Rain Man

I'm getting around to movies that I recorded off of TCM during 31 Days of Oscar, which is one of the months that generally has more recent movies on TCM. So as I get around to those, there's going to be a bit less in the way of studio-era movies for a bit. Granted, the first of the "more recent" movies is already 35 years old: Rain Man.

Rain Man is one of those movies where I think most people know the basic story. Tom Cruise plays Charlie Babbitt, who is living out in Los Angeles where he works as some sort of importer/exporter. His current job is to bring in several Lamborghinis for wealthy people who have already paid for them, and which he needs to deliver to pay off a substntial loan. However, the EPA is holding them up over emissions testing. The business, and Charlie's being away from it, is going to be a running subplot throughout the movie.

But Charlie gets a phone call with more pressing information: his estranged father has recently died out in Cincinnati. There's the funeral and the will and all that fun stuff, so Charlie heads east with his girlfriend Susanna (Valeria Golino). They get to Cincinnati, and when Charlie meets with the lawyer, he finds out something disheartening to him, which is that Dad decided to write him mostly out of the will. Charlie had left home as a teenager over a dispute with Dad's vintage Buick Roadmaster car, so Dad was kind enough to leave that for Charlie, as well as a bunch of rose bushes. But the bulk of the money, some $3 million goes to a trust with an unnamed beneficiary. Charlie is pissed, and wants what he thinks is his fair share.

The will mentions something about a place called "Wallbrook", so Charlie heads there. He finds out it's an institution for those who can't live independently as adults, which is stunning enough. More stunning is that the beneficiary of the trust is Charlie's much older brother Raymond (Dustin Hoffman), of whose existence Charlie was never even told. (Raymond was put in the institution right at the time their mother died, which was when Charlie was two years old.) Raymond is an autistic savant, someone who has a brilliand memory and a way with numbers, but has no social skills when it comes to interpersonal relations or the things it would take to be able to hold down a job, hence the institution. And Raymond seems genuinely to like the routine at the institution.

But Charlie wants to get to know his brother better. And, he sees the possibility of having a bargaining chip. So he takes Raymond out of Wallbrook with the plan of the two of them going back to Los Angeles and Charlie getting control over the trust now that Raymond would need care out in Los Angeles. But Raymond is exceedingly difficult to take care of, hence the institution. And Raymond doesn't like any changes to his routine. As the two make their way to Los Angeles, Charlie learns as much about himself as he does about his older brother.

Rain Man won the Best Picture, but I'm sorry to say I don't think it's really stood the test of time. For me, I think a lot of that comes down to the script, which to me has some key plot holes, starting with Dad never having told Charlie about the older brother and being able to keep it such a good secret all these years. Seriously, Charlie never learned about Raymond at any time in his childhood? Raymond also seems written to be miraculously in the right spot to be an obnoxious burden on someone trying to care for him but without being dangerous enough to scupper the whole trip before the two of them got out of Ohio. It all feels like a by-the-numbers road trip with one of the characters learning about himself. Something like Harry and Tonto is much more charming in the way it pulls this off. The acting from the two leads, however, is excellent; Hoffman won the Oscar while Cruise didn't even get a nomination.

When it comes to movies from 1988, looking through the Oscars list I think I'd pick A Cry in the Dark and Running on Empty as a couple of films that at least deserved a Best Picture nomination. As for what I'd actually select as the winner, I'm not certain since I haven't seen enough nominees to decide on that. So watch Rain Man and judge for yourself whether it should have won.

Good question

Some months back, TCM ran three movies starring actress Colleen Moore, who was big in the silent era and probably could have remained successful until World War II changed everybody's tastes -- except that she retired from making movies in the mid-1930s. TCM ran two of her talking pictures, and one silent movie with synchronized music and sound effects. That silent is Why Be Good?, and since today is apparently "National Silent Movie Day", I picked today to post about it.

Moore is the female lead, but we don't see her first. Instead, we see the male lead. Winthrop Peabody Jr. (Neil Hamilton) lives in a swanky 50th floor apartment in one of those fashionable New York City skyscrapers, where he enjoys partying with his equally rich and stylish friends. However, the partying is about to end for Winthrop. He's the son of Winthrop Sr., who owns a big department store. Junior is going to take it over eventually, but Dad wants him to learn the ropes, and now is the time for him to start as the personnel manager, where, as a title card informs us, he oversees two hundred men -- and a thousand women. Dad warns son not to get involved with the female employees which is of course excellent advice.

Another title card informs us of a place that's several floors below, but in a completely different neighborhood. That place is Jazzland, and tonight they're holding a dance contest to see which couple is best at the Charleston. Winning that contest is Pert Kelly (that's Colleen Moore, if you couldn't tell) and her partner. Her dancing draws the eye of other men, specifically smooth operator types like Jimmy Alexander who seems to go off with all the pretty girls at one point or another. Pert is at heart a good girl, as we see her only pretending to drink from Jimmy's flask by putting her finger over the opening, and then try to escape when Jimmy tries to paw her.

When she tries that escape, she's spotted by... Winthrop Jr., who has decided to go slumming at Jazzland with some of his friends. She's happy for the escape and for Winthrop to drive her home, except they spend a good deal of time being polite together. Pert gets home late, which irritates her parents. Worse, staying out that late causes her to be late for work the next morning, which is a problem, because she works at... Peabody's department store. (Winthrop Jr. never revealed he was a Peabody, and Pert obviously had no reason to point out where she works.)

Having shown up late, she gets called up to the boss' office, where it's revealed that personnel manager and the shop girl know each other. Peabody Sr. is obviously pissed that his son couldn't be bothered to follow his advice, even though Junior didn't realize he was out with an employee. Dad can't really fire his son, so he fires Pert instead. Junior tries to explain that he wasn't the one who wanted Pert fired, and spends the rest of the movie trying to win Pert back. Can he do so? Will Pert accept him?

Considering the sort of movie Why Be Good? is up to this point, it shoud be obvious how it's going to end. There are no surprises here, but what Why Be Good? does, it does well enough. Colleen Moore is appealing as always, and Hamilton is suitably handsome for all the women to swoon over. The print TCM ran is a restoration print with the Vitaphone disc intact, and looks quite good. Why Be Good? is definitely worth a watch.

For the record, tonight's "National Silent Movie Day" lineup on TCM is:

8:00 PM Greed, or at least the four-hour reconstruction of it. As I said when I blogged about Greed in 2010, there was a good 130-minute movie to be made from the original source material, but director Erich von Stroheim didn't give the studio a chance to release that.
12:15 AM The Enchanted Cottage. This is the same story as the 1945 adaptation; both of them were based on a stage play. I have not seen the silent version before but I have it set to record to go into the backlog with a ton of other silent films I've got.
2:00 AM Gösta Berlings Saga, a Swedish movie starring Greta Garbo and Lars Hanson before both of them came over to Hollywood. Garbo you'll remember; Hanson is more remembered by silent fans since he didn't make the transition to English-language sound movies. Two of his best-known Hollywood silents are The Scarlet Letter and The Wind.
5:15 AM Hot Water, another Harold Lloyd quickie clocking in at just under an hour. I did a post some weeks back on For Heaven's Sake, and have Grandma's Boy as part of my silent film backlog to get through.

Dame Maggie Smith, 1934-2024

Michael Caine and Maggie Smith as a feuding couple in California Suite

British actress Maggie Smith, who won both a Best Actress Oscar and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, and who had a long career working almost to the end of her life, has died at the age of 89.

Smith's first Oscar, the Best Actress nod, came for the 1969 film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Smith plays the titular character, a girls' school teacher in 1930s Scotland whose actions cause controversy. This is a movie I got to see part of when it was on TCM quite a few years ago before I had the DVR, and didn't watch the whole thing because it was on a bit too late. Just Watch suggests it's not available on any of the trustworthy streaming services. A search of my Roku box did bring up one app that has it, although I don't know how sketchy that app is.

Smith's second Oscar, for Supporting Actress, came for the ensemble story California Suite, where she plays an Oscar-nominated actress traveling to Los Angeles with her husband (Michael Caine), with whom she's constantly arguing. I reviewed this one several years back, and had fairly substantial problems with Neil Simon's stories not really working in Los Angeles and with the characters in the various stories not coming together.

By coincidence, I put on one of the PlutoTV movie channels, and it was showing Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile, which has an all-star cast including Maggie Smith. I may get around to watching that one and doing a review on it here in the not-too-distant future, although I've already got a couple of weeks of posts in the can.

In later years, Smith won a new generation of fans with her work in the Harry Potter movies, as well as on the smash British TV series Downton Abbey, although I have to admit to not being terribly interested in either of those.

Piccadilly Jim (1936)

Another of the movies that I recorded off of TCM because it sounded interesting was the 1936 Robert Montgomery vehicle Piccadilly Jim. Having watched it, now I can do a review on it for you.

Montgomery plays the title character, James Crocker Jr. He's an American-born artist living in London and making a living as a cartoonist doing caricatures for the London newspapers. He's apparently able to make a pretty darn good living at it, too, since he's got a butler in Bayliss (Eric Blore), and is also able to support his father, James Sr. (Frank Morgan). Dad is an actor, or was an actor at some point in the past; he doesn't seem to have worked in quite some time and everybody calls him a ham.

However, Dad has met a nice American woman, Eugenia Willis (Billie Burke), a widow traveling with her sister Nesta Pett (Cora Witherspoon) and Nesta's husband Herbert (Grant Mitchell). Dad has fallen in love with Eugenia, but unsurprisingly Nesta has the good sense to wonder if the elder Crocker isn't the sort of smooth operator looking for a mark to marry and live off the wife's money. (Haven't the Petts heard of a pre-nup?) Dad tells them his son is a successful artist, so the Petts would like to meet him which will also serve as a way to judge whether Dad is in fact suitable for Eugenia.

Meanwhile, Jim Jr. goes out for a night on the town, which I'd guess would also serve as one of the ways he finds inspiration for the people he wants to caricature. But this time, while out, he meets a lovely young woman named Ann (Madge Evans). He falls in love with her, but she's not so quick to return the feelings. That's because there are several things he doesn't know about Ann, with the first of them bein that she is in fact engaged to another man, Lord Priory (Ralph Forbes). Jim Jr. keeps pursuing Ann, into the next day, with the result that he winds up tipsy at his meeting with the Petts, and they rightly reject the Crockers. This especially after finding out that young Jim is just a sketch artist.

The Petts go off to the Riviera, and this is the other thing we learn about Ann. She's actually the niece of Nesta and Eugenia, but Jim Jr. still doesn't know this. He, having been rebuffed by the Petts, decides to create a new comic strip lampooning the sort of rich Americans abroad that the Petts are, and this cartoon, From Rags to Riches, becomes a huge hit. Eventually, the Petts return from the Continent, and find that they're the butt of all jokes since everybody in London recognizes them as the source material for the comic strip. However, they -- and most importantly Ann -- are unaware of who the real artist behind the strip is.

Piccadilly Jim is based on a story by P.G. Wodehouse that was written 20 years before this movie adaptation. In fact, this isn't the first adaptation, as there was a silent version. There has since been, about 20 years ago, another adaptation of the material. The 1936 version of Piccadilly Jim works well, but it feels closer a lot like a programmer in tone. MGM had Robert Montgomery available, and had the rights to the story (they had planned to turn the material into a musical), and so they put two and two together.

Robert Montgomery is every bit the professional here, as is the rest of the cast. They all put in solid performances that make for a film that works, although at the end of the movie's running time it's not something that's spectacularly memorable. But when the studios were churning out as many movies as they were, "workmanlike" was part of the point. And even workmanlike work from the big studios made for a reasonably good movie.

The Colossus of Rhodes

Another of the movies that I recorded some time back because it sounded like it might be fun was the sword-and-sandal epic The Colossus of Rhodes.

A pre-credits sequences shows people laboring away in an underground cavern, starting a fire to try to get away. They're clearly slave labor, but the ruse doesn't quite work. Then after the credits, we learn that this is the island of Rhodes, east of the mainland of what is now Greece, and that it's 280 BC. The king has just had a giant statue of Apollo built to guard the harbor, and an Athenian, Dario (Rory Calhoun), is visiting. The ceremony to christen the statue doesn't go well, however, as someone who opposes slavery tries to stop it and gets killed for his efforts. The King doesn't realize that there are a lot of people who aren't happy with the political situation on the island.

Worse, however, is that those people aren't quite united. Instead, they're in two factions. One faction is the good people who don't want slavery; they try to convince Dario to help them. Then there's a second faction, led by the prime minister Thar. Thar wants to ally with the Phoenicians against the rest of the Greeks, and it should be no surprise that the Greeks aren't pleased with this, especially because it will have a terrible effect on their shipping.

So the king responds by basically not allowing anybody to enter or leave the island, including people like poor Dario who was just a visitor here but is suspected by some of being a spy, something that's not an unnatural suspicion. Dario, for his part, is seeing Diala (Lea Massari), who is the daughter of the designer of the Colossus, trying to get information on it in the hopes he can use this to smuggle people out of Rhodes. He doesn't realize that she's also been sing Thar. Amusingly, when the anti-Phoenicians try to get out of Rhodes, we see what effective defenses the Colossus has, something I won't spoil here.

Many of the remaining anti-Phoenicians are arrested and sentenced to death, although since Dario is one of them we know he's going to escape because a movie like this wouldn't do with killing off its hero. Eventually he and the rest of the good Greeks try to take over the Colossus to prevent the Phoenicians from taking Rhodes themsevles. The Phoenicians arrive at just about the same time as an earthquake, so we get not just a sword-and-sandal movie, but a disaster film as well.

The Colossus of Rhodes is a movie that's probably remembered for only one thing, which is that it was directed by Sergio Leone early in his career, not that he made that many movies. It's a Spanish/Italian co-production, with Rory Calhoun only brought in because the production companies wanted an American name to get the picture onto American screens. One of the results is that everybody but Calhoun is dubbed into English, with very limited success.

The plot and exectuion of The Colossus of Rhodes is much to complex for the movie's own good; it runs a little over two hours and feels every bit of that two hours. It also doesn't help that the acting is for the most part not very good. But being a sword-and-sandal movie, there's still entertainment to be had even when it's a bad sword-and-sandal movie.

TCM's Donald Sutherland tribute

Mary Tyler Moore, Timothy Hutton, and Donald Sutherland in Ordinary People (1980) (10:15 PM)

Actor Donald Sutherland died back in June. TCM is now getting around to doing a programming tribute to him tonight (Sept. 26), with four of his films:

8:00 PM M*A*S*H;
10:15 PM Ordingary People;
12:30 AM Klute; and
2:30 AM Kelly's Heroes.

I've blogged about all four of those movies before, but as it turns out I've got one of Sutherland's movies that I haven't blogged about yet. So I figured today would be a good time to put up a post on it even though it's not showing. That movie is Eye of the Needle.

The movie starts off in London in 1940, which it doesn't take much to recall is the height of the Blitz during the early stages of World War II. Henry Faber (Sutherland) works in some sort of Ministry of Defence-type job, where adolescent Billy (Philip Martin Brown) looks up to him and hopes to join some branch of the military to fight Germany, although no branch has accepted him yet. Out in the Home Counties, Lucy (Kate Nelligan) and David (Christopher Cazenove) are about to get married before he goes off to fight. He gets too excited driving away from the wedding, and, swerving to miss a lorry, drives into a ravine.

Henry goes off for a weekend and stays with some kindly older woman. She brings up some tea for him, only to find him not answering her calls. When she opens the door to his room, she hears him talking -- on a radio -- in German! Obviously, Henry is some sort of agent working for the Nazis, and his cover has just been blown. So Henry pulls out a stiletto, and stabs the poor woman dead. Now, this is for me the first major plot hole, as you'd have to think the authorities would consider Henry the prime suspect when they find the woman dead, not that they know anything about him being a turncoat.

Fast forward four years to the spring of 1944, and Storm Island off the west coast of Scotland. David and Lucy did not die in the car crash, although David wound up wheelchair-bound. So he's up in Scotland raising sheep to do his part in the war effort while Lucy helps raise their young son. These two subplots have to come together, don't they? Sure enough, that's not long in coming. Faber goes spying somewhere eastish of London. He hires a boat, and the guy on the canal helpfully informs him of a restricted area ahead, not knowing that Henry wants to go precisely there.

Gen. George Patton is in charge of a base there, and that's what Henry's target is. Henry is able to look into the base, where he sees a whole bunch of planes. Somehow, he's able to cut through the fence around the base, and spy unmolested, where he inadvertently causes a bit of sabotage by... breaking a propeller off one of the planes! It's here that he discovers these "airplanes" are actually made of plywood, which is important to know. The Nazis know there are two possible places for the Americans and British to invade: over the Strait of Dover, or into Normandy by the English Channel. Finding a bunch of plywood planes here is a pretty dead giveaway that the Allies are going to invade Normandy, giving the Germans a chance to fortify their position.

But Henry has to get his information to Germany, which means making contact with the German military. The rendezvous point is... a submarine not far off the coast of Scotland, near Storm Island. Henry makes his way up there, although by this time the British authorities are on his case, not that Henry has tried to shave off his moustache, dye his hair, or do anything else to disguise himself. And when he tries to get to the submarine, one of the island's famous storms pops up, sinking his boat and stranding him on the island, which is how he comes into contact with Lucy and David. David at least is smart enough to realize something is wrong, not that he knows what, but can anybody stop Henry from making his rendezvous?

Eye of the Needle is an entertaining enough movie, but for me it has some problems in the form of plot holes, starting with that first murder (Henry kills several more people over the course of the movie). It seems shocking to me that Henry is able to go around the UK for a full four years after that murder without being found out. Lucy also seems way too trusting of this stranger for her own good, even though this is necessary to drive the plot.

But Sutherland gives a good enough performance to make the movie eminently watchable even in spite of the script issues. So while Eye of the Needle isn't great, it's still enjoyable enough for a rainy evening.

The Opera phantom of 1943

I'm not certain how many horror movies I'm going to be blogging about in October, just because I haven't examined the schedule closely enough to see what's on my DVR that's also airing in October to do posts on, or which horror films are worth blogging about in general more than the stuff that's in my queue of movies to post about. So since a horror film has made it to the top of my queue, I'm not going to wait until October to mention it: the 1943 version of Phantom of the Opera.

Claude Rains plays the phantom here, although as the movie opens he's decidedly not the phantom, but still looking as elegant as Claude Rains always did. Rains plays Erique Claudin, and at the start of the movie he's one of the violinists in the orchestra at the Paris Opera House. But the conductor can tell that one of the violinists is off, and he's pretty certain it's Erique. So after the show, the conductor calls Erique into the office to play for him. Eric plays a simple tune of his own composition, something that's easy to play. The conductor isn't fooled, and on learning that Erique has some sort of neurologic issue affecting his hands, forces Erique into a pension.

It's a modest pension, but the conductor knows that Erique lives modestly and his savings combined with the pension should provide a comfortable enough requirement. What the conductor doesn't know is that Erique has been stupid, thinking with his little head instead of his big one. Christine Dubois (Susanna Foster) is an understudy to the lead in the opera, and Erique has fallen head over heels in love with her. She doesn't know this, however, and already has two other suitors, the opera's baritone Garron (Nelson Eddy), and police inspector Daubert (Edgar Barrier). In fact, Erique has spent all his money anonymously paying for music lessons for Christine so she can make it as the lead soloist.

Erique doesn't have any money to pay the rent, but he has been working on a concerto that he hopes can be published. The publisher he submitted it to, Pleyel (not the piano maker), tells he hasn't gotten around to it, but then in the background Erique hears the concerto being played. So he naturally assumes Pleyel is trying to steal it, copyright law not being so strong in those days, and doesn't realize that Franz Liszt has shown up and taken a look at the new concerto. (You may recall from other movies that Liszt was a champion of young composers.) Erique gets in a dispute with Pleyel, and in the resulting fracas a tray of printer's etching acid gets thrown in his face, badly disfiguring him. So this is how he became the Phantom.

Now a wanted man and with little money and a horrible face, Erique retreats under the Paris Opera House, and sets about figuring ways to get revenge on the people who wronged him as well as getting Christine her chance to be the lead soloist. He drugs the actual female lead, and this brings the police in. And wouldn't you know it, but Daubert is the detective on the case! Erique makes more threats (amazingly, nobody recognizes his handwriting), and the threats become increasingly violent. However, the Code won't allow Erique to get away with murder, and the story was always intended to be tragic anyway, at least for the Phantom.

As I watched this version of Phantom of the Opera, it seemed to me rather different from how I recalled the Lon Chaney silent version, which I'll admit I haven't seen in quite a few years. Reading up on it, Universal made quite a few changes to Gaston Leroux's original story, a lot more than the 1925 film version did. Universal also sprung for Technicolor on this version, having access to the lovely three-strip Technicolor process that they didn't in 1925, when only the two-strip process that didn't produce such lifelike or vivid colors was around. Technicolor is a great choice here, as the color is beautiful and the cinematography is quite good. The acting, however, apart from Rains, is mediocre, a lot because the story puts more emphasis on opera singing than on opera acting.

But while this 1943 version of Phantom of the Opera is a bit of a mixed bag, for the most part it's a more than adequate production that's definitely worth watching.

Oklahoma

Hollywood has a long history of finding properties from the Broadway stage to turn into movies, both dramatic plays and musicals. Making roadshow versions of big Broadway musical hits really became a thing in the 1950s, I presume as a way to try to get people away from their new television sets and to a place where they could see something BIG on a big screen and in bright, vibrant colors. Fitting very well into this cycle is the 1955 version of Oklahoma!, which will be on TCM tomorrow, September 25, at 8:00 PM.

Gordon MacRae is the male lead here, playing Curly McLain, a cowboy in the late stages of Oklahoma's being a territory, so around the turn of the last century. He rides onto the scene singing "Oh What a Beautiful Morning", as he's heading to see Laurey Williams (Shirley Jones in her film debut), whom he loves. He wants to invite her to the big box social, but she plays coy because of how slow he's been in trying to woo her. As a bit of revenge, she actually thinks of going to the social with Jud Fry (Rod Steiger), a farm hand on the farm where Laurey lives with her Aunt Eller (Charlotte Greenwood).

Laurey has a friend, Ado Annie (Gloria Grahame), and she's the woman in a love triangle as well. Will Parker (Gene Nelson) is a cowboy like Curly, and wants to marrie Annie, but her father (James Whitmore) isn't so sure as he wants someone with a not so stable profession to marry his daughter. Perhaps if he can go to the big city and show himself to be a success. Will has done that, and his first appearance in the movie is his coming home on the train from Kansas City. However, in the meantime, a peddler, Ali Hakim (Eddie Albert), has come to town, and Annie has an interest in him too.

But the main story is the Laurey/Curly/Jud storyline. Curly and Jud are entirely different, as if you couldn't tell from the casting of Rod Steiger as Jud. Jud is decidedly from the wrong social class, and you get the feeling that in a different sort of western he's be the outlaw, if you can really cast Rod Steiger in a western. He lives in little more than a shack on the farm, and he and Curly get into an argument in the smokehouse that leads to them firing their guns, although at least not at each other. We know, however, that Laurey and Curly are really right for each other, but Laurey has a really bad dream about marrying Curly and how Jud is going to react if that happens.

She was right to have that bad dream. Jud gets even nastier, leading to Curly offering to marry Laurey for protection, which sends Jud over the edge. But this is a musical, so we're going to get a happy ending that also satisfies the Production Code.

I've stated before that I'm not the biggest fan of musicals, so I'm not quite the write blogger to look to for a recommendation on a movie like Oklahoma!. The production is exceedingly well made, and according to the articles I read (I haven't seen any stage version of the musical), it preserves most of Rodgers and Hammerstein's songs, many of which have become standards. MacRae and Jones are also an appealing couple, as they can both sing as well as play convincing pioneer types.

For me, however, the movie did have some problems. One is that the movie runs a bit too long at 141 minutes (and TCM didn't run the roadshow version which has an intro/intermission/exit music). Part of that is down to the dream sequence, which reminded me of the Cyd Charisse number near the end of Singin' in the Rain: it may be well done, but it feels tacked on, and runs so, so long. Some of the casting is also interesting. I mentioned Rod Steiger who I think is out of place as a circa-1900 Oklahoman, although he could certainly play hair-trigger temper types. And then there's Gloria Grahame. IMDb's soundtrack page for the movie doesn't list anybody dubbing her, and it certainly sounds like her voice. Except that she can't sing. Her musical number, "I Can't Say No", brings the production to a screeching halt.

But fans of musicals will most likely love this adaptation of Oklahoma!, and it's easy to see why.

Night Shift

Henry Winkler is probably universally remembered as the Fonz from the TV show Happy Days, although he's had a long career both acting and being an executive producer on TV shows. He didn't make that many movies, and certainly didn't get much chance to star in movies. One where he did was Night Shift.

We don't see Winkler at first. Instead, there's an establishing scene of a guy being chased through Manhattan by a couple of criminals of some sort. He thinks he's escaped, only to find out they made it to his apartment first and have waylaid him, throwing him out the window to his death.

It's only the following day that we see Winkler. He plays Chuck Lumley, who works at the morgue, a job he's taken largely because he couldn't handle the pressure of his previous job as an investment consultant at one of the Manhattan brokerage firms. The man who died in the opening scene was a pimp, and the two guys who killed him were higher up the underworld ladder and expected to get their cut from all the pimps in the area. Showing up to ID the pimp's body is Belinda (Shelley Long), one of the pimp's prostitutes, who for some reason thinks Chuck looks familiar.

Chuck wants as little hassle in his life as possible, both professionally and personally. He's got a fiancée in Charlotte (Gina Hecht), but he seems to be going along with the engagement just to make her and her parents happy. He doesn't even seem to care much when he gets moved to the night shift to make room for a relative of the boss. However, it puts Chuck on the same shift as Bill "Blaze" Blazejowksi (Michael Keaton), a smooth operator who always seems to have some angle that's probably a scam. He can also be incredibly annoying, much to Chuck's consternation.

Anyhow, the reason Belinda thought Chuck looked familiar is because she lives in the same apartment building as him. With her pimp dead, she's started taking clients up to her place, which seems risky although the alternatives without a pimp might be risker. And when she gets arrested over the Thanksgiving holiday, she doesn't have a pimp to bail her out. So she places her one phone call to... Chuck! Needless to see Charlotte and her parents are none too pleased.

Belinda's arrest gives Bill a ridiculous idea: since he's already using the morgue hearse for illicit purposes, and they're on the night shift where nobody's going to notice anything anyway, why not use the morgue resources to help out Belinda and her pimpless friends? Bill can be a kinda-sorta pimp to them, while Chuck can start using those skills as a financial advisor again by investing the money the prostitutes are making from their tricks so they'll have something left over after their beauty has faded, much like Gena Rowlands in Gloria.

Naturally, you'd think the guys who killed the previous pimps are going to figure out what's going on and come after Chuck and Bill. And sure enough, that happens for the movie's climax. But not until there's also the standard-issue romantic storyline of Chuck and Belinda developing feelings for each other.

Night Shift was directed by Ron Howard, and is a movie that has a lot of heart and is fairly charming for a movie with a pretty adult storyline. However, the movie is not without its flaws, and I think that's mostly down to the script. I don't think it's particularly realistic. But worse is that the writers made Michael Keaton's character way too annoying. Now, part of the humor is supposed to be that the character annoys poor Chuck. But he annoys us, too.

There's a lot in Night Shift that would go on to bigger things: Ron Howard as a director; Michael Keaton on the big screen and Shelley Long on the small screen; and one of Burt Bacharach's songs, "That's What Friends are For". But Night Shift is the place to see them all at the beginning.

Kim

The British Raj era of India is one that shows up a lot in the movies in part because it's a ripe source for action and adventure (never mind what Indians of today think of the portrayals), thanks in no small part to the writings of Rudyard Kipling. An excellent example of a movie that fits into this genre is, unsurprisingly, one based on a Kipling novel, Kim.

The movie is set in the 1880s, a time when Britain ruled India with the help of a lot of local bigwigs. Beyond India was the Khyber Pass in the northwest leading to Afghanistan, and beyond that Russian central Asia. Britain was constantly worried about the idea that Russia was trying to gain access to a warm-water port, and agitating rebellious locals to bog the British down to that end. Indeed, the Russians figure into the movie's finale.

But the story is really about Kim (Dean Stockwell). Kim, as we leater learn, is really Kimball O'Hara, son of an Anglo-Irish soldier who served in Europe up until his death. Mom died in childbirth, and somehow there's no other family to take care of Kim and the British army was unable or unwilling to do anything. So Kim, having been left an orphan, darkens his skin and passes himself off as a begging urchin. But his excellent knowledge of English enables him to move in British circles as well. Kim is a bit of a friend to Mahbub Ali (Errol Flynn, top-billed although Stockwell is the star here), who has information about the Russians that he wants passed to the British army in the person of Col. Creighton (Robert Douglas).

To get that information to Creighton, Ali has Kim fall in with a lama (Paul Lukas) who is liable to be unsuspected and so can travel freely. However, along the way Kim sees a regimental flag that he believes is an important sign, so he goes into the British encampment. The Brits capture him, which is where they find his birth certificate and so learn of his provenance. They send him to a prestigious boarding school for the sons of the British. But he's not quite happy there. And, because of his past, it's determined by the military that he could be trained to be a spy. Since he's already shown he can pass as a local, and because he's an adolescent urchin, who's going to suspect him, just like the lama?

Kim's undergoes a lot of training, and then gets sent on his first assignment, which is to go to a village in the northwest and find out from a local there named Chunder (Cecil Kellaway) what he's learned about the Russians in the area. They're officially there to survey the Khyber Pass, but it's obvious to the British that in fact they're using surveying as a cover for spying. Kim goes there, and finds... Chunder has been killed. Kim's instructions were to get the information from Chunder and bring it back, but with Chunder dead and his place ransacked, there's no intelligence to deliver to Creighton. Kim more or less violates orders to head to the Khyber Pass himself to complete the mission. Somehow, his old lama and Mahbub Ali have also made their way there.

Kim is the sort of movie that adolescent boys are going to love. It's got exactly the right mix of adventure and daring-do that will appeal to just that demographic. For everybody else, well, it's not a bad movie, although it could have been a bit more tightly edited. Stockwell does well with his role. All the Hollywood types playing Indian do as well as they can, and boys of the target age aren't going to care about the racial inaccuracies. A fair bit of location work for the establishing shots was done in the newly independent India, which adds to the quality cinematography. On the other hand, experienced viewers will notice the projection photography; younger viewers probably won't care.

Ultimately, Kim stands the test of time as a great example of the sort of action movie Hollywood could make in the decade after the end of World War II.

Thirty Minus Eight

The second of the movies that are on my DVR and coming up on TCM is one that they showed in August as part of Jeanne Crain's day in Summer Under the Stars: Twenty Plus Two. That airing comes up tomorrow, September 22, at 6:00 AM.

Crain isn't the star here although I think she's the highest-billed woman in the cast. The lead is David Janssen, playing Tom Alder. But we don't see him for a few minutes. The movie opens up with a scene at the apartment/office of one Julia Joliet. She runs a service which handles fan mail for movie stars; I assume fans would write to a postal drop and then a service like this would pick up the mail and do whatever the agent and star want done with it. But Joliet's real purpose in the movie is to get murdered.

That's where Alder comes in. He's not the murderer; instead, he's called by one of his police detective friends to look at the case (this rather seems like a plot hole to me). Surprisingly, the place looks like the police haven't gone over it yet. And Alder isn't a police detective. Indeed, he doesn't even like to think of himself as a private detective. Instead, he's the sort of person who goes out and finds missing heirs, which really is detective work but sounds classier. All of this is likely to keep the name of one of Joliet's clients, Leroy Dane (Brad Dexter), out of the papers. And when Alder goes through Joliet's files, he finds some things that he thinks would pertain to a famous missing persons case from a dozen years earler, that of wealthy Doris Delaney.

Indeed, it was reading about the Delaney case years back in a magazine article that gave Alder the idea to become this sort of investigator. And he's about to get another case, as one Jacques Pleschette (Jacques Aubuchon), son of a French-Canadian farmer who emigrated to North Dakota, wants Alder to look for his kid brother Auguste. Searches of military records reveal that there's some weird stuff going on, and one or multiple people is being highly dishonest.

Now if you're still wondering how Jeanne Crain comes into all of this, that's a good question. She doesn't really; instead she plays Linda Foster, a woman Alder had met as she was starting as an undergrad at UCLA and he was about to start law school. Alder didn't become a lawyer because the US got involved in Korea and Alder got his letter from Uncle Sam. That's part of where the closest to a female lead also gets involved. Dina Merrill plays Nicki Kovacs. We first see her as Alder is flying to New York and she's a passenger on the same plane as him. Alder thinks she looks familiar, and he's right. A decade earlier, after he got demobbed and was in Tokyo awaiting transport back to the States, he spent an evening at a taxi dance-type place where Nicki was working, having wanted to get away from the States because.... Well, they spent the evening together and Nicki was a perfect lady to Alder, who had no interest in anything sexual.

Everything eventually comes together for a finale, but before that I should probably mention a couple of cameos. Agnes Moorehead gets one scene as Doris Delaney's mother, who has remained out of the public eye all those years Doris has been missing, but for whatever reason lets this one private investigator talk to her. And William Demarest shows up as an alcoholic journalist. Both of them steal their scenes, unsurprisingly. Oh, there's a third cameo, but not from someone who succeeded as an actor. When Alder is at the taxi dance place, an obnoxious sailor with a bunch of tickets around his neck wants to dance all night with Nicki. IMDb suggests this is a young Robert Osborne, but the voice didn't sound right. Judge for yourself.

Twenty Plus Two isn't a terrible movie, but because of the convoluted plot it certainly isn't great either. To be honest, to me it felt more like the sort of thing that in the 1970s or 1980s would have been maybe a TV movie of the week. Or, possibly more likely, one of those two-hour movies designed to be a test pilot for a possible TV series. (I'm reminded of the one-season TV series Finder of Lost Loves that I used in the February 2020 TV edition of the old Thursday Movie Picks blogathon.) Such a TV show would have been sponsored by United Airlines, considering how many shots show their planes taking off and landing.

David Janssen does OK; Dina Merrill and especially Jeanne Crain are misused; and, as I mentioned, Moorehead and Demarest steal the show. But even with all that, Twenty Plus Two deserves one watch.

Love Affair

There are two movies airing back-to-back on TCM that are currently on my DVR and that I haven't blogged about before, which is why the first one is getting a mention a day and a half or more before it actually airs. That one is the 1939 version of Love Affair, which closes out what TCM considers its September 21 schedule at 4:30 AM September 22.

The movie opens with a bunch of radio broadcasters doing news reports on how a famous French artist, Michel Marnet (Charles Boyer), has gotten on a boat out of Naples heading for the US. There, the artist and playboy is finally going to settle down, as he's set to marry socialite Lois Clark. Also on the boat is an American nightclub singer, Terry McKay (Irene Dunne), although what she was doing in Europe is a bit of a question. She too is engaged to be married back in the US, to Kenneth Bradley (Lee Bowman).

As you can guess even if you haven't seen the famous remake An Affair to Remember, Terry and Michel are going to meet on the boat. This happens when Terry accidentally winds up with a radiogram that was addressed to him. She feigns not knowing him, and since the two are traveling alone, they decide to dine together. They even begin to fall in love, which is of course a big problem since they're both engaged to other people and because of how well-known Michel is; anything that could be seen as not being faithful could present huge problems for him once he gets to the States.

They do have a chance to spend some time alone, however, when the ship stops for an afternoon in Madeira, a Portuguese possession in the mid-Atlantic. There, Michel's grandmother Janou (Maria Ouspenskaya) lives, she having decided to remain there because her French diplomate husband died while serving in the French diplomatic corps. Janou and Terry talk, and the implication from the talk is that Terry and Michael are obviously right for each other, despite being engaged to other people. Grandma knows best, even when she knows nothing of outside pop culture.

But, of course, the two young ones are engaged to other people, so instead of breaking off their engagements forthwith they make an agreement to wait six months, and then meet each other on the observation deck of the Empire State Building to see if they're still in love. They are, but as Michel is on the observation deck, Terry finds herself unable to make the appointment because she gets hit by a car and seriously injured, with no way to contact Michel. She gets noticed singing while in a sanatarium recovering, which gets her work teaching music to children, and a bit of a life of her own. But of course she and Michel are going to run into each other again, aren't they?

The only real problem with Love Affair is the fact that it's one of those movies where pretty much everyone already knows what's going to happen because the movie itself is well-known, and has an even better-known remake, An Affair to Remember. I have a feeling that the movie would have carried a lot more emotional impact in 1939 when it was first released, both because of the relative originality and because the world was in a lot of tension with the run-up to World War II about to break out in Europe.

In any case, Love Affair is anchored by fine performances from both Boyer, who's excellent at romance, and Dunne, who could play either elegant or comedic. The supporting performance from Ousepenskaya is quite good too, and director Leo McCarey handles the material deftly. So despite the fact that Love Affair may suffer a bit from the weight of expectations, it's still an extremely good movie.

Briefs for September 19, 2024

I've got quite a few movies on my DVR that are coming up again, but that I've already mentioned; YouTube's cloud DVR will keep catching them for you until you tell it to stop doing so. First up is a pair on TCM tomorrow, starting with Murder in the Private Car at 7:30 AM. Later, at 12:30 PM, is Avalanche Express. This one is a bit more intresting in that it aired just a month ago as part of Robert Shaw's day in Summer Under the Stars, which is why I recorded it. But when I went to watch it for tomorrow's showing, the opening scene (in Russian) seemed exccedingly familiar. Sure enough, I had blogged about it back in March 2021.

There's a couple of movies coming up on FXM that I blogged about within the last year or so, both of which are airing on Saturday, Sept. 21. First, at 3:00 AM, is Kiss Me Goodbye. For some weird reason, when I log onto YouTube TV, this movie reveals an odd glitch YouTube TV seems to have, at least regarding this particular movie. Shows in the YouTube DVR are depicted with a rectangular screenshot or something that looks like it might have been a title card or movie poster. Jeopardy!, for example, has a shot of Ken Jennings on the Jeopardy! stage. Murder in the Private Car, since I mentioned it above, is a black-and-white shot of two of the leads. For Kiss Me Goodbye, however, it's a title card of a different movie, Kangaroo, which at least has been in the FXM rotation relatively recently. Anyhow, immediately following Kiss Me Goodbye, at 4:45 AM, is not Kangaroo, but On the Sunny Side.

And, speaking of FXM, I was going to look a bit ahead in the schedule to see if anything is getting pulled back out of the vault on October 1. However, Titan TV redid their website to make it more touchscreen friendly, and one of the other changes they made was making it so you can only look out a week ahead. FXM's own website doesn't go out more than a week ahead, either. Bummer.

Insomnia

I've been mentioning recently that I've got a glut of foreign films on my DVR that I have to get through, which is why there have been more posts on foreign-language films recently than I normally do. (Indeed, I failed to watch one, Late Autumn, before it expired on my DVR.) I've also been trying to mix up the languages, not wanting to have a bunch of Japanese or French films in quick succession. This time, we get something rather less common, which is a Norwegian film: Insomnia.

Stellan Skarsgård plays Jonas Engström, a detective for the Norwegian police service out of Oslo together with partner Erik Vik (Sverre Anker Ousdal). Something Norwegian viewers would pick up on is the Ö in Engström's surname. It's a letter in the Swedish alphabet, not the Norwegian, which uses the Ø instead. Most dialects of Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish have a reasonable but not complete level of mutual intelligiblity, but Engström is originally Swedish and his Swedishness is a plot point in that characters either have difficulty understanding him or seem less willing to talk to him rather than a real Norwegian. (It's explained later in the movie that Engström is working in Norway because of a professional indiscretion back in his native Sweden.)

Anyhow, as the movie opens, Engström and Vik are on a plane from Oslo up to Tromsø in the far north of the country because a rather horrifying murder has taken place. Indeed, we actually see the murder play out before the real action, although it looks like it's portrayed as though it was filmed on a video camera instead of a movie camera. A young woman was subjected to some form of assault in an isolated cabin, and when the assailant pushed her against one of the walls, it appears she got stabbed by a nail or something that hastened her death. The murderer was very painstaking in trying to destroy any evidence from her body, cleaning out under the nails and washing her hair. Maybe he was a fan of old Hollywood movies and saw Kid Glove Killer. Tromsø doesn't have the sort of expert police detectives necessary to investigate such a case, which is why the two men are flying up from Oslo and crossing over the Arctic Circle at the start of the movie.

The murder occurred in late May, which is just after the sun set for the last time until late July, but also while school is still in session, explaining why the police detecives are able to go to the school where 17-year-old Tanja, the murder victim, attended classes. She had a boyfriend Eilert, but also apparently other boyfriends since a search of Tanja's apartment (she was an orphan living on her own) reveals dresses much too expensive for her to have bought with her own money. Eilert seems like one plausible suspect, but with other boyfriends, somebody else could easily have done it too.

And then there's a bit of a break in the case, as a couple of Tanja's classmates find the backpack Tanja used. The police don't reveal this information to the public, instead deciding that they'll leave the bag at the cabin where the murder occurred and say that they haven't found it yet, hoping that the murderer will come and try to pick up the bag himself. And indeed, this works, at least in getting the murderer to go out in public.

But it fails in other ways. The murderer goes to the cabin on a foggy day, such that the police can't get a good look at him. They also don't realize there's a bunker under the cabin, so when the murderer flees into the cabin, he's able to escape by going into that bunker, which has a passage out a good ways away from the cabin. The other big point is that Engström has to this point found himself unable to adjust to the 24 hours of daylight, and has not been able to sleep for a couple of days, which is really screwing up with his judgment.

So when gunfire erupts, Engström shoots back. Unfortunately, he doesn't hit the killer, but hits Vik, killing Vik. It's a tragic mistake, and one that ought to get Engström a suspension from duty for a while but nothing big, as long as he's honest. But the rest of the police think the killer may have done it, leading Engström to go along with that lie.

The actual murderer figures all this out, and uses this to try to get Engström to compromise the murder investigation. Meanwhile, Engström's insomnia is getting worse, resulting in his getting more erratic and violent, along with suffering from hallucinations.

One of the reviews I read suggested that Insomnia is more of a character study than a murder mystery or thriller, and for the most part I'd have to agree. It's a well-made movie, albeit one that I felt had a plot hole or two. Engström takes several hits along the way that you'd have to think would lead to multiple concussions, yet he seems to recover just fine from them, even though one of them has him bleeding from the head.

Insomnia was remade by Hollywood, moving the setting to Alaska since that more or less has midnight sun as well. (Well, Fairbanks, the biggest city that far north, is far enough north that dawn and dusk keep the night from getting truly dark even though the sun does set.) I haven't seen the remake, which is already over 20 years old, so I can't compare and contrast the two films. But the original is certainly worth watching.

Violence

Eddie Muller presents quite a few low-budget movies from the minor studios as part of Noir Alley, movies that often times I've never heard of. A good example of this is Violence.

The movie starts off with some of that titular violence. Fred Stalk (Sheldon Leonard) is interrogating a guy named Donahue. Donahue is a member of a group called the United Defenders, a veterans' organization run by True Dawson (Emory Parnell). Donahue has learned that Dawson is a phony, and that he's organizing the veterans to be protesters on demand for whatever cause Dawson and his financial backers want stopped, by violence if necessary. Donahue is enough of a threat that Stalk and his companion Joker (Peter Whitney) beat poor Donahue to death.

Meanwhile, back at a meeting of the United Defenders Stalk tells Borden how worried he is about Donahue. Well, not Donahue per se, since he's dead. But Donahue stands for the idea that pretty much anybody could find out the same things that Donahue did. What they don't know is that Ann Mason (Nancy Coleman), a secretary at United Defenders headquarters, is that anybody. Well, not so much that she knows the things, but that she's actually working undercover for a magazine based out of Chicago and is about to take a train there to deliver the goods on the United Defenders personally.

Of course, they do know about her leave of absence; they just don't know why she's going there. Stalk has the hots for Ann, so he shows up at he apartment while she's packing to go to Chicago, figuring that she's going there to see her boyfriend. Or, at least, that's what he implies; whether he suspects Ann might be the source of the leak to members like Donahue is unclear.

So Stalk, being no dummy, has somebody from the Chicago branch of the United Defenders, Steve Fuller (Michael O'Shea) follow Ann once she gets to the train station. She's not a dummy either, so she urges her cabbie to try to shake the guy following her. Unfortunately, this results in her taxi crashing, and her being injured in the resulting crash. The next morning, Steve goes to the various hospitals looking for Ann posing as her fiancé, giving the doctors her description. He finds her, but the doctor informs him that Ann has amnesia, and doesn't seem to remember anything about who she is or why she's in Chicago.

Needless to say, this all seems very dangerous for poor Ann, as she's liable to spill the beans when she figures out who she really is. Steve takes her back to Los Angeles and the United Defenders. Also posing danger for her is the fact that Donahue's wife shows up. She hasn't heard from him in a long time, for the obvious to us reason that he's dead, not that she'd know it. Mrs. Donahue's letters to her husband were collected by Stalk, but for some reason not destroyed, and finding those letters will put people in danger, leading to the climax of the movie.

Violence is interesting, especially 75-plus years on. With the passage of time, the United Defenders could be interpreted to fit almost any political persuasion you want: there were a ton of Communist front organizations in the late 1940s, but "veterans'" organizations of the early post-war era could just as easily be seen as being on the America First right; see Ray Teal's character in The Best Years of Our Lives getting beaten up by Dana Andrews as an example of that. In 2024, some people would say rent-a-mobs are working in conjunction with anti-Israel (or really anti-Jewish) groups, while others would talk about the "threat to democracy", which in the mass media is only ever implied to be coming from one side of the political spectrum.

Violence works well enough as a B movie even if its low budget doesn't ever allow it to become anything better than a B. So it's an interesting period piece, and definitely worth one watch, but not the sort of movie that anybody will consider a great one.

Gallant Lucy

TCM had a spotlight some months back on working women. One of the movies they picked that was new to me in spite of the big-name cast was Lucy Gallant. Since the cast sounded interesting, I decided to record the movie and recently got around to watching it.

The movie, which was released in 1955, opens up after the opening credits with a title card reading "Texas, 1941". Now, you might guess that this means the US is about to be pushed into World War II with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and that this is important for the plot of the movie. You'll be half right. War does come and a main male character does fight, but the movie isn't really a war movie, which you also might have guessed considering the movie was on TCM for a "women at work" spotlight.

Specifically, the movie takes place in a place called White Sage Junction, TX, the sort of place that in a western would be a cattle town. And it was at one time. But showing up at the whistle-stop train station is cattleman Casey Cole (Charlton Heston). He's there mostly to complain to the stationmaster (Jay Adler in a bit part) about how oil has been discovered and that with this, everybody else has switched from ranching to drilling for oil or otherwise servicing the people who drill for oil. They are, however, interrupted by an emergency dispatch over the telegraph informing the stationmaster that the bridge ahead is out due to a rainstorm.

Of course, there's a train coming that has to stop suddenly. On that train is the titular Lucy Gallant (Jane Wyman). She was on her way to Mexico after her wedding was called off, and she's got her entire trousseau with her. Casey helps her off the train, and eventually takes her to a house in town where Casey stays from time to time, owned by his friend Mrs. Basserman (Thelma Ritter). It doesn't take much to figure out the two are going to fall in love.

Meanwhile, Lucy being a jilted bride (there's a back story about her dad's financial issues leading to his suicide and her unseen fiancé not wanting any part of Lucy thereafter) from New York, she's got a lot of fancy clothes with her. And when she wears them in town, all the wives of the men who have suddenly gotten money hitting oil wish they could wear something like what Lucy is wearing. So she gets the brilliant idea to stay in town and open a couturier selling the finest of big-city fashion to the other women. She's going to need capital however, so she takes out a loan from banker Charles Madden (William Demarest), and runs the store out of the building that used to house the house of ill repute, run by a Lady MacBeth (Claire Trevor).

The store becomes a success, but Casey wants to marry Lucy and raise a family, and being nine months pregnant isn't really going to do for a businesswoman. So in Casey's mind, Lucy should sell up shop. Fortunately, however, World War II intervenes. Casey goes off to fight, and after the war gives up cattle for the oil business himself. But the store is still there, and despite Casey's having been engaged during the war, you know that the two still carry torches for one another. Casey just might be able to come to the rescue when Lucy's business winds up in danger....

Lucy Gallant is one of those competently-made movies the studio system churned out one after another back in the day, but to be honest it's not exactly a great movie. I think part of that is that despite having been released in 1955, it really feels stuck in the 1930s with a very antiquated attitude toward married women working. And Casey is a bit of a jerk toward Lucy. Plus, romance isn't exactly Charlton Heston's strong point. There's also the odd presence of an ex-governor of Texas playing himself. On the bright side, Lucy hosts a fashion show and present at that show is Edith Head, playing herself as the host of the show.

So Lucy Gallant is an interesting movie, even if it is a bit of a misfire.

Cleopatra (1912)

Quite some time back, TCM's Silent Sunday Nights selection was a 1912 version of Cleopatra. I'm always curious about very early movies, so naturally I recorded it to be able to see it and do a post on it.

The movie was made by one Helen Gardner, a stage actress who also was a teacher of "pantomime", which I would guess in this context means learning how to do the right gestures to try to display what action you mean in the context of silent cinema, where there's so much that you can't express with sound or dialogue. Gardner plays Cleopatra and the movie is based on a French stage play from about 1890. Obviously, being a silent film, one didn't need to worry about translating a stage play if the action could be followed; just the title cards would be necessary.

When I did my review of the movie Florence Foster Jenkins, I mentioned that the movie opens with her theatrical work presenting what were known as tableaux vivants, and much of the photography of this version of Cleopatra, being a pretty early silent, uses the same sort of staging. A fairly static camera films tableaux in medium-to-long shots, with a substantial use of title cards to add dialogue and action. (One IMDb reviewer mentions exactly 106 title cards; that number is probably right because in the print TCM showed the title cards seemed to be sequentially numbered.)

As for the plot, there are two plots. One is the relatively standard story line of Cleopatra falling in love with Marc Antony and getting him to fight the Battle of Actium against Octavian and his navy, with Antony and Cleopatra ultimately losing. This, of course, is what leads to Cleopatra retreating to her palace in Alexandria and having the venomous asp give her the fatal bite. The other plot, which takes up most of the first half or so of the movie, is about a fictitious Greek fisherman/slave named Pharon who is taken by Cleopatra's beauty and has a brief affair with her, even willing to kill himself just for the opportunity to have that affair!

One other interesting point about the movie is how many of the cast members are credited not by their full names, but as Mr./Mrs./Miss and their surnames. I know that some wives of prominent male actors would sometimes be credited as Mrs. and their husband's full name; I distinctly recall seeing Where Are My Children crediting Mrs. Tyrone Power (Sr.).

By the standards of 2024, this version of Cleopatra is an extreme antique, and notable by the fact that it does have a true feature-length running time of just under 90 minutes, which was astonishing for 1912. For anyone not interested in cinematic history, it's going to be difficult to watch thanks to Gardner not using much in the way of intercutting that other directors were already beginning to experiment with. She does use a lot of tinting, however.

Many of the IMDb reviewers also comment on the modern-day score that TCM apparently commissioned for this print some 20 year ago. That too isn't going to be to everybody's taste, but at least since it's a silent movie you can turn the volume off and imagine your own music.

The 1912 version of Cleopatra is a decided museum piece, but one that should probably be seen. As of this writing there are several copies available on YouTube.

Hair

Treat Williams died in 2023, and when TCM had its night in December honoring people who died, they selected him by showing the 1979 movie version of the musical Hair. Not having seen the movie (or, unsurprisingly since I don't do stage musicals for the most part), I decided to record the TCM showing in order to be able to do a post on it here. I've finally gotten around to watching it, so now it's time for the post.

It's the late 1960s, when the Vietnam War was at its height in America. Rural Oklahoma kid Claude Bukowski (John Savage) gets his draft notice, but for some weird reason this requires him to go all the way to New York City. I'd think the draft board would send him to a closer military base; apparently this is a change from the stage musical in which Claude was a New York hippie. So Claude heads off to New York, and seems as full of pride and willingness to serve as the steel-town workers from The Deer Hunter.

But in New York he gets waylaid by a group of hippies led by Berger (that's Treat Williams). They're basically being a bunch of dicks, trying to con people into giving them some money, and even devolving into behaviors that are rather more illegal (which escalates as the movie goes on). In this first encounter, they interfere with a rich girl from New Jersey, Sheila (Beverly D'Angelo), who's trying to rent one of thos Central Park horses. Claude saves her, and is smitten by her despite the fact that he's never going to see her again.

Or so he thinks. Since Sheila is a debutante type, the society pages mention one of the coming-out type dinners she'll be at, and the hippies arrange to crash the dinner, bringing Claude along. And Sheila kinda-sorta likes the idea of the bad boy. Not that Claude is a bad boy at heart, but the idea of the hippies violating all sorts of norms to get Claude to see Sheila again. And despite her supposed to be engaged to someone from her own class, Sheila is smitten with Claude, too.

Sheila's parents don't like any of this, so they understandably have the hippies arrested. Claude is so dumb that he uses up what little money he has left to bail out his "friends", who are inveterate moochers. To make matters worse, Berger and his merry band of hippies start carjacking Sheila and her boyfriend to get more money and access to a car.

Eventually, Claude does do his required enlistment, Berger is none to pleased about this, and decides to go out to the base where Claude has been stationed to try to get him to reconsider. Eventually, they even steal a car and commit much bigger crimes just to give Claude one more shot to see Sheila before going off to Vietnam. But there's a twist in all this....

The big problem I had with this version of Hair -- and again, I don't know how much the original Broadway musical has this problem, not having seen it -- is that the hippies are really selfish people here, not caring whom they inconvenience in order to get what they want. I mean, we're supposed to have sympathy for them despite the fact that they have no qualms about blocking drivers from going where they want and committing bigger carjackings, theft, and kidnappings. Regardless of your views on the Vietnam War, they're severely mean even to squares who did want to volunteer, and do it just so they can get their own way.

The musical version is also well known for having a nude scene in a draft board number. The movie, of course, couldn't go quite that far, and had to resort to "artistic nudity" in that scene. The actors are naked, but the camera work and placement of hands doesn't actually show the genitalia.

Still, I'm sure there are going to be people who enjoy this adaptation of Hair, even if I didn't.

Murder, but not my sweet

Robert Mitchum was TCM's Star of the Month back in January, and one of his movies I haven't gotten around to reviewing yet is Farewell, My Lovely. Recently, I finally watched it, so now I can do the review on it.

The movie is based Raymond Chandler's book of the same name, which had already been turned into a movie once before by a major studio, but under the title Murder, My Sweet. Mitchum stars as Chandler's detective Philip Marlowe, here in 1941 Los Angeles, with the passage of time marked by Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak. Other than that, there's not much for Marlowe to look forward to, as he's stuck doing crappy cases finding runaway children or being harassed by the police who want information about one or another case they're investigating.

One night Marlowe finds a runaway teenaged girl working as a taxi dancer. Outside the joint just after getting his money, he's approached by a very large man, "Moose" Malloy (Jack O'Halloran). Moose has just been released from prison after serving a seven-year stretch, and the first thing he did was to go to the nightclub where his old girlfriend Velma worked, wanting to see her again. Seven years is a long time, and in the intervening years the place has changed to one serving a black clientele. So perhaps a private dick like Marlowe can help find Velma.

The new owners of the club, which had been named "Florian's" after the old owner, Jessie Halsted Florian (Sylvia Miles), suggest Marlowe go to the rooming house across the street since someone there might remember the old place. That is indeed the case, and the man suggests where to find Florian and to bring bourbon because she's a hopless drunk now. Jessie gives Marlowe a picture of Velma, and it looks like the case isn't going to be that difficult to solve.

Of course, we're only about a quarter of the way in to the movie, so it should be obvious that there's going to be a catch. The Velma in the photograph is not Velma at all, but a different woman who is now in a sanatorium. The real Velma is going to be much more elusive to find, and much more dangerous. Another guy calls up Marlowe for assistance, but that job goes bad, and the police pick up Marlowe telling him to stop looking for Velma, and that Malloy has gone to Mexico, which I'd think is a parole violation.

But Marlowe wants more information on the other man who hired him, since that guy got murdered on the job he hired Marlowe for while Marlowe was knocked out by unknown assailants. As he continues to poke around, he finds that things are complicated, as he's dealing with some very powerful people. No wonder one of them knocked him unconscious.

I have to admit that I haven't seen Murder, My Sweet in its entirety. But having The Big Sleep and Lady in the Lake, I should point out that at least Farewell, My Lovely isn't quite as convoluted as those other two, particularly The Big Sleep (which I find terribly overrated anyway). The movie has nice atmosphere, and Mitchum is good as the world-weary Marlowe who's getting too old to keep doin this job but doesn't know what else to do.

If you haven't seen Farewell, My Lovely before, it's definitely worth watching.

Kiss Me, Kill Me

TCM celebrated its 30th anniversary back in April, and one of their spotlights that month was to bring in some of the people who work(ed) behind the scenes at TCM to present a movie or two each. One of the production designers selected an early Stanley Kubrick movie, Killer's Kiss, although to be honest I recorded it more for the synopsis than realizing it was an early Kubrick film.

The opening credits are superimposed over a man in New York City's old Penn Station. After the credits, that man, Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith) delivers an opening monologue about how one can get oneself into a mess, just as he did starting a few days earlier.... Once again, this is a cue that makes it seem likely we're going to get another flashback, and sure enough we do. It also sounds as though Davey is on the run, although that turns out not to be quite true.

Davey is a boxer, as the monologue makes clear, since the flashback starts just before his latest fight, against an up-and-coming young man named Kid Rodriguez. Davey is down-and-going, to the point that his uncle out in Washington State has been suggesting that he go back west for a visit. Davey gets knocked out by Rodriguez and that just might be the impetus for him to go west to see his uncle and aunt again.

Meanwhile, Davey lives in one of those apartment buildings with a courtyard. In the apartment directly opposite his lives a taxi dancer, Gloria Price (Irene Kane). As Burt Lancaster had a tendency to do with Susan Sarandon in Atlantic City, Davey looks across from time to time at Gloria, without knowing anything more about her. Tonight, however, he has a bad dream (cleverly portrayed by the use of negative photography), from which he wakes up to discover that Gloria is having a bad time of it in her apartment with a man, who turns out to be Vinnie (Frank Silvera), her boss at the dance hall (Frank Silvera).

Davey goes over there to save Gloria, and over breakfast, she tells him her sad life story. Davey by this time has planned on going back to Washington, and has also fallen in love with Gloria, so the plan will be to bring her along. But each of them will need to pick up their final paychecks, which presents the big dramatic conflict of the movie. Gloria needs to get it from that nasty boss, with Davey waiting at the entrance to the dance hall. Vinnie is extremely jealous, and sends some goons out to rough up Gloria's companion. But in the meantime, Davey gets waylaid by somebody stealing his scarf, and his manager shows up with Davey's check from the last bout. So the henchmen rough up and kill the manager, with Davey being an obvious suspect. Worse, Gloria witnessed it, and Vinnie can't have her as a witness.

Killer's Kiss being a very early film for Kubrick, it was done on an extremely limited budget. Hence the no-name cast and a running time of only 67 minutes. And, in fact, it does have the feel of the sort of thing that might have worked better as one of those episodes in a live play of the week type anthology show that were the rage in the 1950s. That having been said, Kubrick shows that he has a great deal of talent, and also comes up with a lot of nice vintage photography of midtown Manhattan as it really would have been in the mid-1950s, the sort of stark black-and-white photography that can't be recreated by any of today's doe-eyed nostalgic looks back at the Boomer era.

Killer's Kiss certainly isn't the world's greatest movie by any means. But it's a decidedly interesting movie.

What if Sam Peckinpah directed Smokey and the Bandit?

Not too long ago, I notice a movie that sounded like it might be bad in a fun way was available on multiple of the FAST services: Convoy. I knew it was based on the novelty song from the mid-1970s, so I think I might have vaguely heard the movie but never seen it before. With that in mind, I decided to watch it before it leaves the FAST services.

The song tells about a trucker nicknamed "Rubber Duck", or at least that's his CB handle; those of you old enough to remember the 1970s will recall CB radio. Rubber Duck is played by Kris Kristofferson, and as the movie opens he's driving through Arizona in his semi when he gets passed by a woman in a convertible sports car, Melissa (Ali McGraw). This results in all sorts of dangerous driving, and Rubber Duck getting pulled over by a a cop. He gets out of it, however, by making up a story about the woman driving pantsless, which of course gets the cop to go chasing after the women.

The truckers chat with each other over the CB, as there are a bunch of them out on the road. In addition to Rubber Duck, there's "Love Machine" (Burt Young), who also gets named Pig Pen because he's hauling pigs. There's also Spider Mike (Franklin Ajaye). Then a fourth trucker called Cottonmouth comes on talking about the lack of police. It's a ruse, however, as Cottonmouth is actually the local sheriff (Ernest Borgnine) setting up a speed trap.

Eventually, the truckers decamp to a truck stop where, it turns out, Melissa is there, now without her car, which she had to sell for money to get to a job offer in Dallas. She'll eventually take up Rubber Duck's offer to ride in his truck, but not after some other shenanigans. The sheriff shows up looking for the truckers. He taunts poor Spider Mike, which results in a barroom brawl, and the truckers' case becoming a cause celebre as a whole bunch of other drivers start following them in the hopes that Rubber Duck can make it to Texas where he'll presumably avoid extradtion.

Now, you'd thnk the authorities could simply set up road blocks, but then, we wouldn't have much of a movie. Instead, they decide to jail and torture poor Spider Mike to try to get Rubber Duck to out himself in an attempt to rescue Spider Mike. But a lot of people, including the governor, seem to be on Rubber Duck's side.

I mentioned Smokey and the Bandit in the title of this post, and it should be obvious why. The material here has the potential to be reasonably funny, although Smokey and the Bandit would still probably be better thanks to the starring turn from Burt Reynolds. He had the charm to make this sort of role work, in a way that Kristofferson is just there.

The bigger problem, however, is that the movie was directed by Sam Peckinpah, who was known for his boundary-pushing violent westerns, notably The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah seems unsure here whether he should be directing a comedy, or whether he should try to push the boundaries again. So in things like the big fight at the truck stop, we get a lot of Peckinpah-style slow-motion gore that just doesn't work for the sort of comedy that Convoy is supposed to be. And the treatment of Spider Mike in the third act takes Convoy down much too dark a road.

Then again, Convoy was also based on a song that was well past its sell-by date, so it should be no wonder that it doesn't work. 45-plus years on, the movie is little more than a curiosity.

The Fuller Brush Girl

Another movie that I've had on my DVR for several months is the Lucille Ball comedy The Fuller Brush Girl. I don't think it's coming up on TCM any time soon, but it does show up from time to time on Cinevault Classics, one of the FAST channels that's on both the Roku Channel and TubiTV, albeit with commercials. (Indeed, it's one of the movies regularly in the promos.)

The movie begins with a comedic credits sequence of Lucy trying to see cosmetics, which is what Fuller Brush girls do, although she's not actually working for Fuller immediately after the credits. Instead, she's Sally Elliot, a switchboard operator for the Maritime Steamship Company. She works there with her fiancé Humphrey, who's a filing clerk. The two together would like to buy a house in the sort of new development that appeared in Lucy's earlier movie Miss Grant Takes Richmond, but they don't make enough money.

There's a chance, however, when Sally learns that the previous inventory has been fired. There's a chance for Harvey to get a promotion. What they don't know, however, is that their boss, Harvey Simpson (Jerome Cowan), is actually using the company as a front for smuggling. He could use an inventory man who doesn't realize what's going on, and Harvey fits that role perfectly. He's surprised, however, when he gets the promotion, since not five minutes earlier he just had the boss yelling at him to get the hell out of the office.

Meanwhile, Sally being in need of a job, she tries to apply with the Fuller Brush company since her best friend also has a territory in town with them. But Sally is as incompetent as Lucill Ball's character in her previous Columbia film Miss Grant Takes Richmond, which is an opportunity to engage in some side humor of the sort at which Lucille Ball was always quite good. But there's also a plot point here.

Simpson and his wife have gotten into an argument over some of those Fuller cosmetics Sally's girlfriend had brought to Sally's old office, and wants Sally to explain to Mrs. Simpson (Lee Patrick) what really happened. In the meantime, however, Mrs. Simpson decides to oust her husband from the shipping company, which would really screw up that smuggling. So Mr. Simpson hires a burlesque girl to impersonate Sally for that explanation, and then has the burlesque girl murder Mrs. Simpson. Sally shows up as a Fuller Brush girl just as the burlesque girl has murdered Mrs. Simpson. Said burlesque performer knows Sally out and frames her for the killing. Sally and Humphrey have to solve the case while evading the police, leading to a comic finale aboard one of the steamship company's ships.

The Fuller Brush Girl was made not long before Lucille Ball decamped for TV to start I Love Lucy. Ball is in reasonably good -- and reasonably typical -- zany form here, although I will admit that I prefer Miss Grant Takes Richmond. I think that's in part because Lucy was better paired there with William Holden, and because Lucy was the only incompetent one in that movie. Here, both leads are supposed to be somewhat incompetent, and that doesn't really work as well. Still, The Fuller Brush Girl is more than pleasant enough, and definitely worth a watch.

Thoughts on James Earl Jones, and other obituaries

So James Earl Jones died yesterday at the age of 93. I was thinking about his most famous roles, and wondering what TCM could show for a programming tribute. It was a bit surprising to me that there's a relative paucity of movies, with a lot more TV and straight-to-video stuff. Jones provided the voice of Darth Vader, but I don't think there's any way TCM could possibly get Star Wars now, even if it did get aired once several years back when TCM did a salute to 20th Century-Fox. I recall being quite surprised at the showing, since it was after Disney acquired the Star Wars franchise. Jones also provided his voice to The Lion King, but Disney animation is going to be a giant no go for TCM any more. Even when they had Leonard Maltin doing the Treasures from the Disney Vault series, feature animation was mostly non-existent.

So what could TCM show? There's certainly The Comedians, which without looking it up I'm pretty certain is MGM; if my memory serves it's one of the movies mentioned in that hilarious Lionpower promotional short. He was also in Dr. Strangelove. I'd love to see TCM show Sneakers, in which he has a smallish but important role, as well.

It was a week ago that James Darren died. I didn't realize quite how many movies Darren was in as a young man, although he was under contract to Columbia. TCM seems to have some ability to get the rights to run those pictures, although it's not quite as easy as stuff from the old "Turner library". I haven't seen anything about a tribute to Darren, although it wouldn't surprise me if he's the sort of person that gets a movie in December when TCM has its night saluting people who died over the course of the past year.

And, finally, I should probably mention the pasing of Will Jennings, who died last Friday aged 80. If you don't recognize the name, it's because he worked behind the camera. Or at least, off-camera, since he was a songwriter so technically not quite so directly involved in the movies. Except that he won two Oscars, for writing "Up Where We Belong" from An Officer and a Gentleman and that horrid "My Heart Will Go On" from the equally horrid 1997 version of Titanic.

He Knows You're Alone

October is generally the month for horror on TCM, what with it being Halloween and all. But a horror movie that I recorded some months back is reaching the top of my queue of watched but not posted about movies and, since it doesn't seem to be on the October schedule, it's getting a post now, in September: He Knows You're Alone.

The movie opens up with a scene that made me think of The Town That Dreaded Sundown: two young lovers go off to a secluded Lover's Lane somewhere and, in the back seat of the car, proceed to try to make out. But the two think they hear something outside the car, so as a result, the boyfriend gets out of the car to investigate. The girlfriend gets nervous considering how long her boyfriend is outside the car, so she too gets out, and.... At this point, we see somebody get up, to be revealed that this is actually a movie-within-a-movie, and two female friends are watching together in a theater balcony. The one girl, being a bit too scared, goes down for a bathroom break. But in the bathroom, she thinks she hears somebody else! She gets back to her seat, at which point we see a man proceed to sit down behind the two girls, and stab one of them to death through the seat!

Fast forward to Staten Island. The murderer from the theater has gotten on a bus to get away from the murder location, and headed west from Long Island to Staten Island, where he presumably lived. A police detective, Gamble, investigating the murder on Long Island hears from the victim's friend that the victim was scheduled to be married soon, which horrifies Gamble. Apparently there was a serial killer some years back who killed brides-to-be, and one of those victims was Gamble's fiancée. So he's got a personal stake in this case, which is why he's at both that murder scene and trying to run the investigation in Staten Island once murders start happening there.

Oh, yeah, I suppose that's technically giving away a plot point, but it wasn't if if you didn't know there were going to be more murders. It's not as if the movie is trying to hide what it's going to be doing. On Staten Island, Amy is a college student studing psychology under Prof. Carl Mason (James Rebhorn, one of the few recognizable names in the cast) together with friends Joyce and Nancy. Amy is engaged to be married to Phil, although she's got an ex-boyfriend in Marvin who still likes her although she didn't like his working in a morgue.

The killer starts stalking Amy, while also killing a whole bunch of people around her. Gamble keeps investigating, taking the law into his own hands by stealing evidence from a crime scene (although to be fair, it's shocking the other police didn't find it on the murder victim's body). With He Knows You're Alone being an early 1980s slasher film, it's not surprising how this all plays out and leads to the finale.

He Knows You're Alone was unsurprisingly savaged by the critics, which is unsurprising partly because of the divide between critical reception and the views of the general public. However, part of the poor critical perception is that the movie really is generally pedestrian. It was done on a very low budget; Tom Hanks (as a college student jogger Nancy keeps meeting) and Paul Gleason as a police detective are the other two recognizable names in the cast. That low budget shows. Also, He Knows You're Alone has a ton of plot holes. As an example, for the finale, Amy makes a 911 call before the finale, but Det. Gamble shows up before the regular police do and is there a long time before the police show up. There's also one exceedingly obvious bit of foreshadowing. Well, multiple involving musical cues, but one not doing so.

He Knows You're Alone is probably the sort of movie it's more fun to watch with a bunch of friends and have a laugh over than it is a movie with any real frights. But it's still worth a watch.

Till the Clouds Roll By

I had some more movies that were about to expire from YouTube TV's cloud DVR, so I had to make a point of watching them to do a review now. The latest is the musical "biopic" Till the Clouds Roll By.

The movie opens with one of those old-style forewords informing us that the action begins on December 27, 1927, the opening night of the musical Show Boat. The music was written by Jerome Kern (played here by Robert Walker), a composer who had already had a string of Brodway hits in the 1920s, although getting to the top wasn't easy. On his way back home after the show, he asks the cab driver to detour and look for a particular brownstone. Since the movie opens up at the height of Kern's career, we know that we're about to get an exceedingly original plot device... the flashback to the beginning of the subject's career.

This time, we go back around 20 years (the real-life Kern got his start fairly young, around age 20 in 1905). Young Jerome is a budding composer, but he doesn't know so much yet about lyrics or good arrangements. To that end, he's been sent to the brownstone that older Jerome asks the driver to stop by. There (in 1905) lives an arranger, James Hessler (Van Heflin). Now, this leads to why I put the word "biopic" in sneer quotes above. James Hessler is the other main character of the movie along with Kern, but Hessler is a completely made-up person! Hessler is an arranger who would like to be a symphonic composer. He's also a widower with a young daughter Sally (grown-up Sally is played by Lucile Bremer). In any case, Hessler becomes Kern's mentor.

Kern writes good music, and would like to write for Broadway, but when they try to get a foot in the door, they learn that it's still the fad on Broadway to import revue-type shows from the UK and that the music of London is more popular to the Broadway crownd than the new American sounds bubbling up. So it's off to London.

Kern eventually meets British producer Charles Frohman (a real-life person, and his death along with Kern's tangential relationship to that being more or less accurately portrayed), and is able to sell one of his songs to Frohmann's London Gaieties. This also leads to Kern getting hired to write more songs for a show that's going to open in New York. Also while in the UK, Kern met Eva (Dorothy Patrick), the woman who would become Mrs. Kern.

Kern goes back to America with the Hesslers and Frohman, and I'd guess it was the US being out of the Great War for a couple of years while the European powers were fighting it that really boosted the careers of composers like Kern. Sally, now grown up, has always considered Jerome like an uncle, and wants to follow Jerome into musical theater. To that end, Jerome even writes a song for a musical that would give Sally her first solo even though she's not going to be the star of the show. The producer, however, thinks the song would be a better fit for the show's star, Marilyn Miller (another real-life person, played by Judy Garland). Sally has a hissy fit and... runs away!? Dad, by now ill with heart problems, wants Jerome to find Sally, but Dad dies before father and daughter can be reunited.

Jerome, like a lot of other composers and lyricists, went off to Hollywood once sound comes to movies, and wrote more memorable songs for movies in addition to adapting some of the old musicals for Hollywood. The last 10 minutes or so is a montage of various MGM stars doing numbers of a bunch of different songs, giving MGM a chance to put those stars into a big-budget musical if they hadn't already been used in a production number earlier in the movie.

If you like the Great American Songbook, you'll love Till the Clouds Roll By. The songs are unsurprisingly quite good. There's a reason why things like Show Boat or the song "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" from Roberta endure. The production numbers MGM did, at least up until the finale which is a bit more bland, are also very well done. The dramatic story, however, is something best not discussed. To be fair to MGM, however, the real life Jerome Kern story was mostly something not cinematic or dramatic enough for a biopic. But that's part of why Till the Clouds Roll By is a bit of a mixed bag.

If you like the Freed Unit, then Till the Clouds Roll By is definitely for you.

Maksim Gorky is turning Japanese

Another of the many foreign films I had sitting on my DVR was another Akira Kurosawa movie: The Lower Depths.

The opening credits mention it being based on a play by Russian playwright Maksim Gorky, although the action has been moved from early 20th century Russia to 19th century Japan. The action is mostly in a rooming house that looks a lot like it could substitute for the tenement neighborhood of Dodes'ka-den a dozen years later in Kurosawa's career. Osugi is a middle-aged woman who rents out alcoves around a large common area, the alcoves curtained off which is the only privacy the renters get.

Among the renters is an older tinker whose wife is terminally ill and everybody knows it; an alcoholic actor who's drunkien himself into a lack of ability to memorize lines; several men who gamble; and a thief Sutekichi (Toshiro Mifune) who fences the things he steals with Osugi's husband. Osugi likes Sutekichi more than her own husband, but she's also got a sister Okayo who develops feelings for him.

Into all this comes a much older man, Kahei, claiming to be a pilgrim traveling through the region. He has a bit of ability to put people at ease, and also to get in the middle of people's disputes and defuse things, but everybody also wonders where he's really what he's claiming to be. Everybody gets their day in the sun in terms of plot lines, although the biggest one involves Sutekichi since Mifune is the biggest star in the cast.

For me, The Lower Depths was a bit tough to come up with an assessment of, in part because of the lack of an overriding plot. I already mentioned Dodes'ka-den, which I watched first, and that was deliberate because there are certainly some similarities between the two films thematically. But The Lower Depths feels like it moves even slower, and is more philosophical.

Fans of foreign films will probably enjoy The Lower Depths, although if I were recommending Kurosawa I'd probably start off with something else, probably One Wonderful Sunday.