The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm

Tomorrow, February 13 is the start of this year's 31 Days of Oscar on TCM, with the schedule looking like it's being done by themes this year. The first morning starts off with several fantasy-type movies, with different types of fantasic material. Among the movies is The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, at 7:45 AM.

Now, as you probably know, brothers Wilhelm (played here by Laurence Harvey) and Jakob (played by Karlheinz Böhm) Grimm were a pair of brothers in the German-speaking lands in the first half of the 19th century who today are best known for their compilations of fairy tales from various parts of the German-language area. (Remember also that Germany was not a unified country at this time.) They did more, however, such as write books on German grammar and start an etymological dictionary of German, in part because it took a while for the fairy tale books to sell. The original versions of the tales, after all, were decidedly dark and not quite for children.

In this version of their lives, the two are working for a duke (Oscar Homolka) who is interested in having a biography of his family line written because the duke wishes to impress the king of Prussia. This at least gives the two brothers and Wilhelm's wife Dorothea (Claire Bloom) a place to stay while they're trying to sell their other books at Stossel's (Walter Slezak) book store. Meanwhile, a wealthier family from closer to Berlin comes to visit with adult daughter Greta (Barbara Eden), who falls in love with Jakob except that Jakob and especially Wilhelm are too much into those fairy tales.

That backstory takes up about half of the movie, with the other half consisting of three fairy tales -- lesser-known ones, which was a deliberate choice on the part of the moviemakers because they wanted stories the audience would be less likely to know the ending to, as well as many of the better-known ones already having been done by Disney. This also enabled the moviemakers to have a cast with a lot of guest stars if you will, each of whom only appeared in one of the stories. The first one, which Wilhelm tells to his own children, is The Dancing Princess. Jim Backus plays a king with a daughter (Yvette Mimieux) who loves to dance at night. Russ Tamblyn plays a man who, with the help of an invisibility cloak, is abble to discover the daughter's secret.

Later, Wilhelm wants to convince his publisher that there are people out there who would buy the books, so he brings in a bunch of kids and tells them the story of The Cobbler and the Elves about a cobbler (Harvey himself) whose elves come to life at night, aided by the special effects of George Pal.

Finally, as part of a plot point that has the brothers traveling to get information on an obscure branch of the family, Wilhelm runs into an old lady in the middle of the woods (Martita Hunt) who tells the story of The Singing Bone. Nobleman Sir Ludwig (Terry-Thomas) and his servant Hans (Buddy Hackett) find a magical dragon in a cave, with Hans killing the dragon. Ludwig tries to take credit for it, but the titular singing bone tells the real truth of what happened.

The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was filmed in Cinerama, and the print TCM ran is in the "smilebox" format which is supposed to simulate the curved screen that the Cinerama movies were originally projected onto. To me, it's always seemed as though the smilebox is a bit too exaggerated. Yes, there was some curvature, and people would mostly be farthest away from the middle section (considering vertical sections) of the screen, but the photographs I've seen don't look as curved as what the smilebox gives us. Cinerama also had serious issues where panoramas looked good -- and the location photography here is quite good -- but not suited to the sorts of closeups needed for traditional narrative storytelling. The "real life" sequences here are by far the weakest part of the movie. Ultimately, we get a bit too much of the back-story to be really interesting to children. That's a shame, because the three fairy tales aren't that bad.

So overall, I think The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm is an ambitious project that falls a bit short of its intended goal, but a movie that's still worth watching if you haven't seen it before.

Fun with dysfunctional Canadians

Another of those movies with a title I'd seen show up on TCM on several occasions, but had never actually watched, was Jalna. Once again, with that in mind, the last time it showed up on TCM I finally recorded it. Having finally watched it, I can see why it doesn't show up more often.

Jalna is subtitled "A Drama of Canadian Life", and is based on a series of novels that were apparently incredibly popular back in the day. Jalna is the name of a farm somewhere in Ontario, one of those farms that in an old Hollywood western movie would be the big ranch whose proprietor is the big man in the region. In this case, it's three generations of the Whiteoak family, led by matriarch Granny (Jessie Ralph) who's about to turn 100 and who does not get to have a death scene as a dramatic plot point; instead her centenary is the coda to the action of the movie. The family is about to sit down to Sunday dinner: Gran, Uncles Nicholas (C. Aubrey Smith) and Ernest (Halliwell Hobbes), and adult kids Renny (Ian Hunter), Eden (David Manners), Piers (Theodore Newton), and Meg (Peggy Wood). There's one other adult who doesn't get much to do, and a bratty child who has an incredibly obnoxious scene where he plays evil pranks on pretty much everyone else in the house.

Renny is the son who's more or less managing the farm now. Piers is late to dinner because, as the little kid reveals, he's down at the next farm over seeing Pheasant Vaughan (Molly Lamont), daughter of owner Maurice Vaughan (Nigel Bruce). This pisses Meg off to no end: apparently 20 years ago Meg was set to marry Maurice in what was supposed to be a marriage that would unite the two farms and be a big deal. But then it turned out that Maurice had fathered Pheasant by another woman some time back and Pheasant was dropped off there; who knows what happened to Pheasant's mother? Meg suffered a broken heart that she's still nursing, and doesn't want any other Whiteoak to have anything to do with any Vaughan.

And then there's Eden, who doesn't want to be a farmer at all, but a poet. It should go without saying that poetry isn't exactly a lucrative occupation unless you can write things that can be used as popular song lyrics, which isn't what Eden is doing. But he gets word from a publisher in New York that they're accepting one of his books! So the family raises the money for him to go to New York, never mind the internal squabbling about this. There, Eden meets Alayne (Kay Johnson), the reader who read Eden's manuscript and got the publisher to approve it. They meet and immediately fall in love and marry, shocking the rest of the Whiteoak family. But they plan to come back to Jalna.

Equally shocking is that on the day Eden and Alayne come back, Piers has decided that he's going to go elope with Pheasant, and bring her back to Jalna too as his bride. Naturally, as you might guess, this causes certain members of the family to go ballistic. Things get worse as Eden can't really come up with a second volume of poetry, while Renny finds himself falling in love with Alayne, which is a big no-no. There's a whole lot more melodrama to come, even though the movie is only 78 minutes.

I found myself laughing at Jalna quite a few times, which is not a good thing since, for the most part, Jalna is not supposed to be a comedy. (The one exception is Gran's cantankerousness and her parrot.) The family dynamic is ridiculously dysfuctional, to the point that you wonder how they've stayed together so long. There are other questions, like why Renny never got married, and why none of them ever think of getting some sort of white collar job to make ends meet. The Whiteoaks, after all, seem closer to gentry farmers than, say the families in As the Earth Turns which is also a farming saga but looks much more at the more difficult side of farming.

I guess I can see why the original book might have pleased audiences in the 1920s when it was released. But the film adaptation didn't work for me.

But no affairs with married women

Another of the many movies that I recorded the last time they showed up on TCM was The Affairs of Dobie Gillis. It's finally getting another showing on TCM, tomorrow (Feb. 11) at 6:00 AM, so once again now would be the perfect time for me to put up this post I've written on the movie after having watched it.

Dobie Gillis, played by Bobby Van, is a young man about to enroll as a freshman at Grainbelt University somewhere in the Midwest. One wonders how he even got into college, considering his philosophy that some people are workers and others are enjoyers, and, well, he's an enjoyer. At the opening registration, Dobie gets a roommate in the form of Charlie Trask (Bob Fosse) who becomes his new best friend.

Dobie also seems to be a hit with the women. There's Lorna (Barbra Ruick), who winds up with Charlie. The only real reason she isn't with Dobie is because another woman got there first. Pansy Hammer (Debbie Reynolds) is in the same freshman composition class and chemistry class as Dobie, and the two of them immediately hit it off, even though the English professor, Amos Pomfritt (Hans Conried) has it in for Dobie. Pansy lives in town because she's a local and can live with her parents (Hanley Stafford and Lurene Tuttle). Mr. Hammer in particular has a dislike of Dobie, because he sees Dobie wants to get by with a minimum of work and that's not a good trait to have in a husband. But then, we wouldn't have much of a movie if Pansy weren't around or there weren't some sort of conflict.

Things go wrong first when Dobie's car breaks down on a date (although Pansy makes a mistake by not going straight up to her bedroom and changing when she gets home) and then when Dobie decides he and Pansy should just start skipping classes to go on dates, forcing the two of them to do a semester's worth of work in one day and leading to Pansy's blowing up the chemistry lab. For this, Pansy's dad sends her to an aunt in New York so she can go to school there, far away from Dobie. Dobie wants to see Pansy, but he doesn't have the money to get to New York.

Eventually Dobie does get the money, although it's in the sort of dishonest way you'd think would get him strung up on an embezzlement charge: he offers to go to New York to find a band for a fundraiser, and spends a goodly portion of the money dating Pansy instead. Worse, not long after returning to Grainbelt word comes in from New York that Pansy has gone missing! Her dad is understandably pissed, but as you might guess from a movie like this, Dobie is actually innocent and there's a happy ending to be had.

The Affairs of Dobie Gillis is an MGM musical, albeit decidedly not a Freed Unit musical, which in some ways makes the movie a bit of an anomaly. It might also be a bit surprising to some that this came out after Singin' in the Rain, when you'd think MGM wouldn't want to cast Reynolds in such a trifle. There's a lot of opportunity for the four leads to sing and/or dance, to more success than failure although Van's solo of "I'm Thru With Love" goes on too long. The problem that the movie has is the plot, which has too many plot holes and left me wanting to take Dobie and Pansy and literally try to shake some sense into them.

The Affairs of Dobie Gillis is also mildly interesting for those with nostalgia for the studio system; I for one was trying to figure out which of the campus buildings (if any) was the one used as the high school in High School Confidential some years later. There's also a set that has a ton of college pennants on it. Oddly, the design also has a pennant from Carvel High School, which you may recall was the high school from the Andy Hardy movies.

Time Without Pity

TCM ran a morning and afternoon of the films of actress Ann Todd some time back. One that I watched just before it expired from my DVR so that I could write up a review of it here was Time Without Pity.

Todd isn't the star here; that would be Michael Redgrave, although we don't see him in the opening scene. Instead, that pre-credits scene is of an older man killing a young woman named Jennie Cole. Then, after the opening credits, we see a plane landing in the UK after a transatlantic flight. Getting off is David Graham (Michael Redgrave). He's an alcoholic who has been away in Canada in some sort of in-patient treatment, which must have taken quite a long time since David missed not just that murder. David's adult son Alec (Alec Macowan) was accused of the murder of that young girl, found guilty, and sentenced to hang, with the execution being the day after Dad arrived back in Britain. We also learn that Dad's alcoholism has been going on long enough that his son doesn't care about his father, and is perfectly willing to be executed even though we know he's not guilty. Dad is convinced his son couldn't have done such a thing, and plans on proving his son's innocence.

The first person David tries to talk to is Agnes Cole (Joan Plowright), the sister of the murder victim. Agnes is a showgirl, and is convinced that Alec must be guilty. Or, at least, that's what she has David believe with the way she's screaming at him and doesn't want to talk to him at all.

Alec, having been forced to spend a lot of time away from his father, became friends with the Stanford family, specificall with the son Brian. Brian's adoptive father Robert (Leo McKern) is a wealthy automobile manufacturer, and it was in the Stanford house that the murder took place. Alec, you see, spent a lot of time there what with his father being away, and was the boyfriend of the murder victim. David doesn't let on who he is when he visits the Stanfords, (Ann Tood plays Mrs. Stanford), and Dad doesn't seem to recognize David, although the son Brian does and doesn't tell his father that David is using a false identity to visit the Stanfords.

David continues to try to find clues, all with a metaphorical clock constantly ticking down the hours until the scheduled execution. It seems ridiculous that this tyro should be able to solve the mystery when the police haven't been able to, even if we already know who the killer is since we see his face in the opening scene. It also seems ridiculous that the trial went the way it must have gone, but then we wouldn't have had a movie if these things hadn't happened.

Time Without Pity is another of those movies where I can see why somebody like Michael Redgrave would want to take the lead. The idea of having to try to prove somebody's innocence against an extremely tight deadline makes for a potentially really interesting story, as we've seen in great movies like Saboteur. Here, however, it seemed to me like it would be so unlikely for the legal system to screw up this badly, to the extent that it makes the movie not work all that well for me. Still, everybody tries, but can't quite overcome the script flaws.

Paris Interlude

Despite my writing this blog for 18 years now, it always surprises how many 1930s movies are that I still don't know about. The latest example of this came when I watched the programmer Paris Interlude.

The movie opens up in 1927, when Charles Lindbergh was making his transatlantic flight in The Spirit of St. Louis, and everybody in Paris waiting for Lindbergh to land. Especially the reporters, who wanted to be the first to get the story. Among those reporters is Sam Colt (Otto Kruger), who was a flyboy in World War I before he lost his left arm. He's become a reporter since, and at one time was a good reporter before he turned to drink and is the sort of dissolute ex-pat who was a thing back in popular culture in the years just before the Depression, although Paris Interlude was released in 1934. In any case, Colt enlists the help of aspiring writer Pat Wells (Robert Young) to help write the stories in a sort of apprentice relationship. It's not enough for Pat to make a living, and he wants to write fiction any way.

All of these characters spend just as much time at a local watering hole that has next to nothing French about it instead being a place for Americans to recreate their fantasy of what Parisian café life is about. Among these people are aimless Julie (Madge Evans), who moons over Sam because he's just so dashing and handsome, while not having any idea what to do with life. There's also fashion designer Cassie Bond (Una Merkel), and Ham (Edward Brophy), a naïve journalist on his way to the Soviet Union to cover the situation there although he never makes it for whatever reason.

Sam proposes to Julie and plans to take her back to the States, and she even tells her folks back there she's planning to come back a wife. But Sam gets an assignment covering the slow-burning Chinese civil war (at the time the movie was set, this would have been before Japan invaded Manchuria, although the movie was released some years after), forcing him to leave Julie behind. She feels she can't go back to America, so she starts working writing about the haute couture scene in Paris with her articles illustrated by Cassie. Pat falls in love with Julie but can't support her, while another American abroad, golfer Rex Fleming (George Meeker) shows up. And then news comes in that Sam has been shot down in China and is presumably dead.

Except that in a movie like this you have to expect that he's not in fact dead. So 20 minutes later into the movie, on the day that Julie is finally about to marry Sam who has sold a story, Sam arrives back in Paris looking just like he would have looked the day he was shot down in China which makes no sense in terms of plot. Wouldn't he have gotten cleaned up? But Sam's arrival makes Julie wonder just whom she should marry.

For some reason, I went into Paris Interlude thinking this movie was going to be a comedy. It isn't at all, and mostly wasn't intended to be apart from the comic relief character. It's not exactly a bad movie, but it's definitely the sort of thing that would have been what movie exhibitors wanted in 1934: something that could run for a week or two as the second feature and give audiences a movie to come to, only to fade into obscurity as something newer came to the screen. It's with good reason that I had never heard of this one before it showed up on the TCM schedule the last time it did.

Between Two Worlds

Many years ago, I did a post on the early sound film Outward Bound which I found interesting for the way in which I felt it actually tried to use sound as a character in the movie. Outward Bound was remade as a somewhat bigger movie during World War II and given the title Between Two Worlds. I'd been meaning to get around to watching it, so the last time TCM ran it I finally recorded it and eventually watched it, wrote up this post, and saved it in drafts for you to get this post today.

The movie starts off at a travel agency in some British seaside port, presumably Southampton although I don't know that the movie makes this explicit. Various people are trying to get passage to America, something which is difficult considering the war going on. Among them Henry Bergner (Paul Henried), a former concert pianist who joined the anti-Nazi resistance in his home country but had to flee to England. He's not allowed to board, and heads home to commit suicide. As he's going through the streets, we see the car that's carrying the other passengers about to set sail get bombed in a Nazi air raid.

Cut to a shot of Henry'a apartment, where we find him having turned on the gas to off himself. His distraught wife Ann (Eleanor Parker) enters the apartment, and decides that if Henry is going to kill himself, she's going to join him because she'll have nothing to live for. Henry, for his part, tries to keep Ann from joining him, but she's insistent.

And wouldn't you know it, the next thing they know is that they're on the boat that Henry had been trying to get a ticket for, which doesn't seem to make sense at first unless of course you've seen Outward Bound before. And in any case, it's explained much earlier in Between Two Worlds than in Outward Bound what's happened. Henry and Ann are dead, as are all of the other passengers on board, although they're being carried to a sort of purgatory where they'll be judged by the "Examiner" before it's to be determined where and how they spend eternity.

The next passenger to figure out what's happened in Thomas Prior (John Garfield). He's the sort of cynical reporter who always seems to have a sharp word for everybody else but has set up such a shield around himself that he claims not to feel anything. And he's more than willing to spill the beans on what's happening even though the ship's purser, Scrubby (Edmund Gwenn), wants everybody to figure it out for themselves that they're already dead.

Among the other passengers are Pete (George Tobias), a sailor reminscent of the William Bendix character in Lifeboat; a wealthy older couple; a local vicar who winds up helping the "Examiner"; gold-digger actress Maxine Russell (Faye Emerson); housemaid Mrs. Midget (Sara Allgood); and war profiteer Lingley (George Coulouris). Eventually the Examiner (Sydney Greenstreet) shows up to deliver judgment on each of the passengers.

I think I personally preferred Outward Bound in part because I have a thing for early talkies and in part because it's a much more compact little picture at almost 30 minutes shorter than Between Two Worlds. However, even I have to admit that Between Two Worlds has much better production values. Ultimately, however, I think a lot of which version are going to prefer is going to come down to their preconceived notions of the stars playing the various characters. The role played by John Garfield is much changed for Garfield's screen persona, the role having been essayed in Outward Bound by Leslie Howard. A little bit of Garfield can go a long way, and here I think he's a bit too cynical. Somewhat like his character in Four Daughters in that regard.

Sydney Greenstreet, on the other hand is excellent in his role, as is Allgood. So it's not without reason that many fans are going to prefer Between Two Worlds. Watch both and judge for yourself.

Olympia

Another of the movies that I had to watch off of my DVR before it expired was Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl's two-part documentary on the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. Today being the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics, I figured this would be a good time to put up the post on it. Apparently the original plan was to release one movie, but Riefenstahl's edit ran so long that the movie wasn't released until mid-1938, and in two parts as it ran over four hours. Stylistically there's not enough different to justify two full separate posts, so I'm doing a post that covers both Part 1 (Festival of Nations; linked above), and the second part, Festival of Beauty.

The first part starts with a long sequence of Riefenstahl's interpretation of what training for the ancient Greek Olympiad might have been like, with a bunch of nearly naked men wearing nothing more than a codpiece and running or doing throwing events. There are also women who are completely naked, albeit in a form about as artistic as Renaissance art nudes or ancient Greek statuary. We then transition to the Olympic torch relay, starting in Greece and going through southeastern Europe on its way to Germany, leading up to the opening ceremony when the Olympic cauldron is lit after all of the countries (I think 51 of them) march into the Olympic stadium.

The rest of Part 1 deals with most of the track and field events, attempting to document them to show what happened, who won and how, but without running ridiculously long. Berlin is the Olympics where Jesse Owens famously won four gold medals, and these events are shown, with pretty much no more propaganda or racial denigration than one would have gotten from a white American Hollywood production. The recreation of the German radio/public address athletes consistently refers to certain athletes as "the black man [surname]", but that's not much worse than American commentary would have been. But more on the propaganda in the summary later.

Part 2 opens with a shorter sequence of athletes training, which might be a bit controversial in that all the male German athletes retire to the sauna after their run and there's some obvious full frontal nudity. The sports covered here include very brief references to boxing and gymnastics, with more to yachting, and then rowing (showing the American men's win in the eights that became the subject of the book and movie The Boys in the Boat), modern pentathlon, the cycling road race, and the diving, with the diving being the most famous sequence because of Riefenstahl's camera use.

And it's that use of the camera for which Olympia should be rightly remembered. The opening sequences of the two parts are in many ways the most interesting in that Riefenstahl had the most freedom in composing them. When it comes to actual sports, that's a bit harder, since there's only so much you can do to film, say, an actual boxing match. So a lot of the movie has a slightly boring feel to it. To combat this, Riefenstal did as much as she could to put cameras in spots that were unorthodox for 1936, have them moving on rails to track the athletes, or put them under or over the athletes. She also made heavy use of editing, especially in the diving sequence. I think they might have mentioned the winner, but more than any other event that felt beside the point, as she was trying to show the beauty of the human form. Some sequences, however, especially in the cycling and probably in the sailing, look like they have to be recreations.

The beauty of the human body is also where one can start when it comes to discussing the propaganda nature of the movie. Adolf Hitler obviously wanted to show the Germans as a superior people, and all of those nearly-naked bodies are very clearly of a certain narrowly-defined standard of beauty. Riefensthal couldn't show Germans winning events they didn't win -- and she doesn't hide non-Germans winning as with Jesse Owens -- but beauty is clearly a German thing.

There's also the presence of Adolf Hitler. Some of this obviously can't be helped. Berlin had been awarded the right to stage the 1936 Olympics back in 1931, before the Nazis came to power, and it is traditionally the job of the head of state of the host nation to declare the games open. So of course Hitler has to be there. At the same time, one didn't need to show him later on watching the events. There's also a lot of shots of German athletes and spectators giving the Nazi salute to the German flag at various times. During the medal ceremony and anthem playing that's understandable. 90 years on, people are going to be a bit uncomfortable with other shots of it.

All in all, Olympia deserves to be remembered as a movie that introduced a lot of ground-breaking techniques to the coverage of sport, even if it will also always be remembered for director Leni Riefenstahl's involvement with Adolf Hitler.

Who Killed Teddy Bear?

Another of the movies that's showing up on TCM and sitting on my DVR is the 1960s exploitation piece Who Killed Teddy Bear, which will be on TCM tomorrow, February 6, at 6:15 PM. As is always the case, when one of these movies comes up, I make a point of watching it so that I can do the post like this on the film.

The movie starts with a man, face unseen, but with a fairly fit body and wearing just a pair of tighty-whities, making an obscene phone call to poor Norah Dain (Juliet Prowse). Meanwhile, we learn about the titular teddy bear, which comes about when a young girl named Edie Sherman (played as an adult by Margot Bennett) saw her brother Lawrence (Sal Mineo) having sex with someone, which scarred her emotionally and caused her to fall down the stairs, leaving her a brain-damaged adult.

Norah and Lawrence both work at a discotheque run by Marian Freeman (Elaine Stritch) that plays the sort of upbeat pop music that was all the vogue in the 1960s. Norah works as a hostess and playing records, while Lawrence is a busboy. Norah tells Marian about the phone calls, which brings the police into the case, in the form of Lt. Madden (Jan Murray). Madden is a piece of work himself. He's got a young daughter, but no longer has a wife, as the wife was raped and killed some years back. This led Madden to start doing his own independent research on what causes men to become the sort of sex maniac who would make such obscene phone calls or even go further. But, the way he does the research makes you think it's much more than just a professional interest and that he might be about to become one of the criminals he claims to be railing against. Indeed, higher-ups in the police have noticed.

The incident that left little Edie brain-damaged, and forced Lawrence to become her guardian after their parents died, has also saddled poor Lawrence with a lot of guilt in addition to an inability to have a normal relationship with a woman, to the point that he goes to the sort of adult establishments that dotted the streets just off Times Squares in the era before the place was cleaned up and Disneyfied. Meanwhile, the calls to Norah keep coming, so Marian offers to spend the night at Norah's apartment. However, Marian does something Norah considers a sexual advance, and kicks Marian out. But the man pursuing Norah mistakes Marian for Norah since Marian is wearing Norah's coat, and follows Norah and kills her!

Eventually, for the movie's climax, Norah offers to teach Lawrence how to dance. Lawrence reveals his feelings for Norah but, due to his being emotionally stunted, is completely unable to express his feelings in a healthy way.

Who Killed Teddy Bear is an incredibly sleazy movie considering the star power on offer here. That makes it interesting. Unfortunately, as an actual narrative movie it's not quite so good. The story is kind of a mess and it's really not that difficult to figure out who's making those calls to Norah. But the sleaze that makes it interesting also makes it worth a watch.

Un esercito di 5 uomini

Another of the movies that I had on my DVR that I wanted to watch before it expired was one that, unknown to me at the time, is a spaghetti western: The Five Man Army. At the time I recorded it, I only noticed the name of Peter Graves in the screen guide description, but when you watch the opening credits and several of the Italian names show up, it's fairly obviously a spaghetti western.

As I metioned, Peter Graves is the nominal star here, although he's not the first one we see. In a Mexican village in 1914 during the revolution, Luis Dominguez (Nino Castelnuovo) shows up where the authorities are registering men for work permits. Luis has a past, as we later learn, as a bank robber, and so as not to be found out, he takes another man's identity. Luis is then offered a job by a "Dutchman" (Peter Graves).

That job is a heist which is going to require a team of people with various abilities, so in fitting with the formula of a heist movie, we get a series of scenes of the Dutchman finding the right people for the job, all of whom are known to him while they don't know each other. Mesito (Bud Spencer) is a mountain of a man who rustled a rail car of cattle, only to make the mistake of trying to sell them back to their original owner. Mesito also thinks a lot about food, a sort of running joke throughout the movie. There's also the Dutchman's old comrade-in-arms Augustus (James Daly), who is needed because he's the explosives expert. Finally, there's the mysterious "Samurai" (Tetsuro Tamba), who somehow wound up in the US and is good with knives. I don't know if the producers thought Tamba's English wasn't good enough, but there's a conceit written into the script that Samurai is a taciturn man who only speaks when he needs to, and I don't think Samurai has an actual speaking line in the entire movie.

After the five men get together and escape the Mexican authorities again, they learn what the mission is for which Dutchman has assembled them. There's that revolution going on, and the revolutionaries need money. The legitimate Mexican government is shipping a bunch of gold by rail, so as always, why not hijack one of these rail shipments and give the gold to the revolutionaries? Each of them has separately been promised good pay for the work.

Now, the train has a whole bunch of soldiers guarding it, both on open cars and in the one sealed car that actually has the gold. Samurai is good at throwing knives to kill people silently; while Augustus has the explosives knowledge necessary to get into the car with the gold. And Mesito has a key role not on the train. The plan is to unhook that car and shunt it to an abandoned barn; Mesito has to lay a bit of track and operate the switch. And Dominguez, who was in a circus acrobat act before his parents' deaths broke up the act and forced him into a life of crime to make ends meet, is going to rehook the other cars together.

As often happens in heist movies, there are things in the buildup and execution of the heist that threaten to derail it, pun intended. And, of course, even if the heist does go off as planned, it's not unexpected that criminals might wish to get greedy over how much they're going to get paid for it. So with all that, it's not really as though The Five Man Army is breaking any new ground. And yet the road it takes is more than entertaining enough. It's not the world's greatest movie, in part because there's something about the spaghetti western genre's production values that always seems just a bit off. Also, in part because of the cinematography that screams late 1960s with its pans and zooms. But there's more in The Five Man Army that works than doesn't.

The Curse of Frankenstein

Tonight's second night of Bugs Bunny shorts includes a trio of monster/mad scientist-inspired entries in the 1:00 AM half hour. That will be followed by a couple of horror features, including The Curse of Frankenstein at 3:00 AM. Fortunately, I had that one on my DVR from when John Carpenter selected it in last year's Two for One series, so I was able to watch it to do this review.

Frankenstein is, as always, not the monster (called the "Creature" in this movie), but Dr. Victor Frankenstein, who created the Creature. Here, Victor Frankenstein is played by Peter Cushing, and as the movie opens, he's in a Swiss prison awaiting execution. As you might guess, this is going to lead to a flashback in which the main story is told, to a visiting priest.... (I suppose the other plot device could have involved Dr. Frankenstein escaping prison.)

Flash back to when Victor was an adolescent. His father has been dead for some time and now his mother dies, leaving Victor a fairly substantial estate in addition to the Baron title he's already had. His mom's sister shows up together with her daughter, ie. Victor's cousin Elizabeth (the adult Elizabeth being played by Hazel Court). Apparently Mom had given her sister a modest allowance, and she'd like that to continue, although this scene is more a way to introduce the Elizabeth character. Victor being on his own but still a legal minor, needs an adult, and hires a tutor in Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart).

Krempe proceeds to teach Victor everything he knows about the sciences, and Victor is an adept learner. Victor seems particularly interested in the relatively new field of electricity and what sort of energy animates life-forms. This first bit of experimentation culminates in bringing a dog back to life, which is a pretty neat trick. As you might guess from a Frankenstein movie, however, things aren't going to stop there, and Victor wants to go much farther than Krempe would like, leading Krempe to feel a sense of alarm. Worse, Victor builds his human for the experimentation by obtaining various body parts in highly illicit ways, up to and including murder of an aging professor.

Adult Elizabeth shows up with the intention of marrying her cousin, but Krempe wants her to leave the house right away because he believes she's in danger. Indeed, when Victor kills the professor for the professor's brain, Krempe gets in an argument with him that damages the brain. So when Victor's creature (played by Christopher Lee) comes to life, it's brain-damaged and sociopathic, with a propensity to kill.

The Curse of Frankenstein tells the story of Frankenstein's monster in a very different way from the 1931 Frankenstein with Bela Lugosi. This version focuses on Victor as an openly malevolent person, and that's a take which I think serves the story quite well. This was one of the earliest Hammer horror films, and was extremely successful, which led to all those future Hammer horror movies. Cushing is very good, while Lee doesn't exactly have a whole lot to do here since he doesn't show up in the first half of the movie and doesn't have any lines anyway. If you haven't seen The Curse of Frankenstein before, it's an excellent way to kick off the Hammer horror films.