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.

Waiting for a star to fall

Another of the movies that I had sitting on my DVR for a while that I finally got around to watching was Boy Meets Girl. Considering the cast involved and the fact that this was made at Warner Bros., I was kind of surprised that I hadn't seen this one before.

As the movie opens, agent Rossetti (Frank McHugh) is taking his client, cowboy star Larry Toms (Dick Foran) to Royal pictures to talk about a comeback. Rosetti thinks that Royal's writing team of Law (James Cagney) and Benson (Pat O'Brien) has a script ready that would be perfect for Toms, although it turns out they've been lying because they're the sort of people who always seem to be trying to come up with some angle. It's the sort of role that had this been a 1940s picture would have been perfect for Jack Carson, except that this is also the sort of movie that wouldn't have been made after the US entered World War II in December 1941 since it's very much a product of its time.

Studio producer C.F. Friday (Ralph Bellamy) is none too happy with this. Meanwhile, he orders the studio equivalent of room service, which is brought up by commissary waitress Susie Seabrook (Marie Wilson). She faints in Friday's office, which as it turns out is because she's pregnant, which is rather shocking since she's not married and once the Production Code kicked in the idea of an unmarried woman being pregnant and it not being a big moral failure is something you don't expect. In any case, when they find about the pregnance, Law and Benson have a brilliant idea, which is to promote Susie's unborn child as the next big star, to be paired with Larry in a series of movies. Meanwhile, showing up at Friday's office when Susie is recovering from fainting is an English extra, Rodney Bowman (Bruce Lester), who is going to show up later in the plot.

Susie's kid Happy does in fact become a star, bigger than Larry. This ticks Larry off, so Rossetti plans to get Larry and Susie married off so that Susie and Happy will retire. But this is bad news for Law and Benson. They need to come up with a way to break up the relation. Their plan is, at the premiere of the next Errol Flynn movie, they'll have some guy show up claiming to be Happy's father who didn't really die at all. Their plan hits a snag, though, when they hire extra Rodney Bowman to play the part of the man claiming to be Happy's father. They don't know that Happy and Susie have already met.

So Law and Bowman have to come up with another plan that will save the studio. Their plan is to make it look like the British Teddington Studios (an in-joke, as Teddington was in fact Warner Bros.' British arm to make pictures satisfying the British quota system) is going to be buying Royal Pictures in order to get Happy under contract. This brings everybody back to Royal Pictures, and things are concluded more or less happily.

Boy Meets Girl is a movie I had a lot of problems with, mostly down to the script. The screenplay requires everybody to be incredibly loud and obnoxious, as well as dishonest with trying to scam one another. This is supposed to be a comedy, but the characters just aren't very sympathetic in my book. Still, everybody here is professional and do the best they can with the material. Maybe audiences of the late 1930s would have appreciated Boy Meets Girl more than I do in 2026.

Somebody at least had a navy

During World War II, the US military worked with Hollywood to put out a bunch of rah-rah stuff focusing on various sections of the military to promote themselves as well as build morale. A lesser known section that got such a movie was the dirigibles, in the movie This Man's Navy.

Wallace Beery plays dirigible pilot Ned Trumpet, who's such a serial fabulist that you wonder how he wasn't pensioned off when he hit his 20 years since it's not as if anybody would want such a story-teller in a position of command, I don't think. Maybe Pearl Harbor hit before the 20 years and they still needed him. In any case, one of the things he makes up is the wife and kid he supposedly has, somthing you'd think that records would easily disprove. Part of the responsibilities of the dirigible unit is to patrol for submarines, since the U-boats didn't really have the sort of missiles that could take out things in the air.

Anyhow, another part of Trumpet's duties, serving with his friend Jimmy Shannon (James Gleason), is to teach the new recruits both in blimps and balloons. When talking with a recruit in the basket of a balloon and discussing hand-to-hand combat, Trumpet gets knocked out of the balloon. Fortunately he's got a parachute on him, and he lands on a ranch owned by Maude Weaver (Selena Royle) and her son Jess (Tom Drake). Jess isn't serving in the war because he had an accident with one of the horses that left him with bad legs using crutches. But Trumpet sees an opportunity. Jess could become the sort of foster son he never had, which would satisfy all the people in the Navy who think he's been lying about having a son. Meanwhile, this would enable Jess to get surgery courtesy of the military and possibly be able to serve if he doesn't need the crutches any more.

So now we get a sequence of the recruits going through training, which is part of the propaganda that movies like this were designed to be at least from the point of view of the military. At the end of the training, Jess decides that he's going to take up training at Pensacola, which is an air station for regular planes, not blimps. Poor Trumpet is disappointed, especially because he's got his own problems. However, he is given the chance to redeem himself when the Navy sends him over to British India to work with the British to send blimps from India to western China from where the Chinese are fighting against Japan.

And then things get terribly unrealistic. Weaver is on a mission, when his plane crashes. Trumpet gets the idea that because of the dark and the fog, he can actually get a blimp through to pick up the stranded pilots before the Japanese get to them. This even though planes can fly much faster than blimps. But considering the sort of movie this is, we know that Trumpet is going to be able to save the day even though the Japanese are going to be shooting at him all the way back to India and frankly should be able to destroy the blimp the way it's a sitting duck.

I'm sure air buffs will enjoy seeing the blimps in action, although the story is a fairly weak one. Wallace Beery's character is rather a blowhard and if there weren't a war on it would be hard to be sympathetic to him. Tom Drake is also not the most charismatic actor out there. But once again audiences of the day probably enjoyed the morale boost that came with the depiction of the military.

Another Two for One repeat

I mentioned last week how TCM is re-running the spring season of Two for One in the fall, and how this is giving me the opportunity to put up a couple of posts on films that I recorded the first time around and am now able to watch to do these posts. The guest for tonight, Sept. 19, is actress Sheryl Lee Ralph, and one of her selections is one of her first movie roles, in support of Sidney Poitier in A Piece of the Action at 10:00 PM.

An introductory sequence shows Dave Anderson (Bill Cosby), master safe-cracker, getting into the Chicago headquarters of a loan corporation where they keep the safe full of cash. Dave gets into the safe, steals a large sum of money, and is able to get away by jumping out a window into a truck below and driving off.

Cut to a completely unrelated crook, Manny Durrell (Sidney Poitier). He's studied the movements of illegal bookmker Mr. Bruno (Titos Vandis), and uses that to set up what looks like a police raid of Bruno's upscale home where the books and a lot of cash are kept. Bruno fills a briefcase full of cash and gives it to the maid to take to a trusted source. In fact, the maid is working for Manny and she's the one with the cash that Manny is bilking out of Bruno, which would also explain why she didn't get pinched while leaving the house when the police were surrounding it. Those fake police were also working for Burrell.

Meanwhile, during the raid, Bruno calls his mole in the police department to find out what's going on. That mole talks to Det. Joshua Burke (James Earl Jones), which is how Bruno learns it's a fake raid and is going to get whoever is responsible. Meanwhile, Burke is set to retire in a few months. When he does, the first thing he does is write a couple of anonymous letters, to Manny and Dave, as well as a third. Manny and Dave's notes inform them that somebody knows about those jobs we saw at the opening, with a threat to send the two of them to prison if they don't meet the writer at a certain hotel suite. The two men are then directed the next day to a restaurant where they'll learn what their "punishment" entails.

In fact, they don't meet the letter writer, but the recipient of the third letter, Lila French (Denise Nicholas). She runs a community center that is trying to help inner-city youth by doing things such as finding them jobs, even though these are clearly embittered youths. (Sheryl Lee Ralph plays one of the youths.) The letter writer has put Dave's name to the letter, saying that Dave and Manny would be happy to "volunteer" an extremely generous amount of time to the center, which they're forced into doing although Lila doesn't seem bright enough to figure out there's some sort of blackmail going on here.

At this point, the movie really starts to sag as the inner-city youths seem like a bunch of stock character types; I will admit however, that I have no idea whether inner-city adolescents would in fact have acted like that. They come across as being as much of a stereotype as the Sweathogs on Welcome Back, Kotter. But Dave and Manny have an obligation to help them get jobs since that will keep them out of jail. They also use their in at the improvement center to try to figure out who exactly is blackmailing them. Meanwhile, Bruno is busy looking for the people who robbed him out of all that money, and he's going to figure it out in time for the movie's climax....

A Piece of the Action is another of those movies that sounds like a good idea on paper, but doesn't quite work in practice. One is that I've already mentioned how the young people don't quite seem real here. There's also the fact that it's trying to be a drama with some comedy when it should really be a comedy with some drama. I have a feeling that Sidney Poitier, who also directed, wanted to have the movie serve as social commentary on the issues of the inner city. But the biggest flaw is that the film sags at a massive 135 minutes, which is really much too long for the material. It's the sort of film that should really be clocking in at an hour and a half or so.

Still, I'm sure there are people who will enjoy A Piece of the Action more than I did, since it's one of those movies that has its heart in the right place.