Anastasia

I've been mentioning a couple of times how FXM runs most of the movies it runs multiple times, although currently it feels as if there are a few more movies in the rotation than normal. One movie that only seems to have gotten one ainig that that I haven't seen on the schedule in months is Anastasia.

Russian Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917 after the first of the 1917 revolutions in Russia, but stayed in the country with his family. After the Communist October Revolution, the Tsar and his family were placed under house arrest in western Siberia, and ultimately murdered in the summer of 1918. However, the Communists initally only announced the death of Nicholas.

In 1928 in Paris, it was well known among the Russian émigré community that there had been at least one woman claiming to be Anastasia, the youngest of Nicholas' children, who had shown up in various parts of Europe. General Bunin (Yul Brynner) leads a group of émigrés who is trying to get at the money that Nicholas had deposited in a bank in the west, since the western countries weren't about to hand this money over to the Soviets. But to do it, he's going to need to find somebody descended from Nicholas to get the trustees to release the funds, and time is running out.

Enter Anna Anderson (Ingrid Bergman), who has previously been in Berlin and Bucharest claiming to be Anastasia but having spent time in various institutions with a substantial case of amnesia. Now, in this version of the story, Bunin considers Anna a fraud, and we're in on that knowledge. (DNA evidence from after the fall of the Soviet Union confirms Anastasia did not survive the killings.) In the 1920s, there were a lot of skeptics, but no way to confirm that Anna was in fact not Anastasia beyond intuition. So Bunin plans to train Anna to pass herself off better as Anastasia, in the hopes that this time people might actually believe that she is in fact Anastasia.

Bunin can't get the proper people in Paris to believe Anna's story, so the only other option is the long shot of going to Copenhagen, where the Dowager Empress Maria (Helen Hayes), mother of Nicholas and grandmother of Anastasia, lives after having to been able to escape Russia before the Bolsheviks took over. She understandbly doesn't believe Anna's story at all. But a member of her retinue, Prince Paul (Ivan Desny), either does believe it or is going along with it because he has a romantic interest in Anna. Meanwhile, there's also some suggestion that perhaps Anna and Bunin are also developing a romantic relationship. If Anna isn't Anastasia, perhaps she can live happily ever after some other way.

Ingrid Bergman won the Oscar for Anastasia, but after having watched the movie again (I first saw it ages ago, probably before I started this blog since a search of the blog claims I haven't done a post on it), I have to admit that I'm a bit surprised by the Oscar win here. I suppose you can argue that having to play an amnesiac pretending to be royalty is a demanding role, but it doesn't seem all that great a role to me. Then again, the other nominees aren't a particularly strong lineup. (Looking at the other nominees, I think I would have voted for Deborah Kerr in The King and I.) I'm also not certain what the Academy boters would have thought of Bergman at this point. She had been forced to leave Hollywood after her marriage to Roberto Rossellini, and this was her first role back in Hollywood. I wonder if perhaps they had more sympathy than objectivity.

Anastasia is certainly competently made, and a good example of the studio system making an opulent movie to compete with television. But I can't help but think it could have been better.

Michael York and Germany don't mix

Another of the movies that I forgot to record off of TCM and had to watch on the Watch TCM app before it expired was Zeppelin.

The year is 1915, which means that the UK and Germany are at war during the Great War. As you may recall, back in that war the Germans hoped that their relatively new airships would be able to bomb London from the air, since planes were not advanced enough to drop bombs until the next war. The British are well aware of what the Germans are doing, setting up the sort of searchlights that you've seen in a hundred other movies about the two world wars.

Stationed in London is British army lieutenant Geoffrey Richter-Douglas (Michael York), who, as you might be able to discern from the name, is of mixed heritage, both Scottish and German. Now, for various reasons, including the fact that his girlfriend is a spy, both the Germans and the English have reason to believe that Geoffrey might be useful to their side in intelligence gathering. With that in mind, Geoffrey's commanding officer suggest that he fake a defection back to Germany.

The reason for this is that the British have reason to believe the Germans are working on a more powerful zeppelin than what they've been trying to deply up to this point. Geoffrey's mission would be to get the information on the new Zeppelin, code named LZ36. He flees to Germany, even getting himself shot in the process, which also helps in that the Germans might be more likely to believe that he's sincere about his defection should anyone question him.

And as you might guess, people are going to question him. Working on the LZ36 is Prof. Altschul (Marius Goring), who has a much younger trophy wife named Erika (Elke Sommer), although she's no dummy herself and is actually working on the zeppelin, not just married to the professor. Erika thinks Geoffrey might be a spy. Some in German intelligence think so, too, but need him in part for his knowledge of the Scottish coastline which is going to be necessary for their mission. Besides, if they take him aboard the LZ36, they can keep their new friend close and enemies closer, as the phrase go.

As for that mission involving knowledge of the lay of the land in Scotland, it's a fairly audacious mission. One is to bring paratroopers armed with mustard gas over to Scotland; the other is a morale-sapping mission to invade the castle where a whole bunch of historical documents have been moved to to get them out of London where the documents would be in greater danger of being destroyed. Crazy, I know, but some of these war movies have even dafter missions.

Zeppelin isn't exactly great, but it's definitely modestly entertaining. It's definitely worth watching if it shows up again, but I'm not certain I'd pay the Warner Archive prices for it.

The Thin Man Goes Home

Myrna Loy is the Star of the Month on TCM for October, presumably because of her well-known association with the horror genre that's appropriate for Halloween. Or maybe not. Anyhow, six of her movies were part of the Thin Man series with Willam Powell, and unsurprisingly TCM are showing all six of them in a row, tonight in prime time. The fifth movie in the series, The Thin Man Goes Home, comes up overnight at 3:30 AM.

Nick Charles (William Powell again) grew up in a typical-for-Hollywood small town called Sycamore Springs, where his father Bertram (Harry Davenport) is a prominent research doctor hoping to get the money to build a new hospital with more laboratory space for him. You'd think Dr. Bertram would be old enough to retire, but he still works and his wife (Lucile Watson) is alive, the two of them living with maid Hilda who seems obnoxiously nervous all the time.

Nick and Nora (Myrna Loy, again) are returning with Asta, but not with their son who was conceived at the end of the second or third movie, the excuse being that the son is in kindergarten and Nick and Nora don't want to disturb that. Just running off and leaving him with the hired help, is, however, perfectly OK apparently. Nick has father issues, or perhaps it's Dad who has Nick issues, as Dad isn't too happy about Nick's drinking and being a police detective. But in one of this film's running jokes, Nick has given up drinking for the duration, since the film was made in 1944 at the height of World War II.

And with the war on, it's unsurprising that the murder that Nick winds up investigating is going to involve the war effort, although that's not totally revealed until the end of the film. The first night Nick and Nora are in Sycamore Springs, a man shows up at the house and wants to see Nick, only to get shot for his troubles. Obviously not by Nick, although that might make for a more interesting movie. The man in question is Peter Berton, a young but not very talented artist. In fact, Nora buys one of Berton's paintings not knowing it's by the guy who got shot in Dr. Charles' living room.

As you might guess, there are several suspects. Berton was seeing a young woman, Laura Ronson (Gloria DeHaven) although Laura's father Sam (Minor Watson) doesn't exactly like Peter as a suitable romantic match for Laura. Meanwhile, when Nick goes to the auto camp where Peter is staying to investigate Peter's death, he gets hit over the head by Crazy Mary (Anne Revere). He doesn't seem to suffer much of a concussion, however. Then there's Crump (Donald Meek), the art store owner who deals Berton's paintings, as well as the Draques, who had purchased one of Berton's paintings. There's a fairly convoluted mystery that Nick solves, bringing together all of the suspects for the final reveal that this time is a bit self-referential as Nora explains to the local police how Nick brings everyone together and how these reveals generally go.

I found The Thin Man Goes Home a rather weak entry in the series. Part of it is that the murder doesn't happen until a third of the way into the movie, and it seems unlikely that anybody would be able to put all the pieces together to solve this one. The humor isn't as funny as you might expect from a Thin Man movie, with the portion before Nick and Nora arrive in Sycamore Springs as well as every scene involving Hilda being particular weak points.

Still, the movie was a success because fans were so happy to see Nick and Nora Charles back together, and it is still William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Another movie with 1960s views of Italy

Back in the 1960s, international travel was nowhere near as easy as it is today, so one of the drawing cards of certain Hollywood movies was to film in "exotic" locations in Europe that the viewers in America would enjoy seeing, especially if people could look glamorous in such locations. The movies are of varying quality, with an example of one of the lesser movies being Three Bites of the Apple.

Chelsey Tours is one of those British companies that ran guided bus tours of Europe, making it easier for people to see a checklist of the important sites for a modest amount of money. Not that I'd want to be stuck with such touriss for a week or more. Working for the company as one of their guides is Stanley Thrumm (David McCallum). As the movie opens, the tour bus is arriving in France, on its way to Italy. They get stuck in a small town in Italy when Mrs. Tomlinson (Avril Angers) gets sick and her husband (Harvey Korman) buys her some medicine. So they have to stay in a small town for a few days longer than expected.

This gives Stanley the opportunity to walk into a building that happens to be a casino. Due to a comedy of errors a chip gets put on a number and, wouldn't you know it, that's the number that hits. Stanley feels that, being honest, he didn't intend to make the bet, so he's OK letting it ride in the hopes that it will lose and he'll be even. Instead, the number hits two more times, leaving Stanley with gambling winnings just shy of £12,000, which was a huge sum for the mid-1960s. At the casino, Stanely meets a glamorous young fellow gambler, Carla (Sylva Koscina, obviously being groomed for American stardom that never came.

Stanley likes Carla, although that's going to be complicated by the fact that another of the tourists, Miss Sparrow (Tammy Grimes), is interested in Stanley to an extent that would really be unprofessional for Stanley to get involved with. More pressing is the thought that it's going to be tough to get those gambling winnings out of Italy because of capital controls and the thought that the money might be taxed to a substantial extent. Stanley comes up with a plan that perhaps Carla can help him get the cash out of Italy.

Carla starts thinking about a way to get the money for herself. She's got an ex-husband, Remo (Domenico Modugno), who might be able to help, although he's also going to get in on the deal for his own interests and not so much Carla's. Stanley seems to be oblivious to all this as he brings Carla on the tour. Miss Sparrow gets jealous of Carla and threatens to bollix everything as the tour goes through various scenic spots in Italy and into Switzerland.

The plot of Three Bites of the Apple doesn't really work, and it's remarkable that a guy like Stanley could seem so stupid. The movie also tries to inject comedy into the proceedings, which also doesn't really work. I couldn't help but wonder whether the studio and second-tier director cared more about showing scenery than moving the plot along and making the story work.

Harry and Walter Go to New York

One of the movies that TCM ran on Diane Keaton's day in Summer Under the Stars was Harry and Walter Go to New York. As is my wont, a made a point to watch it since I had never seen it before, which would give me the opportunity to put up a post on it.

The movie opens up in Sudbury, MA, in 1892. Harry Digby (James Caan) and Walter Hill (Elliott Gould) are a vaudeville double act doing a musical number, although they also do other stuff like a phony clairvoyant bit. In between the two acts, the action shifts to New York. Adam Worth (Michael Caine) is a gentleman thief who likes to rob banks, keep the cash, and then sell back the bonds. Indeed, he's about to sell the bonds back that he robbed from a bank in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, the bank president brought some police with a Massachusetts bench warrant.

As for Harry and Walter, their clairvoyant act is an excuse to pilfer cash out of the paying customers' wallets. Multiple men figure out that they've been robbed, and they too bring in the police. So as you can guess, Harry and Walter also get sent to prison, and it's the same prison where Adam is sent. Why else would the characters be introduced in this way? Anyhow, Adam has the sort of pull that Noël Coward's character in The Italian Job does, and is able to get the plans to a bank in Lowell, MA, that he's planning to rob just to show that any bank can be robbed.

This gives Harry and Walter an idea. When the reformer Lissa Chestnut (Diane Keaton) shows up with a newspaper photographer, Harry and Walter plan to get a picture of the plans, so that they can rob the bank themselves. Not that they know anything about how to carry out a bank robbery. And not that Adam is going to be happy with them if he finds out, which he is because in their attempts to get the photo they burn the plans. But they're able to escape prison with the help of some nitroglycerin, while Adam gets pardoned and goes back to New York. Unfortunately Harry and Walter have to go to New York themselves to get the picture they took of those plans, meaning they run into Adam again who is really pissed.

Eventually everybody gets to Lowell for the climactic bank robbery. The bank is next to a theater, and Harry and Walter plan to blow the door off the vault during the big musical number near the end of the show so that nobody will hear the explosives. Of course, the plans don't quite go off as planned, forcing Harry and Watler to take more drastic action while both Adam and the bank president Crisp (Charles Durning) are on their tails.

With a cast like this and a wacky heist plot, you'd think you're in for a fun little caper movie. Unfortunately, the movie totally fails. Caan and Gould are both irritating in their comic mugging, and the plot is full of incongruencies, with no good reason for Harry and Walter to wind up in the same cell as Adam as one example. It also goes on much too long, at 111 minutes.

The Man I Killed

Well, OK, I didn't kill a man. But The Man I Killed is the title of the play on which our next movie was based, as well as an alternate title for the movie itself: Broken Lullaby.

The Great War ended on November 11, 1918. As it was the so-called "war to end all wars", the first anniversary of the armistice was marked in a way that it's not marked today, at least not in the US. As the movie opens, a memorial Mass is being celebrated in Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, with a whole bunch of military men in attendance. One man remains after the Mass, on his knees in prayer and seemingly distraught, noticed by the priest who officiated the Mass.

The young man in question is Paul Renard (Phillips Holmes), a former music student who was drafted by the French. His confession is that he killed a German soldier and can't get the face of the soldier he killed out of his mind, which has greatly reduced his ability to function in life. Worse, he saw the soldier's last letter so he knows the soldier's name, Walter Holderlin, as well as the fact that Walter was a fellow musician who had actually studied in Paris before the war and didn't hate the French the way that most German people did.

Paul decides that the way to expiate his perceived sins is to go to Walter's grave since he knows where Walter lived, as well as meet with any of Walter's surviving family to apologize for what he did. When he gets to the town where Walter is buried, we learn that Walter's father is a physician (Lionel Barrymore), who hasn't gotten over the fact that his son died. Ditto Mom (Louise Carter). Worse, Walter left behind a fiancée, Elsa (Nancy Carroll), who happens to spot this strange man who has been attracting gossip and rumor in town as Paul is putting flowers on Walter's grave.

Paul eventually sees Dr. Holderlin, who understandably doesn't want to see any Frenchman since he considers all of France responsible for his son's death. But when Elsa mentions Paul's having left flowers on Walter's grave, that gives Paul the chance to explain himself. In the film's critical moment, Paul is unable to bring himself to tell the actual truth, since that would destroy Walter's parents. Instead, he lies that he knew Walter at the conservatory and that as a result he doesn't really harbor any ill feelings toward the Germans.

The Holderlin parents warm to Paul, with Elsa doing so even further. And yet, among the rest of the townsfolk the gossip only continues to grow. And certainly, at some point Paul isn't going to be able to keep up the lie. After all, if Paul and Walther had been at the conservatory together for that long, he'd know Walter well enough to answer some of the questions about the past that are bound to come up. So what's going to happen when the truth finally does come out?

Broken Lullaby answers that question in an interesting way, which I won't spoil beyond saying the solution is one that is a big reason why the movie wasn't a financial success. Phillips Holmes is also a bit too over the top at times, although Carroll and Barrymore do a good job with an intriguing presence and interesting script. Broken Lullaby is definitely an unconventional Hollywood movie.

Not yet

I've mentioned on several occasions how I wound up with a substantial number of foreign films on my DVR that I don't always get around to watching before they expire. One that I did in fact watch is Akira Kurosawa's final film, Madadayo.

Tatsuo Matsumara plays Hyakken Uchida, a teacher of German at an all-boys school during the height of World War II. He's getting on in years a bit, but not yet so old that when he announces he's retiring to focus on his writing and the fact that he can live modestly off the proceeds of his writing, it's a shock to everybody. But retire he does, and he and his wife downsize.

Uchida is apparently one of those teachers who had an impact on his students, because all of those past students seem to admire him, to the point of coming to his house at the height of the war just to celebrate his birthday with a less-than-suitable feast because, well, you know there's a war on and the Japanese are inexorably losing. Part of that losing the the Americans' ability to carry out air raids on the Home Islands of Japan, and in one of those raids, the Uchidas' house is destroyed.

They're forced to move into a shack that's open to the elements, at least until the end of the war, when his still-admiring students look into finding a plot of land where they can move their professor and get him a better house. Also after the war, the students organize a better birthday party, which they call the "Not Yet" party (the film's title "Madadayo" means "not yet") because when they ask Uchida whether he's ready to die, he responds "Not yet!". The students are able to get a nice house built, as well as impressing on a neighboring landowner not to sell out to somebody who wants to build a house tall enough to block the sun from Uchida's house.

Madadayo is more a series of vignettes than a movie with a full plot, so the next portion of the film focuses on a stray cat that shows up at the Uchida place and basically adopts the professor and his wife. Uchida loves the cat, and is devastated when the cat goes missing in a rain storm, never to return. But everybody in the neighborhood drops everything to look for the cat in the hopes of finding it and bringing Uchida out of his depression.

Finally, we fast forward to when Uchida is about to celebrate his 77th birthday, in the early 1960s. He has one more "Not yet" party, although this one doesn't have quite the ending as the earlier parties. But then director Akira Kurosawa was in his early 80s when he made this movie, and obviously thinking himself about themes of growing old and looking back at life.

Madadayo has a fair bit to recommend it, but it's also not a perfect movie. The relative lack of a plot may not be suitable for everyone. More importantly, and I'm not the only person to have mentioned this in the reviews I read, but the segment with the missing cat goes on far too long. Indeed, the movie as a whole is 134 minutes, which is a bit too long. There's a resonance to a film like Goodbye Mr. Chips which is also about a teacher, but I also found myself thinking about Harry and Tonto which deals with the idea that the elderly still have something to offer us and a sense of dignity that needs to be preserved.

Eva Marie Saint, 1924-2026

Eva Marie Saint learning from Marlon Brando how he was involved in her brother's death in On the Waterfront

Oscar-winning actress Eva Marie Saint died on Tuesday at the age of 102. Saint didn't actually make as many movies as one might think, even though TCM ran a bunch of them when she was star of the month for her 100th birthday in July 2024. In addition to winning the Oscar for On the Waterfront, Saint is well known for appearing opposite Cary Grant in North by Northwest. A Hatful of Rain doesn't get as much attention as it should.

As of this writing, I haven't seen anything from TCM about a programming tribute. There's enough going on in October with all the Hollywood movies and Mario Cantone hogging the channel that I'd guess a tribute is being pushed back to November.

Sayonara Sinatra

Another of the movies that I recorded the last time it showed up on TCM that's getting another showing is The First Deadly Sin. That next airing is early tomorrow morning at 4:00 AM, or at the end of tonight's prime time lineup if you want to look at it that way.

The movie starts off with some interesting intercutting. On the one hand, we have a woman on the operating table getting surgery for some sort of kidney condition. On the other, it's the streets of New York City at night, and one man comes up with what looks like some sort of hammer, and bashes another man to death with it! The two turn out to be indirectly related, in that the woman on the operating table is Barbara Delaney (Faye Dunaway), the wife of New York police detective Edward Delaney (Frank Sinatra).

Edward has a lot on his mind, because the surgery goes wrong, forcing the surgeon, Dr. Berardi, to remove one of Barbara's kidneys. Meanwhile, in the murder case, the coroner, Dr. Ferguson (James Whitmer), reveals to Edward that the wound from the weapon is circular, which is interesting in that it means the murder must have been committed with a weapon that's not all that common. It also turns out that there's a series of unsolved murders that seem to have involved similar wounds.

So Edward calls upon someone who doesn't work for the police, but is an expert in obscure weapons, Christopher Langley (Martin Gabel) at the Metropolitan Museum. He doesn't know of any weapons in his ambit that might have caused the death, but is intrigued by the case and decides to help investigate by going to hardware stores. They can't really help him, beyond suggesting that perhaps it might be the sort of ice axe that mountain climbers use. That's actually good information, since not many people use such an implement. And when Langley goes to the sporting goods store to investigate, he gets a list of people who have bought the sort of ice axe that was used in the murder.

So Edward starts doing some investigating of the sort that the police department wouldn't really approve of and would probably result in all the evidence gathered being thrown out of court. The first guy obviously couldn't have done it, since he was paralyzed in a mountain climbing accident. The second man, however, Daniel Blank (David Dukes), seems like a much more likely suspect. Then again, the way the movie is edited, it's already led us to believe that this is the killer. Meanwhile, another attempted killing goes wrong, and there's still the situation with Edward's wife, which is many ways is really extraneous to the plot.

The murder mystery part of The First Deadly Sin is reasonably well done, and the sort of movie where I can see why Frank Sinatra would want to do it. But there's that whole pointless subplot involving the Faye Dunaway character, who really has a thankless acting task here. So the movie as a whole feels like a bit of a mishmash that doesn't always work. Frank Sinatra was 64 at the time he made this, and it was pretty much his last real movie apart from some cameos. It's not a bad way to go out, although it could have been better.

Why not Anthropoid

One of the more daring operations in World War II was the plan to kill Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi Reichsprotektor of the Czech lands. It was known enough to be the subject of two movies at the height of World War II, Hangmen Also Die and Hitler's Madman (airing today at 12:30 PM on TCM, hence scheduling this post today), as well as the much more recent Anthropoid. In between came a co-production between the west and Communist Czechoslovakia, Operation Daybreak.

One thing I didn't realize about Operation Anthropoid is that the Free Czech paratroopers who parachuted into the country from Britain in fact did so in December 1941, quite a few months before the actual assassination on May 27, 1942. The movie opens with three of the paratroopers: Kubiš (Timothy Bottoms), Gabčík (Anthony Andrews), and Čurda (Martin Shaw) being brought in to see a Czech General in exile who is telling them about the plan since Heydrich (Anton Diffring) is considered a second-in-command to Hitler who could take over the Nazi leadership were Hitler to die and is thought of as more intelligent than Hitler. The men all accept the assignment, and parachute in to ares near Prague, landing in the snow (which is what prompted me to look up more of the details of the operation).

Eventually, the paratroopers meet up in Prague with members of the Czech resistance, personified as members of General Moravec's extended family. The first plan is to shoot at Heydrich while his train is leaving the station in Prague, with Kubiš shooting from a control room at the station, but another train passes by just at the exact wrong moment, thwarting the plan. Of course, if you've seen any of the other movies, you'll know that Heydrick was really killed as a result of his car being attacked. This time is was Gabčík's job to shoot Heydrich, but when his gun jams, Kubiš throws a grenade into the car.

The Nazis are, understandably, pissed about one of their higher-ups being so brazenly assassinated. They also have that repuation of being brutal, so it's natural that their reprisal is going to be nasty. They destroy the village of Lidice, and set up a manhunt for the people involved in the plot to kill Heydrich. They're more than willing to commit torture and further reprisals, but Čurda eventually cracks and reveals details about who was in the group and where they were being kept. By this time, the rest of the members of the assassination plot had holed up in a church, but it was already too late. The Nazis were able to surround the church, and all of the plotters were killed (or killed themselves) in the church.

I found it interesting that Operation Daybreak was an international co-production, meaning that they were able to film on location in Prague. This gives the movie an air of authenticity. However, I also couldn't help but think about the fact that in real life, the Free Czechs who had been based in London were decidedly not considered heroes by the Communists who ran the country after 1948. There's little if anything in the way of Communist politics in the way of the movie, which is competent if a bit straightforward in its storytelling. The plotters don't get the time to be complex characters, for example.

Worse, though, is the print that TCM ran. It's only in 4:3, when the original aspect ratio was 1.85:1. Worse is that it had some sort of motion problem, as though there were visual frames missing but there's nothing wrong with the soundtrack. This gives large portions of the print a sort of jerky motion that for me was disconcerting to watch.