Thursday Movie Picks #338: Space/Aliens (TV edition)

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This being the final Thursday of the month -- and indeed, the final Thursday and final day of the year -- it's time for another TV-themed edition. This month, that theme is space and aliens, which isn't necessarily all that difficult when you think about all the science fiction shows out there set in outer space. However, I wound up picking only one show that would normally be considered science fiction:

Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993-1997). Superman did come from the planet Krypton, which makes him an alien, after all. I'd already used the George Reeves TV series, so I went with this one, starring Dean Cain as Superman and Teri Hatcher as Lois Lane.

ALF (1986-1990). A snarky alien fleeing his destroyed planet crash-lands in the San Fernando Valley, setting the stage for a culture-clash sitcom with all sorts of insult humor. Not my favorite, but it fits so I decided to use it.

Space: 1999 (1975-1977). An explosion of nuclear waste on the Moon hurtles the Moon out of Earth's orbit, sending it into space and stranding the people stationed on Moonbase Alpha, led by Martin Landau and his then-wife Barbara Bain in the fabulously dated faux-futuristic uniforms.

Ring in the new year the same way!

There are a lot of traditions around the holidays, such as watching the ball drop in Times Square at 11:59 PM, probably an hour earlier in Central Time Zone who celebrate the new year at an odd time. No zombie Dick Clark, of course. At any rate, TCM is not immune to recycling programming ideas on December 31 in the day and prime time. I think it was on TCM back in 2004/2005 that I first saw them run ABBA: The Movie as part of a night of concert movies on New Year's Eve.

But this year sees to of the more repeated, I think, New Year's Eve programming ideas they trot out. The morning will be starting at 9:15 with the 1934 movie The Thin Man, with William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, solving the murder of Edward Ellis in a story that actually does have its climax on New Year's Eve. At any rate, I'm sure you can guess what the other five movies are leading up to prime time.

Then, at 8:00 PM, we get the first of the That's Entertainment! movies, which is always somewhat sad since the wraparounds were all filmed on the old MGM backlot which at the time was already decaying and which I believe was eventually sold off. TCM used to run the trailer for it when the movie was on the schedule, which had an amusing line about how "there may never be another movie like it". Not that the producers knew there was going to be a sequel in two years. And you can probably figure out that the sequel follows at 10:30, with the next two movies following that. Hollywood, My Hometown concludes the night at 5:00 AM.

Now to do one final edition of Thursday Movie Picks before putting a wrap on the blog for 2020. Here's to hoping that the politicians don't fuck up 2021 as much as they did 2020 and it's a better year for all of us.

Tormented

It's been a couple of weeks since I did a post on a horror movie. To be honest, I tend not to watch quite so many horror movies as films in other genres. But one of my recent watches was the 1960 B horror film Tormented.

Richard Carlson plays Tom Stewart, who at the start of the movie looks like he's a lighthouse keeper on an otherwise deserted island. But in fact, there are other people on this island and Tom is just a composer and musician living elsewhere on the island and spending time at the abandoned lighthouse to get away from it all. Tom is engaged to be married, and coming up the steps of the lighthouse to visit him is Vi Mason (Juli Reding).

The only thing is, Vi isn't Tom's fiancée; that would be Meg Hubbard (Lugene Sanders). Vi is a former girlfriend of Tom's, and apparently serious enough that Vi thinks she can blackmail him, which frankly makes no sense to me since Tom is old enough that you'd think Meg would know Tom had other women in his past. At any rate, Vi and Tom get into a heated argument that results in their going all the way up to the top of the lighthouse where the light is. Since this is an old abandoned lighthouse, the railing up there is weak, and Vi breaks it, nearly falling off and having to hold on to the railing with one hand.

Tom decides he's going to do nothing, and lets Vi fall to her death! Vi didn't take the normal boat over from the mainland, so nobody is going to know she's here, and her body is going to wash out to sea, so nobody is going to find it. Tom's safe, except that he forgot about that pesky little Hollywood Production Code.

The next morning, Tom is walking along the beach, when he sees that Vi's body has washed ashore! Only, he goes closer, and realized what had clearly looked exactly like Vi's body turns out to have been a clump of seaweed. But then Meg's kid sister Sandy (Susan Gordon, daughter of the movie's director) finds a watch that Vi had given to Tom which was presumably going to be part of the blackmail attempt.

Further strange things start happening, notably involving Vi's disembodied head showing up to torment Tom, although of course nobody else can see it, much like the Poe story The Pit and the Pendulum. More worrying is the presence of Nick (Joe Turkel). He's the owner of the small boat that Vi chartered to bring her over to the island, and when she hasn't returned back to the mainland, he knows something is up. He wants to blackmail Tom too.

It goes on like this for a little over an hour, being interesting enough and modestly entertaining, while never being anything particularly great. Not that the producers were trying to make anything that would come anywhere near greatness, of course. They did succeed, I think, in making something that's worth one watch with friends and a bowl of popcorn. It has a rather low rating on IMDb, but I bet that's because the movie was used for an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Tormented has received multiple DVD releases, and I think at least one is available for purchase.

Skyjacked

Charlton Heston was one of the stars in TCM's Summer Under the Stars back in August. One of the movies that I recorded, not having done a review on it before, was the all-star disaster movie Skyjacked. Having been released by MGM, it's one of those movies that got a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Charlton Heston plays Hank O'Hara, pilot of a Global Airways flight to Minneapolis that is carrying a disparate group of passengers consisting of Holywood newcomers and veterans looking for one more paycheck. There's a US Senator, Arne Lindner (Walter Pidgeon), hoping to go on a fishing trip; a pregnant woman Harriet (Mariette Hartley) so you know she's going to go into labor later on in the movie; and older couple the Shaws where the wife is played by Jeanne Crain; and a jazz cellist Gary Brown, played by football player Rosie Grier.

Hank has a backstory involving the woman who gets assigned to be chief flight attendant on this flight, Angela (Yvette Mimieux). As Hank is at the counter talking to the folks from the airline, an army officer, Lt. Jerome Weber (James Brolin), comes up, trying to get a ticket on the flight because he's got to get to his sister's wedding. They're out of tickets in coach but there's room in first class; Gary, who normally travels with his cello in the seat next to him, graciously offers to let Weber have the seat if there's enough room for the cello elsewhere in first class storage.

Of course, you can probably guess that Weber is up to no good, although that will only be revealed later in the movie. One of the passnegers, Elly (Susan Dey who at that time was still on The Partridge Family), goes to use the lavatory and finds that there's been a message written in lipstick that there's a bomb aboard the plane. She's obviously distressed. Gary figures out that it's Weber behind this, because he's been getting Weber drunk and Weber lets slip that he doesn't have a sister or a wedding to go to.

Somehow, Weber sobers up enough to hijack the airplane and demand that it be flown to Anchorage. He has flashbacks about getting honors for his military service in Vietnam which suggest he's got some sort of PTSD or other mental illness as a result of his time in the military. He's got some sort of remote control device that could easily detonate that bomb, if Hank doesn't do Weber's bidding. So they're on their way to Anchorage.

While there, Hank tries to come up with a plan to get some feds onto the plane, and also get all the passengers off. Not that Weber wants the passengers to deplane. His plan, however, is not to have a standoff, but to have the plane refuelled so that he can have Hank fly him to... Moscow, where he plans to defect, because he knows the Soviets need his military prowess!

Yes, Weber's plan is nutty, but all of Skyjacked is nutty. It scrapes the bottom of the barrel of disaster movies, but unfortunately doesn't get to be as consistently entertainingly bad as some of the others (The Concorde: Airport '79 comes to mind here). Jeanne Crain in particular is underused. Grier actually doesn't do badly for a football player with limited acting experience, while Brolin goes way over the top. There is stuff to laugh at in Skyjacked, but like a lot of MGM in the era just before That's Entertainment, there's also an extremely threadbare feel of a studio that's completely lost its luster.

If you want to laugh at something that's a mess, you'll certainly have a chance to do that with Skyjacked. But you'll have more chances to do it with some other movies out there.

Another Parade of the Dead

TCM runs the annual TCM Remembers piece looking at the people who died over the past year, set to music and running a little over four minutes. But for the past few years at least, they've also had a night of programming in December dedicated to people who died and didn't necessarily get a programming tribute earlier in the year. This year, that night of programming is tonight in prime time, continuing into tomorrow afternoon. It looks as though there are ten movies:

The Graduate, at 8:00 PM, honors Buck Henry;
Shirley Knight is a co-star of Sweet Bird of Youth, at 10:00 PM;
Fred Willard shows up in This is Spinal Tap at 12:15 AM;
The Belly of an Architect, a new-to-me movie, stars Brian Dennehy and comes on at 2:00 AM;
Jerry Stiller plays the brother-in-law of a fleeing mobster in The Ritz, at 4:15 AM;
Ennio Morricone provided music for The Battle of Algiers at 6:00 AM;
The Family Secret stars Baby Peggy and starts at 8:15 AM;
Honor Blackman appears in the British comedy The Square Peg at 9:30 AM;
Fellow British actress and Bond Girl Diana Rigg has a role in Evil Under the Sun at 11:00 AM; and
The China Syndrome includes a part by Wilford Brimley, at 1:15 PM.

The following movie is The Red Badge of Courage, and if anybody from that movie wasn't already dead and died in 2020, I couldn't find it. TCM's page for the programming doesn't mention it either.

Amy

Another of the movies that I had the chance to record during one of the free preview weekends was the 2015 documentary Amy. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 11:30 AM on The Movie Channel Xtra, and again later in the week on another of the Showtime channels; check your box guide or favorite listings site for details.

Amy Winehouse died in 2011 at the age of 27, after several years of being the brunt of tabloid punchlines for her drug and alcohol abuse. So we know how the movie is going to end. But that's not how the movie begins. Instead, it starts when Amy was 14 of 15, sharing a birthday celebration with a couple of her friends. When Amy starts singing "Happy Birthday", it's clear that even at this young age she's a phenomenal talent.

But even then, this phenomenal talent was beset with personal problems. She admitted to her mother already as a teenager that she suffered from bulimia, while she also openly said that Mom should have been a bit tougher on her and not spoiled her so much. Dad also seems a bit distant, at least until Amy becomes financially successful. It's all enough to engender clinical depression, as Amy discusses some of the prescription drugs she was on.

Unsurprisingly, Amy's talent gets spotted and she quickly starts climing the ladder of success, helped by an older boyfriend, Nick Shymansky, who decided at the age of 19 to become her manager, at least until the suits in the music industry took over control of Amy's career. Although she became a success, she ominously says in one of her early interviews that she doesn't think she'd be able to handle the success, which I guess shouldn't be a surprise considering what we already know of her life up to that point. One of her producers, Salaam Remi, comments on hearing her perform at an audition, that this is an 18-year-old girl with the voice of a 65-year-old jazz singer. Presumably, he also means that she's got the life experience of a 65-year-old jazz singer, too.

At any rate, Amy starts falling into the spiral of drug and alcohol abuse that seems a common theme for fictional jazz movies, probably because it really did happen in real life. Amy has a new boyfriend who eventually becomes her husband, Blake Fielder, who knows how to procuer the good stuff and is perfectly willing to take the drugs along with Amy. Both of them really need to go to rehab, but the first time it's suggested to Amy and her entourage, her Dad puts his foot down and says no, which was probably the wrong thing but I don't think was malicious even though as the movie plays out we see Dad to be the one person more than anybody else to make serious mistakes in handling Amy.

Not that everybody else around Amy didn't make mistakes. Blake is certainly right up there with Amy's father, an addict who pushes Amy further into drug abuse like Jack Lemmon does to Lee Remick in The Days of Wine and Roses, with the difference that Amy didn't need much of a push considering all the problems that she had before becoming successful. There's also a music promoter whose job is to keep Amy in the public eye, which clearly doesn't always mesh with Amy's mental health needs.

All of this -- and we get voiceover interviews from a bunch of people, along with home video footage and other archival footage from studio sessions and public performances -- plays out over those performances, where we see Amy writing some extremely personal songs, such as one titled "Rehab". She does eventually go into rehab a couple of times, with the paparazzi hounding her, and obviously it only has a temporary effect.

Amy is a fascinating story of tragedy of a singer I really only knew about from the personal problems, not being a huge fan of jazz. There are a lot of interviews here that work well, and some really insightful comments from the people who were famous for reasons unrelated to Amy, such as Tony Bennett's comment right at the end. I did, however, have a problem with some of the archive footage, which I found myself thinking more and more over the course of the movie was being manipulated, if not some outright reenactments. The closing credits and everything I read indicate it's all real footage, but still, things like the flashbulbs of the paprazzi came across to me as though they were edited to appear even harsher than they would have been in real life.

It's tough to say who's most at fault for Amy Winehouse's untimely death, or whether anybody would even have been able to stop it considering how young she was when all her demons started manifesting themselves. There's a lot of fault on display here, and a lot of people trying to justify what they did. But Amy Winehouse also left behind some incredibly good music, even if like me you're not much of a jazz fan.

Amy is available on Amazon streaming and did get a DVD release, although I think the DVD might be out of print.

Home of the Brave

Some weeks back, TCM brought in frequent guest co-host Donald Bogle to present a night of movies about movies from 1949 dealing with racial issues alongside Ben Mankiewicz. One of the movies they showed was one I hadn't blogged about before, Home of the Brave. So I recorded it, and having a long weekend for Christmas, sat down to watch it and do a post on here.

The movie opens on a Pacific island during World War II, where a couple of soldiers are discussing a mission they were on and how one of the other soldiers on the mission, Pvt. Peter Moss (James Edwards) is being seen by an army psychiatrist (Jeff Corey) because the mission left Moss with psychosomatic paralysis.

Flash back to before the mission. This is a voluntary mission to go to a neighboring island and survey it as part of the advance against the Japanese. Maj. Robinson (Douglas Dick) is in command, and has already brought in cartographer Finch (Lloyd Bridges), and soldiers Sgt. Mingo (Frank Lovejoy) and Cpl. T.J. Everett (Steve Brodie). The only surveyor who volunteered for the mission is Moss, who happens to be black.

This of course was set during World War II, which was before President Truman integrated the military, so having a black guy be part of the mission was going to controversial in any case, but making it voluntary is a way to get around any possible issues of historical inaccuracy. As for the four soldiers, Finch and Moss went to high school together and were basketball teammates, so he's supposedly the one guy who isn't supposed to have any racist views. The Major and Mingo are both trying to do their jobs, but growing up in a segregated country, they of course have bigoted attitudes in the back of their mind. T.J., however, has them in the front of his mind. Moss, understandably, carries a lot of resentment, expecting every white person to be racist to him.

Still, since Robinson is trying to be professional and there is a mission to carry out, he's going to try do the best he can with the volatile situation he's been given. Mingo gets shot in the shoulder, and is eventually going to have to have his arm amputated. But things get worse when Finch calls Moss a "ni-", stopping himself before finishing the word although everybody knows what he was going to say and Moss knows what even Finch was thinking. Just after this, Finch gets shot as well, telling Moss to keep on with the mission which is more important.

Moss is beside himself over not being able to save Finch, but eventually takes the maps back to the beach since that's the mission. Finch wasn't killed by the Japanese shot, instead getting captured and tortured by the Japanese, and that is what brings about Moss' paralysis.

The story of the mission presented in Home of the Brave is interesting enough on its own, with the social commentary of racism adding an element that makes the movie more worth a watch. Apparently, the movie is based on a play where the social element was anti-Semitism, but since Hollywood had already covered that topic with Crossfire and Gentlemen's Agreement, the topic got changed to racism. This gave James Edwards his first big role, and he shines, although the supporting cast is mostly good even if the characters all might seem a bit formulaic 70 years on.

One thing that bothered me was the ending, which seemed a bit too pat and happy, and not like what might have happened in real life back in World War II. Neither Mingo nor Moss would have had a completely changed world view like what the movie implies. I noticed it right away watching the movie, and Bogle pointed it out in the post-movie commentary with Ben Mankiewicz. But the question of how we get to a point where the sort of reconciliation Mingo and Moss had might actually be realistis was left unanswered.

So, although Home of the Brave definitely has its flaws, it's still more than worth a watch. The TCM Shop does list is as being available on DVD.

Underwater with the Maltese Falcon

A lot of the movies I blog about here are recorded off of TCM and available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive. Every now and then, I see one that's coming up on TCM and watch it so I can blog about it because of the upcoming airing. That's the case with Mara Maru, which will be on TCM early tomorrow morning at 4:00 AM (or overnight tonight if you're out in the Pacific time zone).

Errol Flynn plays Gregory Mason, who at the start of the movie is doing some undersea welding on the hull of his boat docked somewhere around Manila or whatever port handles the cargo for Manila. He's called topside because there's some news about his business partner Andy Callahan (Richard Webb). He's drunk in a bar, but has been blabbering on about some alleged treasure.

Andy is in an estranged marriage with Stella (Ruth Roman), who doesn't want to be in the Philippines and wants to return home to Americal Andy and Gregory only being here because they served in World War II together when the Philippines was still a US possession and think that there are still good business opportunities in the now-independent country.

And then Gregory gets summoned to the house of one Brock Benedict, who we know is a Bad Guy in part because of the pompous name like Brock Benedict and in part because the role is played by Raymond Burr before he played Perry Mason on TV and started becoming a good guy. Brock knows that Gregory and Andy were on a PT boat together during the war, and that they survived the boat's sinking by the Japanese. Brock and Andy have learned that one of the passengers they were evacuating was carrying some sort of treasure, the buried treasure that Andy was raving about in the bar. Brock would like Gregory to help him find it.

Not that Gregory has much choice, what with a man like Brock funding the salvage operation. It doesn't help that Andy gets killed with the murder carried out in such a way as to frame Gregory. Stella decides she's going to stay behind to get her share of the buried treasure, although it wouldn't be stupid to wonder whether or not she and Gregory are going to fall in love by the end of the story and whether that emotion is sincere on the part of either or the both of them.

Of course, with Andy dead, Gregory is the only one who knows the precise location of that PT boat's sinking. He also has the good sense to realize that Brock means no good, and is planning to double-cross Gregory once the location of the PT boat is revealed. So Gregory decides he's going to give a false location at first to see how Brock and Stella will respond. Eventually they get to the real location, and it turns out that there actually is a treasure. But who will get away with it? And will anybody get away considering that there's a typhoon approaching?

While I was watching Mara Maru, I couldn't help but think of The Maltese Falcon, since the broad idea between the two stories has a lot in common. Not that this is anywhere near the Humphrey Bogart movie. It was made right near the end of Errol Flynn's time at Warner Bros., and he had aged quite a bit over the previous few years. A lot of people consider it one of Flynn's worst movies from his Warner Bros. days (some of his final movies might well be much worse), although to be honest, I didn't think it was anywhere near that bad. It's formulaic and by-the-numbers with an absolutely silly ending, but none of that is Flynn's fault. There's a lot better with Flynn out there, but if you want to be entertained for an hour and a half, you'll get that from Mara Maru.

Mara Maru does seem to have received a DVD release from the Warner Archive, but for whatever reason it's only showing up at Amazon but not the TCM Shop.

If you like Noël Coward....

"Noël" happens to be the French word for "Christmas", but it's just a coincidence that I recently got around to watching Private Lives so that I could do a review on it here.

The movie starts out with a wedding, that of Elyot Chase (Robert Montgomery) getting married to Sibyl (Una Merkel). It's a fairly big British wedding. Cut to a second wedding, this one a much more modest affair in France, but betweeen two Britons, Victor Prynne (Reginald Denny) and Amanda (Norma Shearer), as though they're eloping. There's some fairly obvious foreshadowing here that the two couples are going to meet, even if you don't already know the plot.

After the two weddings, we cut to what is probably the French Riviera for the honeymoon. Elyot and Sibyl have booked a nice suite overlooking the Mediterranean, while Victor and Amanda have also booked a nice suite with a Mediterranean view. Again, you can guess that they're going to meet out on the terrace even if you didn't know anything about the plot or what to expect from a Noël Coward movie.

Victor and Elyot could probably get along together, and Sibyl and Amanda could probably also get along together. But there's one minor little problem. OK, it's not so minor. Elyot had previously been married to Amanda, and you can imagine not wanting to meet your ex-spouse on your honeymoon with your new spouse!

There's a bigger problem, however, which is that in some ways, Elyot and Amanda never really fell out of love. Or, they fell out of love but back into love repeatedly, with the divorce coming during one of those times when they were out of love. Now that the two have met each other again after a separation of some time, they realize that the old passion has returned, which really ought to create problems.

Technically, it does, as the two decide to run off with each other to enjoy a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. This time, they say, things are going to be different. Of course, that's not going to happen, and the couple is soon going to realize why they got divorced in the first place, as they start bickering in between bouts of falling back into love. But since they already got divorced once, you have to assume that they're going to reach the breaking point again.

Indeed they do, but this time things get more complicated in that while they're in separate bedrooms of a suite waiting the night out so that can part for good, Victor and Sibyl show up after having searched for the couple for some time. You can only imagine how awkward things are going to be in the morning after everybody wakes up....

I have to admit that I didn't particularly care for Private Lives, but at least I can understand why people who are fans of Noël Coward would enjoy the play in general and this version of it as well. To me, the dialogue came across as Coward thinking he was witter than he actually was, at least when he was writing this play. (Apparently, he originally wrote it for himself to be in the Elyot part, which he did on the stage.) There's a rapid-fire sense to the plot that even Howard Hawks would find impressive, although in my view it doesn't work as well as it does in a Hawks movie like His Girl Friday. I also found the characters irritating, as Elyot and Amanda's bickering quickly grew thin.

But there were also some plot difficulties that I had. I couldn't help but think that the play might be more interesting if Elyot and Amanda didn't run off when they first spotted each other in the adjoining suites, but instead found their old feelings coming back slowly over the course of the play while dealing with their current spouses. And then when Victor and Sibyl show up for the final act, I would have had them see the destruction Elyot and Amanda had wrought upon them and each other, and decided that Elyot and Amanda deserved each other while Victor and Sibyl can live happily ever after together.

Still, a lot of the IMDb reviews really like this movie, so I'm sure a lot of readers will probably enjoy it, too. Watch for yourself; the movie should be available from the Warner Archive although the TCM Shop has an odd tendency to claim some of the Warner Archive standalones are only available on backorder.

Thursday Movie Picks #337: Holiday Action Films

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. Today is Christmas Eve, so it's not surprising that the theme is "Holiday Action Movies". Now note that it only says "Holiday" action movies, not "Christmas" action movies. So technically we can use the holiday(s) of our choice. I did wind up picking one non-Die Hard movie that was set at Christmas time:

Ocean's Eleven (1960). Holiday: New Year's Eve. Frank Sinatra comes up with a plan involving all his Rat Pack friends, here playing World War II veterans, to rob the casinos of Las Vegas at the stroke of midnight between Dec. 31 and Jan. 1. As with all heist movies, things don't quite go according to plan.

The Day of the Jackal (1973). Holiday: Liberation Day. French generals, disgruntled with the way the Algerian War of Independence is going, try to assassinate President De Gaulle. When their plot fails, they hire a professional assassin, the Jackal (Edward Fox), to do the deed. The police determine that something is up, and very determined police detective Michel Lonsdale pursues someone he knows is out there even if he doesn't know who he's looking for. The Jackal plans to shoot de Gaulle at a military parade markin the anniversary of the World War II liberation of Paris.

Trapped in Paradise (1994). Holiday: Christmas Eve. OK, this is more of a comedy than an action movie, although there's a bank robbery gone wrong. Nicolas Cage has a pair of incompetent brothers (Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey) he's jost picked up from having gotten out of prison on parole. While in prison, the brothers learned about a foolproof bank robbery plot in the idyllic small town of Paradise, PA. Of course, the brothers are fools and the plot isn't foolproof, as things spiral out of control.

FXM for Christmas, and maybe some other channels too

TCM's been running Christmas-themed movies non-stop since about last Friday, and is going to be doing so through the end of the prime-time lineup tomorrow night. Come December 26, it's increasingly the case that places act as though the Christmas season is completely over. (What ever happened to the 12 days of Christmas?)

Over on FXM, in years past, they've run a loop of the Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol from 1951. This year, they're doing something different. At roughly the end of the normal daytime Retro programming block, or starting at 2:30 PM today, they're running that version. But after that's over, at 4:20 PM, they're running a 2019 version, which FX made last year as a three-part TV miniseries starring Guy Pearce. Those two versions will be alternating on a loop through to about 3:30 AM Saturday.

I looked briefly at the other movie channels, first with the listing service set for 4AM on Friday and then at 4PM, and there's surprisingly little in the way of Christmas-themed movies. Starz has a double feature of the 2019 version of Little Women and Elf both Friday morning and Friday night, but in between there's a marathon of Outlander.

SHOxBET also has a double feature on Friday afternoon, with a pair I haven't seen, One Crazy Christmas followed by Holly Day; the synopsis of the latter makes it sound like a reworking of A Christmas Carol.

I suppose if you want some real Christmas cheer, you could tune in to More Max. At 5:10 AM tomorrow, they're running Glengarry Glen Ross, which as everybody knows is the ultimate Christmas movie, now, isn't it?

Merry Christmas to everybody!

Star Trek II

Not that KAAAAAAAAHN!

Another of the movies that I had the chance to record during one of the free preview weekends that I hadn't yet blogged about was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Recently, I decided to watch it so that I could do a blog post on it here.

William Shatner returns as Capt. James T. Kirk, who is actually now an Admiral and earthbound, since he's too old to be commanding a starship something shown by his need for eyeglasses. (They didn't have Lasik when the movie was made.) Kirk is running the simulation for new captains, with Saavik (Kirstie Alley) about to become the new captain of the current incarnation of the Enterprise.

Cut to some part of the universe out in the middle of nowhere. A group of scientsts led by Dr. Carol Marcus (Bibi Besch) and her son David (Merritt Butrick). They're working on something called "Genesis", which will supposedly be able to rearrange molecules to create life out of nothing. There's obvious use as a weapon, and Starfleet would like it, which irritates Marcus and her colleagues.

Meanwhile, the Genesis folks need a completely lifeless planet for their experiments. After all, if they can rearrange molecules to create life out of nothing, then the rearrangement is going to kill anything already living. They think they've found one in Ceti Alpha 6, but they're also getting some odd readings, so they send in a ship captained by Terrell (Paul Winfield) and Chekov (Walter Koenig) to investigate. They find the remains of the S.S. Botany Bay.

This is a big problem, because as Chekov remembers, the Botany Bay was captained by Khan (Ricardo Montalban), who was a survivor of the eugenics wars of the 1990s, and survived in stasis with his crew before they were revived by Kirk's Enterprise in the Space Seed episode of the original ceries. Khan was a villian and super strong from all that genetic engineering, so he's easily able to overpower Chekov and Terrell and take their ship, going first for the research station where the Genesis project is headquartered before going after the Enterprise.

The Enterprise just happens to be the closest ship in the area to where Khan is, so they're sent to intercept Khan, even though the Enterprise's refitting isn't complete. There are further complications when it turns out that Dr. Marcus is Kirk's ex-wife, making David the son he never saw and didn't know about. But getting Khan, who also recognizes the Genesis project's potential as a weapon, is the priority.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is a pretty good adventure movie, even if you didn't know anything about the Star Trek franchise. It just happens to be set out in space instead of on the ocean or some other way a pursuit would make sense. William Shatner is definitely nobody's idea of a great actor, but for a movie like this you don't need great acting, so Shatner's bombast works well here.

Even though it helps to know the back story of Star Trek, I think anyone can appreciate Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It's definitely worth a watch.

Minor Watson, 1889-1965

Minor Watson in a production still from Mister 880 (1950)

Today marks the birth anniversary of Minor Watson, one of those character actors whose name you've probably seen in the credits of a bunch of movies even if you couldn't recognize the face. Watson was born on this day in 1889.

In looking through Watson's list of credits, there are a lot of movies that I've mentioned in the past, and some relatively big ones, such as Dead End and Boys' Town in the 1930s; Yankee Doodle Dandy or Courage of Lassie in the 1940s; and Mister 880 or The Star in the 1950s, part of a career that lasted two dozen years if you don't count a brief foray into silent cinema in the 1910s.

Of his appearances, I think I currently have Princess O'Rourke on the DVR from when TCM did their Olivia de Havilland tribute as part of Summer Under the Stars, and They Died With Their Boots On on DVD as part of an Errol Flynn box set. In any case, watch TCM long enough and you're certain to come across one of those many small roles.

The Alphabet Murders

My sister was a big fan of Agatha Christie when she was a teenager. I never really got into reading mysteries, but when one or another of the movies based on Christie's stories has shown up, I've always been willing to give them a try. Recently, that meant watching The Alphabet Murders, based on Christie's book The A.B.C. Murders.

Tony Randall shows up, sans make-up, at the beginning of the credits to inform us that he's going to be playing Hercule Poirot, Christie's Belgian private eye who just loves a good mystery. Poirot shows up in London to see his tailor, followed by a man from Scotland Yard, Capt. Hastings (Robert Morley). Scotland Yard ostensibly wants to keep Poirot safe since his being harmed while in England would create an international incident. But the real reason is that Scotland Yard doesn't want Poirot involved in investigating a murder on English soil.

Of course, you just know that there's going to be a murder and that Poirot is going to wind up investigating it. At a public swimming pool, the clown Albert Aachen, who does a high-diving routine, gets killed by a poison dart to the neck, the killer leaving behind a copy of a guidebook called ABC London. Not long after that, a woman with the odd name of Amanda Beatrice Cross (Anita Ekberg) shows up where Poirot is taking a steam bath and gives Poirot a bowling scorecard.

So Poirot goes to the bowling alley, which is where he meets Betty Barnard, an instructor there. Not that Poirot needs a bowling instructor, but that's another story. Anyhow Barnard gets killed, and Poirot puts two and two together. The first victim had the initials AA and the second BB, so the next is going to have the initials CC.

Scotland Yard, meanwhile, knows fully well that Poirot is trying to investigate, and at every turn, Hastings and his boss Inspector Japp (Maurice Denham) try to get Poirot deported and sent back to Belgium. But every time, Poirot is able to outwit them, on his way to ultimately solving the murders. Well, with a little help from the police who keep him from getting bumped off.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Poirot learns that Amanda's psychologist has the initials DD, being a man named Duncan Doncaster (Guy Rolfe). He also learns that the CC who seems to be the next victim is one Carmichael Clarke, who has family set to inherit a large sum of money should he die. But how does it all tie together?

Frankly, I found the mystery in The Alphabet Murders to be rather convoluted and unsatisfying. I think that's in no small part because director Frank Tashlin and the writers seem to have decided to make this a rather more comic mystery, with the casting of Randall. Tony Randall is not a bad actor by any means, and can certainly do comedy. But I get the impression Tashlin wanted Randall to be way over the top here, and a little bit of Randall's Poirot goes a long, long way.

I thought the print TCM ran didn't look so good, and since it was 4:3, I figured it had to have been panned-and-scanned. But a look at IMDb suggests that it was in fact filmed this way.

If I were going to introduce people to Agatha Christie movies, I think I'd start with the 1974 Murder on the Orient Express. I also like the Margaret Rutherford Marples, even though supposedly Rutherford isn't anything like the Marple that Christie wrote. The Alphabet Murders would be far down the list.

The Decks Ran Red

Dorothy Dandridge was TCM's Star of the Month back in September. She didn't make all that many movies so TCM didn't run many, but there was one that I hadn't seen before and recorded: The Decks Ran Red. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

The SS Berwind is a ship docked in a small port in New Zealand, owned by an American shipping company based out of Los Angeles. The ship's captain has recently died suddenly, which causes some dissension in the crew's ranks, with the cook and chief steward jumping ship, and other crew members thinking the captain didn't just die of a heart attack. Henry Scott (Broderick Crawford), in particular, seems to have it in for the management and already seems to be planning a mutiny with his friend and crewmate Leory Martin (Stuart Whitman).

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, Edwin Rummell (James Mason) is the first mate aboard a cruise ship whose home port is Los Angeles and which is owned by the same company that owns the Berwind. The shipping line decides to promote Rummell to take over the Berwind even though this means flying him all the way across the Pacific, and also overlooking Moody, the Berwind's own first mate, because he's too old and probably should have been pushed into retirement anyway.

So Rummell arrives on board the Berwind to find a tense situation. This is exacerbated by the fact that the ship had to find a cook at very short notice, since getting crappy food is one of the things that will make a crew even more likely to become malcontents and mutiny. The cook that the get is a Māori named Vic, who has agreed to be the ship's cook only on the condition that he's allowed to bring his wife Mahia (Dorothy Dandridge) aboard with him; she effectively gets to be the ship's steward.

Needless to say, the presence of Mahia really gets the crew's hormones flowing, resulting in more dissension. And we also learn what Henry's real intention is. He doesn't want to mutiny; instead, he's found an obscure bit of maritime law that someone who finds a derelict ship and rescues it is entitled to half the value of the ship and its cargo. So his plan is to waterlog the ship but not enough to sink it, and then claim to find the derelict ship. I'd think this wouldn't work since he was one of the crew members and certainly the shipping line would know this, but run with the story anyway. Henry and Leroy plan to pull off the nefarious scheme at some point. The bring in a third party, Mace, becaue he's got a gun. But he talks in his sleep, and that forces Henry and Leroy to kill him!

The disappearance of Mace raises one more alarm among the crew, together with the death of Moody and Henry's trying to incite a mutiny which is of course not really what he wants, but is an excuse to get rid of the officers before he can get rid of the unsuspecting crew. Eventually, Henry and Leroy kill the four men on watch in the engine room, and that sets off the "mutiny" and the climactic struggle for Rummill to regain control of the Berwind.

In terms of storytelling and visual style, The Decks Ran Red made me think of another Mason movie I blogged about recently, Cry Terror! This shouldn't be surprising, since both movies were directed by Andrew Stone and made by him and his wife Virginia. It's a no-nonsense style that plays out more like a programmer than a big-budget movie, and frankly, it's something that works well for both movies. Mason and Dandridge are both quite competent if unspectacular. Whitman does OK with an early role, while Crawford has fallen into his bombastic style that isn't necessarily bad here, but makes you wonder why anybody would follow him as a leader.

I somewhat wish the movie had been made in color (there's a brief splash of red on the word "RED" in the title card), but that's a minor quibble. While nobody will think of The Decks Ran Red as the highlight in the career of anybody who made it, it's a definitely effective little film, and not a bad way to spend 84 minutes.

Wings for the Eagle

One of the movies that TCM ran during the Star of the Month salute to Ann Sheridan that I hadn't blogged about before is Wings for the Eagle. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

Dennis Morgan plays Corky Jones, a habitual shirker who BSes his way through an encounter at a gas station where he meets Roma Maple (Ann Sheridan). Roma is the wife of Brad (Jack Carson), who just happens to be an old classmate of Corky's from college as well as a former football teammate who would be 4-F because of a knee injury. Corky would be prime draft material, and plans to keep himself out of the draft. (It should be pointed out that World War II has not started at the beginning of the movie, although you could be forgiven for not realizing this. The attack on Pearl Harbor comes up halfway through the movie or so.)

One way to get out of the war effort is to be involved in an essential industry, and the Maples happen to live near one of those essential industries, the Lockheed aircraft plant. So Corky decides he's going to get himself a job there to be able to stay out of the war. Brad, for his part, seems to have less earning potential because of that knee injury, and that's a constant source of tension between him and Roma.

Corky does get a job at the plant and, because he's rooming with the Maples because of the housing crunch, that really puts a strain on Brad and Roma's relationship. They decide to separate, which lets Corky think he can put the movies on Roma. He also moves out, getting a room in the house of one of his bosses, Jake Hanso (George Tobias). Jake has a son in Pete (Russell Arms) who is studying to be able to join the Air Corps, since the modern-day US Air Force would only be organized as such after World War II.

Disaster strikes when it comes to light that Jake's citizenship papers never came through; the aircraft plant being "essential" for the war effort, it's no place for legal aliens, even if they've been living in the country long enough to have an adult son who got his citizenship by virtue of having been born in America. Jake starts running a lunch joint across the street from the plant, while Pete says to hell with joining the Air Corps; any country that would treat Dad the way it did doesn't deserve Pete.

Meanwhile, Corky's being an even smoother operator in trying to woo Roma than you normally get from a Jack Carson character, so the roles are somewhat reversed here. Not that Brad is out of love with Roma, but their situation is complicated until Brad is finally able to pass the application test to get a job at the aircraft plant. The Japanese finally attack Pearl Harbor, and that changes everybody.

Wings for the Eagle was released in July 1942, so right in the middle of World War II and a time when the audiences on the home front needed a lot of cheering up. As such, the movie is pure wartime propaganda, with the need to inculcate a desire to serve crowding out more important considerations like a good story. I found the whole thing fairly cringeworthy, with neither of the male leads particularly likeable. Some people might enjoy the movie for its contemporary look at the early stages of America's involvement in World War II, but I think that's about it. Still, as always, you may want to watch and judge for yourself.

Forrest Gump Builds His Dream House

Another of the movies that I had the chance to record during one of the free preview weekends was the very 1980s comedy The Money Pit. It's on DVD and is going to be on multiple times in the near future, starting with tomorrow morning at 5:00 AM on The Movie Channel (three hours later if you only have the west coast feed).

The movie starts off in Rio de Janeiro with the weddng of Walter Fielding Sr., who on being asked about his son not being at the wedding, comments that his son knows way. Cut to a scene of Watler Fielding Jr. (Tom Hanks) readnig a letter from his father revealing that Dad has been embezzling from the law firm and has taken a powder to Brazil, leaving our Walter with a seven-figure debt for the him to repay.

Walter is a lawyer in Manhattan, which has a severe housing crunch in the go-go 80s. He's married to Anna (Shelley Long), a concert violinist who is on her second marriage, having formerly been married to an extremely temperamental conductor, Max Beissart (Alexander Godunov). Apparently part of the divorce settlement let Walter and Anna stay in Max's (well, it would have been Anna's as well before the divorce) apartment while Max is in Europe. The couple think they have several months before Max returns, but he's cut his work in Europe short, so he's returning now.

With that, Walter and Anna need a place to stay. Finding one is going to be difficult, not only with the high rents, but the fact that Walter is trying to pay off all those debts. Walter has a friend who's a real estate agent, but doesn't realize that the agent has any number of properties that it's important for him to get off the books, no matter what. There are a lot of properties that are no good, until the couple gets to the one that's clearly too good to be true.

Estelle (Maureen Stapleton) and her husband were supposedly wealthy, living in a million-dollar mansion, but circumstances forced the husband to leave, leaving Estelle in the lurch and needing to sell her grand old house right now, at a pittance of its actual assessed value. This ought to set off all sorts of warning lights and sirens in a good lawyer's mind, but either Walter is so clouded by his need to find a place to live as quickly as possible, or he's just that dim, that he doesn't get a contract that would allow him to back out of the deal within 30 days if things with the house aren't up to snuff. Amazingly, the couple buys the house.

With the plot so far and a title like The Money Pit, it should be no difficulty to guess what happens next, which is that the house starts displaying all the problems that it miraculously didn't have the first time Walter and Anna were visiting. First it's the doorbell and the front door itself, then the electric, and the water, and the grand staircase, and on and on. And none of the contractors really want to help Walter; apparently he's developed a bad reputation. Finally one, Curly (Philip Bosco), and his team do. But their constant presence in the house while the couple are still trying to live there puts yet another strain on the couple's marriage.

It would be easy to see a plot synopsis of The Money Pit and immediately compare it to something like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. But that wouldn't be quite fair; after all, movies about moving out the the suburbs and a better house not being all it's cracked up to be go back to the beginning of the 20th century with a short called The Suburbanite (and I wouldn't be surprised if there's an even earlier one). But the two movies are deliberately different in tone. Blandings is more of an intelligent comedy while The Money Pit isn't intending to be anything more than a broad physical comedy displaying all of the stereotypical excesses of the 1980s.

And it's in that vein that The Money Pit largely succeeds. It's not the world's greatest movie by any means, but the comedy mostly works, and it'll certainly entertain you for the 90 minutes or so that it's on. It's easy to forget that Hanks started out with comedy before the 1990s, and he was pretty capable at it too, as The Money Pit shows. Long is OK, and Godunov is hilarious. It's a shame he died much too young.

So if you like 80s comedy, then you'll definitely love The Money Pit.

TCM Remembers 2020

It seems as though the TCM Remembers piece remembering all the people who died in 2020, or at least all the people who died since the airing of the 2019 TCM Remembers piece, is finally running yet. I haven't caught it yet on the channel; I figured right before the start of prime time would be a good time for TCM to run it. And the movies the played on Tuesday and Wednesday left a fair bit of time to stick the piece in between the end of the movie and 8:00 PM. But no airing in either slot.

TCM has a presence on Youtube, and I figured the piece might have been posted there, but apparently not. And the TCM website itself is so lousy that I wonder whether it's been updated at all in the past few days. Somebody on the TCM boards posted a day or two ago that the piece had been posted to Facebook, which I don't do. But it also was posted to Twitter, which I do use on and off. The above is the direct link to the Twitter post containing the video, if the embedding below doesn't work properly, which wouldn't surprise me considering that I've got the column for posts on the blog set to an odd width.

As this historic year comes to a close, we'd like to recognize those who made history through their contributions as filmmakers, actors and icons.

Today we remember those we lost but will never forget. #TCMRemembers pic.twitter.com/8KpPOhXG4q

— TCM (@tcm) December 16, 2020

Thursday Movie Picks #336: Directed by Women

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week, the theme is films directed by a woman. I thought some about it, and had two movies in mind that fit a common theme, and tried to think of a third. Unfortunately, the third one was made-for-TV according to IMDb, but considering the subject material for my three selections, I think it's worth bending the rules a bit to use it:

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018). Directed by Pamela B. Green, this documentary, as you can guess, tells the story of Alice Guy-Blaché. Guy wasn't just a pioneering woman director, she was a pioneering director period, making movies starting in the 1890s when anybody making movies was a pioneer. (The humorous story is that she was working for a company making camera equipment as a secretary, and her bosses let her make short films to promote their equipment on the proviso that it not interfere with her day job.) Guy worked through the 1910s, spending a fair bit of time in America. Her movies are in the public domain, and the last I checked, Youtube has copies of The Birth, Life, and Death of Jesus and Falling Leaves.

Scandal: The Trial of Mary Astor (2018). In 1936, actress Mary Astor was making Dodsworth. She was also involved in a bitter custody battle with her husband for custody of their daughter Marilyn (who appears in the documentary). The husband had apparently obtained a copy of Astor's diary which had some entries that might scandalize Hollywood, and threatened to use it against Mary. (Both parties to the case had rather serious flaws, however.) Amazingly, Astor was allowed to make Dodsworth by day, going to court at night for the proceedings in the custody battle. Alexa Foreman, former TCM employee, directed, and in his will Robert Osborne bequeathed her the amount of money the rights holders to Dodsworth were looking for so that she could use the clips in the movie.

The Brothers Warner (2007). Cass Warner Sperling, a granddaughter of Harry Warner, directed this movie about the four brothers who founded one of Hollywood's more celebrated studios, and ultimately part of a megacorporation. Sam died young (the day before The Jazz Singer premiered); Harry and Albert sold their stock in the company in 1956 in a deal that the fourth brother, Jack, engineered so that he could snooker the other brothers into giving up their control of the studio, allowing him to take control. This was made for TV (I don't know if it premiered on TCM, but that's where I saw it), and has lots of interviews with descendants of the Warners and som other studio heads too.

The Juggler

Back at the beginning of the year, TCM ran a couple of nights of movies appropriate for Holocaust Remembrance Day, which gave me the chance to record one I had seen show up cut to pieces for one of the digital sub-channels, The Juggler.

The movie opens with a title card telling us that this is Haifa, in 1949. Haifa is the big port city in the then newly independent state of Israel. As mentioned prominently in Exodus and one or two other movies, after the end of World War II and the liberation of the concentration camps, Jewish refugees tried to make their way to Palestine, only to be blocked by the British mandate, but once Israel became independent, the country was able to take in as many refugees as it could handle.

Among the refugees is Hans Muller (Kirk Douglas), a German Jew who had been a juggler and clown in the circus in his native country, and successful enough to be prominent and to have picked up good English along the way (in the context of the movie, Muller doesn't speak Hebrew but does speak English; this isn't just the characters speaking English for the sake of a Hollywood movie). But then he and his family were put in the concentration camps and he was the only one to survive, with his wife and children being murdered.

As a result of the horrors Muller saw, he's got a bad case of PTSD, not that anyone really knew all that much about it in those days, and certainly not in a new country like Israel which had much more pressing needs, like how to get all these new refugees into appropriate work. Muller is put in the barracks of the main refugee camp, which isn't for him because he's had enough of camps, especially if he can see any barbed wire.

So Muller escapes and makes his way into Haifa, although where he's going is a good question. In Haifa a policeman sees him and Muller sees the policeman too. Muller, thanks to his experiences in Germany, has a primal fear of the police, and acts like a cornered animal, trying to fight his way out when the policeman finally does catch up to him. Muller knocks the policeman unconscious and, thinking he's killed the guy, flees.

The cop is found by a Dutch tourist (John Banner) and the police investigate, led by Detective Kami (Paul Stewart). Muller falls in with a group of adolescents, most of whom are with a school group, although there's one kid, Yehoshua (Joey Walsh) who isn't. When Yehoshua learns that Muller was a juggler, he wants to become one himself.

The two eventually wind up at a kibbutz in Galilee near the Syrian border, an area which was mined to prevent the Syrians from invading, since at the time they still held the strategically important Golan Heights. Yehoshua goes boundering off and sets off one of the mines, knocking him unconscious and breaking his leg. The kibbutzniks save both Yehoshua and Muller, Muller being put up in a small house by Ya'el (Milly Vitale).

Predictably, Muller finds himself falling in love with Ya'el, although keeping everybody from finding out the truth about his past is in the back of his mind, and unsurprisingly, the police are closing in on him, leading to the movie's finale.

The Juggler is a movie that's fallen into relative obscurity, and I think it's somewhat understandable why. The movie was produced by Stanley Kramer and released by Columbia, and I wouldn't be surprised if rights issues help up a DVD release. Stanley Kramer's involvement, combined with the subject material, make it an obvious candidate for falling into the trap of heavy-handed social commentary, and that does happen to an extent here. In particular, the movie ends too suddenly, as if it didn't know how to resolve the issues it set up.

On the bright side, there's a good performance from Kirk Douglas, with the highlight being a performance he puts on for the children of the kibbutz. The movie was also the first Hollywood production made on location in Israel, which also works well even if it's only in black and white. Paul Stewart puts in a professional performance. I don't know that he ever got to be a lead, but it's easy to see why he was able to work for decades in so many movies and TV performances as a supporting character. Vitale and Walsh are adequate.

The DVD of The Juggler does seem to be available at Amazon, but last I checked, not at the TCM Shop.

National Film Registry 2020

For quite some time, TCM had a blank spot on their schedule for tonight which, as in most recent years in the past, has been given over to a night of movies selected for the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. TCM has to embargo any mention of what films they're running until after the announcement of the full 25 selections is made. I figured the Library of Congress was announcing the selections today, since TCM has the programming tonight, but it turns out the list was released yesterday.

There is, as always, a mix of the old and the new, or at least the relatively new, since a movie has to be at least 10 years old to be considered, and a lot of people misunderstanding that the Registry's mission is to select movies that are culturally, historically, or artistically important. Anybody can nominate movies, and unsurprisingly, my suggestions didn't get picked. (Note that the link in the 2014 post for the complete list of films on the Registy is broken; the complete list can now be found here.

I don't know the details of how TCM selects which films from this year's selections are picked for airing on TCM, although I'd guess it's a combination of features that they already have the rights to plus shorts that the Library can help with. This is probably how The Battle of the Century from 1927 kicks things off at 8:00 PM. The other selections are:
Lilies of the Field (1963) at 8:30 PM;
Illusions (1982) at 10:15 PM;
The Joy Luck Club (1993) at 11:00 PM;
Cabin in the Sky (1943) at 1:30 AM; and
The Man With the Golden Arm (1956) at 3:15 AM.

Hard to Handle

Er, not quite this

Another of the movies that I had the chance to wtach off my DVR recently is the pre-code Hard to Handle. This one got a DVD release on one of Warner Home Video's Forbidden Hollywood collections, and last I checked is available for streaming at Amazon Prime.

The movie stars off at a dance marathon that has been going on for weeks, with just two couples left vying for the $1,000 prize. One is a married couple with an uncredited Sterling Holloway as the husband; the other is a platonic couple with Ruth Waters (Mary Brian) as the female half. The contest is being run by PR man Lefty Merrill (James Cagney). Lefty has become enamored of Ruth over the course of the marathon, but has to deal with Ruth's mother Lil (Ruth Donnelly).

Eventually Ruth and her partner win the contest, but when Lefty goes to the office to get the prize money, he finds that his associate has stiffed him, running off with all the proceeds from the contest, including the prize money. Lefty has to beat a hasty escape, although he goes to meet Ruth later. At this point we find that Lil is just as much a chiseler as Lefty, and will do anything to make certain that her daughter marries into wealth.

After some more failed schemes, Lefty decides he'd do best to get out of California, and high-tails it to New York, where he runs into Ruth again; she's now working for a famous studio photographer. Lefty hopes to win back Ruth, while Lil vacillates between suggesting Ruth marry the photographer or Lefty, depending on how well Lefty is doing financially.

Lefty tries some more schemes, one for a reducing creme, one promoting a college, and then one for the sort of land deal that was a stereotypical scam back in those days. That one bring him into contact with Miss Reeves (Claire Dodd), who could also be a romantic rival for Ruth. But perhaps the law may also catch up with Lefty.

As I was watching Hard to Handle, I couldn't help but think of a Warner Bros. movie from the previous year, High Pressure; that one has William Powell as a similar PR man whose schemes are of dubious legality. I think of the two, I liked Hard to Handle less, largely because the script requires Cagney to be even more of an obnoxious con artist than Powell was asked to be. I found it quite hard to have any sympathy for him. Cagney tries the best he can, and the script certainly isn't his fault. Ruth Donnelly plays quite well off of him, and gets a bunch of great lines.

Overall, Hard to Handle certainly isn't the first movie I'd recommend in any of the categories it could be put into -- pre-Codes, Cagney, looks at the Depression, or so on. But I'm glad it's available as part of a box set.

In time for TCM's Star of the Month....

I mentioned last week that TCM's Star of the Month for December 2020 is a pair of stars, that being the comic duo of Laurel and Hardy. It just so happens that during the recent Thanksgiving free preview weekend, one of the Starz/Encore channels was running Stan and Ollie. I recorded it, and since it's running again tomorrow at 6:55 AM on StarzEncore (and again three hours later for those who only have the west coast feed), I watched it to do a review on here.

The movie starts off with a brief prologue in 1937, telling us how the duo of Stan Laurel (Steve Coogan) and Oliver Hardy (John C. Reilly) were Hollywood's top comic actors at the time, and visits them on the set of Way Out West. This was made by the Hal Roach studios, and we get a brief sighting of Roach, as well as frequent Laurel and Hardy foil James Finlayson. Both halves of the duo have financial issues thanks to ex-wives and Hardy's constant wagering on horses. Laurel also wants more artistic freedom, so he eventually signs a contract with Fox that Hardy doesn't; cut to a small scene of filming on Zenobia, which starred only Hardy and an elephant, not Laurel. (IMDb doesn't list any features Laurel made without Hardy at this time.)

Fast forward to 1953. They had made one movie together since the end of World War II, thanks in part to changing tastes reducing the duo's popularity. Laurel wants to make another movie based on the Robin Hood legend, but is having difficulty securing funding. So together with a theater producer, Bernard Delfont (Danny Huston), the two start off on a tour of variety halls re-enacting some of the classic skits from their movies.

Because of their relative lack of success over the past several years, Laurel and Hardy start off in small theaters well away from London, a tour reminiscent of the theater company in The Dresser. They're also getting small audiences, which makes Hardy think something's up, although Laurel keeps trying to maintain Laurel's hopes of the funding for the movie. The tour snowballs in popularity, getting larger audiences and better venues, until eventually the pair make it to London and their wives (Shirley Henderson as Lucille Hardy and Nina Arianda as Ida Kitaeva Laurel) join them in a big public relations coup.

But it's here that the team starts facing a series of setbacks. Now in London, Laurel realizes that he can go visit the producer with whom he had been in discussions over funding for that Robin Hood movie. Unfortunately, the producer had sent Laurel a telegram in Hollywood that apparently never reached Laurel, stating that funding fell through, and the studio was dropping the project, something Laurel never realized. Laurel also has some simmering resentments with Hardy over Zenobia and the contract dispute with Hal Roach, which boils over at an afterparty when an oblivious old man tries to show himself to be the team's biggest fan.

But the biggest setback comes when the pair are asked to judge the sort of seaside resort town beauty contest that Laurence Olivier's character organized in The Entertainer. The two are asked to come up on stage to announce the winner. Laurel comes up but hardy stays at the foot of the stairs, before collapsing from what is a minor heart attack, minor being defined as a heart attack that happens to somebody you don't personally know. Lucille had always been a bit worried about the tour since she knows her husband is getting old, and now with this heart attack, she wants Oliver to retire now. This even though there are still tour dates.

History tells us that Laurel and Hardy did finish the tour, with Hardy eventually retiring in 1955, a few years before his death, and Laurel more or less retiring with Hardy's retirement although staying involved in answering fan mail and giving advice to up-and-comers until his death in 1965.

I really enjoyed the performances from the two leads, although I had a few technical issues. The directing seemed mildly intrusive in the way that I had a problem with Chocolat, but nowhere near as obnoxious as Darkest Hour. There was also something mildly sterile about the production design, as though everything was all too neat and clean for what, assuming the tour started off slowly, would have been much more run down.

These are minor quibbles, however, and I very much enjoyed and recommend Stan & Ollie. The movie did get a DVD and Blu-ray release; Amazon lists the Blu-ray as being available while the TCM Shop has it on backorder.

Pretty Maids All in a Row

Another of the movies that I recently got around to watching that is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection is a really odd little thing from the early 1970s: Pretty Maids All in a Row.

The opening credits play out over a song by the Osmonds, while young Ponce (John David Carson) is driving to his high school in suburban Los Angeles and ogling all the girls, Ponce being a typical sex-obsessed teenaged male. The only thing is, he's never actually had sex. It's going to get particularly bad when Ponce finds that he's got a substitute teacher in his English class, Miss Smith (Angie Dickinson). She's hot, and she gets extremely close to Ponce. So close, in fact, that Ponce has to take a bathroom break to cool off

Except that when Ponce goes into the stalls, he notices that it looks as though there's somebody in the next stall, not moving. So he checks up on the guy, only to find that it's a young woman. And a very dead young woman, one of the football team's cheerleaders. Ponce is unsurprisingly shocked, and goes to get help.

Meanwhile, the assistant principal, Tiger McDrew (Rock Hudson) is administering an aptitude test in his office. Well, not really; he's got a "testing" sign and is a psychologist in addition to being the assistant principal, so he could administer psychological evaluation tests to students. It's just that a lot of time, the "testing" is an excuse for Tiger to get it on with one of the female students.

But Tiger has sympathy for sexless Ponce. Ponce is one of the student managers of the football team, and Tiger is the head coach in addition to all his other duties. So Tiger gets Miss Smith to agree to give Ponce some private "lessons", which is really supposed to be teaching Ponce all about sex and helping him finally get laid, or something.

Ponce's sexual quest is half of the movie's story, but of course, there's also been a murder at Ponce's school, and that's the other half of the story. Capt. Surcher (Telly Savalas) comes from the state police together with his colleague Follo (James Doohan) to investigate, after the local police chief, Poldaski (Keenan Wynn) completely screws things up. As Surcher investigates, he gets the distinct feeling that Tiger killed the cheerleader, but isn't able to prove it. To make matters worse, there's another murder, and then a third.

Pretty Maids All in a Row is a really odd little movie, since it spans a bunch of different genres. In some ways, you could imagine this having been written by somebody like Paddy Chayefsky; after all, the movie came out the same year as The Hospital, which also has murder and extremely dark comedy. In fact, however, the screenplay was written by Gene Roddenberry!

The oddness makes Pretty Maids All in a Row interesting and memorable, and in the end also enough to overcome the film's weaknesses. It really shouldn't work, but there's so much nuts going on here that you don't necessarily notice the problems until thinking about it well after the movie has ended.

Dust Be My Destiny

I've mentioned before that Warner Bros. seemed to make the most interesting social commentary movies back in the 1930s. Recently, I had the opportunity to watch another one, but this time I felt it had a surprising lack of punch: Dust Be My Destiny.

John Garfield plays Joe Bell, a man who was wrongly convicted of a crime he didn't commit, and spent 16 months in prison for it before the truth came out and was was released. He gets the hell out of town, and in hopping the trains, runs into two of the Bowery Boys, brothers Hank and Jimmy played by Billy Halop and Bobby Jordan respectively.

At one of the rail yards, these three get involved with another set of vagrants. Again, the only thing Joe's done wrong is to hop those trains without paying, but one thing leads to another and after getting into a fight with one of the other vagrants, Joe gets sent to the work farm while Hank and Jimmy ultimately wind up going west.

At the work farm, Joe meets Mabel (Priscilla Lane). She's the stepdaughter of the farm's foreman, Garreth (Stanley Ridges), and he somewhat understandably doesn't want Mabel hanging out with the criminals, even if we know that Joe isn't really a criminal to anywhere near the extent of the other guys in the farm. So of course Joe and Mabel fall in love and somehow get to keep seeing each other. Garreth generally doesn't treat Mabel so well, and now that she's seeing Joe surreptitiously, he gets even angrier, trying to hit Mabel to the point that Joe defends himself and Mabel and knocks out Garreth, who eventually dies of a heart attack.

Joe and Mabel have to flee, although they don't know yet that Garreth died. They don't have enough money for two rooms, which is a problem, because they're not married, which was of course a thing in those days. But they're in luck. A wacky promoter named Caruthers (Frank McHugh) needs a promotion for the traveling stage show, and decides to pack the audience in by having a real wedding live on stage! He needs a couple and they need a valid license since city hall is closed until morning, so this'll have to do.

Of course, the couple's pictures get taken, which means their location will be known to the general public. And since they also learn about Garreth's death and the obvious assumption on the part of the authorities that it's at the very least manslaughter if not murder (and who can blame them), Joe realizes the couple is going to have to go on the run and stay on the run. Mabel naïvely believes that if only Joe turns himself in, he'll get a fair hearing at the trial. Yeah right.

After running to another town or two, Joe gets an important photo in a bank robbery, one that a newspaper would pay big bucks for. And shockingly enough, the local editor, Mike Leonard (Alan Hale), could use a good photographer and doesn't care so much about Joe's past. But Joe's past is going to catch up to him anyway, leading to a trial and Mabel's character defense of Joe.

Dust Be My Destiny is a movie that I found I had a hard time suspending my disbelief over. There seem to be way too many coincidences here, and things that I wouldn't expect to happen in real life, such as finding Hank and Jimmy for the big trial at the end. Garfield does the best he can with the material he's given, but this stuff is second-rate material and Garfield would be in much better movies.

Dust Be My Destiny has received a standalone DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive, but I think it's another of those movies that would really be better served as part of a box set.

Thursday Movie Picks #335: Movies for Seniors/The Elderly

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. The week, the theme is Movies for Seniors/The Elderly, which isn't necessarily difficult, with me just having to look up whether or not I'd used the movies I had in mind recently. After some checking, I came up with three movies, all of which won one of the stars an Oscar:

Harry and Tonto (1974). Art Carney plays Harry, a widower who's going to have to leave his New York apartment because the building is being torn down. He finds living with his New York son intolerable, and eventually gets invited out to California by another son living there. The only thing is, Harry has a cat Tonto who can't stand to be apart from him. So no going in the hold, and the two go on a cross-country trip where Harry meets a bunch of interesting characters and shows us the elderly still have a lot to offer. Carney won the Oscar for his fine performance.

The Sunshine Boys (1975). Walter Matthau plays an aging comic whose agent/nephew (Richard Benjamin) gets him a great job offer, with a catch: there's a planned TV special on the history of comedy, and the producer wants to reunite the vaudeville team of which Matthau was one half, the other half being George Burns. Unfortunately, the pair had an acrimonious break-up à la Martin and Lewis, and when the two get back together, we see why they broke up in the first place. George Burns deadpans all his lines on his way to winning an Oscar, and unintentionally enraging Matthat at every step along the way.

The Trip to Bountiful (1985). Geraldine Page plays an elderly woman living in a cramped apartment in 1940s Houston with her son (John Heard) who is hen-pecked by his wife (Carlin Glynn), the wife feeling her mother-in-law is a burden. Page dreams of seeing an old friend in the town of Bountiful, somewhere further southwest of Houston. Her son and daughter-in-law can't afford it and don't have the time, so one day Page takes her Social Security check and runs off to the bus station to try to get to Bountiful, meeting a young army wife (Rebecca De Mornay) along the way. Page won the Best Actress Oscar.

Now to see what everybody else picked.

For the last time, the door is not green

It's been a little while since I've blogged about a silent movie, so I recently sat down to watch Behind the Door and do a post on it here.

The movie was released in 1919, but is set in 1925. Oscar Krug (Hobart Bosworth) returns to his home town in Maine, where he used to run a taxidermy shop, and stops off at the grave of an old friend, who is the only person who could possibly understand the sorrow that Krug feels. There's a reason for that sorrow and guilt, and we're going to learn about it in flashback....

Go back to 1917, when Krug was a respected member of town society, running that taxidermy shop and in love with Alice Morse (Jane Novak). But then a funny thing happens. The US declares war against Germany, entering the Great War, which is of course not yet World War I since the movie was released well before the outbreak of World War II. Krug, despite having been considered quite respectable, is also German-American, and as we saw in Ever in My Heart, there was a substantial amount of hatred towards German-Americans in 1917.

It's so bad that Alice's father, the local bank manager, decides Alice is not to see Oscar any more, even though she's an adult, and tries to get her to marry his business partner. Krug decides that the best thing he can do is show that he's even more patriotic than the rest of the people in town, and enlist so that he can go fight the Germans. He winds up in the navy.

Somehow, as his ship pulls out, who should show up but Alice! She and Oscar have already gotten married secretly, but when she comes to see the ship off, she stays on board beyond the "all ashore who are going ashore" speech, being hidden by a navy nurse who apparently knows the score. Alice gets to keep seeing Oscar, and they all live happily ever after.

Oh hell no, that's not what happens. The ship they're on gets torpedoed by a German submarine, and Krug is left to drift by the nasty German commander, Lt. Brandt (a young Wallace Beery). Brandt is so nasty that he takes Alice as the spoils from having torpedoed the ship!

Some time later, Krug is on another ship, and this time they get to bomb a German sub out of the water. As you can probably guess, this one is commanded by Brandt, and the ship takes Brandt on board as a prisoner. Brandt doesn't recognize Krug, and on learning that Krug speaks German, thinks Krug might be more sympathetic, so he tells about the American ship he sank and what he and the crew did to the woman they took hostage. Now that Krug knows what happened to his wife, he has the chance to extract some revenge.....

Behind the Door is a surprisingly brutal movie for 1919, with Bosworth doing quite well in his role. Beery's is more of a supporting role even though he of course would go on to become the better known actor. The movie languished for years; some footage is believed lost permanently, or at least, they haven't found it yet. The most complete known print was found in an archive in Russia, and combined with a script, there was a collaborative effort to restore the movie, with intertitled production stills filling out the lost portions. So, in that regard, it doesn't look anywhere near as intrusive as the four-hour reconstruction of Greed.

The restoration of Behind the Door has received a pricey DVD release. Because of the lack of prints out in the wide world, there doesn't seem to be anything on Youtube despite the fact that anything before the restoration would be in the public domain. (The added intertitles are all labeled "2016" and there's a new music score.)

Oliver Twist (1948)

Tonight's lineup on TCM is a bunch of adaptations of the works of Dickens, which includes a chance to see MGM's 1938 version of A Christmas Carol at 8:00 PM, this being the Christmas season after all. But the movie I'd lik to mention is the 1948 British version of Oliver Twist, which comes on overnight at 2:15 AM, which is still late this evening if you're out on the west coast.

The movie starts off with a woman who's apparently heavily pregnant, but able to move surprisingly well for a pregnant woman. She shows up at a parish workhouse, which serves as an orphanage for all the lower-class children without parents, gives birth, and dies soon after, leaving behind the kid and a locket.

Fast forward nine years, and the kid, little Oliver Twist (John Howard Davies) is suffering in the orphanage under the cruel treatment of the administrator Bumble (Francis L. Sullivan), especially because Oliver is slightly more foolhardy enough to stand up for himself than all the other kids. One day the kids draw straws to see who's going to have to ask the adults for a second helping of gruel, and Oliver gets the short straw. For his impertinence, the administrators send Oliver to be apprenticed to an undertaker, Mr. Sowerberry

The undertaker isn't much better, and thanks to more bad treatment, Oliver eventually runs away, making his way to London, the great city of the day where there are a million people and nobody will ever be able to find him, not that he's got any marketable skills or anything like that. In London, he's espied by a teenaged urchin nicknamed the Artful Dodger (a young Anthony Newley), who is part of gang of criminal youths, mostly pickpockets, led by the adult Fagin (Alec Guinness). The Dodger takes Oliver in, and Fagin starts teaching Oliver the tricks of the trade.

In an attempted robbery gone wrong, Oliver is wrongly accused of trying to pick the pocket of wealthy Mr. Brownlow (Henry Stephenson), when he was just watching. So technically he's guilty of being an accomplice although there's no evidence of that. When a witness states he saw two other kids doing the actual deed, Oliver is released to the care of Brownlow, who turns out to be an incredibly nice guy.

Unfortunately, Oliver has a bit of a past, and not just being an orphan, thanks to that locket that would reveal a big secret. A guy named Monks (Ralph Truman) suspects something, and asks Fagin to get Oliver while he tries to get the locket. Fagin's men, in the form of Bill Sykes (Robert Newton) and his girlfriend Nancy (Kay Walsh) do kidnap Oliver.

There are more twists (no pun intended) and turns, of course, this being based on a Dickens novel, and Charles Dickens having written precious little that's actually short. (If memory serves, most of his novels were originally published as serializations, which would explain the length -- Dickens needed to keep writing more installments for the money!) But little Oliver winds up having a happy ending as you can probably guess.

There were a couple of things that really stuck out at me when watching this adaptation of Oliver Twist, directed by David Lean at the start of his career. One is that the production values seemed slighlty off, at least certainly nowhere near those of the Korda brothers or Powell and Pressburger. I'm not certain how much this has to do with the fact that there was still post-war rationing going on in the UK. But watching Oliver Twist felt more like watching an RKO movie than watching a glossy MGM literary adaptation. Not that this makes the movie bad; it just didn't seem to have that shine. I don't recall having that feeling while watching Lean's earlier Great Expectations (on at midnight), which I think came mostly from the same studio.

The other obvious thing was Fagin. Not only is Fagin supposed to be Jewish, he's a very obvious and negative stereotype, complete with the thoroughly unnatural hook nose. Guinness is so made up that this, along with the anti-Semitism, may be disconcerting to some viewers. Overall, though, this adaptation of Oliver Twist is definitely worth watching, especially since it doesn't have the cloying musical numbers of the 1960s musical. (There's a traditional song or two sung in a dive bar.)

This version of Oliver Twist has received a DVD release courtesy of the Criterion Collection, so it's a bit pricey.

How many tropes and clichés can you fit into a 100-minute movie?

Another of the movies that I had the chance to DVR during one of DirecTV free preview weekends was The Game of Their Lives. It's going to be on again, tomorrow morning at 11:00 AM on Flix (and again on December 18).

The movie starts off at the Major League Soccer All-Star Game in Washington DC in 2004. A younger man approached Dent McSkimming (Patrick Stewart) and asks is Dent could ever have imagined a soccer game being played in a stadium of this size in the US. Cue the flashback....

We're now back in early 1950, in St. Louis, where McSkimming is a young man (played by Terry Kinney, although Patrick Stewart provides all the voiceovers) working as a sports reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. There's an immigrant community known as "The Hill" that was sports-mad, even having produced two baseball Hall of Famers who grew up across the street from one another (Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola). But there's also a large number of soccer teams playing in The Hill.

In late 1949, the US had qualified for the FIFA World Cup, to be held in Brazil in June 1950 (due to World War II and what not there were only three teams in North American qualifying and the US only needed to draw one game against Cuba to effectively earn their qualification alongside Mexico who beat the crap out of both the US and Cuba). The US Soccer Federation, a shoestring operation at the time, decided that the tryouts for the national team to go to Brazil would be held in St. Louis.

Among the young men from The Hill trying out are goalkeeper Frank Borghi (Gerard Butler), Frank "Pee Wee" Wallace (Jay Rodan), and "Gloves" (Costas Mandylor). They're up against the best soccer players from the east coast led by Walter Bahr (Wes Bentley), and the national team is going to be made up of the best players from both the east coast and the midwest. Obviously all of the players I've mentioned get picked, and everybody heads to New York for training before flying down to Brazil. Pee Wee has a bit of a problem, in that because of his service in World War II, he's now deathly afraid of flying.

Anyhow, the two contingents, the St. Louisians and the easterners, have wildly different styles of play that they have a dickens of a time trying to mesh, and because of ethnicity, with the St. Louisians being mostly Italians and the easterns mostly WASPs. But Walter at least has the intelligence to realize that the folks from St. Louis will listen to Borghi, so Walter gets Borghi to be a sort of co-captain.

Walter also realizes that there's a great player out there who isn't in the training camp: Joe Gaetjens (Jimmy Jean-Louis), a Haitian immigrant working as a dishwasher in a restaurant and who has a radically different culture from either of the other groups. Somehow they're able to draft him into the team.

One of the training matches involves playing against a team of England players not good enough to qualify for the England team considered a co-favorite, although the team is led by one member of the national team, Stanley Mortensen (Gavin Rossdale). He's unsurprisingly dismissive of the Americans, who lost to this B side handily; even worse, the Americans have to go on and play England in Belo Horizonte in a few weeks time.

Finally, the US national team gets down to Brazil, accompanied by McSkimming, who's using his vacation time to cover the tournament for the American press, and even get their uniforms, the question of whether the latter would arrive being a running plot point (which surprises me since the team qualified for Brazil nine months before the actual tournament). The US Army arranges for the flight from Rio de Janeiro to Belo Horizonte for the England game.

Now, since this is a movie based on historical fact, you'll know that the US, who were extreme underdogs, somehow won the game 1-0, with a goal late in the first half from Gaetjens. (Obviously, the US did not go on to get anywhere near winning the tournament.) Head back to the present game, where the surviving members of the team from that game are assembled at RFK stadium, which is why McSkimming is also there.

As I was watching The Game of Our Lives, I couldn't help but think how there's one trope after another cobbled from any earlier sports movie you can think of, to the point that it's almost laughable. From the flashback, to the two disparate halves of a team having to come together, to arrogant Stanley Mortensen getting his comeuppance, to the wacky outsider, and on and on.

That having been said, it's not exactly a bad movie. There's a lot of soccer in it, with an overuse of slow motion, so people who aren't soccer fans may not care for this movie as much. For me, however, I'm always happy to see England lose, the team being perpetually overrated and hyped here in the US because of the cultural and historical ties between the two countries.

There were also some interesting errors, such as the use of a Union Jack at the stadium for the US/England game. Stewart also makes a comment about all of Britain being sad by the result. England, of course, have their own flag, the red St. George's cross on a white field, and something makes me think the Scots would have been ecstatic to find out that England had lost.

The Game of Their Lives doesn't seem to be available on DVD, although you can get it at Amazon streaming.

TCM Stars of the Month December 2020: Laurel and Hardy

Stan Laurel (r.) and Oliver Hardy in Sons of the Desert (Dec. 7, 9:30 PM)

We're into the first full week of a new month, so we're finally getting a new Star of the Month on TCM. Technically, we're getting two stars of the month, since the honoree is the comedy duo of Laurel and Hardy. Their films will be airing on three Mondays in prime time, with the 21st being given over to the Christmas movie marathon that's running all of the week leading up to Christmas.

Actually, we're not just getting prime time, as Laurel and Hardy made a whole bunch of shorts and many of those are running in the afternoons, starting this afternoon at 12:30 PM with Do Detectives Think?. The duo's first feature was Pardon Us, if you can call it a feature at just under an hour. In any case, it's running at 8:00 PM tonight.

One thing that I didn't see mentioned on the schedule, or in TCM's article on the programming salute, is Tree in a Test Tube, which I've actually posted in the past: