Briefs for Feb. 24-25, 2026

I think I mentioned last week when I posted the obituary for Robert Duvall that I had Apocalypse Now on my DVR and was planning to watch it probably over the weekend and write up a post on it. In the meantime, TCM altered their schedule for an evening toward the end of 31 Days of Oscar where Tender Mercies was scheduled to run and added two more of Duvall's Oscar-nominated roles, including the one in Apocalypse Now. So I watched the movie anyhow and wrote up the post, but scheduled it to run in conjunction with the upcoming airing instead of at an earlier date.

Also dying recently was actor Robert Carradine, brother of Keith and David as well as son of John and an actor himself. His roles included a debut performance in the John Wayne movie The Cowboys as well as 1980s comedy classic Revenge of the Nerds. Carradine, who was 71, had reportedly suffered from bipolar disorder for decades and decided to take his own life.

A movie I blogged about back in 2009 is going to be back on FXM after a fairly long absence: The Ox-Bow Incident, tomorrow, Feb. 25, at 8:05 AM. Actually, somewhat surprisingly to me, FXM seems to have decided to pull a fair bit more out of the vaults than they seemed to have done on the previous occasions when they refreshed their rotation. Looking through the schedules since the start of 2026, I've gotten the impression that there aren't nearly as many repeats, with a greater range of titles than I'm used to seeing. Of course, I'm also still surprised that the schedule isn't 24 hours a day of more recent stuff. I think it's been over 13 years now since the change to FXM, and I said at the time I didn't expect the Retro block to last more than about six months.

I'll also repeat the warning that I'm far enough ahead in scheduling movies that, as with Apocalypse Now, I have to make certain that I'm scheduling the posts on the proper date, so as always check your box guide to make certain I've got the date correct.

The Merry Widow (1952)

The TCM lineup for tonight in prime time going through to the start of tomorrow's prime time lineup is Oscar-nominated movies that are remakes of earlier films. One that's on my DVR that I hadn't seen before is the 1952 version of The Merry Widow, which you can see tomorrow (Feb. 25) at 7:00 AM. So once again, I made the point of sitting down to watch the movie in order to be able to write up this review.

Now, the first thing I have to say is that I have not seen the Franz Lehár operetta on which this movie is based, nor have I seen the 1934 movie, so I'm judging this one on its own merits. I of course knew the famous "Merry Widow Waltz" both from piano lessons when I was a kid as well as its use in the Alfred Hitchcock movie Shadow of a Doubt where the widows didn't exactly stay merry for long. This version opens literally at the turn of the 20th century in Washington DC where everybody is celebrating at the various countries' embassies. Well, every embassy but one, the embassy of the fictional central European monarchy of Marshovia. Marshovia is a nearly bankrupt country, and the ambassador can't even pay the embassy's rent.

But the ambassador gets a coded cable from the king (Thomas Gomez) that there are three Marshovians living in the US, and one of them died, having emigrated to America and become an exceedingly wealthy man, leaving his widow with $80 million, a hugh fortune by the standards of 1900. Perhaps she can be convinced to come to Marshovia to dedicate a statue to her husband, although this would really just be a ruse to get her to use her fortune to help pay off the national debt.

The ambassador and his aide, Popoff (Richard Haydn), visit the widow, Crystal Radek (Lana Turner), who has a very capable secretary in the form of Kitty Riley (Una Merkel). Eventually Crystal does agree, and the two women head off for Marshovia, where the King has planned a big reception at the train station, except for the fact that the train is late getting there so everybody has gone a block or two away to party when the train arrives, leaving Crystal and Kitty to hear the joyous singing and see the dancing only from a distance and make their way to the palace by themselves.

The king has a military officer, Count Danilo (Fernando Lamas), whom he knows to be quite the ladies' man, and Danilo's singing has already impressed the two women. So the king comes up with a detailed schedule of how Danilo should seduce Crystal so that she'll marry him, at which point Danilo can use the estate to pay off the national debt. Mind you, this is supposed to be a light comic operetta. And the king can order Danilo to do this. Some of the king's ladies-in-waiting aren't thrilled, so they put the copy of Danilo's agenda in the envelope that accompanies the flowers Danilo is going to give Crystal. The point is that Crystal will find this and understand that the wooing is a sham.

Things get complicated when Danilo goes to see Crystal but Kitty answers, and Danilo gets the mistaken impression that Kitty is in fact Crystal. But when the two women see the agenda, they get fed up with Marshovia and leave for Paris, where Crystal gets a bunch of suitors. Danilo eventually follows, and Crystal is willing to let Kitty pretend to be her. Meanwhile, the real Crystal meets Danilo but hides her real identity and kinda-sorta falls in love with Danilo except for the fact that Danilo is on a mercenary mission. Crystal, calling herself Fifi, completely bowls over Danilo, who falls in love with her but can't go further because the King requires him to marry Crystal. And, of course, he can't find Fifi either, until the film's climax....

This version of The Merry Widow was made in Technicolor and is lovely to look at. It's not a surprise that the film's Oscar nominations were in the color technical categories, from the era when set and costume design had separate awards for color and black-and-white movies. Fernando Lamas does most of the singing here, and there's quite a bit of singing and dancing. This may slow the movie down for the sort of people who, like me, aren't the biggest fans of musicals or opera. I also have to admit that I find the plot of a mercenary marriage a bit mean, although the way the screenplay here gets around the Production Code more or less works.

Furious Island

I'm not certain if TCM ran a morning/afternoon salute to Margaret Lindsay some time back, but I inadvertently watched two of her movies in close succession. I put up a post on Broadway Musketeers some time back, so as is my wont now I'm writing up a post on Isle of Fury now and saving it in drafts to post at some point in the future.

The movie opens with one of those title card intros that were not uncommon through the 1930s, talking about the Pacific Islands being a good place to escape one's past. One one such island, Tankana, Val Stevens (Humphrey Bogart early in his career and with a ridiculous moustache) is about to get married to Lucille Gordon (Margaret Lindsay) against the backdrop of a raging storm. As with White Shadows in the South Seas, Val is part of the lucrative pearl trade, although he's rather kinder to the locals to the point that he offers to go down and do the work himself to show them there's not really any danger, although that's a plot point to be discussed later in this post.

More importantly is that the storm leaves one of the passing ships in distress, so the people on the boat have to be rescued: Tankana is one of those islands that doesn't have a harbor for the big ships; instead, a small tender has to go out to where the big ships anchor and pick up and drop off people. The two people who are worth mentioning among those brought to the island in the storm are young Eric Blake (Donald Woods), and Captain Deever (Paul Graetz), who it's not really discussed why he wasn't the last man off the boat. Deever looks like the sort of "this man has a shady past" trope you'd expect from an old Hollywood movie, while Blake is closer to leading man handsome. He, too, isn't entirely open about why he's on the island.

As you might guess, with Lucille tending to Blake, the two begin to develop feelings for each other. This, even though Lucille took those vows to be faithful to Val. Blake and Val also start to become friends in part because Blake helps save Val's life when Val goes under the sea to harvest pearls, only to have to face... a giant rubber octopus! So that's why the locals didn't want to do the work. They really were in danger.

There's more danger for Val because he has the pearls and the cash locked up in his warehouse, and that's a logical point for shady characters who would like the money themselves to attack. Captain Deever, meanwhile, is constantly in the background eavesdropping, with everything about Val's past and the reason for Blake and Deever being on the island revealed in the finale.

I didn't notice on watching the opening credits, but Isle of Fury is actually based on a novel by Somerset Maugham, which probably helps explain the inclusion of one character I didn't mention, alcoholic Dr. Hardy (E.E. Clive) who serves as a sounding board for the other characters. The material isn't bad, although this is decidedly a B movie from the time when Bogart was working his way up the ladder. Bogart supposedly didn't like it, which I'd guess would have had to do with the octopus scene. It is, also, a B movie so the plot feels rather rushed at just 60 minutes. If Warner Bros. could have come up with a script of a programmer length closer to 80 or 90 minutes they might have been able to get a pretty good movie rather than a B curiosity. But even as just a little B movie Isle of Fury is worth watching.

David Niven's crisis

Yet another of the movies that I recorded off of TCM because of how it sounded interesting, but only got around to watching not long before it expired from my DVR, was the previously unknown to me Guns of Darkness. As always, having watched it, it's once again time to write up a review.

David Niven stars as Tom Jordan, who is working as a manager at a British plantation in the fictional Latin American republic of Tribulación. There's some hints that Tom was a bit of a screw-up in his previous professional life which is why he's working a job like this. It doesn't exactly please his wife Claire (Leslie Caron) either. She'd like to have a family but hasn't been able to have kids to this point, and she's getting to the point that she's thinking of packing up and heading back to Europe.

All of this is happening against the backdrop of a New Year's Eve party all the expats and some local elites are at. What none of the expats know, however, is that outside a bunch of rebels are planning to overthrow the current government of El Presidente Rivera (David Opatoshu). The coup is successful in that Rivera winds up out of power, but somewhat unsuccessful in that Rivera escapes, if with an injury.

Amazingly, the following morning none of the expats seems to have learned that there was a coup the previous night! And they should be relatively close to the capital city considering that one of last night's party guests, Hernandez (Derek Godfrey), shows up on the balcony with the new leader to serve as the Minister of Justice in charge of finding Rivera. The expats, meanwhile, all go to work the next day and act as though they're just going to keep going to work every day with the new regime not even resulting in a temporary disruption as order gets restored!

Eventually they learn about the coup and suffer some inconveniences themselves as there are roadblocks looking for Rivera and some summary justice as the new authorities deal with the people who aren't quite on board yet with the new regime. But if everybody suffers minor inconveniences, the Jordans are about to suffer a major one. Rivera was shot and needs medical treatment, and he's found hiding in the Jordans' car! He doesn't just want medical treatment, he wants Jordan to help him escape across the border where a neighboring country will presumably accept him into exile.

Husband, wife, and ex-president set out, and find that the road to the border, or at least the one that the authorities aren't watching, involves crossing a dryish riverbed. Unfortunately it's not quite dry, and what moisture there is left has turned the area into quicksand! Worse, as part of getting across, they're spotted by a young boy who Rivera is convinced will rat them out to the authorities. So he want to kill the boy, which is brutal but understandable and even logical. Jordan doesn't want to. The road ahead is going to require them to go on foot and go through difficult terrain to keep from being found by the new president's men.

Guns of Darkness is another of those movies where there's the basis of a pretty good movie in the plot, and you can see why the stars involved might want to take on this project. The finished product, however, is surprisingly inert. The conflict between Mr. and Mrs. Jordan doesn't feel authentic, and it doesn't seem at all likely that someone as injured as Rivera would be able to make it as far as he does. So it's all a bit of a tepid misfire, but one of those movies where you'll want to watch and judge for yourself.

This movie should have been a comedy

Sometimes, a movie gets made where you think it's going to be in one genre, but winds up being something else. Another example of this that I recently watched off my DVR was The First Hundred Years. (That, in and of itself, is a rather odd title for the movie since it doesn't seem to have anything to do with 100 years of, well, whatever.)

Robert Mongtomery plays David Conway. As the movie opens, he shows up at the New York office of theatrical agent Harry Borden (Warren William). He's looking for his wife Lynn (Virginia Bruce), who is not an actress but Harry's second-in-command, and good at what she does. In fact, she's been doing it long enough that she started under her maiden name and still uses that professionally. Not only that, but she makes enough money that the couple can afford a ridiculous Manhattan apartment and fine cars and dresses and whatnot.

This kind of bothers David, who has long felt that he's not paying his fair share into the relationship. He's a nautical engineer, designing yachts. However, the good shipbuilding jobs are not in New York. He's here to tell Lynn he's got a promotion lined up that is going to bring in more money -- $15K a year, which is more than Cary Grant's Mr. Blandings reveals his salary to be a decade later in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House -- but that the job requires working out of New Bedford, MA. This presents an obvious problem for the late 1930s when the best technology could do was the telephone and there was no good way for couples to have a good relationship working this far apart.

Deep down inside, the two still love each other, but just don't know how to work through the issue, since Lynn still wants to work. Understandable by 2026 standards, although in the late 1930s this would have been seen as a bit scandalous. Further complicating matters is that Lynn, being good at what she does, is prized by Borden. She also signed a five-year contract to work with him just six months earlier, and getting out of that might be problematic. Borden certainly doesn't want her to get out of it, instead actively interfering with the help of his lawyer Walker (Alan Dinehart).

The differences between husband and wife are irreconcilable enough that the two separate, with Borden really intimating that the couple should divorce. Indeed, each of the spouses is seen with another person out to dinner at the same club, with all of them (including Binnie Barnes as David's companion Claudia) going to the other man's apartment for coffee and a nightcap. Lynn is torn between what to do with her husband, and what Borden wants her to do.

And then Lynn's uncle Dawson (Harry Davenport) shows up in New York from where he's going to be leaving on a round-the-world cruise. He doesn't know yet about the marital difficulties, so Lynn and David play at still being happy together. Dawson is no dummy and realizes something is up, and he tries to get everybody to see sense, while Borden is still trying to keep Lynn professionally. (As far as I could tell, he had no romantic designs on Lynn.) This being a 1930s movie, there is a happy ending in a way that would have made sense to 1930s audiences but may annoy audiences of today.

The bigger problem I had with The First Hundred Years wasn't the ending, but the fact that it's taking itself much too seriously. It's trying to be a drama, but the material just doesn't work, and you expect comedy to break out, especially with a lead like Robert Montgomery. Think something like The Awful Truth the previous year, which was about divorce but was nothing but comedy at heart. Montgomery was certainly capable of serious drama, but this script doesn't help him. So overall, The First Hundred Years is more of a historical curiosity that we should look at as a product of what values people in the late 1930s had.

Lawrence of Arabia

It may be a surprise, but one of those movies that I never sat down to watch all in one go, largely because of the length, is Lawrence of Arabia. Partly for that reason and partly because of my reluctance to do posts on extremely well known movies, I've never done a full-length post on it here. But to rectify that, the last time it showed up on TCM, I recorded it in order to be able to watch it in advance of the next showing. That next showing is tomorrow, February 21, at 11:30 AM as part of a day devoted to epics.

Peter O'Toole stars as T.E. Lawrence, and as the movie opens, he's riding his motorcycle to his death in England in the mid-1930s. His was a well known name, so a lot of people gather for the funeral, and a couple, such as reporter Jackson Bentley (Arthur Kennedy), basically intimate that Lawrence was an SOB, but our SOB. Since Lawrence is dead, we're obviously going to get a flashback to when he was alive.

The scene shifts to 1916/1917, which is smack dab in the middle of World War I. Britain is one of the Allies while the Ottoman Empire are one of the opposing Central Powers. The Ottomans are Turks, but a fair amount of the territory they govern is Arab, such as the Hejaz which is now a province on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness) is one of the potentates who is leading an Arab revolt against the Turks, and the British realize supporting the Arabs is a good way to destabilize the Ottoman Empire. They've already got an advisor there in Col. Brighton (Anthony Quayle), but aren't certain of what the situation is really like, so they want to send a second man in Lawrence, an army lieutenant (ultimately promoted to colonel) who speaks Arabic and has good knowledge of the region, to get more information.

Lawrence is supposed to meet Faisal, but first meets Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif), who will take Lawrence to where Faisal is. However, along the way, Ali and his men run into Auda Abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn), who is from a different tribe from Ali. Sadly, the two tribes have a blood feud that threatens to derail the whole uprising until Lawrence puts it to rest by carrying out an execution himself. Worse, he finds that he doesn't dislike killing people. In any case, the result of this is that many of the Arabs act like they've got a lot of respect for Lawrence.

Lawrence's plan is that the Arabs should attack the port city of Aqaba, now at the southern tip of Jordan. Of course, the port is well defended, but only from the sea, since on the other sides lies a desert that's thought to be impassable. Except that Lawrence figures they can cross it and surprise the Ottomans that way, which works. It brings Lawrence more glory, but to go any further he's going to have to get more help from the British back in Cairo.

The British seem none too pleased that Lawrence looks as though he's going native, as it were, and supporting the Arab desire for total independence which would clash with what the British and French have decided should be done with the Middle East after the defeat of the Ottomans. The Arabs, for their part, are looking to get to Damascus, while General Allenby (Jack Hawkins) of the British will be going to Jerusalem as that area even during the 1910s had a substantial Jewish population. (Not every Jew had left in the various diasporas, while Zionism had begun with some European Jews already moving to the region, which south of Beirut had a fairly sparse population.)

Lawrence keeps attacking, but there's some question of whether he's getting too big. Also, there's the question of whether the Arabs are going to be able to govern anything modern if they do take Damascus. The leaders of the revolt are tribal and suited to desert warfare, but Damascus is a fairly modern city. They could easily use western engineers, but that might keep them from being truly independent.

It's easy to see why Lawrence of Arabia won so many Oscars. The acting is quite good, as is the cinematography and other parts of the production design. Maurice Jarre's musical score is also memorable. However, I'd have to say that Lawrence of Arabia is another of those movies where, while it's very good, I'm not certain I agree with it ending up near the top on lists of all-time great movies. The movie runs over three and a half hours plus the intro/entr'acte/exit music; the print TCM ran is 227 minutes. And frankly, in the last hour or so the movie really loses steam. Some historians take serious issue with some of the ways history is presented here. Certain of the characters are composites (such as the diplomat played by Claude Rains), a movie which is often necessary when trying to distill a story like this down to a reasonable length, but apparently some of the timeline is wrong and the movie glosses over Lawrence's knowledge of the region before the war.

Mr. Chump

I've mentioned in the past how I tend to really enjoy Warner Bros.' B movies, but even they had some that weren't particularly good. One that unfortunately fits that category is Mr. Chump.

Johnnie Davis, fresh off his performance singing "Hooray for Hollywood" in Hollywood Hotel, gets a starring role even it if is just a B movie. He plays Bill Small, a trumpeter who likes to imagine what sort of return he'd get if he could play the stock market, which is a sort of minor genre of 1930s movies. Well, the stock market and trying to beat other people to the punch with a tip that might be skirting the law. Bill has charts and everything that show how he'd have huge returns with his system, if only he had the money to actually invest.

In real life, Bill doesn't seem to want to do much work, and is behind on the rent at the rooming house run by Ed Mason (Chester Clute) and his wife Jane (Lola Lane). Also living there is Bill's would-be girlfriend Betty (Penny Singleton). She, meanwhile, is also being prusued by Jim Belden (Donald Briggs). Jim and Mr. Mason are pretty much the only two employees at the local small-town bank, so Jim it seems might not be so bad a choice for Betty. Mr. Mason asks Bill about his system, and Bill mentions that he gets all of his information from a particular newsletter.

At this point a couple of things happen. One is that Bill gets a chance to work with a traveling band, which might give him some money to pay off his bills. The other is that Mason and Jim both decide they might like to try Bill's stock market system. The only thing is, they get the money by borrowing some of the bank's bonds, which is as always a fairly serious embezzlement issue. And wouldn't you know it, but when other people try Bill's system, it goes wrong, leaving the two bank employees with a hole in the bank's finances and a couple of bank examiners about to visit. It's prison time for sure.

With that in mind, the scheming Jim comes up with an idea to get Bill to be the one holding the bag. He joins the scheme seemingly naïve to what's happening, but he's got some tricks up his sleeve of his own, claiming he can win back the money by going out of town for a couple of weeks. He returns to the news that the bank is about to be sold, which is sure to bring in bank examiners....

Johnnie Davis didn't have a particularly long career in Hollywood, and watching a movie like Mr. Chump it's easy to see why. Davis doesn't have much of a range of emotion, and isn't quite as appealing as Warner Bros. might have hoped. It also doesn't help that the story in Mr. Chump feels terribly old-fashioned. Then again, Mr. Chump was the sort of B movie that was probably never thought about in the sense of people watching it years later.

Savage doctor

Another of the spotlights that TCM did some months back was movie adaptations of pulp literature. One of the movies they showed that I had never heard of -- and somewhat surprisingly, I'd never heard of the book series either, which had some 180 books in it -- was Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. Since it sounded interesting enough, I decided to record it, and finally got around to watching it recently.

Savage, played here by Ron Ely, was a 1930s superhero in the MacGyver or Thunderbirds mold, in the sense that he didn't have the sort of superhuman powers that other superheroes had. We first see him at some sort of fortress in the high arctic, where he's engaging in meditation before being summoned back to New York. Unfortunately, his forced return to his New York headquarters is due to bad news: his father died suddenly in the little-known Latin American country of Hidalgo. Worse, when he has a conference with his associates to talk about this, somebody tries to shoot him through the window but misses only because of the special glass Savage has installed that screws up the refraction and makes things appear where they aren't.

Doc and his men chase after the sniper, who eventually falls to his death. OK, so they won't get any information by interrogting him, but they are able to discover that the sniper is of some native tribe and has a tribal tattoo on his death. It looks like the sort of thing that may have come from one of the indigenous peoples of Hidalgo, so Doc and his team decide they'll head down to Hidalgo to claim Dad's body and figure out for themselves just how implausible the official word on the elder Savage's death is.

Once down in Hidalgo, they're welcomed by the official authorities in a way that make it seem like they want Savage to have a nice time, but where it's clear that they've obviously got a lot to hide. The unofficial authority is Captain Seas (Paul Wexler), who lives on a superyacht, the Seven Seas and travels the world doing mobile business of some sort. Captain Seas invites Savage and his men aboard for dinner, although it's clear that some sort of danger is going to await them even though they know they're going to have to take Seas up on his offer anyway. There's danger on land anyway, in the form of the "green death", a humorously badly animated glowing green snake-like creature that has a venomous bite.

Further investigation reveals that Doc's father received some land grants in the jungle, and that somebody else wants this land, probably because there are vital resources that can be extracted from the land. The deeds to that land have mysteriously gone missing, so Savage and his men set out for the jungle, leading to the ultimate showdown between them and Captain Seas' forces of evil.

It's fairly easy to see why Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze was a box-office disaster. It's played like the old Batman TV series of a decade earlier, which apparently goes against the spirit of the original books. Those were supposedly earnest rather than campy, sort of what you might expect if Thunderbirds had been live action: an extremely wealthy person using his wealth to fight injustices that governments couldn't right. Instead, we get campy, which is fun at times for how bad it is, but not what fans might have wanted. (As I understand it, the books were still in print at the time.) It doesn't help that Ron Ely isn't much of an actor.

So sit back and watch Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze to have a little bit of fun, but beware that you're not getting a particularly good movie.

A British exploitation movie

Not too long ago I did a post on the exploitation movie Mad Youth. A movie that tries to make similar warnings, only coming from Britain, is Good-Time Girl.

A very young Diana Dors shows up in the framing scenes at the opening and closing. She plays Lyla Lawrence, a teenaged girl who is brought before Judge Thorpe (Flora Robson) for getting into the sort of trouble that teenaged girls on the way to bigger trouble get into: being out way too late and hanging with the wrong crowd and stuff. Judge Thorpe decides that the best thing for Lyla would be to give her a cautionary tale about a girl who was in Lyla's situation not too long ago, but who didn't straighten her life out and suffered serious consequences as a result. Cue the inevitable flashback....

Jean Kent is the real star of this movie. She plays Gwen Rawlings, a 16-year-old girl who lives a lousy life in the years just after World War II. She's needed to get work to help the family make ends meet, working at Pottinger's pawn shop and dreaming of better things, such as getting away from her nasty father. Since people pawn nice things at the shop, Gwen decides one day that she's going to "borrow" one of the pieces of jewelry. Unfortunately, she gets caught out before she can return it and gets fired, which also results in a beating from Dad. So, she runs away.

Gwen gets a room on the top floor of a rooming-house opposite Jimmy (Peter Glenville), who works at the sort of club you wonder if it's really fully legal. In any case, Jimmy comes across as a bit of a shady character but claims he can get Gwen a job based on her looks. Max Vine (Herbert Lom), isn't quite trusting of Gwen's insistence she's an adult, but also recognizes her legs can get her tips. Red (Dennis Price), who plays in the band, kind of takes Gwen under his wing although he's married. Jimmy gets jealous, leading to his framing her for a crime she's technically guilty of if only out of ignorance, in pawning some stolen jewels.

For this, Gwen gets sent to the British version of reform school and finds that it's got the same sort of hierarchy you'd seen in the women's prison in Caged or in a boys' reform school. In any case, the place sucks and she thinks about running away. Eventually, she does escape, and goes looking for Max who has opened a new club. This isn't the best idea, although it's not as though she's got too many other options. She gets in a car with one of the patrons for a drive, but this results in a hit-and-run, and a downward spiral that we know is going to end badly or else Judge Thorpe wouldn't have a story to tell Lyla at the beginning of the movie.

Although Good-Time Girl has all of the plot stylings of an exploitation movie or Hollywood B morality tale, it's actually a surprisingly good movie. It's on par with a Hollywood programmer: better than a B movie, but clearly not an A film. The quality stems from the movie being a straight drama without trying to be lurid or over-the-top in the way that the Hollywood exploitation movies were. It's also got a pretty good performance from Kent. Definitely catch Good-Time Girl if you get the chance.

Robert Duvall, 1931-2026

Robert Duvall in his Oscar-winning role in Tender Mercies

The death was announced yesterday of actor Robert Duvall, whose long career included a string of memorable performances, several Oscar nominations, and one win for the film Tender Mercies. Duvall was 95 years old.

Duvall started his movie career as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, but it was really in the 1970s that Duval started to get his best roles, in the first two Godfather films, or in The Conversation, where he played the director of the business that hired Gene Hackman.

Robert Duvall in the middle, with Harrison Ford and Gene Hackman, in The Conversation

More good roles came, including his first Best Actor Oscar nomination for The Great Santini; in all Duvall received three Best Actor nominations and four Supporting Actor nominations, although he only won for Tender Mercies.

The Great Santini

The Great Santini and Tender Mercies are both showing up in the latter half of 31 Days of Oscar. In the meantime, there's also an early role as Maj. Frank Burns in M*A*S*H which will be on FXM on Feb. 22. (Bud Cort, who died last week, also has a small role.) I've got Apocalypse Now on my DVR and plan to finally get around to watching it and putting up a review in the near future. I assume TCM will have a programming tribute sometime after 31 Days of Oscar, more likely in April.