodox Church as well as the Tsar. On the other hand, those views gained a modest but extremely devoted following to the point that there was a Tolstoyan colony on some lands near Tolstoy's estate. As the movie opens, it's 1910 and Tolstoy is past 80, so there's naturally some thought being given to what's going to happen after he dies. He's got a devoted wife of many years, Sofya (Helen Mirren), and a couple of adult children. Sofya wants to ensure that she and the family will be looked after financially after Leo dies.

Meanwhile, Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) heads the Tolstoyan organization in Moscow. It's something that comes with some political risk and he feels like he's being watched by the authorities. But he's also worried about what's going on down at the Tolstoyan estate. He and the other Tolstoyans feel that, in conjunction with Tolstoy's stated beliefs, the copyrights to Leo's works ought to go into the public domain after he dies. He's trying to get Leo to sign a new will that will do just this, while Sofya is understandably concerned that such a will not be signed. Chertkov, in order to see that his interests are seen to, and wanting to know exactly what Sofya is up to, sends a new secretary, young Valentin (James McAvoy) down to the estate partly as personal secretary and partly as a sort of spy.

Valentin finds a, shall we say, interesting situation that's not quite like the family in You Can't Take It With You, but something that's not too far off. There's that farming commune, while there are all sorts of hangers-on at the actual estate. And a lot of them want to get in Leo's good graces, in part by showing just how Tolstoyan they are, in a belief system that supposedly requires chastity. Valentin does the same thing, although as time goes on he begins to develop quite a bit of sympathy toward Sofya. Meanwhile, one of the working girls, Masha (Kerry Condon), whom you might think is almost a sort of groupie, decides to seduce Valentin: these Tolstoyans apparently need to learn about sex.

As the dispute over whether a new will is going to be signed rages on, we also learn that the marriage between Leo and Sofya is hitting a rough patch. That's partly because of Leo's advanced age; familiarity breeds contempt and all that. There's also Sofya's understandable feelings that Leo isn't looking after her. And with as busy as the estate is, matters are bound to come to a head, and sooner rather than later.

Now, you may not know this bit of history if you didn't study Russian in college like I did, but the end of Tolstoy's life involved him basically getting sick of it all and literally running away from home. However, he wasn't able to run too far as the strain of this resulted in his final illness and death in a country train station, with a bunch of assembled press holding vigil since Tolstoy was after all a prominent celebrity.

The Last Station is a movie looking at something that I don't think has gotten much attention in English-language cinema, although Tolstoy's works themselves obviously have. The movie gets high marks on all of the technical aspects, although filming was done with eastern Germany standing in for Russia. Plummer and Mirren both take the roles they're given and play them for all they're worth, which means extremely showy. I, however, was left at the end wondering why anybody became a Tolstoyan in the first place.