Fugitive in the Sky

I've mentioned quite a few times how I almost always enjoy the Warner Bros. B movies, even when they're objectively nothing more than pedestrian. Another such movie that certainly fits the "fun if not great" category is Fugitive in the Sky.

Before airline deregulation in the late 1970s, but even more so before World War II, flying was one of those luxuries that average people couldn't afford and was considered glamorous. Jean Muir plays Rita Moore, a stewardess on the sort of cross-country flight that stops at a bunch of places on its way from Los Angeles to New York. She's got a boyfriend in reporter Terry Brewer (Warren Hull), although the pilot Bob White (Gordon Oliver) also has a thing for Rita and as a result doesn't really care for Brewer.

Brewer has been covering the case of missing and wanted criminal Killer Madsen, and when Brewer sees an FBI agent board the plane, he figures that the agent must be after Madsen, and wangles the final seat on the plane for himself, which seems to make a bunch of people unhappy. Never mind that the flight is about to make a lot of people even more unhappy. The plane makes a scheduled stop in Albuquerque, where an obnoxious female passenger who keeps wittering on about astrology buys an Indian knife from the sort of souvenir stand that's set up to serve the passengers who are passing through. And wouldn't you know it, but that knife gets used to kill one of the passengers while everybody is ostensibly asleep.

At this point the FBI agent, Phelan (John Litel) reveals who he is; he kind of has to considering there's been a crime committed in the air. Madsen deduces as well as Brewer had before the flight that Phelan's original reason for getting on the flight was to follow him. So Madsen takes the passenger cabin hostage before going into the cockpit (this being well before 2001, there were no fortified doors) and turning the gun on the pilot and co-pilot and finding the spare guns that the two of them have just for a situation like this.

But wait, there's more. There's a dust storm going on even if it's ostensibly not over the part of the Plains that got the dust storms but in Missouri and points east. This means that the airports can't track the planes (never mind the fact that there was no radar yet) and want to ground all of the planes, while Madsen wants a detour to Evansville, IN where he was planning to make an escape. The radio's already been knocked out, and now the dust knocks out both engines, forcing the plane to land somewhere where nobody can quite deduce where they are. Except that there's a farmhouse in the area that Killer Madsen flees to. Since it's the only thing in the area, sure enough the passengers and crew of the stranded plane wind up there for the finale.

There's too much in Fugitive in the Sky that doesn't bear much relationship to reality. But audiences didn't always go to the movies for reality. Especially not when it came to the B movies. For audiences who wanted to be entertained, a movie like Fugitive in the Sky was going to give them that, all in just under an hour. Definitely worth watching the next time it shows up on TCM.

The Trap

I've got so many movies to get through on my DVR that it's not uncommon for me to watch multiple movies that have something in common, whether it be the same star, genre, or something thematically in common. One rarer case of the last phenomenon was a pair of movies that have mute women as prominent characters. The Spiral Staircase was scheduled because it was coming up on TCM, while the other movie necessitated my saving the post on it in drafts so that the posts on the two movies weren't scheduled so close together. That other movie is The Trap.

The opening credits mention that the movie was filmed on location in British Columbia, with the opening being a village near the sea since oceangoing vessels can approach. It's the sort of tiny place at the mouth of a river that serves the trappers and whatnot who eke out a meager living upstream and then come down to sell their goods once a year and buy the provisions they'll need to survive another year. One of the trader familes (none of the family members' names are given) has a father, mother, and bratty teenage daughter, who's thrilled that the family is getting a piano because the daughter really ought to learn cultured stuff like that. They've also got a maid, Eve (Rita Tushingham), whom they've fostered for the 10 years or so since an Indian raid killed Eve's parents and left Eve in such a state of shock that she hasn't been able to speak since. Meanwhile, one of the hunter/trapper types ordered a mail-order bride who is coming off the boat. But the man who ordered her died in the meantime, so she's being auctioned off.

One of the traders who's made his way down the river is Jean La Bête (Oliver Reed), who grew up in Quebec and lost both of his parents at a fairly young age, causing him to migrate west to British Columbia where the trapping is better. He goes to see the trader, as the trader has been holding some money for the Jean in escrow. Jean has come to claim that money, which really ticks off the trader's wife, as she'd been hoping to use that money to get the family to San Francisco and away from an uncultured shithole like this. Worse, she learns that her husband has gotten the family heavily into debt. He can't get any more credit.

Jean could use a wife, but somebody else bought the mail-order wife. The trader's wife, however, has an idea: offer Eve to Jean in exchange for that money that Jean had gotten back from the trader. Jean considers it a relatively fair deal, although Eve doesn't. Not that anybody asked her. But since she doesn't really have a choice, she's sent up the river with Jean. Needless to say, she tries to escape on several occasions, while Jean stops her. After all, it's going to be dangerous for the two of them at the cabin, what does Eve think it's going to be like if she tries to go off on her own?

Jean starts teaching Eve all he knows about how to hunt and trap and how not to get lost in the woods; this is important stuff for Eve to know if she wants to survive. Eve begrudginly starts doing her part to keep things running, if only just to survive and plot an escape later. Life out in the wilderness is harsh: nasty, brutish, and short as Thomas Hobbes would have said, and eventually that brutishness comes for Jean when he gets his foot caught in one of the traps that he'd set while trying to get away from one of the big cats that are predators out in that part of the world. Eve is going to have to take care of him as well as keep the cabin running and check the trap lines.

The Trap has pretty good performances from Oliver Reed and Rita Tushingham, who form the bulk of the movie's action. However, the bigger problem with the movie is the relative lack of action. It's hard to make a story about surviving in a cabin in the wilderness exciting. If characters are trying to go from point A to point B as in any of the pioneer migration movies, that's one thing. But winter survival? And then, the movie resolves its conflict with an ending that doesn't really make much sense. I can see why actors would want to stretch themselves with a movie like this, but the plot doesn't serve them well, which is a bit of a shame.

From Headquarters

Tonight continues TCM's Star of the Month salute to actor George Brent with one of the movies where he's the star and there's not really much in the way of a big female star to eclipse him. That movie is From Headquarters, which comes on tonight at 8:00 PM.

We don't actually see Brent at first. Instead, we see the workings of a bug-city police department, where they're bringing in various people they've arrested. However, the big news of the day is going to be the discovery of the dead body of a famous playboy, Bates, whom we'll see briefly in a couple of flashbacks. It's obvious that somebody has shot him, and, as it turns out, there are going to be quite a few suspects. Multiple department members are assigned to the case, with Dr. Van de Water (Edward Ellis) doing the forensic work. Sgt. Boggs (Eugene Pallette) has definite ideas on what's happened, while Lt. Stevens (George Brent) is much more thorough in trying to figure out who killed Bates.

Part of Van de Water's analysis is to determine the time of death, which seems a bit strange since all of the suspects have conflicting views of when they might have seen him. Some claim they saw him after he died, while others may be able to have an alibi in that they saw him before the shooting, if at least that was the last time they saw him. One of the obvious suspects is Lou Winton (Margaret Lindsay), as she is his ex-girlfriend. She tried to break off the relationship and Bates might have been forcible in trying to prevent that, which might make the case self-defense. Except that Lous has a brother Jack who shows up and seems to be way too protective of his sister, which implies that he knows more than he's letting on and might have something to do with the shooting himself.

And then there's Bates' butler Horton who is less than fully honest. There's also Anderzian, a dealer in Oriental rugs who has been selling stuff to Bates and says there are letters in Bates' safe that Bates wanted him to have in case Bates were to die. But Anderzian also seems a bit too insistent that he gets those letters, which gives Stevens an idea. Meanwhile, that opening sequence comes full circle. One of the guys being booked in that scene has wanted to see Stevens when he hears of the killing of Bates. That guy is found out and gets murdered as well for his troubles. When the detectives discover the dead body, the building goes on lockdown, leading to the killer ultimately being found out.

From Headquarters is an interesting enough little programmer, although I have to say that the police procedural would get much better in later years. Brent does a competent job, even though he's not the sort of actor that you'd think of as playing a police detective. Margaret Lindsay as the nominal female lead is OK too, but she doesn't have much to do. Audiences watching this in 2026 won't find it anything special, but back in 1933 when moviegoers didn't have TV or much chance to see these movies after first-run, I think it would have entertained them.

The movie isn't exactly a comedy

In the latest of the musical biopics that I wanted to make certain I watched before it expired from my DVR, it's time for Funny Girl. It's finally coming up again on TCM, tomorrow, March 24, at 5:15 PM, as part of another day of musical biopics, so now's the time to put up this post.

Funny Girl is story of the earlier years of stage actress and singer Fanny Brice, played here by Barbara Streisand. As the movie opens, it's a bit before World War I, and although the second half of the movie covers events that are in Brice's real life after the war, I don't think the war itself is ever mentioned. Fanny was born to a Jewish immigrant family in New York, although the only family member we see is her mom, played by Kay Meford. Mom runs a pub/restaurant and plays poker with lady friends, while all the neighborhood cares about Fanny because that's the way this sort of neighborhood is.

Fanny, after the roadshow opening music, shows up at the New Amsterdam Theater that hosted the Ziegfeld Follies, where she hopes to get a job as a chorus girl in the follies run by Florenz Ziegfeld (Walter Pidgeon). But she's going to have to make her way up the ladder first, which includes doing a vaudeville act on roller skates, even though she can't really skate. However, she can sing, and the combination of singing that appeals to the audience combined with the comedic value of not being able to skate, makes her a hit. In the audience is Nicky Arnstein (Omar Sharif), who comes backstage and is so charmed by Fanny that he negotiates a salary increase for her right on the spot even though he has no real job in any theatrical production company.

Eventually, the Ziegfeld Follies does come calling, putting Fanny in a musical finale that will have her dressed as a bride while singing to a bunch of men. Fanny isn't comfortable with the number, so she changes things by having the costume altered to imply that the bride is already pregnant. Once again, Nicky is in the audience. It turns out that he's a professional gambler, but he's so taken by Fanny that when he goes to her mom's place after the show, he lets the old ladies beat him at very low-stakes poker. Fanny and Nicky run into each other again in Maryland when he's buying a race horse that he eventually loses betting on a race. He has to go back to the ungentlemanly routine of playing the cruise ship trade, playing cards against the rich gentlement to earn more than his passage. Nicky wants Fanny to pursue her dream, but she loves him so much that she gets on the boat and accompanies him to Europe.

In the next scene, they've just gotten married, although in real life that didn't happen until 1918 so puts a major hole in the timeline considering World War I was raging. (The real life Fanny and Nicky were romantically involved for several years but couldn't get married until Nicky's divorce from a previous marriage went through.) Fanny is a big star, and the house they buy could just as easily have been purchased by either of them. But things start to go south for Nicky when his gambling stops paying off, and he starts racking up debt to everyone in town save Fanny, who is totally oblivious to it all. One of the people to whom Nicky is in debt offers a chance to pay it off by taking part in a "bond deal" that's clearly fraudulent, while Fanny secretly tries to use her husband's name to help open a new high-class casino with Nicky as promoter. Nicky figures out what's going on, doesn't want to be beholden to Fanny in that way, and goes for the bond deal, which is going to land him in prison eventually.

The movie ends when Nicky gets out of prison, which was in December 1925 in real life, although the movie seems to imply it's earlier. The movie doesn't mention the less-than-happy ending of Fanny and Nicky's marriage crumbling, although at least Fanny would go on to have a fairly successful third act playing a character named Baby Snooks on radio before her untimely death at the age of 59.

Somewhat surprisingly, despite the well-known musical talents of Barbra Streisand, the material is something that I think would have worked better as a non-musical, or limiting musical numbers to scenes from when Fanny was on stage. Yeah, I know this would mean ditching a song like "People" which Streisand sings just after the evening with Nicky at her mom's place, and that people went to the movie to see the songs from the Broadway show from which this is adapted. But keeping the songs from the musical turns this into an overlong slog lasting right around 150 minutes, which is a good half hour too long, I think.

Streisand, of course, does well, even though I'm not the biggest fan of her style of singing. She tied in the Best Actress Oscar race that year with Katharine Hepburn for The Lion in Winter, and was deserving of that Oscar win. But for me that wasn't quite enough to make Funny Girl as worth watching as some of the other musical biopics out there.

Well, Debbie Reynolds loves him

TCM is running a couple of Debbie Reynolds' movies tomorrow (March 23) morning. There's one that I hadn't blogged about before, but that I have on my DVR, so I watched it as I always do with an intention to writing up this review for the airing. That movie is I Love Melvin, which comes on at 7:45 AM.

Debbie Reynolds plays Judy LeRoy, a chorine who has dreams of making it on Broadway although she currently is only appearing in the chorus of one of those dumb college musicals. (This is not an indictment of the movie; it's that the college musical as a genre is disproportionately insipid in my view as musicals go.) Not having hit it yet, Judy still lives with her parents, real surname Schneider (Una Merkel and Allyn Joslyn) and an obnoxious kid sister Clarabelle (Noreen Corcoran).

However! Good news comes for Judy when she gets a call from the manager of the show that she's got the chance for a more substantial role, that of the football in a highly stylized dance scene that Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen might have come up with except that as far as I know they didn't have their fingerprints anywhere near this movie. So Judy heads off to the theater, walking and singing her way through Central Park.

Also in Central park is Melvin Hoover (Donald O'Connor). Melvin works for Look magazine as someone at the bottome of the ladder, a would-be photographer who is still just an assistant to Mergo (Jim Backus). He too is singing his way through the park in the sort of duet where the two aren't together until they literally bump into each other. Judy isn't pleased at first, although you know she's going to fall in love with Melvin by the end of the movie. Never mind that her parents have been trying to hook her up with a guy who's really got nothing wrong with him beyond being boring, Harry Flack (Richard Anderson).

Melvin, for his part, falls for Judy immediately. Knowing that she's a chorus girl, he comes up with an excuse to do a photo shoot on her. He makes a much bigger mistake, however, when he lies to her by telling her that he's going to get her photo on the cover of Look, something he has no power to do. His bosses don't seem to be particularly interested in his work, either. Melvin compounds the lie by getting Mergo to make a mock-up cover of Look that has one of Melvin's photos of Judy on it, which Melvin presents to Judy even though the editors have no plan to put Judy on the real cover of the magazine.

Judy and the rest of the Schneiders are dumb enough to start gossiping about Judy's being on the cover of Look, and as you might guess, everyone goes to buy copies only to find out that Judy is not in fact on the cover. This leads to the sort of complications you might expect from a light romantic comedy, although you also know they're going to get solved with a happy ending, since MGM wasn't about to put Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds into something dark and twisted.

I Love Melvin is a competent enough vehicle for Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds, but it never rises to anything great. Part of that is that it's only programmer length at 76 minutes, and part of that is that it was conceived more as a musical. The numbers take even more away from the story line, leading to a movie with a wafer-thin plot. It's inoffensive, but incredibly minor stuff.

Tribute to a Bad Man

Another movie that's coming up on TCM that was on my DVR for a while is Tribute to a Bad Man, which will be on this afternoon (March 21) at 4:15 PM. So, as always with that in mind, I sat down to watch the movie in order to be able to do the post on it here.

Don Dubbins provides the narration, as he plays Steve Millar, a young man originally from Pennsylvania who in 1875 moves west, making it out to Wyoming and the horse ranch owned by Jeremy Rodock (James Cagney). Although as the narration tells us, Steve at first knows nothing about Rodock or his reputation, or even much about horse ranching. Steve is a bit of a naïf, and has the good fortune -- or maybe the misfortune -- of running into Rodock just after Rodock was shot chasing horse rustlers. Steve removes the bullet from Rodock and brings Rodock home. Like Androcles and the lion, Rodock is grateful enough to offer Steve a job on the ranch.

The ranch has a bunch of men working for Rodock, led more or less by wrangler McNulty (Stephen McNalley). There's one woman on the ranch, Jocasta Considine (Irene Papas), whom Steve mistakes for Mrs. Rodock. In fact, there is no Mrs. Rodock. Jocasta escaped war in her native Greece, but had to do things she's not quite proud of to survive in America, which is why she's escaped to this isolated ranch in Wyoming. Jocasta understands that Steve is not right for this place, and in return, Steve develops a bit in the way of feelings for Jocasta. Since she's the only woman around, it's not just Steve who is going to develop feelings for her. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Somebody tries to steal some of Rodock's horses again, so Rodock sets up a posse to find out who did it, which offers Steve the opportunity to see just how hard a man Rodock can be. To be fair, horses are his lifeblood, and stealing the horses would be like rustling cattle. But still, Rodock can be quite harsh. Suspicion leads to the Petersons, a family who used to work for Rodock but had a falling out. Rodock has been trying to drive the Petersons off their land, without success. They've got a son Lars (Vic Morrow) who is an adult but who, like Steve, is a bit too young to be in such a range war.

McNulty is another of the men who's interested in Jocasta, and is more open about pursuing her than Steven is. This really pisses Rodock off, and Rodock gets in a fight with McNulty and gives Steven the responsibility of making certain McNulty leaves and doesn't come back. McNulty is unsurprisingly none too happy about this, and decides to get revenge on Rodock by stealing Rodock's foals and treating the horses worse than your average rustler might. This leads to a climax, although you might figure out how things go considering the narration at the beginning of the movie.

James Cagney did make a couple of westerns in his career, although the western is a genre with which he's not generally associated. That having been said, Cagney was of course a fine actor, so when he's given an intelligent script like this he has no difficulty handling it. In fact, Tribute to a Bad Man is as much of a character study that just happens to be placed in the context of an old western as it is a traditional western. Don Dubbins does well enough as does the rest of the supporting cast, although this is really Cagney's movie.

Billy Wilder's Bad Seed

Now that we've finished 31 Days of Oscar for another year, it's time for TCM to get back in to its various spotlights. One of them is going to be a prime time night of TCM Imports tonight. One of the movies is one that's already on my DVR and that I hadn't blogged about before is Mauvaise graine, early tomorrow at 2:00 AM (so March 21 in Eastern time, but still March 20 out on the west coast if you don't have the west coast feed). With that in mind, I watched the film in order to be able to put up this post in conjunction with tonight's airing.

Henri Pasquier (Pierre Mignand) is a playboy living in Paris with his doctor father. Dad makes a reasonably good living as a fashionable doctor, but it's not enough to be able to support Henri in the manner to which he has become accustomed. Henri drives a nice car and can't be bothered to work. So one day when Henri gets home, Dad asks if he's got the car keys and registration. That's because Dad decided to sell the car. Henri can join the 7/8 of Parisians who don't have their own car.

Henri is none too pleased about it, and then one day he happens to come across the old car. The people who bought it left it parked with the keys in the ignition, this being the 1930s when people were much more trusting. So Henri decides he's going to "borrow" the car since he was hoping to meet up with a woman in one of Paris' many parks for a date. The two start driving around, until Henri discovers that he's being followed.

The reason the men are following him is that they are part of a ring of car thieves who steal high-value cars and sell them off to people looking to get a good car on the cheap. However, the ring considers Paris their territory, and they don't want anybody horning in on it. Henri's quick thinking convinces the leader of the ring, against his better judgment, to let Henri into the ring. There, Henri meets two of the other members, Jean (Raymond Galle), a kleptomaniac who steals neckties, and Jean's sister Jeannette (Danielle Darrieux). Jeannette is the bait for a lot of the men thanks to her looks. These two become Henri's friends in the ring.

Henri screws up the theft of one of the cars, losing the rear license plate which is picked up by a little kid who rides one of those pedal replica cars. Eventually, the rightful owner of that car spots the kid, which brings the police on to the ring. But before that, the head of the ring has decided to get rid of Henri, sending him to Marseilles where the plan is to have Henri killed along the way by having him drive a car with a busted axle. The two make it to Marseilles where they plan to escape to Casablanca. Except that Henri doesn't want to leave Jean behind, which is why he goes back to Paris and arrives just in time for the police pinch.

Billy Wilder, along with any number of people involved in the German-language cinema, fled Germany and Austria after the Nazis took over. Wilder wound up in Paris briefly becure making his way to Hollywood, and it's in Paris that he directed Mauvaise Graine. Another refugee was Franz Waxman, who provided the score. This was the first time Wilder directed a movie, having done screenwriting up until now, and continuing to write for several years more once he got to Hollywood.

As an early directorial effort, it's obviously not yet to the level that Wilder would reach once he became an established diretor, but Mauvaise Graine is still an interesting movie and one that's definitely worth a watch.

Treasure Island (1973)

Last autumn TCM ran a two-night spotlight on Hanna-Barbera, who are mostly known for their TV animation, although they obviously put out some movies too or else that stuff wouldn't have wound up on TCM. That animation is from an era when there was a lot of fairly low-budget animation on TV. Hanna-Barbera wasn't the only studio to put out such cheap animation. Filmation was another one, and among their movies was an animated adaptation of Treasure Island.

Jim Hawkins, voiced here by Davy Jones of the Monkees, is an adolescent lad living in 18th century Bristol, which was one of the main ports of departure from England. He lives with his widowed innkeeper mother, when a sailor who keeps an anthopomorphic rat as a pet comes in. That sailor has a map which supposedly reveals the location of secret treasure on an island in the Caribbean. The sailor warns Jim about a one-legged man. Pirates also believe this old guy had the map, since they come looking for it.

Jim and the rat are saved by Squire Trelawney and his retinue, who then commission the Hispañola, captained by Alexander Smollett (Larry Storch). Jim gets a position on board working in the galley, which is where Jim meets Long John Silver (Richard Dawson). Naturally, Jim notices that Long John Silver only has one leg of his own, although Jim develops a grudging respect for Long John Silver as well. Sure enough, however, Long John Silver is the head of the band of pirates looking to get that treasure, and they eventually take over the boat as it's about to reach the island where the buried treasure supposedly is.

Jim is no dummy, stowing away aboard the dinghy Long John Silver and some of his men take to the island. Smollett and the good guys are able to escape and make their way to the island as well, although there's the question of how they're all going to be able to get back on board the ship considering that the pirates are in control of it.

There's also the question of how they're going to be able to get off the island, considering that Long John Silver and some of his men are there too. But you probably know that Treasure Island is one of those adventure stories that's going to have a happy ending.

It's been a while since I've seen any of the earlier movie versions, notably MGM's 1930s version starring Wallace Beery or the 1950 Disney version with Robert Morley. I also don't think I've read Robert Louis Stevenson's original book, so I can't really comment on just how much liberty this animated version takes with the story. Some of the liberties, however, are obvious, such as the rat, who isn't exactly going to have been a character in a live-action telling of the tale. There's also the musical numbers, not counting sea shanties.

As for the animation, it's pretty dire with many of the same visual and sound effects you'd see on Saturday morning animation from the era. Note also that the print is 4:3, which led me to wonder whether this wasn't originally a TV production, but looking it up everything claims it was a theatrical release first. So this version of Treasure Island may appear to kids, especially young boys who want a sense of adventure. But for anyone else it's mediocre at best.

Round Midnight

Another of those 1980s films that I had heard about when they came out but was really too young to have seen in the movie theater is Round Midnight. So when TCM finally aired it some time back, it gave me the chance to record it and see what I had missed on its original release.

The movie opens up with a small black and white scene of two men in a crappy hotel room in New York and one of them asking the other if this was the room where a particular jazz legend died. Now, the logical thinking is that the rest of the movie is going to be a flashback to the story of the guy who died, but that's not what actually happens. Instead, the action turns to color. The black guy in that opening scene is jazz legend Dale Turner (real-life jazz musician Dexter Gordon), who is finding life in late 1950s New York difficult for a whole bunch of obvious reasons. So like any number of American jazz musicians, he decamps to Paris.

In Paris, Dale stays at one of those crummy long-stay hotels together with a whole bunch of other blacks who have made the same decision. (I'm not a big jazz fan, so the only name I recognize from this portion of the cast is Herbie Hancock, playing pianist Eddie Wayne. Hancock also wrote the original portions of the score and won an Oscar for it.) They all perform together at a basement club called the Blue Note to the sort of white Europeans who think they're being terribly progressive by identifying with the jazz musicians. It's not much of a living, but the musicians are doing it as much for the art as they are for the money. As for Dale, he's got a serious drinking problem, and leaving his problems (and a daughter) behind in America hasn't really done anything to make the reasons why he turned to drink in the first place go away.

One of the Parisians who shows up at the Blue Note is Francis Borler (François Cluzet), a poster designer with a love of jazz who has problems in his personal life much like Dexter, although in his case the problems aren't quite as serious. Francis has a failed marriage too, although at least his daughter Berangere lives with him. He can't even afford the entry fee to the Blue Note, listening from outside. And then one night Francis gets the chance to meet Dale personally when Dale wants a beer after a show, giving Dale a chance to reveal his back-story.

Francis has idolized Dale anyway, and all this gives Francis a chance to try to "help" Dale, first by taking him to the hospital when Dall gets way too drunk again, and ultimately by taking him into his family, including a birthday celebration for Berangere and a new apartment, with Francis' helpful ex putting up some money. Francis even works to get Dale back to America (Martin Scorsese shows up here as a booking agent who works to get Dale's union paperwork handled among other things). But is it going to be a happy return to America?

For people who are jazz fans, I think they're going to love the music in Round Midnight. There are a lot of bebop and cooler jazz standards, and Hancock's original music is good too. As for the story, however, it's a bit lacking, which is a problem since the movie is a bit over two hours and really drags at times without a good story.

I also couldn't help but think about what audiences of today would say about the movie in terms of a completely different political climate in terms of race relations. Round Midnight is more or less French director Bertrand Tavernier's ode to jazz, and I can see a lot of people taking issue with all sorts of things in the story, from the formulaic look at those blacks who went over to France to Francis as a sort of white savior. It's a romanticized view of jazz, I think, and some people aren't going to be happy with it not fitting into today's presentist views.

The Forest Commandos

Back in 2017, I briefly mentioned the short film The Forest Commandos. TCM ran it some months back during the Saturday matinee block, which is how I got it on my DVR under its own title, and not tacked on to some feature movie to fill out a time slot. So I rewatched it to give it a bit more justice with a longer review rather than just a one-paragraph synopsis.

The opening titles mention that the short was filmed in Technicolor, but whether any color prints survived is an open question as the print that TCM ran was in black and white. It was filmed in 1945, right at the end of World War II, and obviously makes a lot of reference to the war. Northern Ontario has a lot of forest, and forestry products are a key element in the production of all sorts of goods. However, there's not a whole lot of transportation connections since the region is fairly sparsely populated, and the bush pilots are a key element in keeping the region connected; as such, the movie is dedicated to them.

Forests like that are also under threat both from invasive species and forest fires, and a good portion of this short is dedicated to those two, especially the latter since fire is cinematically more interesting than somebody looking through a microsope for moth larvae. One thing mentioned is the series of lookout towers that were used in those days, something very familiar to me living in the Catskill Mountains. A couple of the peaks here in the Catskills still have the fire towers on the top, not for the original use of having fire rangers look for fires and use ranging equipment and ham radio to speak ranges in other towers to determine the exact location of the fire, but now as a sort of museum to promote conservation.

As you might guess, we get the obligatory forest fire, with the second half of the short showing how the fire was fought in those days. The fire they cover also threatens a small village called Gogama, with footage of a possible evacuation filmed. Thankfully the rains come and help put out the fire.

The Forest Commandos is certainly an interesting idea, especially for audiences in the 1940s that wouldn't have had as much opportunity to see such stuff elsewhere. However, a good portion of this is presented almost in the way you'd expect a Pete Smith short to go, except not nearly as funny. It also doesn't help that there's a good deal of footage that's obviously stock footage from somewhere else, making you wonder just how much of the whole thing was staged. It's also a shame that the original color prints don't seem to be available, as the footage probably would have looked a lot more dramatic in color.