Not at the end of the soufflé

One of the classics of the French Novelle Vague (translation: New Vague) is the Jean-Luc Godard film Breathless. It's not a movie I care for because the main character is a talky jerk. But all the critic and filmmaker types love it. So in the early 1980s, some of them got the brilliant idea to remake it, also calling the movie Breathless. TCM ran it some months back, so I figured I'd give this remake a chance.

Richard Gere stars as Jesse Lujack, a man-child who, as the movie opens, is in Las Vegas seemingly partying, although that's not really why he's there. He seems to be a car thief for hire, as he steals a Porsche with the intention of taking it to his home in Los Angeles. However, he insists on bringing attention to himself by driving recklessly, so it doesn't take all that long before the highway patrol spots him and one of the cops approaches him. Thankfully, Jesse has looked in the car's glove compartment, where he finds a gun. So, he can shoot the cop, not that this was what he meant to do, and head off to Los Angeles to try to get away. Naturally, the cop is going to be found, and when it does, Jesse is the prime suspect, to the point that his picture is already in the papers when he gets back to LA.

Jesse makes it back to Los Angeles, and sees that the cop's murder has already made the news. He looks at his calendar and sees a bunch of women's names on it, which he of course would know as old girlfriends although we don't. One of them is Monica Poiccard (Valerie Kaprisky), a French woman studying architecture at UCLA. Jesse immediately starts harassing her by showing up on campus and then being an utter jerk to her. But there are women dumb enough to want a bad boy, and Monica seems to be one of those women.

Jesse tries to convince Monica to go off to Mexico with him, he trying to get there to escape. She's ambivalent about it, but damn if the sex isn't spectacular. However, Jesse needs money to be able to live on once he gets to Mexico, and he doesn't have that in hand yet. That's going to require him to stay in Los Angeles for another day, and the cops are going to be on his case.

As I said in the opening paragraph, I really didn't care for the original French Breathless, although to be fair I'm not a big fan of the French New Wave. I had big problems with this Hollywood remake, but not quite for the same reasons. Jean-Paul Belmondo, who plays the killer in the original, is a bit more of a glib charmer, but still a somewhat annoying guy. Richard Gere plays the character (or the screenplay has him play it) as a much more obnoxious type of unlikeable antihero. The production design also is stylized in a way that I felt didn't really suit the material.

For once, I'm generally in agreement with the critics in my negative review of the movie, albeit for different reasons. While critics tend to love the French original and not see the need for a Hollywood remake, I didn't care for either version.

TCM's Kris Kristofferson tribute

Actor and singer Kris Kristofferson died last September at the age of 88. TCM is finally getting around to doing a programming salute to him, which is a bit surprising since I'd have thought he'd be the sort of person to get one movie in December; some of the people who did only get that treatment were bigger stars than Kristofferson. At any rate, TCM's salute to Kristofferson is tonight in prime time, with five of his films:

8:00 PM Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, starring Ellen Burstyn as the New Mexico mom whose husband dies, prompting her to pick up and move west;
10:00 PM A Star Is Born, the 1970s version of the story where a singer (Barbra Streisand) rises up the ladder of success while her formerly at the top lover (Kristofferson) sinks into alcoholism;
12:30 AM Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, where Kristofferson plays Billy the Kid opposite James Coburn's Pat Garrett;
2:30 AM Blume in Love, in which Kristofferson is the new boyfriend of the ex-wife (Susan Anspach) of George Segal; and
4:15 AM Rollover, with Kristofferson investigating a bank where there's a lot going on underneath the surface.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid actually ran over the weekend, but I didn't record it and didn't really have the time to watch it and do a post on it before putting up this short post on TCM's programming salute. It was also directed by Sam Peckinpah, who is not one of my favorite directors. I'll record tonight's showing and get around to doing a post on it sometime, however.

The Promoter

A movie that I think I briefly mentioned a couple of times in conjunction with planning to record it on my DVR is an early Alec Guinness movie from his native UK called The Card. IMDb and Wikipedia both say it was retitled The Promoter for its first American release, but the print TCM ran was titled The Card. The last time TCM ran it, I finally got the chance to record it, and recently watched it.

Alec Guinness plays Denry Machin, although as the movie opens we don't see Guinness because the opening scenes are with Denry as a child. Young Denry is an average at best student, but he's able to get access to the report cards to change his grade to something much better. This allows him to get accepted to the sort of school when where the scions of better families attend, although obviously not actual upper-class Britons since the movie is set at the turn of the last century when Britain's class structure was even more rigid than it is today. Poor Denry is the son of a washerwoman, and worse, one who seems happy with her lot in life and has no desire to have a life of luxury and convenience In any case, once Denry graduates from school, he gets a job working as a clerk for the solicitor Duncalf, which is where we first meet Guinness as the adult Denry.

On one of his first days at the job, the Countess of Chell (Valerie Hobson) comes in. She's engaged Duncalf for the job of sending out admissions to the big charity ball, something which is strictly by invitation only and something to which a man of Denry's station is never going to receive an invite. However, Duncalf has Denry fill in and address all the invitations, a job that should keep him up half the night. Denry ends up with several invitation blanks, and decides to use one to send himself an invitation. Since it's an invitation ball, he's going to need learn how to dance, and goes to the dance school run by Ruth Earp (Glynis Johns), albeit not successfully. However, the two begin to develop a romantic relationship.

Denry gets fired from his job with Duncalf for his stunt, but taking this sort of initiative gives him ideas, as he gets himself hired into one job after another that requires a person with the sort of go-getter attitude that I get the impression was decidedly frowned upon in the Britain of the era. Denry eventually becomes reasonably wealthy and offers some of his money to his mother, but she feels like it's somewhat ill-gotten, and besides, she couldn't stop working as that would be immoral. The relationship with Ruth begins to go a bit sour, but she's got a lady's companion in Nellie (Petula Clark), who also likes Denry, although she too isn't from the highest class of family.

The Card is yet another of those movies where you see the basic idea and the source material (it's based upon a novel from 1911 that I haven't read), and you can obviously understand why filmmakers would believe there's a good story here. However, something in the making of The Card doesn't go quite right. I think it's that the screenplay makes Alec Guinness' character out to be a bit too much of a grasper when the material really calls for lighter comedy. I'm not quite certain, however, how the screenplay could square that circle.

Still, all of the cast do a a professional job, and it's nice to see all the location shooting, even if it's all in black and white. The Card isn't a bad movie; it's just a bit of a shame that it's not quite up to the level of some of Guinness' other work from this era.

The shoes of color

I've briefly mentioned the movie The Red Shoes a couple of times before, most recently when the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were part of a TCM spotlight back in November. The Red Shoes is back on the TCM schedule again quite soon, tomorrow (January 12) at 11:45 AM, so I made a point of re-watching the film so that I could do a full-length post on it.

The movie opens up with what feels like suprisingly long exposition. The ballet company run by impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) is performing in London, and a bunch of starving artist types from the ballet/classical music world have spent their hard-earned money to get balcony tickets to watch the performance. Among them are dancer Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) and composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring). Julian hears the music, and is shocked to discover that one of his professors of composition from the conservatory has basically lifted themes that Julian himself wrote. Julian writes a letter to Lermontov to complain, and eventually goes to meet Lermontov when he decides that perhaps he doesn't want to burn his bridges that way. The bad news is that Lermontov already read the letter; the good news is that he admires Craster's talent and drive.

As for Victoria, she's about to meet Lermontov as well because her aunt is putting on a party for Lermontov after the show. Lermontov asks her about dance, and she of course gives the obligatory answer that dance is her one true love and that she'll sacrifice everything else just to be able to dance professionally, as opposed to someone like Shirley MacLaine in The Turning Point who opts for motherhood. It's the answer she needs to give if she wants to advance in her career, but you suspect she really means it at least at this point in her life. As for Lermontov, he has a policy that nobody in the troupe can keep their job after getting married since it'll put too much strain on the dancers and take away from their dancing; indeed, he's going to have to replace his prima ballerina later in the movie.

And, unsurprisingly, it's going to be Victoria who becomes the new prima ballerina. She starts off in the corps de ballet, getting noticed when she does a charity version of Swan Lake for the old company she grew up with performing at a grimy theater in a decidedly unglamorous part of London. The joy she shows in dancing, however, is enough to get Lermontov to hire her and bring her on the company's tour of first Paris and then the French Riviera. Julian has wound up with the company, too, as an assistant to the conductor. He and Victoria have a rocky relationship since they both have their own ambitions, but they fall in love eventually.

In the film's highlight, which is somewhat surprisingly only halfway through the movie, Julian writes a score for a new adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen story The Red Shoes, about a woman who gets a magical pair of red ballet shoes that have the curse of forcing the wearer to dance until the wearer drops dead. The ballet is a hit, and Virginia is the only one to dance the lead role. She eventually decides to get married to Julian, forcing her to leave the company, and leading Lermontov to decide not to re-stage The Red Shoes without Virginia.

Virginia's career stalls, however, and she eventually goes back to the Riviera to beg Lermontov to let her dance again. But Lermontov is ruthless in trying to get Virginia to conclude that she's going to have to give up Julian to regain the passion for dance she first had. Julian, meanwhile, has had a more successful career, writing a new opera that's about to premiere in London. But when Victoria leaves him to resume her dance career, he decides to go to France to try to win her back....

In watching The Red Shoes, the movie that I was reminded enough was one that may surprise you: A Clockwork Orange. The reason why I thought of it is that I had the same visceral reaction to both of them. That reaction is that it's easy to see why all the critics -- at least latter-day critics -- heap such high praise on the movie. It's a technical marvel, with gorgeous color and stunning dance scenes. However, it's also a movie that leaves me emotionally cold, which I think it in no small part down to the fact that I'm not into ballet at all. That's not to say that The Red Shoes is a bad movie at all; indeed, I'd highly recommend it to all those who enjoy dance movies. It's more that I feel like I'd need to have a more intimate knowledge of the world portrayed here to empathize with the characters' motivations.

Three Faces East

A year or so ago, when TCM had a festival of B movies, one of the selections was a 1940 movie called British Intelligence, based on a World War I-era play called Three Faces East. The play was made into a silent film, and then again at the beginning of the sound era with the same title as the play Three Faces East, so when TCM ran the 1930 version, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

The movie opens up on the Western Front during World War I. In Belgium, a man named Valdar (Erich von Stroheim) is getting a medal from the Belgian Army. At about the same time as this, we're transferred behind the German lines. They've captured a nurse to be a POW, but it turns out that despite her being British, she's really working as a double agent, with the code name Z-1 (Constance Bennett). Being in field hospitals enables her to gather intelligence, and eventually she's able to convince her "captors" of her identity as Z-1.

The Germans have an idea for her. One of their former POWs was a man named Robert Chamblerain, son of one of the Lords of the Admiralty, Sir Winston Chamberlain (the original William Holden, not the one who worked with von Stroheim on Sunset Blvd.). Robert is dead, and the Germans will send Z-1, taking on the name Frances Hawtree, to visit the Chamberlains under the ruse that, as a field hospital nurse, she too was taken POW and became the lover of Robert before she died. Of course, her real job is to get inside the Chamberlain house and gather intelligence which she'll pass on to the unseen Blecher.

Surprisingly, Frances' ruse works, although that's in part because the Germans collected a bunch of Robert's personal effects for Frances to bring to London to give to the Chamberlains. Still, a bunch of the military types are suspicious of anybody and everybody. Heck, they're even suspicious of Valdar whom they know has German ancestry even though he's Belgian. (There's still a small German-speaking minority in Belgium, in the southeast along the German and Luxembourg borders.) They're right to be suspicious, since Frances' contact between herself and Blecher turns out to be Valdar.

So we now have the British military on one side, and a known nest of German spies under the same roof as the British. This being a movie from 1930, and since we know that the English won the war, we can assume that the Germans are not going to win this skirmish in the war. And if you saw the remake British Intelligence you'll know that too. But how this happens is something you'll have to see.

This version of Three Faces East is pretty well done, at least within the context of the early sound technology of the era and the story's provenance as a stage play. There are better movies out there, but the studios were in need of material in 1930, so an adapted stage play like Three Faces East adequately fit the bill.

The Mine Wolf

Ruth Roman was TCM's Star of the Month back in November, and once again that gave me the chance to record several movies I hadn't seen before. One of those movies is coming up on the TCM schedule, so I watched it now to do a review on: Barricade, which airs tomorrow (January 10) at 3:00 PM.

We don't see Roman at first; instead we see Dane Clark. He's playing Bob Peters, a man running from the law, with a saddlebag draped over his shoulder. Bob may be a crook, but he's no dummy, and is able to evade the posse and make it to the next town. But there's a mine foreman there gathering supplies for the mine some ways out of town. The mine can always use more workers, and as a mining camp there's room and board included. Bob, needing a way out, takes this lifeline.

Showing up in town at the same time is the stage, with a pair of passengers. Aubrey Milburn (Robert Douglas) is a bit mysterious, while the lady, Judith Burns (Ruth Roman, not as if you couldn't figure that out), is quickly revealed to be a convict escaped from a women's prison back east in Indiana. She tries to get Milburn to cover for her when she discovers the sheriff has her picture. He doesn't, and Judith tries to escape by taking the stagecoach, with Milburn hopping aboard. Neither of them knows how to drive it, and it predictably crashes, injuring both of them substantially.

The wagon with the mine foreman shows up and since the two aren't dead, takes both of them aboard and brings them to the mining camp. The mine is owned by Boss Kruger (Raymond Massey), and he'll let Milburn stay to recuperate, at least if he pays his way by working. With a broken ankle, it's only kitchen work for him, which is degrading in the other men's eyes. As for Bob, he'd like to move on, but there's only back to town, as the other way is 35 miles of desert. Kruger takes Bob on as a demolition expert, to set of the charges to clear out more mine.

Boss Kruger fairly quickly reveals himself to be one nasty man. To an extent, he has to be in this harsh environment. But you get the sense that he was amoral even before getting to the mine, as he's willing to hire any sort of bad guy trying to escape his past -- indeed, Kruger won't question the men's pasts. There's more to it however, which sets off Milburn's curiosity, as he goes snooping around in Kruger's quarters on the premise of cleaning them. There was a dispute between Kruger and a putative co-owner some time back, and for the time being, Kruger seems to have won. But the co-owner is bound to show up again sometime, Kruger may well have hired these men to be the muscle defending the mine.

There's also the question of what's going to happen to Bob and Judith. After all, Barricade was released in 1950, and the Production Code was still most definitely in force back them. Perhaps they can come up with some deus ex machina to pardon both of them, or maybe they can die heroically trying to save to good guys from the bad guys.

Barricade is based on the Jack London story The Sea Wolf, which had already been made into a memorable movie a decade earlier. Obviously, there's no sea here, but I think it's a good decision to change the location so that it wouldn't bring up too much comparison to the earlier movie. Then again, one can't help but make the comparison. Barricade doesn't come up to The Sea Wolf, but it's not a bad little western programmer. You could do better, but you could do a lot worse.

TCM's Teri Garr tribute, and other briefs

Actress Teri Garr died back in October, and when I wrote a briefs post mentioning her death I thought that TCM would honor her in the December block with one of her movies. I was wrong, and in fact she's getting half a night of her movies tonight in prime time. Those movies are:

8:00 PM Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks' parody of the Frankenstein story;
10:00 PM Oh, God!, which sees Garr play wife to John Denver, a man who is visited by God (George Burns) and asked to deliver His message to the world; and
Midnight The Black Stallion, about a boy (Kelly Reno) stranded on a desert island with the titular horse.

I actually have The Black Stallion on my DVR, as TCM ran it back in December when Mickey Rooney (picking up his I think sixth and final Oscar nomination) was Star of the Month. I haven't watched it yet to do a post on it, and while today might have been a good time to do that post in conjunction with the Garr tribute, I decided to hold off since I've already got another post coming up later today on a movie that's airing tomorrow. That, and I actually have several Rooney movies to get through over the next several months. The other surprise is that Close Encounters of the Third Kind is not one of the movies selected for the tribute.

Unrelated, but I should also probably apologize for my horrible proof-reading ever since I started getting ahead of the game in doing movie posts. Back when I started the blog, I'd usually write up a post and immediately post it to the blog, then look at the blog where I'd be able to see if what I just posted had some sort of horrible formatting error. Blogger has a bit of a glitch in that closing a paragraph block doesn't seem to remove other formatting, so if I forget to close a bold or italics tag, that formatting takes over the rest of the blog. Since I schedule the posts quite a few days out now -- I think I'm currently closing in on three weeks ahead -- I don't notice the errors until the posts are actually published.

The shakedown of size

I've mentioned the TCM Saturday Matinee block on several occasions, although for the most part I haven't done posts on many of the movies. Part of that is that the timing on some of them isn't always accurate, as I noticed when I recorded The Big Shakedown. The recording missed the opening credits, but the recording started early enough that I didn't miss any key action.

Bette Davis plays Norma Nelson, who works at one of those big-city full-service drug stores from the era when pharmacists actually compounded the drugs themselves and the stores did a lot more. However, it's not a particularly successful store. Norma is in business with her boyfriend the pharmacist, Jimmy Morrell (Charles Farrell), and they'd get married if only he had enough money to support her. Why they couldn't keep working together until Norma got pregnant isn't mentioned; it's just assumed that Norma would stop working upon marriage since it's the early 1930s.

One day, Dutch Barnes (Ricardo Cortez) comes into the drugstore. He's a bootlegger, or at least was a bootlegger. Prohibition has recently been repealed, putting a crimp in the lifestyles of a bunch of makers of illicit booze. Dutch starts talking with Jimmy about his job, and how the chemical makeup of some of the products they sell isn't all that complicated. It's just expensive because the stuff has a brand name. Well, that's not the only reason, but brand reputation is a thing, and the capital needed for mass production is substantial.

But Dutch has some of that capital, having made a substantial bit of money during Prohibition. So he gets the idea of piggybacking off the established brands, making knockoff counterfeit goods! And Jimmy is dumb enough that at first he doesn't get that this is what he's doing for Dutch. At least he's honest enough about it, however, to have some moral qualms when he learns what Dutch is really up to. He also tells Dutch that he can't quite copy some products, since schlub pharmacists like him can't get all the materials. Dutch basically bribes Jimmy: here's enough money to marry Norma!

One person who isn't happy with any of this is Lily (Glenda Farrell), Dutch's former girlfriend. She learns what's going on, and goes to the authorities, getting murdered by Dutch's henchmen for her troubles. The plot spirals from there, with Jimmy having to make ever faker drugs, which is a much bigger problem than just counterfeit cold cream. Fake antibiotics, for example, could get patients killed. And, of course, you know that one of those patients is going to be Norma.

The Big Shakedown is a good example of the sort of B movie that Warner Bros. churned out in the early to mid-1930s, once they got the sound quality up to a level where the camera could be somewhat more fluid. It's nothing more than a B movie, but it moves swiftly and has some surprisingly shocking moments. Sure, you can see why someone like Bette Davis would grow tired of the roles Warner Bros. was giving her, and a movie like this could be seen as an example of it. But for the most part, The Big Shakedown does everything the studio could ask a B movie to do.

Two from Vitagraph

I mentioned several months back that I bought a box set from Kino Lorber of comedies from the Vitagraph studio, which was active in the early days of filmmaking in America. I'd only watched one of the shorts so far, and recently watched another pair of them as each of the was shorter than even a standard one-reeler:

First up was The Boy, the Bust, and the Bath. A bunch of people live at a boarding house with a shared bathroom. A women who lives there is down in the common room working on making a hat, using a bust that looks a lot like her to keep it on. Two of the other residents try to flirt with her; you'd think all of these people would have known each other for a fairly long time already, the way they seem to do in most sound-era films set in rooming houses. A kid who also lives in the house takes the bust and sticks it in the bathtub, so that when the men living in the house try to take a bath, they'll think they're walking in on a naked lady.

The second short was even shorter, at three minutes: Get Me a Stepladder. In this one, a man wants to hang a painting for his wife (actually played by a man in drag; presumbaly Vitagraph didn't have enough women around the day they made this one), and puts a chair on top of a table to get to the required height. Needless to say, the chair and table fall out from under him with the intent of comic effect. The wife looks for a ladder and has some difficulty getting it back to the room, again with comic effect. This second half of the short also showed how flimsy the sets were as one of the walls shakes fairly noticeably.

I have to say that even though both of these shorts are from before 1910, they're still relatively poor even when compared to other stuff that I've seen from the era. I'd have thought that by 1908, the short three-minute length that had appeared in "documentary" shorts, where they basically set up a camera and filmed real life going on, would have been a thing of the past, but apparently not. Yes, I know that D.W. Griffith's Those Awful Hats from around the same time is also only about three minutes, but that one was made as more of a sort of public announcement, like modern day trailers before movies, only with a great joke to make the message. And the first one is basically a one-joke movie. It wasn't uncommon for other movies of this era to have more fully fleshed-out plots.

TCM Star of the Month January 2025: George Raft

George Raft and James Cagney in Each Dawn I Die (Jan. 14, 8:00 PM)

Once again, we're into the first full week of a new month, and that means it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time, that star is George Raft, who is probably best remembered for all the gangster roles he essayed. Raft's films will be showing up on TCM on Tuesday nights in January, kicking off at 8:00 PM this evening with Scarface, a movie to which I gave just enough of a review back in 2011 that I'm not doing a full-length review on it now.

Raft actually got his start as a dancer, and it's there that he shows up uncredited in the 1929 film Side Street (Jan. 8, 1:00 AM), which I think I haven't seen before. At least, a search of the blog reveals it to be one of the few films airing in Raft's honor that I haven't done a blog post on yet. Raft also has a smallish dancing role in Taxi!, airing on January 15 at 3:00 AM.

George Raft (center) in Some Like It Hot (Jan. 29, 12:30 AM)

The movies airing in the tribute are in rough chronological order in that January 7 is from the early part of Raft's career; January 14 is from the late 1930s and early 1940s; January 21 is from the mid- to late 1940s; and the last night is from the 1950s. This last night includes Some Like It Hot and Ocean's Eleven (Jan. 29, 2:45 AM).

There's a lot that TCM isn't showing, mostly because those movies were made away from Warner Bros. and the films aren't quite as accessible to TCM and the old Turner Library. In looking through Raft's filmography, I see he went over to Universal to make a movie I'd never heard of, I Stole a Million, in the late 1930s. Stuff like Black Widow in the 1950s was at Fox, while the Jerry Lewis movies he appeared in in the 1960s were done at Paramount, as was Skidoo.