Trois Couleurs: Rouge

I've mentioned several times that I've got a bunch of foreign films on my DVR, to the point that since YouTube TV "deletes" them after nine months I've had several foreign films I didn't get around to watching. One that was just about to expire and that I finally watched was Three Colors: Red, the final film in director Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy following Three Colors: Blue and Three Colors: White.

Irène Jacob plays Valentine, a woman living in Geneva and studying at the university there while paying the bills by doing modeling work. She's got a difficult personal life, revealed in dribs and drabs over the course of the movie, involving a mom who is in England for some reason; a brother who has issues with drugs; and a difficult relationship with her boyfriend Michel. (None of these characters are actually seen, although we hear Michel's voice in phone calls with Valentine.) In a seemingly unrelated incident, law student Auguste drops his law books and meets his girlfriend Karin.

Some time later, Valentine is driving home one evening when a dog runs out in the street and Valentine is unable to avoid hitting the poor dog. Fortunately, the dog has a name tag: Rita, and the address of the dog's owner. So Valentine loads Rita into her car and takes her to Rita's owner, Joseph (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Joseph declares that he doesn't want the dog, so Valentine is welcome to keep Rita. Valentine takes Rita to a vet, who informs her that Rita is also pregnant with puppies and is going to make a full recovery.

The next day, Valentine takes Rita for a walk, but she escapes and goes to Joseph's house, which isn't a bad thing since Joseph had sent Valentine money for the vet bill but much too much money so Valentine wants to return some of it. When she goes to see Joseph this second time, she discovers a shocking secret: he likes to listen in on the phone conversations of his neighbors! This is for all sorts of obvious reasons illegal, and the sort of thing that for similarly obvious reasons disturbs Valentine. She plans on telling the neighbors about it, except that when she visits the neighbors, she finds that the daughter of the man on the phone is also listening in, so knows fully well that her father is not exactly faithful.

Eventually, everything comes together when Joseph hands himself over to the law and wouldn't you know it, but the judge at his trial is Auguste, who has had issues of his own with his girlfriend. Joseph takes Rita back although Valentine wants one of the puppies; Joseph and Valentine continue their platonic relationship as Joseph reveals more of his past and why he never married. Eventually there's a sort of twist ending that I won't give away.

Three Colors: Red received a lot of critical praise upon its release, although it was considered ineligible for a Best Foreign Film Oscar due to the Academy's rules on foreign films having to be credited to one country as opposed to international productions like this that don't quite neatly fit into being a film from a certain country. Having said that, I don't quite get the inordinate praise. It's not so much that Three Colors: Red is a bad movie so much as it's the sort of film that doesn't quite go anywhere. It's unbelievably talky, and leads up to an ending that doesn't satisfy. It's certainly competently made, and I can see why some people are going to love it. I just couldn't get all that invested in the characters.

For some values of spirit

Another movie that was sitting on my DVR when I noticed that it was about to get another airing on TCM is The Spirit of St. Louis. That airing comes up tomorrow, July 26, at 5:30 PM, so once again I made a point to watch it in order to be able to schedule a review for the TCM showing.

As you probably know The Spirit of St. Louis is the name of the plane that Charles Lindbergh (played by James Stewart) flew across the Atlantic Ocean in the first non-stop transatlantic flight in May, 1927. This right away brings up two issues with the movie. One is that we know how the movie is going to end, which is that Lindbergh is going to succeed in his attempt to cross the Atlantic, which removes much of the dramatic tension. The other is that Charles Lindbergh was a young 25 when he completed his fight, while James Stewart was 47 at the time of filming, and looks it for the most part despite the horrendously dyed blond hair. It's worse than Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia.

The movie opens about a day before Lindbergh takes off. He's already on Long Island, where the flight started, waiting for the weather to clear for take-off. Having time and nothing else to do, Lindbergh starts thinking both about the upcoming flight, and about how he got here. This is the lead-in to the requisite flashback, although since the second half of the movie is the actual flight, the flashbacks don't take up the entire movie. There are, however, multiple flashbacks to various points of Lindbergh's flight.

Lindberg was working as an airmail pilot around 1926 or so when he's forced to land in bad weather and reads a newspaper article about a couple of pilots who had an even worse flight trying to do that transatlantic flight. For several years there had been a prize offered to the first pilot (or pilots if a plane wasn't manned by one person) to make that non-stop transatlantic crossing. This gives Lindbergh the idea that perhaps he could be the pilot to make that flight. Except that he doesn't have enough money to buy a plane of his own and modify it so that it can carry enough fuel to make it all the way across the Atlantic.

The next section of the movie deals with Lindbergh getting the financial backing to buy a plane, although the contract with the plane manufacturer falls through since they want to pick the pilot. This leads to a different manufacturer being selected, but one based in San Diego. So they have to fly the plane cross country before it can make the actual flight to Paris.

The flight to Paris is going to take about 36 hours and, as there's no autopilot, it means Lindbergh is going to have to stay awake the entire time, which is a significant plot point. Worse is that Lindbergh didn't get enough sleep before taking off. To try to stay awake, Lindbergh has more flashbacks to other points of his flight career, whcih in the movie included a stint in the military as well as stunt flying. In addition to lack of sleep, there are other technical issues that threaten the success of the flight. But as we know, and it's not much of a spoiler, Lindbergh succeeds and becomes a hero.

For me, the big problem with the movie is the fact that we know fully well how it's going to turn out. Also, with half the movie being Lindbergh on the titular plane, there's not a whole lot that can be done to open up the action. Stewart and writer/director Billy Wilder try, but fall into a bunch of Hollywood tropes. I've seen worse, but then again I've also seen better.

To the Victor

Another of the movies that was sitting on my DVR, about to expire, was one that doesn't seem to show up all that much on TCM, which is a bit surprising considering that it's a Warner Bros. film. It also doesn't have that many reviews on IMDb. That movie is To the Victor.

It's post-war France, and the authorities are still de-Nazifying the country by going after collaborators. One such collaborator is Lestrac, who will very likely be convicted on the evidence of his Swedish-born wife Christine (Vivea Lindfors). However, Lestrac has some powerful friends, and those friends are looking for Christine to prevent her from testifying. So they send someone to shoot her, causing her to run though the streets of Paris. She's obviously able to escape, considering the fact that if she weren't we wouldn't have much of a movie. (Well, I suppose we could have a movie like The Killers.) Christine runs into the Hotel Anivers, which seems to cater to the sort of American involved with rebuilding France after the war.

Or, at least, the sort of American who wants to make a buck helping to rebuild France. Holding court in a private office in the hotel is Paul Taggart (Dennis Morgan), who, as it turns out, is actually a black marketer. He takes Christine to an upper-story room, but various bad guys are able to determine their location. One tries to shoot through the door of the room, while there are snipers in other rooms who get into a firefight until police on the ground are able to shoot one of the snipers. In any case, it's fairly clear that Paul and Christine are going to have to get out of town.

So they go to Normandy, where they stay with some people whose relationship with Paul or Christine isn't made particularly clear. But, this is also an excuse for Warner Bros. to do a bit of location shooting on the shores of Normandy where the D-Day invasion took place and some of the scuttled ships from that era are still there as a breakwater, which is frankly the one big reason to watch this film. Paul begins to fall in love with Christine, while thinking he can get out of France by taking a job in Cairo. He doesn't quite yet know just how complex Christine's personal life is. Never mind the fact that she's married; the police detective who's been investigating the case, Beauvais (Victor Francen), also has a yen for Christine. And, of course, the Fascist friends of Christine's husband are able to determine where Christine and Paul have fled to, and show up in Normandy.

It goes on like this for an hour and a half or more, along with a whole lot of political speechifying about what morally needs to be done in postwar Europe, with the eventual climax that I suppose satisfies the Production Code.

As I mentioned in the opening, I'd never heard of To the Victor before it showed up on TCM. Having watched it, I can see why I'd never heard of it. There might be the seed of a good story here, but boy is the presentation of that story slow, combined with a whole bunch of Marshall Plan-type commentary about what needs to be done in Europe now that the war is over. There's no particular reason to care about the Viveca Lindfors character, while Dennis Morgan is entirely the wrong Warner Bros. actor to play a black marketer. It's a mess of a movie, with the one big reason to watch it being the location photography, both in Paris and especially on the Normandy coast.

The Jerk

TCM ran a two-night salute to actor Steve Martin back in May, which gave me the chance to watch one of his movies that, somewhat surprisingly, I had never seen before. That movie is the one which made him a movie star in addition to his TV and stand-up comedy work: The Jerk.

Steve Martin unsurprisingly plays the titular jerk, although his character isn't so much a jerk as a man named Navin Johnson who's just so profoundly naïve that you wonder how such a person could ever survive in the real world. As the movie opens, in fact, he's a bum with little to his name except the clothes he's wearing and a thermos, and he tells the other assembled bums how he wound up in this condition.

Navin was a foundling left on the porch of a family of very poor black sharecroppers in Mississippi (although, as a shot just before the closing credits reveals, it's the Universal backlot as we can see the Magnificent Mountains of Mississippi in the background). His adoptive family are good people, except that they haven't been able to bring themselves to tell him before now that he's not their biological child, let alone not black. When they do tell him, he feels he has to make his way to St. Louis to find his true purpose in life.

Navin gets hired as a gas station attendant at a station run by Harry Hartounian (Jackie Mason), where he deals with robbers before meeting inventor Stan Fox (Bill Macy, not to be confused with William H. Macy). Navin has come up with an idea for a device that will prevent eyeglasses from slipping down your nose, and Stan offers to find a buyer for the idea. But Navin has to leave the gas station when a crazy sniper (M. Emmet Walsh) tries to kill him.

Navin next makes his way to a traveling carnival where he's seduced by fellow carny Patty (Catlin Adams) before meeting fairgoer Marie (Bernadette Peters), who is sweet and just the right person for Navin, although they can't get married yet because Marie wants someone who can provide for her, which Navin can't do yet. At least, not until Stan finds him to let him know that his invention has paid off and boy is Navin going to be rich. Not that Navin has any idea what to do with the money: you'd think he goes bankrupt through overspending. And yet, that's not really what happens. He loses his fortune in a different way, and here I'm not exactly spoiling things considering that the movie opens with Navin as a bum telling us how he ended up that way. So you know things are going to go wrong somewhere.

A lot of people love The Jerk, and it's easy to see why. At the same time, the movie opened to mixed reviews, and I think that's easy to see why too. Not that this is so much a movie that divides critics and audiences the way movies do today depending on the political or culture war message the movie is trying to make. Instead, The Jerk is more of a showcase for Steve Martin's comic stylings than it is a movie with a fully fleshed-out plot. At times it feels like more of a series of episodes than a coherent whole. And Martin hadn't learned to tone things down the way he would in later movies, especially where he had a better script. So I definitely have some issues with The Jerk.

The Lovesick Maidens of Cuddleton

Going back to another of the box sets I've got, there are still two and a half discs worth of shorts on the Vitagraph Comedies collection. This time, it's the 1912 short The Lovesick Maidens of Cuddleton.

Once again, the short is only about 12 minutes, so there's not a bunch of plot. Charles Eldridge plays the venerable doctor in the town of Cuddleton, IN, with some sort of advisor who's constantly in his office. Apparently, they need a way to drum up business, and the idea is to bring in a younger doctor to his practice, that being Dr. Baldwin (Earle Williams).

Baldwin is, so we're supposed to figure, considered young and handsome by the standards of 1912, so suddenly, all the young unmarried women in town become hypochondriacs who want Dr. Baldwin to treat them. It's reminiscent, I guess, of the the relationship the Jean Harlow and Edumnd Lowe characters were having in Dinner at Eight. If it's funny how these young women all want to see Dr. Baldwin, it's even funnier when one of the women feigns illness, but it's th old doctor who comes to see her!

Unfortunately, the movie loses steam in the second half. Dr. Baldwin is married, and his wife has finally decided to follow him to town. Only she's supposed to pretend for some reason that she's his sister instead of his wife. Whatever the reason they give, it's not something that makes much sense, and not anything I can imagine the doctor's wife wanting to go along with.

The Lovesick Maidens of Cuddleton isn't bad by the standards of 1912, but it's also as technically limited as most of the shorts I've seen that were being churned out in the early 1910s when new theaters needed new content to show their patrons. I'd also say that there are better shorts from the era, too.

Norman Jewison centenary

According to Wikipedia and IMDb, yesterday, July 21, was the centenary of director Norman Jewison. However, Tuesday nights in July on TCM have been given over to American independent directors, I'm\ guessing because that and the "singers acting in movies" Star of the Month were both things TCM wanted to spend four nights on, and the calendar worked out such that Monday and Tuesday were the weeknights in July that had only four nights.

What that means is that TCM's centenary salute to Norman Jewison is being held tonight in prime time. Now, it looks as though TCM has run enough of Jewison's movies over the years that perhaps they could have done a 24-hour salute, but as it stands we get four of Jewison's movies in prime time:

8:00 PM The Thomas Crown Affair
10:00 PM In the Heat of the Night
Midnight A Soldier's Story
2:00 AM Fiddler on the Roof

The very end of the overnight is an episode of the MGM Parade, at 5:15 AM, which mean there will be filler before the start of tomorrow morning's schedule.

Now, I didn't notice it until I looked up Jewison's filmography, but he directed Only You, which ran I think on New Year's night. If I had known that was a Jewison movie, I would probably have watched it in conjunction with his centenary.

Daddy's Dipsomania

Another of the movies that had been sitting on my DVR for a while that I needed to watch before it expired was Papa's Delicate Condition. Once again, having finally gotten around to watching it, it's time to write up a review and schedule it on the blog.

Jackie Gleason stars as Jack Griffith, who works as a railroad superintendent in a small town in northeast Texas in the early part of the 20th century. (The movie is based on the memoirs of silent screen star Corinne Griffith, born in 1894, but the sets look closer to a pastiche of small-town American between about 1900 and 1915.) Jack has a wife Ambolyn (Glynis Johns), and two daughters: younger daughter Corinne (Linda Bruhl) and Augusta (Laurel Goodwin). Corinne is a bit of a mischief-maker, but also unfailingly honest. Dad, for his part, eschews church, which is mildly scandalous for the early 1900s. But that's not the real focus of the movie.

Instead, the main plot driver is what's referred to as the titular "delicate condition". Dad has a tendency to drink "medicinal" alcohol, which is of course not medicinal but just to get Dad good and sloshed. And when Dad does drink, he also gets rather irresponsible with the family's money. Now, he's trying to do good-hearted things with the money, but what he does is still not fiscally imprudent, to the point that you wonder how the family can afford to live in the nice house they have. One would think Dad's spendthrift ways had been going on for years and that Mom would have taken the kids home to her father. After all, her father Mr. Ghio (Charlie Ruggles) is the mayor of Texarkana.

The first time we see Dad spending the family money unwisely, it's to "help" a man who's painted his house in a garish color that Ambolyn doesn't like get the house repainted in white. Sure, it's dumb to see Jack do this, but you can understand him wanting to make his wife happy. Next up, however, Jack stops by a drug store where the guy behind the counter has a wife who's going into labor and can't get the time off bcause of nasty boss Mr. Cosgrove (Charles Lane). Jack takes over for an hour and gets into big trouble by service a kid a banana split. To get out of his trouble, Jack comes up with a plan to have a "syndicate" of his friends buy the place. He then blackmails his friends into co-funding the scheme!

And then the circus comes to town. Corinne like the pony and wishes she could have one. Unfortunately, the only way Jack can buy the pony is if he buys the whole damn circus. And, of course, he's stupid enough to pay the two crooked proprietors cash. They run off, leaving Jack owning a circus that's heavily in debt and has lots of process servers chasing them. Yeah, he really is that dumb. It's here that Ambolyn finally has the good sense to go off to Texarkana to be with her father. Jack, having screwed things up badly, realizes that he has to go where they can't find him, and takes a job as a railroad superintendent with a railroad in Louisiana. But this is also the sort of movie that you know is going to have a happy ending. So how is it going to get there?

I can see why people think a movie like Papa's Delicate Condition has its charms. For me, however, it had a bunch of problems, which are mostly down to the script. Jack Griffiths is, if not a nasty character, one for whom it's hard to have sympathy. He's causing all his own problems, and you keep wanting Ambolyn or perhaps her father to knock some sense into Jack. The other big issue is that Jackie Gleason is miscast for a period piece like this. It's as though he's still playing Ralph Kramden and not Jack Griffith.

For some values of luck

TCM's schedule for most of the morning and afternoon tomorrow, July 21, is films with have the word "lucky" or a variation thereof in the title. One that's been sitting on my DVR is Lucky Me; not having seen it before, I once again wanted to watch a movie in order to be able to do a full-length post on it. The movie comes up at 2:15 PM tomorrow, so now is your chance to watch it, too.

Doris Day stars as Candy Williams, opening with a well-choreographed musical number singing a song about superstition, before winding up backstage at a theater in Miami. She's part of a troupe called the Parisian Pretties managed by Hap Schneider (Phil Silvers), who also appears in the troupe. They put on a sort of vaudeville revival show with song and dance acts but no overarching plot. It's a nostalgic sort of show that time has passed by. Audiences have passed it by, too, causing the show to be canceled and leaving Hap and Candy stranded in Miami together with two other members of the troup, Duke (Eddie Foy, Jr.) and Flo (Nancy Walker).

Hap, playing fast and loose with the truth, comes up with a scheme to get a free dinner at the hotel across the street involving a cop friend of theirs "arresting" them just before the check comes; however, the scheme fails when the cop in question gets rotated out on his shift so is no longer there to arrest them. Since this was a fancy hotel, they're going to have to pay their way out of the bill by doing various forms of work for the hotel. This is how we get to the male lead. One of the guests in the hotel is Dick Carson (Robert Cummings). He's a Tin Pan Alley songwriter who's had a fair deal of success writing for other people. But he wants to strike out on his own and write a complete show of his own. To that end, he also needs a backer, and thinks he might have one in Texas oilman Otis Thayer (Bill Goodwin). Otis has a daughter Lorraie (Martha Hyer) who is kinda-sort Dick's girlfriend, with the obvious implied threat that if she's not his girlfriend, he's not getting her daddy's money.

One evening at a gas station, Candy runs into Dick but doesn't know him. For various reasons, especially involving the fact that he doesn't want more people trying to audition themselves for him since he already had to deal with Flo doing just that, Dick passes himself off as a mechanic at the station named Eddie. From here, it's not too difficult to guess what happens the rest of the way. First, Dick and Candy fall in love although Dick has to keep up the ruse. Then, Candy learns the truth from a meeting between Dick and Hap, who does recognize Dick. This causes Candy to believe Dick is just trying to take advantage of her. Worse is that when they patch things up and Candy sings for Dick, Lorraine finds out. Lorraine decides that if she can't have Dick, she won't let her father back the show.

This leads to a finale at a birthday party for Otis where Dick was planning to play some of the songs for Otis. Dick decides to abandon the show, and Candy and her friends come up with an idea to put everything right. This involves crashing the party and coming up with a ruse to get Lorraine away from the party just long enough for Candy to sing some of the songs Dick was writing. Unfortunately, they can't keep Lorraine away long enough, although as you'll have figured out the film is bound to have a happy ending. You'll also know who ends up together in the last reel.

Lucky Me is, like the show the Parisian Pretties put on, a hoary old chestnut of a story. The story idea might not have been a bad one in the early 1930s, although it's decidedly dated here. It also doesn't help that Doris Day gets a subpar set of songs to sing. Day tries, and the film's weaknesses are definitely not her fault. But there's a reason Lucky Me got lukewarm reviews when it was released. Doris Day fans will probably still enjoy it, but anybody else watching it will see fairly quickly why it got those tepid reviews.

The face don't care

TCM had a night of body horror movies some months back. One of the movies that I hadn't seen was The Hand, which I recorded in part because of its star, Michael Caine. I finally got around to watching it and, as always, that means that now you get the review.

Michael Caine plays Jonathan Landsale, a cartoonist living in Vermont with his wife Anne and daughter Lizzie. However, it's become a bit of a strained marriage. Anne has an offer for a job at some new age institute down in New York City, and she thinks having their daughter studying in New York instead of middle-of-nowhere Vermont might be better. Jonathan doesn't want that, and besides, there's more space to do cartooning in Vermont and it's cheaper, too.

So the husband and wife drive down to New York to see the apartment, but get in an argument along the way while also having to deal with lousy drivers. Anne tries to pass a truck when a car comes in the opposite direction, and in the ensuing accident Jonathan's right hand is severed at the wrist. Obviously nobody wants to lose a hand, but it's even worse when you're a cartoonist and you make a living using that hand to draw things. Anne and the police stay behind to look for the hand in the hopes it can be re-attahed, but since they're in a field with thick grass, they can't find it.

Jonathan does get a prosthetic and and learns how to use it, as well as dealing with the residual nervous system sensations that amputees apparently film. Jonathan's agent suggest somebody else take over the strip, but Jonathan hates the direction the other guy wants to take it. Worse, Anne seems to be having a romantic relationship with a yoga instructor at the institute.

Oh, but that's not the worst thing at all. Jonathan starts having something that might be nightmares, or might be some sort of dark hallucinatory premonition, in which he has visions of the severed hand doing really nasty things like strangling people to death. To deal with that, Jonathan decides a change is in order, and takes a job as an adjunct professor at an unorthodox college in rural northern California, where he's going to teach cartoon drawing to people who are about as talented as Billy Crystal's students in Throw Momma From the Train.

Unfortunately, Jonathan continues to have those horrible visions. He makes a friend in the form of fellow instructor Brian Ferguson (Bruce McGill), and then suddenly, one of his students shows up at his house in the woods. That student, Stella, doesn't know what she wants to do in life, but is more than comfortable having sex with Jonathan which ought to be a big no-no not just because Jonathan is married but because sex between teacher and student is way wrong. Then again, it also turns out that Stella had been thinking of going down to Los Angeles with Brian for the Christmas holidays, which leads to the movie's climactic finale.

The Hand received poor reviews at the time of its release, and having watched it it's not hard to see why. The movie has a glacial pace, and a lot of the time it feels like there's not a lot going on. And for what is supposed to be a horror movie, it's not as if there's that much horror, not even of the sort in a Val Lewton movie where the horror is not explicit but desiged to be in the viewer's mind. Michael Caine tries, but even he can't save this one.

However, The Hand has apparently become a bit of a cult film in the intervening years, so watch and judge for yourself.

High Aces

Another movie that TCM ran during their Summer Under the Stars salute to Christoper Plummer was a World War I aviation drama called Aces High. I'd never heard of it before and, as it turns out, this was a TCM premiere, which might explain why I hadn't heard of it. Well, that and, after having seen the movie, I understood why it doesn't get shown all that often.

Plummer plays Capt. Sinclair, a pilot during World War I, although we don't see him at first. Instead, the action opens at Eton in 1916, where the next group of students is about to be graduated. John Gielgud, in a cameo role as the headmaster, leads the students in prayer before introducing them to a former student of theirs now serving with distinction, Maj. John Gresham (Malcolm McDowell). One of the students he speaks to, Stephem Croft (Peter Firth), is the kid brother of Gresham's girlfriend.

A year passes, and Croft is now a lieutenant who is serving with the air corps precisely because he looked up to Gresham and wanted to serve under Gresham. However, what he finds isn't all that it's cracked up to be as the air base is a bunch of bombed-out houses in some god-forsaken French village not far from the front lines. Croft doesn't yet realize how stressful and difficult aerial combat is, or the high attrition rate that it leads to, with the concomitant fatalism. Sinclair is Gresham's second-in-command, and warns Croft not to look up too highly to Gresham because of what war does to people.

The pilots go up and engage in dogfighting -- this is, after all, a World War I movie -- and in one of the first dogfights Gresham saves Croft's life, which is only going to make things more difficult for Gresham who doesn't want Croft to look up to him. There's a German pilot shot down and the alleged custom that a pilot shot down is for 24 hours the personal prisoner of the pilot who did the shooting. And then there are also unsuccessful missions that result in English pilots getting shot, which greatly darkens the mood in the British camp.

One way to deal with all of this is to see the proverbial "girl in every port", which Croft is given the opportunity to do as well, although this leads to more disillusionment as well when Croft goes back to see the girl again and finds that she's seeing a French officer. Finally, the pilots are asked to take part in a more dangerous mission to deal with some German balloons that are being used for surveillance. The balloons are harder to get rid of, and defended to the point that going after them results in a lot of surface-to-air shooting.

I suppose that if you're an aviation buff, there's a good deal to like in Aces High, as there's a fair bit of aerial combat footage. But as for the movie as a whole, it didn't quite work for me. The plot feels really muddled, with too many cameos (Ray Milland and Trevor Howard also appear) leading to extraneous scenes. The various pilots at the base are also too alike that it's a bit difficult to keep track of everything that's going on.