Back Street (1941)

Back in 2019, I did a post on the glossy Ross Hunter-produced 1961 version of Back Street. I think I knew there's also a 1932 pre-code version, although I don't think I've seen that at all. I don't think I had known that there's also a 1941 version of Back Street, at least not until TCM ran it some months back. So I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

In this version, the action opens in Cincinnati around 1900. Margaret Sullavan plays Rae Smith, a woman living with her step-sister and step-mother and working at the family notions store. Rae, however, is a bit more of a free spirit, meeting all of the traveling salesmen who come to try to get the stores to buy stuff, along with taking a ride in a car (remember, this is 1900) from Curt Stanton (Richard Carlson), who runs a bicycle shop but wants to get into cars and would be right for Rae. But if the two of them married and settled down, we wouldn't have much of a movie, would we?

One of the salesmen, Ed Porter (Frank McHugh) is about to head back to the train station, and there runs into Walter Saxel (Charles Boyer), who is going through town because reasons. Ed introduces Walter to Rae, and they hit it off, spending the evening together and causing Walter to delay his departure from Cincinnati for several days so that he can keep seeing Rae. However, there's an issue, which is that Walter has a fiancée in Louisville and Walter is supposed to be visiting her and her family in advance of getting married. Walter is thinking seriously about breaking off the engagement and going off with Rae, and invites Rae to go off with him. But on the day of that departure, Rae has a date with another man who makes certain she misses the boat.

Five years pass. Rae has decided to get out of Cincinnati for greener pastures, which means going off to New York City and becoming a designer for one of the department stores in the city. She seems to be doing OK in live, except that one day whom should she run into but... Walter Saxel? He's an investment banker in New York, with a wife and young son, and destined for good things in his business. But he too still holds a flame for Rae, and she does for him, so they start seeing each other again. The problem, of course, is that he can't divorce his wife because he's in the very conservative world of banking, and divorcing his wife is exactly the sort of thing that would cause him to lose his position. Eventually, Saxel is asked to go to Europe with his family to handle some of the bank's European operations, and that causes another parting between Walter and Rae.

Rae goes back to Cincinnati, and this time actually decides she's going to marry Curt, who by this time has become an automotive engineer in the young auto industry in Detroit. But on the day she's supposed to take the train to Detroit, wouldn't you know it but Walter has returned from Europe and come to Cincinnati since he learned that Rae went back to Cincinnati. And as you might guess, Walter keeps Rae from getting on the train. Poor Curt; he didn't do anything to deserve this.

Watching this version of Back Street, I kind of want to smack Rae so that she can get some sense. Curt is clearly a good guy and could provide her a bit of the excitment she craves since his jumping in on the ground floor of a young industry. But no, Rae keeps making stupid decisions. Sullavan and Boyer both give good performances, while Frank McHugh gets to show he really could do drama which he didn't get to do so much. Everything about this version of Back Street is competently made, but the problem is the source material it's based on.

Bloody Queen

TCM did a salute to Roger Corman some months back, which once again gave me the opportunity to record several lower-budget titles that I'd never heard of before their TCM airings. This should, I suppose, not be a surprise, considering how many movies Corman produced over the course of his career. One of them was a film inspired by Soviet science fiction, Queen of Blood.

The year is 1990, about two dozen years in the future since the movie was released in 1966. Humans have made it to the moon and found it lifeless, so the question of whether there is in fact life out there is one that's still open. Working for the IIST, the International Institute of Space Technology, is astronaut and expert in communications Laura James (Judi Meredith). She picks up a signal that may be from extraterrestrial intelligence, and her boss Dr. Farraday (Basil Rathbone) agrees. In what should be an ominous sign, the message is that an alien race is planning to send an "ambassador" to Earth.

The Institute then gets another message that the ambassador has not been able to make it to Earth, but has instead crash-landed on Mars. This means that the Institute is going to send out an expedition to Mars to search for the ambassador. Laura hopes that she'll be on the spaceship with her boyfriend and fellow astronaut Allan Brenner (John Saxon), but he's put on a different ship. This leaves her to travel with Paul Grant (a young Dennis Hopper) and Anders Brockman (Robert Boon) on their ship to Mars, with Allan and another astronaut following on another ship.

Laura's ship does make it to Mars, albeit not without some difficult. And, despite the size of Mars, they're able to find the alien ship, only to discover that the one passenger on the ship is really quite dead. The presumption is that the rest of the crew was able to make it to escape pods or something, and a search is set up for that, a search in which Allan and his crew will take part.

It is indeed Allan who finds the escape pod, only it's on the Martian moon Phobos, which is going to present all sorts of logistical problems considering the difficulties of interplanetary travel. They also find that there is one surviving alien on the escape pod, a female alien who gets called the alien queen (Florence Marly). The bring her down to the surface of Mars, and the ship on which Laura and her crew are located.

They try some scientific research, which is a bit difficult since the alien doesn't seem to speak English, but then one night when only Paul is away, the queen attacks him and kills him for his blood! The other three know that the queen is a problem, but for whatever reason don't tie her down or anything. Apparently they want to bring her back to Earth alive and in good condition, which seems like an iffy proposition if she's already murdered one of their number.

Queen of Blood is a moderately interesting movie, although I have to admit I think the story would have been more appropriate for one of those science fiction anthology TV series that were not uncommon in the 1960s. The movie only runs about 80 minutes, but it's surprisingly slow for an 80-minute movie. Stick the material into a 30- or 60-minute time slot, and it probably works better. Queen of Blood isn't great, but it's the sort of thing where you can see why Roger Corman would have been drawn to it.

Trollflöjtan

I watched a couple of movies recently that were based on musical theater and where the movies were staged in such a way as to be deliberately stage-bound. One worked better than the other, with the one that worked for me being Ingmar Bergman's production of the Mozart opera The Magic Flute. (The production was originally for Swedish TV, but got a theatrical release outside of Sweden.)

The Magic Flute tells the story of two couples. One is a high-class couple where we're introduced to the man, Prince Tamino, first, as he's walking through a forest and accosted by what looks like a dragon but according to the synopsis of the opera was originally a serpent. Three maidens who are ladies-in-waiting to the Queen of the Night come and save Tamino, whom they all find incredibly handsome. He's knocked unconscious in the assault and discovered by Pagageno, a fowler who lies about having saved Tamino. For this the maidens punish Papageno and give Tamino a locket with a portrait of the gorgeous Pamina, who happens to be the daughter of the Queen of the Night.

However, Pamina has been kidnapped by the evel Sarastro, leading both Tamino and Papageno to go looking for her because by this time the two of them have become friends. Papageno finds Pamina and finds out that it's not so much Sarastro who is the bad guy but Monostatos, who is more or less the overseer of Sarastro's slaves. Papageno rescues Pamina just as Tamino enters the castle, so it seems as if the two are going to miss each other. But thanks to their flutes they're ablt to find each other.

They don't get to live happily ever after, at least not yet, since we're maybe halfway through the film. Sarastro decides that they should be wed, but only under the condition that they're both pure of heart. To that end, both of them are going to have to go through a series of purity trials, although this second act focuses more on Tamino's trials. Tamino being the equivalent of the noble knights from medieval stories, he immediately takes up the offer with no thought to how difficult or dangerous it might be. Papageno, meanwhile, has also been promised the sort of woman who's perfect for him, except that he too is going to have to go through the purity rituals. He's rather more timid but also decides to go through with it. Papageno is also the comic relief character, so he's going to have a bit more trouble with the rituals. But The Magic Flute is not a tragic opera, so it's going to have a happy ending.

Ingmar Bergman had apparently seen a performance of The Magic Flute at Drottningholm, a Stockholm palace that had a vintage 18th century theater, when he was young, and always wanted to direct a performance of it himself. Unfortunately, Drottningholm itself wasn't up for the rigors of movie production with the heavy cameras and bright lights necessary, so Bergman had to build a replica. His intent was to make The Magic Flute look like it's a stage production, but with the freedom of the camera being able to record from different angles as well as closeups. Think the Olivier version of Henry V as opposed to the Kenneth Branagh version; the set pieces are clearly props as opposed to filming outdoor scenes outside. It's a decision that mostly works, although I could have done without cuts to "audience" members. The color palette is interesting as well in that it's very heavily focused on greens and reds.

I think that if you like opera, you'll enjoy this adaptation of The Magic Flute.

Not the Donna Summer song

I mentioned some time back when I did a post on the film The Angel Levine how TCM did a night of movies last Christmas dealing with the subject of divine intervention. Another movie that was new to me, probably because it was a United Artists release and TV rights to vintage UA isn't always straightforward, was Heaven Only Knows. Once again, I made a point to watch it before it expired from the DVR so that I could write up a post and schedule it here for a suitable time.

In Heaven, there's a bit of consternation. Apparently, there was some guy named Duke Byron (Brian Donlevy) who was born on Earth in the 1850s who was not written into the book of life, which means he was born without a soul, and was not able to fufill the destiny that was written for him into the Book of Destiny. The angels are all worried about this, so they send one of their number, Michael (Robert Cummings), down to Earth, specifically Montana of the 1880s. However, Michael has to go down as a human and convince him to marry the woman he's supposed to marry, and isn't allowed to perform divine miracles.

Michael gets down to Montana, in many ways being naïve to the way things work in a frontier town since he's been in Heaven for ages, and finds that the whole town is in quite a mess. The town is in a parlous financial state because the mine around which the town sprung up has been closed. That is thanks to a dispute between the two owners, Duke and Bill Plummer (Bill Goodwin). The two men have become rivals in other ways too, such as owning competing saloons. Plummer has been planning to kill Duke, and when he meets Michael, he figures that Michael would be a suitable person to use as the hired gun who should kill Duke. Not that Plummer expects Michael to kill Duke, but this is a way to keep Duke from finding the real killer.

Michael of course doesn't grasp any of this, considering how he has a mission of his own that doesn't involve killing Duke. Michael is able to save Duke from being killed, so Duke thinks Michael is also a hired gun type, and hires him to go after Plummer. Meanwhile, most of the normies in town are sick of the violence between Duke and Plummer, and are thinking of becoming vigilantes to get rid of Duke and Plummer. This includes Drusilla (Jorja Curtright), daughter of the town's minister. Further complicating things is the fact that there are certain people in town who don't exactly enjoy the presence of Michael, not realizing who he really is and where he's come from. On the other hand, there's the young kid Speck who has been idolizing Duke and who is able to help Michal do what he came down to earth to do, although he doesn't quite know it.

Heaven Only Knows is one of thos movies that's really offbeat by the standards of Hollywood in the late 1940s. But I can see why it's not so well known beyond the mere fact that it was more or less an independent film. The offbeat idea is one that doesn't always work since it has to be a bit contrived to get to the place that it's going. After all, Michael isn't allowed to come out and say directly that he's an angel from heaven sent to bring Duke and the woman together. Not that anybody in town would believe him. But everybody in it is appealing enough even if the movie as a whole isn't a great one.

Miss Pacific Fleet

I'm always up for another movie with Glenda Farrell in the cast, so when TCM ran Miss Pacific Fleet some months back, I recorded it, not having seen it before. Eventually I finally got around to watching it so that I could put up this review; considering that it has a Navy man and a Marine as main characters, I figured it's appropriate for Veterans' Day especially as the movie I originally had planned for the day wound up on the TCM schedule for December. This one will also be airing on TCM in Decmeber, specifically on December 8 but unfortunately I don't have any military-themed movies that I've watched and are absent from the schedule for me to move this one to December too.

Farrell is the female co-star here, playing Mae O'Brien, a chorus girl who came west from New York with her best friend Gloria Fay (Joan Blondell), presumably to try to make it in Hollywood. But they didn't, so they wound up in one of the Pacific coast towns that hosts a naval base, where they have a booth at the carnival pier running the ring toss game. It's not much of a living, and certainly doesn't give them the money to make it back to New York which is their goal.

The fleet is about to come back in, which will bring a bunch of men to town who have been to sea for several months. One such man is Kewpie Wiggins (Allen Jenkins), who has been spending his time at sea training to do the ring toss, as he's spectacularly good at it, winning a bunch of prizes and falling in love with Gloria along the way. Meanwhile, the local chamber of commerce, run by J. August Freytag (Hugh Herbert), wants to do something to get the returning men to spend even more money.

So with that in mind, they come up with the idea of sponsoring a "Miss Pacific Fleet" contest, which is sort of like a beauty contest, except that it's one that people can vote on, and can win multiple votes by spending money with the right local businesses. There are also businesses sponsoring contests that will allow the winner to win a bunch of votes, although obviously those contests are not free to enter. Kewpie, being smitten with Gloria, enters her in the contest and tells her that he's got a friend in the Marines whom he convince to cast his votes for Gloria as well.

Of course, there are bound to be complications. One is that when Kewpie, the two girls, and August go out to dinner at a roadhouse-type place to introduce Gloria to Kewpie's Marine friend Sgt. Foster (Warren Hull), Foster also falls in love with Gloria. Now, it's fairly obvious that Foster is the one who's right for Gloria, not Kewpie. But Kewpie is jealous, and thinks that if he can't have Gloria, then he's not about to give his votes in the Miss Pacific Fleet contest to her. Then there's August's wife Sadie (Minna Gombell), who catches August out with the two young chorus girls at the road house. Sadie isn't about to put up with that crap, so she also comes up with a plan to scuttle Gloria's hopes. Her plan, however, is somewhat more illegal in that involves kidnapping Gloria.

But with Miss Pacific Fleet being a B romantic comedy, we know that Gloria is going to come out right in the end. This requires her being rescued and, presumably, winning the contest in the last reel so that we get the requisite happy ending.

Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell are always delights to watch, but I have to say that they're saddled with subpar material here. That, and a lesser set of actors to support them. Allen Jenkins may have been a good character actor, but he's not exactly a romantic lead. Warren Hull is doll as dishwater as the other romantic partner for Gloria. And Glenda Farrell isn't given enough to do. They try, but they can't really save Miss Pacific Fleet from mediocrity.

Hello, Sadness

One of those movies that has shown up on TCM several times in the past that I'd heard about but never got around to watching was Bonjour Tristesse, which I knew is also based on the sort of novel with a reputation. With that in mind, the last time it showed up on TCM, I finally decided to record it and watch it to be able to put up a review.

The first interesting thing is that the opening credits are in color (and obviously by Saul Bass even if you didn't pay close enough attention to the credits), but the opening scene is in black and white. In Paris in the present day, Cécile (Jean Seberg) is out at some nightspot, but not necessarily happy, which is because of things that happened last summer down on the Riviera. As you can guess, we're going to get another flashback, but the flashback is in color, which is in some ways a good thing considering the natural beauty of the French Riviera.

Cécile is the daughter of Raymond (David Niven), a widowed businessman who doesn't actually seem to do much business but spends his time wooing a series of youngish women. The current romantic partner is Elsa (Mylène Demongeot), who seems to get along well with Cécile, which isn't exactly a bad thing for someone of Cécile's age. She's enjoying the summer, and when she goes down to the swimming platform at the beach, she meets Philippe (Geoffrey Horn), a law student who is good-looking enough that it's obvious Cécile is going to be romantically interested in him.

And then things change when Raymond learns that Anne (Deborah Kerr), a friend of Raymond's late wife, it looking to come down to the Riviera for the summer and is going to be spending the summer with Raymond and Cécile. Anne is a huge change of pace from Elsa, and not in a good way as far as Cécile is concerned, as Anne is the sort of woman who is a bit more concerned with actually parenting a teenaged girl like Cécile. Anne's, unsurprisingly, isn't happy with Elsa being around. Worse is that she's thoroughly disapproving of Cécile's relationship with Philippe, and that Raymond is taking Anne's side in the dispute.

Things get more complicated, and as you can guess from the opening, the way the summer ends isn't exactly happy. But I'm not going to spoil that.

Bonjour Tristesse isn't going to become one of my favorites. It's based on a French novel, and while the film itself isn't particularly pretentious in the way that foreign arthouse movies of that era would become, there's something about the movie that feels like it's got the same tedious vibe that New Wave movies would have. The acting is good, and the Riviera is lovely to look at, but there's something about the story that's aggravating to the point that I don't really care about the characters.

Vengeance Valley

I mentioned yesterday that I've got two movies on the TCM lineup for Nov. 10 that I wanted to blog about. The second of those movies is Vengeance Valley, which you can see tomorrow at 2:30 PM as part of TCM's salute to Star of the Month Burt Lancaster.

Carleton Carpenter as Hewie provides opening narration which made me think about Tribute to a Bad Man, about how memories from when one was young are disproportionately positive and how driving cattle out in the fresh air was wonderfully invigorating. He then talks about how the problems began when the Strobie brothers walked into town.... Well, technically they're not brothers. Lee Strobie (Robert Walker) is the son of rancher Arch (Ray Collins), while Owen (Burt Lancaster) is Arch's foster son, taken on to help Lee grow into a man. Owen has the responsibility necessary to be ranch foreman, while Lee seems to spend like there's no tomorrow along with being a rather invirtuous person. At the saloon in town, the doctor mentions that Lily (Sally Forrest) needed help with what is childbirth, but that the doctor wouldn't help unless he knows who the father is, which seems like a violation of the Hippocratic Oath.

So on the way back to the ranch, Owen stops off to see Lily and finds Lee's relatively new wife Jen (Joanne Dru) there. Worse is that Lily's brother Dick (Hugh O'Brian) is there. Dick is unsurprisingly worried about Lily's honor, what with this being the Old West, and besides, raising a kid alone would have been a particularly tough thing for a woman in those days. If Lily had been it widow that would have just sucked, but worse is that Lily got knocked up out of wedlock and she's not saying who the father is. But with Owen bringing money, Dick makes the logical conclusion that Owen is the father.

However, we are given more than enough hints early enough on that this may not in fact be the case. Lee has overdrawn his account at the bank by the same exact amount of money that Owen gave to Lily. Also, Lee and Jen's marriage seems to be one of convenience as she needed a man and he needed a wife. If anything, Lee would like to take the money and run, except that he doesn't have a whole lot of money yet. Dad owns the ranch outright, and despite being confined to crutches (hence needing Owen as a foster brother to problem child Lee) hasn't given up control of the ranch for what are really sensible reasons. Who wouldn't expect Lee to run the place into the ground?

The train pulls into town, and getting off the train is Hub (John Ireland), brother to Dick and Lily. Hub isn't really known to the folks in town, which would make him perfect as someone to bring in to help take down Owen for deflowering poor Lily or, if not Owen, then whoever is the actual father. The two main plot threads eventually come together for a finale along a cattle drive, satisfying at least the Production Code office.

Vengeance Valley is a well-enough made little programmer with good performances and a surprisingly grown-up plot. But it is a programmer and there's enough about it that's typical (if not formulaic because of the plot) to early 1950s westerns that I guess there's a reason it's not thought of as a great movie. There is, for example, stock footage used for the cattle drive that definitely sticks out. But the pluses definitely outweigh the minuses here, and Vengeance Valley is a pleasant enough way to spend 80-some minutes.

More World War II intrigue in the desert

I hadn't really thought about it, but the North African campaign of World War II was the setting for a whole bunch of movies, either obvious war films, or films that deal more with the political intrigue in the region against the backdrop of the war. (And then there's movies like Benghazi that deal with what the war left behind.) I would assume that part of it has to do with the sense in the US that North Africa is somehow exotic and therefore cinematically interesting. A movie in the second group that's been sitting on my DVR since 31 Days of Oscar is the 1943 version of The Desert Song. It's getting another airing on TCM Nov. 10, at 12:30 PM, but I'm putting it up two days early because I've got a post for another movie showing up on TCM later on November 10.

The action opens in the the summer of 1939, so just before World War II breaks out in Europe. The opening scenes are in Geneva, where future Allies and the future Axis powers are freely able to mingle since Switzerland remained as neutral as they could be considering that within a year they'd be completely surrounded by Axis powers. A company is trying to finance the building of a railway through the French colonies Sahara from Casablanca to Dakar, which necessitates going around what one map shows as the Río de Oro: for those who don't remember their history, that's part of what in those days was Spanish Sahara, to be annexed by independent Morocco in the 1970s although that's controversial for reasons not having anything to do with the movie. Anyhow, although the French are trying to build this railroad, foreshadowing clearly implies that the Nazis are really trying to get control of it.

Meanwhile, construction of the railroad is slow because of constant interference from an ethnic group called the Rifs. The Rifs are more or less being impressed into service and don't like that, hence the guerrilla attacks. The Rifs are led by a mysterious man named El Khobar; the French under military commander Col. Fontaine (Bruce Cabot) would really like to know who he is.

In town, there's also American journalist Johnny Walsh (Lynne Overman), who tries to get interesting stories from the region out to the world, although it's difficult considering the censorship from the colonial authorities. Johnny has a friend in adventurer Paul Hudson (Dennis Morgan), who fought presumably on the republican side in the Spanish Civil War and is in Morocco as a nightclub singer and pianist. Also doing the nightclub thing is Margot Bendits (Irene Manning), who sees the poor Rifs about to be hauled off and shows some sympathy for them by offering them her glass of water.

El Khobar goes to meet the leaders of the various Rif tribes out in the desert, and even though he's wearing a cloth to cover most of his face it's oh-so obvious that El Khobar is in fact Paul Hudson. The brings up an interesting dilemma. El Khobar seems to be a bit of a criminal at the very least, but since he's the lead and this is a light drama musical it doesn't seem as though there could be any way for the male lead to meet a bad end in the last reel. So how are things going to be resolved? Also, there's the question of how Paul gets all the time to be in so many different places, although that's something that's never really explained in movies like this.

Along the way, Paul and Margot become romantically involved, while Col. Fontaine also has a yen for Margot. He's nominally the antagonist for much of the movie, at least until he learns that he's been played the fool by Nazis. As best as I can tell, the movie ends sometime before the Nazis invaded France and, as you might guess, the good guys defeat the bad guys and the right people get the chance to live happily ever after, or at least as happy as could be with a war on. There's also the chance for Morgan and Irene Manning to perform several nightclub-style musical numbers.

The Desert Song is based on an operetta by Sigmund Romberg that had already been turned into a film once before at the dawn of the sound era. Obviously, since this version is from 1943 and deals explicity with the war, there's a lot that's been updated. It's not a bad movie, although it's decidedly Hollywood. Part of the fun for me was seeing all of the California locations doubling for the Moroccan Sahara. I could swear I've seen some of those rock formations in other movies. Morgan is pleasant enough, a capable if unspectacular actor. The Technicolor is very nice in this print.

Ultimately, this version of The Desert Song is entertaining enough although also not anything that's going to be thought of as an all-time great movie. It's definitely worth a watch, even if it's not the sort of thing you're going to thing of coming back to watch again and again.

La planète sauvage

My DVR can list programs in chronological order of when they were added to the DVR, although it's not always accurate especially when there's more than one airing of a program. In any case, it had a pair of animated films together and I wouldn't be surprised if TCM ran them together because there are some thematic similarities beyond the films both being animated. I already did a post on Watership Down for a subsequent airing; the other movie was Fantastic Planet. (For some reason, the English title is Fantastic Planet even though the original title in both French and Czech, the film being an international co-production, translates to Savage Planet or Wild Planet.

The movie opens with a woman running along a desolate and dangerous landscape with her baby in her arms, as though she's trying to get away from something. She tries running up a hill, only to be stopped by a much larger, blue, God-like hand that flicks her down the hill multiple times until the last time it picks the woman up and drops her from too high a height, killing her and leaving the baby alive. The blue hand is actually the hand of a Draag, a race of advanced humanoids on a planet called Ygam, while the woman and baby are Oms (it's not explicity stated that they're human, but Om is clearly a play on words from the French homme meaning "human"). There are actually several juvenile Draags playing with the Om, and one of them, a girl named Tiwa, has pity and decides to keep the baby Om as a pet.

Tiwa is the daughter of Master Sinh, who has a fairly high position in Draag politics. There has been quite a bit of discussion about the Oms. The Draags consider them Oms a clearly inferior species, although there's also a raging debate on how much intelligence the Oms have. A relatively small number of Oms are kept as pets, but out in the forests and other areas not inhabited by the Draags there are "wild" Oms living and these are seen as pests by the Draags. There are pest-control campaigns carried out, but the Oms reproduce so quickly that the Draags can't keep up.

Then again, the Draags also seem to spend most of their time meditating, for reasons that will be made clear near the end of the movie. How they actually make all the things necessary to keep their civilization going is of course not mentioned. Tiwa, the girl Draag who took an Om as a pet, calls her Om "Terr". She dotes on Terr for a good while, including letting Terr in on her lessons which are carred out through some sort of telepathic necklace. Somehow, this one has a fault that allows Terr to learn the Draag knowledge. So eventually, when Tiwa begins to grow up, she starts tiring of Terr, and Terr runs away to join a tribe of wild Oms.

Not that the Oms are united, as there are various tribes who go after one another. But they're more likely to come together when Terr reads some of the writing on the wall outside the abandoned Draag park where the Oms live and realizes that the Draags are about to carry out another of their eradication campaigns against the Oms. They do kill a fair number of Oms but many survive and one group even kills a Draag. That's a big problem as it's going to make the Draags even angrier and more vicious.

The Oms escape to an area where the Draags used to work with rockets, although they don't need the rockets anymore thanks to their meditation which allows them to travel. The Draags learn where the Oms have gone to, and send another eradication campaign after them. The Oms, for their part, go to the titular wild planet which is a moon of Ymag that the Draags consider uninhabitable. Except that it actually serves a purpose for the Draags....

Fantastic Planet is a movie that got a lot of acclaim when it was first released. On the other hand, the reviews on IMDb are rather more divided. I think that's because Fantastic Planet is a rather surreal movie that in many ways is more about the visuals than the plot. The movie is also quite clearly an allegory, although exactly what it's an allegory for is something that could have multiple interpretations. I found Fantastic Planet mostly interesting, especially in the visuals presenting the dangers that the Oms faced.

If you're willing to try something different and a bit challenging, Fantastic Planet certainly fits that bill and is more than worth watching.

Driving Miss Daisy

Another of those movies that for some reason I'd never gotten around to seeing was Oscar's Best Picture for 1989, Driving Miss Daisy. So when TCM ran it during the 2026 edition of 31 Days of Oscar, I finally recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

Driving Miss Daisy is one of those movies that doesn't need all that much of a synopsis, in part because it's one of those little movies where there's not a whole lot going on, and in part because having won the Best Picture Oscar people tend to know what it's about already. Jessica Tandy stars as Daisy, a Jewish widow living alone in Atlanta in the late 1940s, with just a black housekeeper Idella (Esther Rolle). Daisy has a businessman son Boolie (Dan Aykroyd) who is married to Florine (Patti LuPone), a woman who has become assimilated to the point of celbrating Christmas, something that horrifies Daisy. Daisy is also fiercely independent despite getting on in years.

One day, she puts the car in the wrong gear and crashes into the neighbor's yard. Booley knows this means that the insurance company won't want to insure her any longer, but that Daisy won't want to give up driving. Boolie hits upon the idea of hiring someone who can really use a job to be Daisy's chauffeur; and, since Boolie is doing the hiring, Daisy can't fire him. That man is Hoke (Morgan Freeman), who isn't exactly a spring chicken himself.

Now, given the fact that Daisy is independent, and the racial difference, you can be certain that things aren't going to go swimmingly at first. Daisy has attitudes typical for the late 1940s South, but not nearly as bad as a lot of whites would have had in part because she's a minority herself as a Jew (something that comes into much sharper focus when the synagogue gets bombed) and because Atlanta in that era was, from what I've read, less bad than the rest of the South. Daisy learns to trust Hoke, and in turn, Hoke is able to learn from Daisy since, for one example, Daisy was a teacher and Hoke is illiterate.

The two spend 20-plus years in their professional relationship, going through the same sort of pastiche of background historical changes that a lot of movies looking at that era through a longer lens did, until by the early 1970s Daisy is too old to live by herself and is beginning to suffer dementia. Hoke is old too and definitely at the age where he should probably be retiring.

Having watched Driving Miss Daisy, it's easy to see why so many people think it's the fashionable thing to bash it. Ooh, it delivers its race-relations parable in a soft form that's easy for a certain sort of white to enjoy and feel smugly morally superior! Or, it doesn't actually have much of a plot, and besides, it only won because everything else that year was weak. I'm not certain whether it was the best movie of 1989, but at the same time I don't think it deserves the vitriol it gets. At its heart, Driving Miss Daisy is more of a character study, driven by two leads who both give excellent performances and got Oscar nominations. Tandy won, although Freeman lost to Daniel Day-Lewis for My Left Foot; if you've seen the latter, you can say that Day-Lewis probably did deserve the win. But Dan Aykroyd, generally thought of as a comic actor, was also nominated, and deservedly so.

Still, when it comes to the South of that era, I think the period piece I'd recommend first and that I thought of as I was watching Driving Miss Daisy would be The Trip to Bountiful.