Thursday, October 31, 2024

Difficult to review: The Seventh Continent

As I've mentioned a few times, I've got a bunch of foreign films on my DVR waiting to be watched, some of which I may not get around to watching before they expire. Then again, they're all distributed by Criterion, since that seems to be about all TCM runs when it comes to foreign films, so TCM will get around to those movies again. Anyhow, a few months back TCM Imports was a double feature of films directed by Michael Haneke, and I've now watched the first of the two, The Seventh Continent.

The movie is divided into three parts, each of which is roughly one day in the lives of a middle-class Austrian family in 1987, 1988, and 1989. The main family has father Georg, who works at what looks like a power plant; wife Anna, who works as an optometrist; and daughter Evi, who is a bit of a problem child as, in the 1987 sequence, Evi feigns blindness!

Georg's parents are only briefly seen, but in both the 1987 and 1988 parts of the movie, Anna is heard narrating letters to them that give some of the family's back story. Anna's mother died sometime in 1986 and left Anna and her brother Alexander an inheritance of a family business, but the death also left Alexander in an obviously depressive state of the sort that required hospitalization. All of the dealing with the will and such also had an effect on Anna, but a rather more subtle one. At work, Georg seems to be doing fairly well, as he's up for a promotion when his boss eventually retires.

The first segment in 1987 involves Anna inviting her brother over for dinner, although it doesn't go quite so well as Alexander's depression seems to return rather suddenly in the form of a crying jag. Anna is also ticked at Evi's lying to her teacher, and even responds by smacking the poor girl, something that's a portent of events later in the movie. Georg, for his part, has been dreaming about selling everything and moving to Australia (hence, the title of the movie); if they sell their share of the inheritance they'd have the seed money to make a move.

The second segment, in 1988, shows how Georg is moving up in his job, but going into further detail about the family's life will begin to risk giving away the ending of the film. And that's part of why I found The Seventh Continent a difficult film to write a full-length post on. Not that it's a bad movie, by any stretch of the imagination. It's more that it's hard to describe without giving too much away, and more than a lot of other films you don't want to give a lot away.

Haneke's filmmaking style here is slightly unorthodox, consisting of short vignettes separated by fades to black that are longer than in most movies that transition between scenes (and I don't mean just the end of the 1987 and 1988 parts here). The movie also has long scenes without much in the way of dialog, which is a good thing for those of you who don't care much for reading subtitles. One quibble I had, however, was a plot hole of how it seemed as though Georg hadn't seen his parents in ages even though they presumably live someplace in Austria and it's not as if it would be overly difficult for them to visit each other -- Austria isn't that big a country. But that's a minor nitpick.

The Seventh Continent is an interesting movie, although it's another one I'm not certain is going to be for everyone.

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Dracula (1931)

I mentioned in my original post on Bela Lugosi as TCM's Star of the Month for October that the 1931 version of Dracula was going to get two airings: one on the first night of the tribute, and a second on Halloween itself. So I recorded the first airing to be able to watch it and do a post for the second, which is tomorrow (October 31) at 3:45 PM.

Lugosi of course plays Dracula, the vampire living in Transylvania. But we have to meet him first, and this character establishment is done in the form of a British estate agent, Renfield (Dwight Frye), going to Romania to see Dracula. Dracula has decided to visit England, since the people in Transylvania seem to know what a monster Dracula is and the English won't know this. Renfield has found a place for Dracula to stay and is there with the contracts. Of course, Dracula has the ability to hypnotize victims just by holding up his hand and staring at the poor unsuspecting dupes. Dracula does this to Renfield, turns Renfield into a fellow blood-sucker, and sets off for England aboard a tramp steamer.

When the boat gets to England, Renfield is the only one alive, seemingly having gone made. Dracula turned into a bat as he has the ability to do and flew off, one assumes. Renfield is sent to a sanatorium run by Dr. Seward. Seward has a lovely daughter, Mina (Helen Chandler), who is engaged to nice young Harker (David Manners). Dracula meets Seward and realizes he's got the opportunity to get at some very lovely young women to turn into his slave-brides. But poor Dracula doesn't realize that Seward has a friend, Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan), who knows a few things about vampires, and is able to deduce that Dracula is a vampire turning others into fellow vampires. Van Helsing also has a strong will and knows how not to fall into that hypnotism schtick.

To be honest, the story in this version of Dracula isn't the strongest. To me, a lot of it seemed to rely on the idea that the English were a bunch of ignoramuses. What is worth watching, however, is the acting from Lugosi, who takes the role (well, actually he'd done it on Broadway already as this movie is an adaptation of a stage play based on the book) and milks it for all it's worth and then some. Dwight Frye isn't bad either.

If you haven't seen the 1932 Dracula before, now's your chance.

Briefs for the end of October 2024

I was saddened yesterday to see news of the death of actress Teri Garr, who had a long battle with multiple sclerosis. Garr was 79. She started off as a dancer and was one of the backup dancers in the concert movie The T.A.M.I. Show, but I couldn't spot her in the YouTube clips I looked up. I seem to recall her wearing a bullseye shirt, but I didn't see that anywhere. As for her acting, she was memorable in several films of the 1970s and 1980s such as Young Frankenstein, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Tootsie. I'd guess that TCM will honor her in December with one of the latter two films since those seem to show up more often unlike Young Frankenstein which was done at Fox.

Halloween is tomorrow, and TCM is running programming today and tomorrow. The programming starts off with a handful of Hammer films, although thankfully those end before the end of the daytime block as Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim is on at 6:45 PM. The evening of the 30th brings movie that are more horrifying than horror movies, such as Psycho at 8:00 PM and Michael Powell's controversial Peeping Tom at 10:00 PM.

Halloween itself brings more "classic" horror; I mentioned at the beginning of the month when I did the post on Bela Lugosi that his 1931 version of Dracula would be getting a second airing on the afternoon of Halloween. I've got a standalone post for that which will appear later today. Also worth mentioning are Mystery of the Wax Museum at 7:30 AM, Freaks at 10:15 AM, and Frankenstein at 5:15 PM.

Very much of note on Halloween night on TCM is the 8:00 PM airing of The Other. This one is a Fox release, my having done a post on it some time back the last time it was in the FXM rotation. Somewhat surprisingly, it's on FXM tomorrow as well, at 1:15 PM. FXM isn't doing much for Halloween; their retro block has The Other preceded by Hand of Death at 12:10 PM. The ad-supported evening half of the schedule has some of the movies from the Alien and Predator franchises.

Finally, I'd like to continue to November 1. The TCM schedule for that morning and afternoon is a bunch of stuff based on the works of W. Somerset Maugham. He wrote a lot of stuff that's been turned into movies, and I've done posts on quite a few of those adaptations. Among the ones airing on Friday is the 1934 Greta Garbo The Painted Veil at 4:30 PM. It's been adapted for film at least two more times since, once about 20 years ago with the same title, and in the 1950s with the title The Seventh Sin. I've actually got that one on my DVR, but haven't gotten around to watching it yet since I've got so many other films I've done posts on.

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

A strangler from no particular town

I mentioned at the beginning of the month when doing a post on TCM's Star of the Month Bela Lugosi that October 30, the last Wednesday of the month, would not be given over to Lugoi's films, because it's being programmed as part of the Halloween marathon. To be honest, some of the movies aren't really traditional horror, but more movies with dark psychological overtones, such as The Strangler, which comes on at 2:00 AM.

The movie opens up intriguingly, with special effects being used to expose the image of a woman getting home and changing into something more comfortable superimposed on an eyeball, which implies somebody's watching the woman. Sure enough, sombeody is, and when the woman gets out of the bathroom, she's in for a rude surprise, which is that the person watching her is there to strangle her to death. However, the phone rang just as the strangler was about to do his deed, so the victim's boyfriend is able to know right away something's gone wrong.

It's not as if this strangler is new to the cops either, as they've got a serial killer on their hands who's killed eight women by now, all nurses, too, which gives the cops a place to start looking for their killer. Not that there's any mystery to the viewer, however, since the killer is revealed right away. Leo Kroll (Victor Buono) returns to his apartment and takes a doll that he's undressed, putting it in a locked desk drawer together with several similarly undressed dolls. And Kroll works as a lab technician at one of the local hospitals, which would explain how he's come into contact with a bunch of nurses to be able to kill.

With this killing, the police investigation, led by Lt. Benson (David McLean), decides the police are going to interview all the male employees of the hospital the latest victim worked at, which happens to be the same one where Kroll is currently working. He passes a lie detector test, but is way too arrogant in his dealings with the police. One place he somewhat trips himself up is that he has his father is dead and his mother is a cripple, which is true but implies that Kroll is taking care of his elderly, infirm mother. In fact she's in a nursing home and Kroll is paying good money for the privilege.

Kroll claims to try to visit Mom every night, but in fact misses night in part because he's committing those murders and in part because Mom (Ellen Corby) is a piece of work herself. She's basically told Leo that no woman is ever going to want him, which is a really nasty thing to tell one's own son!. Leo, in fact, has a woman he has is eye on: Tally, who works at the local arcade where Leo wins the dolls that he dismembers. Not that Tally realizes Leo has any feelings for her; in any case, she'd be horrified to find that out.

Now, the Production Code was still in effect, so we know that there's no way Leo is going to get away with his crimes. Even if the movie had been made 10 years later after the disintegration of the Code, I don't think they could have made a movie in which this sort of murderer gets away with it. With that in mind, the ending is somewhat pre-ordained.

The Strangler is a low-budget movie, but a reasonably fun (if you can consider subject material like this fun) one thanks to the performance of Buono, and how ridiculously over the top Ellen Corby as his mom is. However, large portions of the movie really do have the feel and look of a low-budget affair. Definitely worth at least one watch.

Monday, October 28, 2024

More Zenda prisoners

About a year and a half ago, I did a post on the 1937 movie version of the 1890s novel The Prisoner of Zenda. I knew that there was another movie version, made in color in the early 1950s, but I hadn't seen that one before. So the last time TCM ran it, I recorded it. The 1952 vesion of The Prisoner of Zenda is coming up on TCM again tomorrow, October 29, at 4:15 PM.

Needless to say, the plot of the two movies is pretty much the same, especially so since to save money, TCM largely reused the 1937 screenplay, never mind both movies are adapting the same source material. Rudolf Rassendyll (Stewart Granger) is an Englishman who's decided to go on a fishing vacation to the tiny Balkan monarchy of Ruritania. As he steps off the train in Ruritania, everybody seems shocked, and frankly as I watched this version of the movie it hit me: nobody bothers to tell him why they react the way they do when they see him. The reason, of course, is that Rudolf bears a striking resemblance, except for his moustache, to the crown prince who is soon to be crowned King Rudolf V (also played by Granger, which explains why they look alike).

Rassendyll is found by Col. Zapt (Louis Calhern) and Capt. von Tarlenheim, who explain the similarity to him (apparently, the two are distant cousins), and invite Rassendyll to meet his doppelgänger. They have dinner together and a bunch of wine, the crown prince known to be a heavy drinker. What they didn't know is that there's one last bottle of wine, which the English Rudolf doesn't drink, that was drugged by the prince's evil brother Michael (Robert Douglas). The idea was that with Rudolf incapacitated, Michael could take over as Regent, with Rupert (James Mason) being the power behind the throne.

But Zapt and company have an English lookalike, and are able to persuade him to take his cousin's place at the coronation. Of course, the English Rudolf doesn't know anything about Ruritanian politics, and one would think he doesn't know the language. But none of that is a barrier since this is a movie. One other problem is that in one of those royal marriages of convenience, the crown prince was supposed to marry a cousin, Princess Flavia (Deborah Kerr). Flavia didn't particularly care for the crown prince, but when she meets the Englishman playing the part of the crown prince, she likes this guy.

Now, the plan was for English Rudolf to go through the coronation and then give the crown and everything else to the crown prince, with nobody knowing the difference. Except that while the ceremony is going on, Michael and Rupert have the actual crown prince kidnapped. English Rudolf has to keep up the charade.

Since the screenplays are largely the same, there's not much to compare between the two movies. And of course, I haven't watched the 1937 version since blogging about it to compare the two movies. I will say, however, that Technicolor is something that works for a movie like this, even more so than modern-day color which is way too often based on a color scheme of teals and oranges for no good reason. There's not much grounding in reality in The Prisoner of Zenda, and the bright three-strip Technicolor is great for that. Stewart Granger is also an actor well-suited to period pieces like this, even if the other actors are better in other genres. Still, they all give it a professional go, and make this version of The Prisoner of Zenda a rousing watch.

Sunday, October 27, 2024

The Formula

Marlon Brando was TCM's Star of the Month back in April, and I recorded several of his movies such that I've got a backlog of his films to get through. Next up is one of his later films, The Formula.

The movie starts off with a couple of establishing scenes in Germany in early 1945, before V-E Day but with the Soviets rapidly closing in on Berlin. A meeting of Nazi Reichsministers talks to a general, and gives him a truckload of documents that he's to try to take to the border with Switzerland and use to try to negotiate an amnesty with the Americans, as surrendering to the Americans is considered far less bad than surrendering to the Soviets. The general leaves, but is unable to make it to Switzerland, getting stopped at an American checkpoint headed by a Maj. Tom Neeley.

Fast forward 35 years to the present day (the movie was released in 1980), and Los Angeles. Barney Caine (George C. Scott) is a Los Angeles police detective, divorced, and spending his weekend with his adolescent son at a movie revivl house. Coming out of the theater, he is stopped by a a Sgt. Yosuda, a fellow police detective. Unfortunately, an urgent case has come up and Caine is going to have to give up the rest of his Sunday off to investigate: the murder of one Tom Neeley, who after the war became a higher-up in the police department and Caine's former boss!

Caine interviews the man who found the body, who gives up the information that he works for a wealthy Mr. Clements who liked to host cocaine-fueled parties -- and that Neeley was the one who obtained the drugs for Clements. Further investigation involves Neeley's ex-wife Kay (Beatrice Straight), who seems to be less than honest about what's been going on. The fact that she, too is later found murdered, is pretty good indication that she wasn't quite honest. More investigation brings into the case an oil executive named Adam Steiffel (that's Marlon Brando, looking rather older and bald).

Neeley was working for Steiffel, in a role that involved ferrying large sums of cash over to Europe. All roads lead to Germany -- so Caine feels he needs to go over there to find out what might have been going on with Neeley's business in Germany to cause somebody to murder him. Not that it's too hard to figure out Germany was going to get involved again considering the opening scene.

That involvement, and those documents the Nazis were trying to get to Switzerland, involve a secret Nazi project code-named Genesis. The Germans, being in central Europe, were not in a location that produced much oil, mostly coal. That's part of why they wanted to get to the smallish oil fields in Romania, and larger fields in north Africa and what is now Azerbaijan but then in the Soviet Union. Instead, they made synthetic gasoline by converting their large reserves of coal through the Fischer-Tropsch process. Genesis was a way to make the conversion process much more efficient. And if Genesis could be put into action today, it might well make a world of cheap energy and put the current oil companies out of business. No wonder someone might have wanted to murder people for possible knowledge of Genesis.

The Formula has a pretty good cast -- I haven't yet mentioned John Gielgud as the present-day version of the Minsiter for Energy at the Nazi conference at the beginning of the movie. But the whole trope of "big business using ridiculous conspiracy theory to stifle innovation" is one that had already been done to death in the 1970s, so the result is a movie that feels tired and as though it's going through the motions. In theory an interesting idea, but in practice not the greatest execution.

TCM's James Earl Jones tribute, and other schedule notes

[NB: The first draft of this post was written a few weeks in advance, and TCM may have updated the schedule without my noticing in the intervening time.]

Actor James Earl Jones died back in September. As I said then, there aren't too many movies Jones made, but there is enough for TCM to do a modest tribute. That tribute is tonight, October 27, and includes two of his movies:

8:00 PM Cry, the Beloved Country, a 1990s adaptation of the famous South African novel that had already been filmed in the 1950s; and
10:00 PM Matewan, a film about union organizing in the mining sector.

Matewan has a 135 minute running time, and with an intro and outro, it means the next film is going to start at 12:30 AM, and that's where the schedule problems begin. The current iteration of the schedule properly has Silent Sunday Nights, and at 12:30 AM, the silent version of The Phantom of the Opera. But, the schedule lists a following movie, also at 12:30 AM, that being a documentary on Lon Chaney. Phantom of the Opera is listed at 94 minutes, with the documentary beind 90 minutes.

However, the following movie, the TCM Import is a latter-day Polish movie, The Lure, scheduled to begin at 3:30 AM and run 92 minutes. The rest of the TCM schedule, into the morning of October 28, lines up in terms of time. But as you can see, the listed running times for Silent Sunday Nights would have it run past 3:30 AM, never mind the intro and outro from Jacqueline Stewart.

My first thought was that the documentary: Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces was in fact made for TV and that the 90 minute runtime listed would be when it was on TV with commercial breaks. That would make it significantly shorter and, along with The Phantom of the Opera, fit in to a three-hour slot. But IMDb lists the documentary as 85 minutes, which would come up right against the start of the next feature even without Jacqueline Stewart. My guess, as of this running, is that Silent Sunday Nights will run over but there's enough buffer in TCM Imports to have the next feature (Sweetie at 5:15 AM) start on time.

Saturday, October 26, 2024

Vol de nuit

A movie that airs fairly rarely on TCM despite being an MGM movie is Night Flight. The movie is based on a novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who is better remembered for The Little Prince but, having been a pilot himself, wrote books about aviation. Part of the reason for the movie' infrequency on TCM is that for decades it was in rights limbo. I only got to see part of it when it first aired a dozen years or so ago, so was thrilled to see it show up again on TCM to be able to record it and do a post here.

The theme, as you can guess, if flying at night, which is commonplace enough today but in the early days of aviation when instruments weren't so good was a much more risky proposition. MGM got the rights to the book and immediately set about coming up with an all-star cast to fill the roles. The beginning of the movie, however, seemingly has nothing to do with aviation as a mother is worried sick at a hospital in Rio de Janerio in Brazil where her kid is sick with a case of infantile paralysis (polio). However, the doctors find out that there's no serum anywhere in Rio, or in fact anywhere this side of the Andes, which means that the serum is going to have to be flown in special delivery from Santiago. And as luck would have it, the Trans-Andean European Air Mail company, run by Rivière (John Barrymore) is just about to institute flights by night to get mail -- and small packages like polio serum -- out faster. Tasked with flying from Santiago over the Andes to Buenos Aires, where another plain picks up everything from points west and south, is Pellerin (Robert Mongtomery).

Rivière is, unsurprisingly, a strict taskmaster. In his defense, that's in part because he has an exceedingly tight schedule to meet. Everything has to get in to Buenos Aires in time for the plane to Recife in northeastern Brazil to take off and meet a French cargo ship there, as that's the closest main port in South America to Africa, from where planes take off to Africa toward Europe. Although Rivière runs the company, he's not the President, and is up against the President and others who don't want to take the risk that planes might not be able to make it through the night to Buenos Aires.

Pellerin isn't the only pilot whose flight is chronicled. There's also Fabian (Clark Gable), who is flying out of Punta Arenas in the south of Chile together with a radio operator. Their flight takes them over the southernmost part of the Andes before getting to the ports on the Atlantic side of Argentina and making their way up the coast. However, this flight finds itself getting into weather issues that push them off course and threaten the make the flight too long for how much fuel they have on board. And, in addition to having to contend with the company president, Rivière also has to deal with Fabian's terrified wife (Helen Hayes), who just knows something is wrong.

Since the beginning of the movie dealt with a sick child in Rio de Janeiro, and all the planes land in Buenos Aires, there's also going to be a flight from Buenos Aires to Rio. That pilot is a Brazilian, played by William Gargan, and like Fabian, he's got a worried wife (played by Myrna Loy). Rounding out the cast is Robineau (Lionel Barrymore), a former police inspector now dishing out discipline for Rivière.

All of the subplots in Night Flight are reasonably well handled, and yet for some reason the movie feels a bit less than the sum of its parts. I guess that's in part because there are so many stars and a relatively brief running time of under 90 minutes. There's not quite enough time for the characters to be well-developed, particularly Robert Montgomery's pilot. Still, Night Flight is a worthwhile watch with MGM bringing all the production values it could to what for the viewing public of 1933 would have been a novel topic.

Friday, October 25, 2024

Simon

The 1970s were a time of change in American cinema, and there were a lot of quirky movies made that I watch and find myself thinking they were too quirky for their own good. Another example of this phenomenon is the Alan Arkin film Simon.

We don't see Simon for several minutes; instead the movie first introduces us to the Institute for Advanced Concepts. This is one of those super-secret government agencies set on a large campus with ample green space, where they come up with all sorts of crazy conspiracy theory ideas that are too wacky to be real but in the movie's universe are things that actually happened, such as jamming all the Nielsen TV rating boxes so that they can decide which TV shows are the popular ones. The question of "why" implies that they're going to plan something much bigger.

Their idea comes when they realizes that a lot of Americans believe that there is in fact life out there in space. Now, they're not going to find an extraterrestrial, so they're going to have to create on on their own. But how? Well, if they can manipulate Nielsen boxes they can come up with methods to make a man think he's actually from outer space. But they need someone who won't really be missed. To that end, they ask their proto-AI computer to look through the information is has on all Americans for an orphan from near birth who doesn't have any other family. The computer settles on Simon Mendelssohn, a psychology professor who has bizarre ideas on Einsteinian relativity and the end of the world, as well as using the sort of sensory deprivation tank from the movie Altered States. They convince him to come to the Institute, not telling him what they really do of course.

Dr. Becker (Austin Pendleton), the head of the Institute, has his fellow researchers, particularly Van Dongen (Wallace Shawn) and Cynthia (Madeline Kahn), work on Simon. Eventually, the idea they come up with is to put him in a sensory deprivation tank for 200 hours (never discussed is how you eat, drink, or pee during those times), during which time they'll put hypnotic suggestions into his mind that he was actually born to an extraterrestrial mother and is a machine. The plan works, more or less.

At least, it works for a while. The researches are able to use their powers to get Simon to take over the airwaves and broadcast a bunch of strange and incoherent ideas. Surely at this point Simon's girlfriend from the outside Lisa (Judy Graubart) is going to recognize him. But more worrying for the researchers is that he becomes popular enough that his ideas threaten them. So they call on other goverment departments to kill Simon. He goes on the run, while Lisa tries to bring back the real Simon who is not an alien at all.

As with quite a few movies I've blogged about, it's not that hard to see why the writers and cast thought that what they were making was going to be quite funny. But for me, I find it hit-and-miss, with more miss than hit. Still, again I can see why there are people out there who would love this stuff, so watch and come to your own conclusions.

Thursday, October 24, 2024

Briefs for October 24, 2024

I probably should have mentioned the passing of Mitzi Gaynor earlier; she died last week at the age of 93. She was active until fairly late in life, although her movie career ended fairly early in the 1960s. She also made a lot of her movies at Fox, so I don't know how much of a salute TCM will be able to do for her. I noticed that Les Girls is part of TCM's prime-time lineup on Monday (technically, midnight between Monday and Tuesday ET), but beyond that I could see Gaynor being honored on one of those nights in December when TCM runs one film each for a bunch of people who died over the past year.

Ron Ely died at the end of September aged 86, but his death wasn't announced until a day or two ago. I've been a game show fan since I was a kid, so I first came across Ely as the host of a now mostly-forgotten game show from the early 80s called Face the Music. From that I learned he was one of the many actors to play Tarzan (in his case, on TV). So I was surprised when I first got the Fox Movie Channel and saw him in The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker.

Since the beginning of September, TCM has been running a series of "political" films on Fridays in prime time. This week, they're finally getting to one that to me is a very surprising pick from them: Leni Riefenstahl's two-part Olympia on the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The IOC has an official Olympic film every Olympiad, and in conjunction with the release of a Criterion set of them some time back TCM ran a bunch of the movies, notably skipping Olympia. It's airing early Saturday at 4:15 AM for the first part and 6:30 AM for the second; those times are surprising as well since I'd think it's normally the early section of prime time that has the guest on to let everyone know who wicked Riefenstahl was for making the movie, because you're only allowed to think of movies like this or Gone With the Wind in the way TCM's hosts think you should.

Before all that, however, TCM has a morning and afternoon of disaster movies, including Transatlantic Tunnel at 8:15 AM. I probably should have posted this earlier; I did a post on Transatlantic Tunnel many years back and it's one that doesn't show up very often. But I've been concentrating more on getting ahead of the game by writing up posts two to three weeks in advance, and have been a bit derelict in my duty to post things like obituaries and mentioning upcoming films that I've already blogged about.

The Shout

Another horror-ish movie that TCM is running as part of their October horror spotlight and which is on my DVR from a previous TCM showing is The Shout. The next showing is early tomorrow (October 25) at 5:00 AM; as TCM runs its daily schedule from 6:00 AM to 6:00 AM the next day, their schedule makes it look as though the movie is on October 24.

The movie starts oddly, with Rachel Fielding (Susannah York) walking into some sort of facility in Devonshire, England, where she's directed into a dining room. There, on three of the tables, are three dead bodies laid out, covered with sheets! (Frankly, that seems exceedingly unhygienic to me.) She pulls the sheets back, and seems most surprised by the third body.

Cut to a guy on a motorcycle driving to the same facility. He gets there at the same time a woman in just a dressing-gown is coming down the stairs, very much disturbed by this man. The place in fact is a mental hospital/sanitarium, and the woman happens to be one of the patients; her presence is only to establish that this is in fact an inpatient mental facility with a rather large grounds. The man, Robert Graves (Tim Curry), is a young doctor who one might think is coming to work at this facility. But before that, he's shown up on recreation day. And the doctors are busy setting up a cricket match between mixed teams of doctors and patients.

Graves is being asked to help keep score for the match, a process which requires two people to do all the statistics, one for each side. The two official scorekeepers are in a little cabana off to the side; accompanying Dr. Graves is one of the patients, Charles Crossley (Alan Bates). Except that Crossley doesn't seem quite nuts enough to be a patient here. However, he has a story to tell that may just explain why he's at the facility....

Crossley claims to be a world traveler, and to have killed his wife and children. That was as a result of his having spent time with the Aborigines in Australia, and having learned many of the traditional rituals that Westerners would simply disparage as "magic". Of late, Crossley wound up in Devon, where he made the acquaintance of an avant-garde composer/sound designer, Anthony Fielding (John Hurt), who is the husband of the aforementioned Rachel Fielding. Crossley is a bit of a smooth operator in addition to everything else, so he worms his way into the Fieldings' lives, including staying in their guest room.

And then Crossley tells Mr. Fielding that among the Aboriginal "magic" he learned was The Shout. That's a sort of bellow that can be used as a weapon to kill someone nearby (albeit not the person who actually produces the noise), although the range is a bit too much for it to be really useful to kill one person. Anthony is understandably curious but also disbelieving. He'd like to hear The Shout, even though Crossley insists it would kill him. The two play a bit of a cat-and-mouse game, but as this is going on, Crossley also seems to be seducing Mrs. Fielding. He's also getting rather more erratic, and that might cause a danger to everybody around him.

The Shout is an movie with an intriguing premise, but at the same time I have to think that it's not a movie that's going to be for everyone. The narrative structure jumps back and forth in time and, even though it's a relatively short movie by even 1970s standards at a bit under 90 minutes, it feels very deliberate in its pacing, as though there's more atmosphere than plot. I didn't dislike The Shout, but I can see why some will and I can also see why there are people who are going to love it a lot when that isn't quite my reaction.

Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Sex Story

I was a kid when the 1981 movie version of D.H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was released. Obviously I was too young to go see the movie, and had never (and still have never) read the book, but somewhere along the way I picked up on the fact that the title had become a byword for "steamy and banned for obscenity". When I picked up the documentary Electric Boogaloo about Cannon Films some time back, this was one of the "highbrow" movies that was discussed in the early part of the movie. Recently, I discovered that it's now on some of the FAST streaming services, so I've finally been able to see the movie version of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

The story begins around 1914. Sir Clifford Chatterley (Shane Briant) lives at one of those great British country manors together with his wife Constance (Sylvia Kristel), where they host parties for similar nobility. That is, at least until war comes. Sir Clifford goes off to fight and, like a lot of young British men who went off (or were drafted) to fight the Germans, the war destroys him. Sir Clifford thankfully doesn't die, but he's left forced to use a wheelchair.

Worse for him is that the injuries also leave him unable to perform sexually. This is important because Sir Clifford didn't produce an heir to the title and all the lands that go with it before leaving to fight in the war. So he tells Lady Constance that if she wants, she's welcome to go out there and find a suitable man to produce an heir for the family, and he won't hold it against her. Besides, he knows that she has physical needs he can no longer fulfill. That's fairly frank stuff for any era, but in the late 1920s when the original book was written, you can see why it would be scandalous. (Of course, there would also be no IVF for 60 years after the war.)

Lady Constance is riding the grounds one day, when she comes across the hut where the gamekeeper lives. No big deal. He's washing himself, which in theory would be no big deal either. But he's doing it stark naked, and doing it outside! The gamekeeper, Oliver (Nicholas Clay), being a man who does physical labor, is reasonably fit, although not by the standards of the latter-day entertainment industry. For the 1920s, however, he looks like a man who got a reasonably fit body from doing hard farm-type work day in and day out, and that unsurprisingly turns Lady Chatterly on. So they start having an affair, in the hopes that he'll knock her up.

However, when Sir Clifford wanted Constance to produce a suitable heir, he meant that he wanted her to have a discreet affair with somebody of his class, the 1920s still being an obscenely (pun intended) class-conscious era in Britain. Doing it with the gamekeeper? Oh the horror! How can the adopted child of a commoner be suitable to take the Chatterly title?

Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus claimed that they wanted to bring highbrow cinema to the masses, having conquered the tiny Israeli market through the sort of trashy movie that always appealed to the sort of teens who especially drive the pop music market. And, watching this adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover, I think they were sincere in their beliefs about going highbrow. Of course, Golan and Globus never quite figured out what made American audiences tick, so their movies are generally slightly (or more than slightly) "off" in ways that oftem make the movies a lot of fun even if not very good.

Lady Chatterley's Lover is definitely another one that fits the description. No matter what Golan and Globus said, nobody was truly going to watch this movie for reasons other than tittilation or, later, for curiosity as to what all the fuss was about. The acting is, unsurprisingly, terrible. On the other hand, some of the production values, notably the set and costume design, are quite good. But then there's the editing, which really jumped out at me, and that means it has to be spectacularly bad because I'm not the sort of person to notice something like editing in most pictures.

Lady Chatterley's Lover has a reputation for being steamy but not very good, and it's easy to see why it got that reputation.

Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Love Story

Some years back, I blogged about the Ryan O'Neal movie What's Up, Doc?. If you've seen the movie, you'll recall the final lines have Barbra Streisand telling O'Neal "Love means never having to say you're sorry", to which O'Neal responds, "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard". Audiences of the day, and I think a lot of people who are fans of old movies, would recognize Streisand's line as the tagline of O'Neal's earlier movie Love Story. TCM finally ran Love Story back in March during their programming tribute to the late Ryan O'Neal, so it gave me a shot to record it and finally be able to do a full-length post on it here.

Well, more or less full length since Love Story is one of those movies where people pretty much already know what it's about based on its reputation. Ryan O'Neal stars as Oliver Barrett IV. A name like that implies wealth and old family traditions, and you'd be right to expect that here. Young Oliver is a student at Harvard, star of the hockey team, and expected to go on to Harvard Law School, in part by his wealthy father, Oliver III (Ray Milland).

Harvard was one of the Ivy League schools that set up a complementary college for women, Radcliffe, before going officiall co-educational, and one day when Oliver goes to the library at Radcliffe to pick up a book, he meets librarian Jenny Cavilleri (Ali McGraw), doing the work-study thing to make it through college. She's everything Oliver is not: free-spirited, working-class, and Catholic. She doesn't seem to care for the rich, or for hockey either. But in a movie like this, you know they're going to fall in love.

Jenny's widower father is accepting of this despite thinking the young couple's lives together isn't going to be a bed of roses. Oliver's dad, however, is pissed. So ticked off, in fact, that he decides to cut young Oliver off from his trust fund which means that Oliver IV isn't going to be able to afford Harvard Law School and that nobody in a position of authority seems to have any understanding of this. But Jenny and Oliver get married anyway, with Jenny taking a job as a teacher to help Oliver work his way through law school.

Oliver does eventually graduate and gets a good job with a New York law firm, and would like to start a family. But for some reason, he seems unable to knock Jenny up. The reason, it turns out, is that Jenny has some sort of cinematic terminal illness, of the sort that makes her still look gorgeous by the standards of 1970 even as she's on her deathbed. Think the way Bette Davis suddenly drops dead at the end of Dark Victory, still looking like the glamorous Bette Davis of old, and you'll get the idea. (I had an uncle die of a brain tumor, and while he never looked like a picture of Hollywood glamour, he looked terrible in the final pictures we have of him.)

Love Story is the sort of movie that was a ridiculous runaway hit when it was released to theaters in 1970, and it's easy to see why. It's also the sort of movie that a lot of critics hated; again, it's easy to see why. Love Story is unashamedly mawkish and manipulative, and actively invites the viewer to go along for the ride. I tend to come closer to the critics on this, but at the same time I realize that if I had been around in 1970 I wouldn't have been in the target demographic for Love Story. If you're the sort of person into this genre of movie, then you'll love Love Story.

Monday, October 21, 2024

Cross No. 7

I've got a couple of World War II movies that I haven't blogged about before on my DVR. One that's technically not a war movie, although it was released during the war and is set in Nazi Germany, is the Spencer Tracy movie The Seventh Cross.

The movie opens up with a shot of several crosses outside one of the old concentration camps inside the borders of Nazi Germany as it was before they annexed any territory or other countries declared war on them; these were not quite the same as the extermination camps set up in present-day Poland to kill the Jews, and had a bunch of political prisoners. Seven men escape from the camp, and one of them, Wallau (Ray Collins), narrates their story, even though he gets captured early on and killed. Since most of them get caught, and Wallau is narrating from beyond the grave, it's mostly the story of one escapee, Georg Heisler (Spencer Tracy).

Heisler along with the others, escaped, but doesn't really have anywhere to go. At least, not many places that could offer him any amount of safety. However, Wallau had been talking about going to Mainz since he had a friend there who is part of the anti-Nazi resistance and might be able to help the men get forged documents that would allow them to travel somewhere, hopefully out of Germany. So Heisler heads there even though he's got a badly injured hand.

The Nazis are making a big deal out of trying to find Georg, no surprise, and are watching as many people who knew Georg as they can think of. As a result, those people who would like to help Georg find themselves unable to do so since they can't reach Georg. The best he can do is see an old girlfriend Leni (Kaaren Verne), but she's no longer able to help him. He's able to get help from a couple of Jews who already know what's coming for them in Nazi Germany, but that is once again only temporary.

Eventually, Georg can only think of one person left who knew him and who, as far as Georg knows, doesn't have any political views, which seems astonishing in a country like Nazi Germany: factory worker Paul Roeder (Hume Cronyn). Paul now has a wife Liesel (Jessica Tandy, who was of course Paul's real-life wife) and kid, and doesn't seem to know anything about Georg's wanted status or why he just suddenly dropped out of society. Paul, however, is fundamentally decent, so he decides that he's going to try to come up with some way to help Georg, even though it's going to put himself in great danger.

There's still a good ways to go in the movie, however, so Georg has a lot more hiding to do until he can either get out of the country or be caught. Considering when the movie was made, I think you can guess how the movie ends.

The Seventh Cross is one of the earliest movies directed in Hollywood by Fred Zinnemann, who does a fine job here. Unsurprisingly, Tracy is also quite good even though I don't think of him as realistically German. Neither is Hume Cronyn, who got an Oscar nomination for his part. If the movie has any flaws, it's in the script which doesn't really get to be subtle since the movie had to be something that would please American audiences during the war. In that regard it succeeds in spades. The Seventh Cross is a fine example of a World War II-era suspense movie.

Sunday, October 20, 2024

Pollock

I mentioned a few weeks back that I've got several more recent films to get through that I recorded off of TCM during 31 Days of Oscar. Next up is a movie from the odometer year of 2000, so almost a quarter century ago, but still fairly recent by the standards of the movies that I blog about: Pollock.

As you probably know the title refers to Jackson Pollock (played by Ed Harris, who also directed), who changed the world of abstract art in the 1940s and 1950s. The movie starts off in the late 1940s with Jackson doing a show and being the subject of a story in Life magazine, with people knowing who he is and lining up for his autograph. We then go back nine years, and before World War II. Jackson is an alcoholic struggling artist, living with his brother and sister-in-law.

But it's not really a relationship that works, especially with a baby on the way and Jackson needing space for his art. Coming to his door one day is a fellow abstract artist, Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden, who won an Oscar for her role). She's really intrigued by his art, and eventually moves in with him. After some time of Jackson continuing to struggle, Lee runs into Howard Putzel (Bud Cort), who is a buyer for wealthy and influential Peggy Guggenheim, who might just be able to promote Jackson's work and make him a success as an artist.

Since this is a biopic and we know how Jackson Pollock turns out, we know that in fact Peggy Guggenheim will take an interest in Jackson and put on a show of his in late 1942. The attention is starting to make him into a name, but his art is still of the sort that most people aren't interested in actually buying. And, with his alcoholism, trying to make a living at anything isn't going to be easy, as well as having an increasingly volatile relationship with Lee.

Eventually, Lee gives Jackson an ultimatum, and he marries her with the two moving out to Long Island. There, he develops the drip technicque for which he would become famous. But he continues to drink and become erratic and violent. He also starts seeing other women who show up at the house. If you know Pollock's biography, you already know how all of this is going to end, and it's not exactly a happy ending.

Pollock, being a biopic about a well-known figure, is one that's not going to offer a bunch of surprises. However, it's very well acted, as both main leads earned Oscar nominations. The movie was a labor of love for Ed Harris, and it certainly paid off. Pollock is definitely worth a watch.

Saturday, October 19, 2024

I guess you had to be there

Another movie that was one of my "blind spots" is one that showed up a few months back when TCM ran their miniseries Two For One, with a bunch of movie types picking double features. That miniseries is being rerun, so we're getting all of those movies again. Having taped several, you'll be getting more over the next few months, just like with One Touch of Venus a few weeks back. This time, the movie in question is The Bad News Bears, tonight at 10:00 PM.

Walter Matthau plays Morris Buttermaker, a heavy drinker who lives in the suburbs of Los Angeles and now has a business cleaning swimming pools. But as the movie opens, he's in his car just outside a baseball field, when a man comes up to him. That man, Bob Whitewood (Ben Piazza), is a local city councillor and has a son he insists is a great baseball player. However, for whatever reason his son and a bunch of lousy baseball players weren't able to join the local Little League until Whitewood threatened legal action. Bob is hiring Morris to be the coach of this ragtag team of players no other team wanted, and is willing to pay well for it.

Morris, in the past, had been a professional baseball player, or so he claims. He only got as far as the minor leagues in the years following World War II, and has stories to tell anyone who will listen. Or at least, anyone who can be forced to listen, which he now has with a bunch of young kids. However, trying to make baseball players out of them isn't going to be easy.

The team is filled with stereotypes, such as the butterball catcher, or the nerdy and shy kids who know that they aren't very good and are OK with sitting on the bench, or the ethnic types. They more or less get along, but basically have no real baseball ability. And Coach Buttermaker nearly turns them off when he first tries molding them into players by harsh practices. They lose their first game not even by the mercy rule, but by having to quit because they can't get anybody out in the top of the first inning.

However, Morris fathered a child out of wedlock, and as part of being an absentee parent, he helped the kid learn to throw a curveball. That kid, Amanda (Tatum O'Neal) is the right age to be on a Little League team, so Dad tries to reconnect with his daughter. Deep down inside, she's always wanted that but doesn't want to show Dad how badly she wanted it. She's also able to convince bad-boy Kelly (Jackie Earle Haley) to join the team.

At this point, the team starts winning, and may just make it to the championship game against the Yankees, who are coached by Roy Turner (Vic Morrow), the sports parent from hell who is, if anything, even more of a taskmaster than Morris.

The Bad News Bears has become a classic over the half-century since it was released. To be honest, however, it left me rather colder than most fans. I'd guess part of that is the fact that I never did Little League, or much in the way of youth sports in general. Part of it is that I would have been a few years too young for the movie, as well as not growing up in the sort of suburb that populated this movie or a lot of the teen movies of the 1980s. And the characters were to me not the most sympathetic.

But a lot of people love The Bad News Bears, so you may love it too if you watch it.

Friday, October 18, 2024

The slime of color

Some months back, TCM ran a day of science fiction films from the late 1960s. I already did a post on Moon Zero Two out of the set, and recently watched a second movie that TCM showed that day: The Green Slime.

Scientists on board a space station called Gamma 3 are sending back a "space weather" report to the United Nations Space Command, whose headquarters are show in a model that looks surprisingly cheesy and made me wonder about the provenance of the movie. More importantly, Commander Elliott (Richard Jaeckel) and his crew spot an asteroid called Flora that has come out of its orbit or something because they determine that on it new path, it's going to strike earth and destroy life on the planet much like the object that killed off the dinosuars 65 million years ago.

The only person who can save Earth is Commander Rankin (Robert Horton). Well, he's going to lead a crew that can save the planet. His job is going to be to go up to Gamma 3, from where he'll lead a mission designed to blow up the asteroid so that the remnants will either barely miss earth or burn up in the atmosphere or something; other movies have since been done on the idea. And with a title like The Green Slime, you might suspect that this is not what the movie is really about as well.

But we'll get to the real plot of the movie in a bit. There's a subplot in that Cmdr. Elliot is in love with Gamma 3's doctor, Lisa Benson (Luciana Paluzzi). However, she was formerly in a relationship with Cmdr. Rankin. That, and the two men constantly clash over whether Rankin thinks is really capable of command. They're going to have to put those differences aside to complete the mission to destroy Flora.

So a ship heads off to Flora to deploy some explosives which should destroy the asteroid, even though it doesn't seem like much in the way of explosives. While on Flora, one of the men finds this weird pulsating green substance that's attached itself to one of the instruments. (Now you know how the film gets its title.) Obviously they're going to have leave those instruments behind, because bringing such a substance back to the station would be extremely dangerous.

Except that they're not able to avoid completely that green slime. Some of it winds up on the station, and it's a form of life unlike anything mankind has seen before. There doesn't seem to be any good way to destroy it, and it also seems to have some odd way of regenerating itself that they're not able to figure out. That, and it's highly dangerous to humans. So the rest of the movie involves the slime being on the station and the humans trying to figure out if there's some way they're going to be able to get rid of it.

The Green Slime, as I implied at the beginning, has a distinctive visual look, even if it's one that looks like it has a very low budget. That, it turns out, is becuase of the international nature of the production. MGM helped finance it, which is why they're at the beginning of the credits in the version TCM ran. However, the idea was conceived by the same Italians behind War of the Planets and the rest of what was known as the "Gamma 1 Quadrilogy". I think I've seen and posted on two of those movies, and they're wildly fun if not terribly good. Furthermore, The Green Slime was filmed in Japan with a largely Japanese behind-the-camera crew.

The results, in terms of an actual polished product, are not particularly great, as the plot is unoriginal and the acting is lousy. But it's stylish and still entertaining if you want an unchallenging scifi/horror film.

Thursday, October 17, 2024

The Geisha Boy

Jerry Lewis was one of the stars honored in Summer Under the Stars back in August, and TCM ran quite a few of his films that I had not seen before and weren't on my Jerry Lewis box set that I've gone through over the past several years. I think I finished up that set when I posted on The Nutty Professor since that one was on the TCM schedule. The upshot is that I've got a fair amount of Lewis' work to get through over the next several months before the stuff expires from the YouTube TV DVR. But even before that, I noticed that I had a different Lewis movie that aired on TCM previously and was not reused for the Summer Under the Stars block: The Geisha Boy, which showed up when Sessue Hayakawa was Star of the Month in May.

Jerry Lewis stars as Gilbert Wooley, a failed musician who hasn't worked in months but has a rabbit, Harry, who's the star of the show. Gilbert and Harry show up at the airport in Los Angeles because they've been booked as part of a USO tour of Japan that's being headlined by actress Lola Livingston (Marie McDonald). Wooley and Lola immediately do the exact opposite of hitting it off, as Harry agitates Lola's dog to the point that the military orders the dog to stay behind as part of its no pets policy. Then, on the flight, Wooley keeps causing trouble as part of his attempts to keep everybody from finding out about the existence of Harry. The only person who seems to have any sympathy for Wooley is stewardess Sgt. Pearson (Suzanne Pleshette in one of her earliest roles).

When the plane lands in Tokyo, Wolley screws up Lola's PR reveal so badly that Lola uses her influence as headliner to get Wooley kicked off the tour. But Wooley also developed an ally as a result of his physical comedy failures. Maj. Ridgely (Barton MacLane), the organizer of the tour, doesn't speak Japnese, and needs an interpreter, which he's given in the form of Kimi Sikita. She's also the guardian of her nephew, Mitsuo, as his parents died tragically some time back and Mitsuo hasn't gotten over it. Until now, as Wooley's antics cause Mitsuo to smile and laugh for the first time in ages.

So Wooley now has a little boy who looks up to him, and a woman who in a normal movie would become a love interest. But this is a Jerry Lewis film, so you know it's going to be more about the sight gags than about a wholly coherent plot. And in any case, Kimi also has a boyfriend, or at least someone she's "supposed" to marry, that being the star pitcher on one of the the local baseball teams. This subplot is never fully realized but is used to set up a scene of an exhibition game between the Japanese team and the Dodgers who had literally just moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles.

Eventually the time comes for Wooley to return to America, but little Mitsuo doesn't want Wooley to leave. Mitsuo is willing to create an international incident to deal with his plight, although that incident leads to the requisite happy ending for all the right characters.

As I've strongly implied above, The Geisha Boy is another of Jerry Lewis' movies that's much stronger in the sight gag and physical comedy departments than it is in the area of a good story. Indeed, the whole idea of the "clash of cultures" is one where it's easy to see people getting humor from, while at the same time running a serious risk of greatly offending people if it isn't handled well. Thankfully, most of the movie is on the side that doesn't play to the stereotypes, although I found the baseball game scene poorly handled. As for Hayakawa, he plays Kimi's father, and gets a sight gag of his own when he's directing a bunch of men in his backyard garden pond to build a bridge that looks suspiciously like the one on the river Kwai.

The Geisha Boy didn't get the best reception, and watching it, it's easy to see why this of Lewis' films is so little remembered. There are some fun sight gags here, but that's not enough to sustain an entire movie.

Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Remembering Alain Delon

French actor Alain Delon died a few months back, and I don't think that TCM had a traditional programming tribute to him. One of his movies is on my DVR and on TCM soon, so I decided to watch it: Le Samouraï, tomorrow (October 17) at 6:00 AM.

Delon plays Jef [sic] Costello, and as the movie opens he's in one of those crappy apartments in Paris of a sort similar to those that seemed to populate American noir movies as well as a lot of European films where the housing stock was older and much worse, living there with just a bird for a pet. He exits the apartment and gets into a Citroën parked along the street, where he pulls out a ring of keys and tests each of them in the ignition. He finally finds one that starts the car, stealing it and taking it to a place that changes the license plate for him. Jef then goes to the apartment of his girlfriend Jane (Delon's then wife Nathalie), asking her to come up with an airtight alibi for him. After this, he goes to a nightclub called Martey's, goes to the office to see Martey, and shoots Martey dead!

However, quite a few people saw Jef as he entered and exited the club. Worse, Jef is stupid enough that he always wears the same hat, which seems like it would be a pretty big giveaway to the police. They, in the form of the Commissar (François Périer), investigate the case, rounding up the usual suspects. Unsurprisingly, Jef is one of those suspects, since he's been well known to the police for ages. A lot of what follows over the remainder of the movie is not quite a police procedural, but a decided cat-and-mouse game as the police, suspecting Jef, try to tail him. Jef, for his part, tries to give the police the slip as much as possible.

Jef also has good reason for that. He hasn't been paid off for his side of the contract killing yet. He goes to what in America would be an el train overpass to meet Olivier, the man responsible for fulfilling the contract from that end and paying Jef. Instead of a cash payoff, however, Olivier tries to kill Jef, only giving Jef a wound in the left forearm. At least some people however, will have noticed that Jef has been shot and doesn't have full use of his left arm any more.

Meanwhile, the club's pianist (Caty Rosier) saw Jef enter and leave Martey's, so was naturally called in by the police. Surprisingly, however, she lies about Jef's identity. Jef starts to put two and two together, realizing that she knows something about who the people above Olivier responsible for hiring him are. They want him dead, figuring that if the police do get him he might be able to tell the police something about who the people behind Jef are. Best to get Jef out of the way for good.

Now, this synopsis probably makes Le Samouraï sound like a dry film. But it's actually quite good. There's violence and some action, although the pace is not exactly fast. That, however, works in favor of a movie like this, building up the tension. It also felt to me like there was rather less dialog, again, something that's to the movie's benefit.

Le Samouraï feels like it could fit in well with American noir films, only with a certain French flair of its own, making it the sort of foreign-language film easier for those who aren't particularly into reading subtitles -- and definitely not wanting to deal with arthouse stuff -- to sink their teeth into. If you haven't seen it before, don't miss this TCM airing.

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Tess

The next movie that's on my DVR and getting another airing on TCM is Tess. As of this writing, it's going to be on overnight tonight at 2:45 AM, so still late in the evening of October 15 out on the west coast.

Tess is a film version of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles Nastassja Kinski plays Tess, a young woman in England of the 1880s. She's the eldest daughter in a poor rural family named Durbeyfield, with a father who is an alcoholic. Dad is walking along a country road when the local vicar rides by, referring to him as "Sir John". It turns out that the parson has been doing some research, and has determined that the Derbyfields are actually descended from a nobleman who came over as part of the Norman conquest in 1066, the d'Urbervilles. Their particular line, however, fell into poverty due to the death of male heirs and, I'd guess, not being the eldest son in a line.

The parson also knows that there's a family of d'Urbervilles a town or two over, and that this particular line is rather well to do. So Tess' parents get the idea that Tess should introduce herself, and perhaps the d'Urbervilles might be able to help the Durbeyfields in some way. Yeah, is seems rather like a grift to me. But Tess goes along with it, in part probably because it's at least a chance at a better life.

Tess doesn't meet the matriarch of the family, but instead the matriarch's son, Alec d'Urberville (Leigh Lawson). He's intrigued by the idea of country cousins, but much more by Tess' beauty, with him and Mom eventually giving Tess a trial job as manager of the manor's poultry. It also transpires that Alec is not a real d'Urberville, having simply bought the name and coat of arms because he was from a working class family but worked his way up to prosperity and wanted a good name to go with that prosperity.

Alec also has the hots for Tess so seduces her, and eventually rapes her, knocking her up in the process. Tess is horrified and returns home, but doesn't take care of herself, and the child dies as an infant. Tess goes off again to try to escape her life, getting a job as a dairy maid. It's there that she meets Angel Clare (Peter Firth), a farmer who's hoping to grow his business as well. He falls in love with Tess, and eventually decides to ask for her hand in marriage even though his mom would prefer a better marriage for her.

It's only after the wedding that Tess decides to tell Angel about her background, specifically the having been raped and impregnated part. This being the Victorian era, that really ticks Angel off, with his thinking it's somehow Tess' fault. The two still kinda-sorta love each other, but for whatever reason Angel thinks they can no longer live together for the time being. He's going to go off to find himself, eventually coming back when he does after a long sojourn in Brazil of all places.

Tess, needing some form of support, decides to go back to Alec, which is why Angel has trouble finding Tess when he returns to England. And once Angel returns, Tess finds that perhaps having chosen to live with Alec wasn't such a good move. Not like she had anyone else to go to, however, since Dad finally died and the rest of her family became part of the indigent itinerants as a result. But Angel's return ultimately leads to tragedy....

I had never read Tess of the d'Urbervilles, so I didn't know what a mess it was in terms of plotting. That's partly because the novel was originally serialized. But in any case it's a sprawling story. Director Roman Polanski also wrote the screenplay for this adaptation, and he didn't bother to edit it down into a manageable length, so we get a story here that's fairly slow and all over the place. The technical parts of the movie -- the cinematography and production design -- however, are quite good, and both won Oscars.

Roman Polanski's original edit of the movie was a shade over three hours. The version that TCM ran in 31 Days of Oscar was a restoration from the early 2010s, and runs 172 minutes. However, as I write TCM only has the movie in a 165-minute block; the following presentation, an episode of MGM Parade, is set for 5:30 AM and runs 25 minutes in a half-hour block. The previous film, A Room With a View, is 117 minutes and starts at 12:30 AM. If A Room With a View were on during weekday daytime, TCM could conceivably put it in a two-hour block. But since this is part of a prime-time block, there's an intro and an outro, which would make it run past 2:30 AM if you wanted to put Tess in a three-hour block starting at 2:30 AM. By the time this actually posts, however, things may have changed.

Monday, October 14, 2024

Neptune's Daughter

Once again, I've hit a period where there are multiple movies on my DVR that I haven't blogged about before but that are coming up soon on TCM, so you're going to get a bunch of such posts in quick succession. First up is Neptune's Daughter, which concludes a night of Ricardo Montalbán movies early tomorrow (October 15) morning at 4:00 AM.

Montalbán is the male lead here, although the star of the movie is Esther Williams. She plays Eve Barrett, a swimmer who wins a bunch of trophies in the days when you couldn't make money from a competitive sport like swimming since the International Olympic Committee highly frowned on that. So, needing to make money, Eve went into business designing swimsuits with Joe Backett (Keenan Wynn). Joe has a thing for Eve, but for her there's a business partnership and just a friendship.

Eve has a kid sister, Betty (Betty Garrett). Betty is man-hungry, so when news comes that a South American polo team is going to be visiting, Betty gets excited. Joe is excited by the idea of putting on an aquacade for the team and all the audience that will show up for the matches to make some money and serve as advertising for the swimwear company. Eve, however, is not excited, because she knows that poor Betty will go after the guys and possibly get herself in troube for it.

The star of the polo team is José O'Rourke (that's Montalbán, of course). He, being a performance athlete, gets a lot of the aches and pains that high-level athletes do, and needs a masseur. He gets on in Jack Spratt (Red Skelton), and gives Jack some advice on Latin lovers and that the reason Anglo women go for them is that apparently they find Spanish irresistible. José leaves, Betty walks in, and since Jack is practicing his Spanish, Betty immediately assumes this is José. As if Red Skelton could look even remotely Latin.

The real José shows up at Joe and Eve's factory, which gives Eve the chance to speak her piece to José, telling him to stop seeing Betty, even though he never has met Betty. So instead, José takes this as an opportunity to start putting the moves on Eve, who does after all look good in a swimsuit. Eve tries to rebuff José at first, but you know she's going to fall for him despite the mistaken identities that will need to be resolved.

And then out of nowhere the plot takes a ridiculous turn. Mac (Mike Mazurki) is a professional gambler who has a wager on the outcome of the big polo match, and figures the best way to hedge his bets is to try to waylay José, by less than legal means if necessary. This has an affect on both the José and Eve relationship, as well as on Jack, since of course with Red Skelton in the film you're going to get some of his physical comedy.

The plot of Neptune's Daughter is wafer-thin, but that's not the reason to watch the movie. The real reason is that all of the main leads are so appealing here in spite of the plot. Betty Garrett and Red Skelton get the better musical numbers, including one with Xavier Cugat. Among the songs is one that's now become a Christmas standard, "Baby It's Cold Outside", although Neptune's Daughter has nothing to do with Christmas. The song is also done twice, once with Esther Williams not able to stay and Montalbán telling her it's cold -- and a second time with the sex roles reversed, and Red Skelton feigning wanting to leave with Betty Garrett trying to convince him to stay. Also, all four of the characters have their eyes fully open about what they're doing. So this Christmas if anybody tries to claim that "Baby It's Cold Outside" is "problematic", tell them to go fuck themselves.

Rant aside, Neptune's Daughter is a decidedly entertaining movie, if one that's fairly mindless.

Sunday, October 13, 2024

The Belle of Broadway

I think I mentioned the last time I did a silent movie, back on Silent Movie Day a few weeks back, that I have a fairly substantial backlog of silent films to get through, like with foreign films, so it means those two genres are going to show up a bit more often than they normally do. Up next is a silent from Columbia that I hadn't heard of before it showed up on TCM: The Belle of Broadway.

Oddly enough, Broadway really has precious little to do with the movie, other than the fact that one of the two main characters supposedly starred on Broadway in her youth. That character is Mme. Adèle. As the movie opens, it's 1896 in Paris, and Adèle (played here by Betty Compson) is the toast of the Paris stage, playing her most celebrated role, Madame du Barry, who was the last mistress of French King Louis XV in the 1760s and 1770s. Adèle has all sorts of men swooning over her, such as Count Raoul. However, she's also got a husband Fabio, who is set up in the orchestra box and can see all of the men who are not Mr. Adèle like he is trying to woo her. Fabio decides he's had enough of this, and leaves his wife. Worse for her, however, is that he also takes their infant son with him.

Fast forward to the present day, or at least 1926 when the movie was made. Adèle has, like everyone else, grown 30 years older. Acting is, for women, the same as it's always been: a profession where the audience wants young, beautiful things. Adèle (now played by Edith Yorke) is pushing 60, and looking like a woman of 60. Not terrible by any means, but no longer what the audience generally wants in a leading role. The stage producers can no longer find any good roles for her.

Living in the same building as Adèle is young Marie Duval (that's Betty Compson again, so you can guess where the movie is going). She's walking along the sidewalks of Paris on a rainy day when she gets her shoe stuck in a mud puddle. A kind young man named Paul (Herbert Rawlinson) rescues her from her predicament and takes her home. It's at this point that Marie and Adèle finally meet, and Adèle notices the similarity between her younger self when she was playing Mme. du Barry, and Marie. This is also where the plot starts getting ridiculous.

Adèle and the people close to her decide that they could give Marie her big break. But, it would come as Marie pretening to be Adèle, having been rejuvenated by all sorts of plastic surgery and other fountain of youth-type treatments that as I understand it were the rage in the 1920s when the movie was made. Marie goes on stage, and all those suitors Adèle had 30 years prior come out of the woodwork despite the fact that they're now lecherous sexagenarians, The Thin Man joke about the meaning of sexagenarian aside. Marie obviously doesn't remember these people, but they remember who they think she is, and are going to put her in compromising situations.

But if that's not bad enough, the plot is going to get even more ridiculous. Paul, the man who saved Marie from the mud and brought her home, is actually the son of Fabio and Adèle. Dad died when Paul was a kid, and he obviously never met his biological mother. So by going out with Marie who is trying to pass herself off as Adèle, the suitors would consider this an incestuous relationship.

The plot of The Belle of Broadway gets ridiculous in the latter half of its brief running time, but the movie is still a fun one. Granted, if I were trying to introduce people to silent film, this isn't the one I'd pick, but for people who are already fans of the genre, I'd absolutely recommend it.

Saturday, October 12, 2024

India from a passage

I've mentioned quite a few times before in passing the "Blind Spot" blogathon, where the point is to select a dozen "essential" movies you haven't actually seen, and blog about them over the course of a year. I've never taken part it it, largely because I don't know what movies I'm going to be watching over the course of the following year, and whether movies that are one of my blind spots are going to show up on TV for me to watch. In any case, a movie that had been one of my "blind spots" was David Lean's A Passage to India, which TCM ran during 31 Days of Oscar and which I finally watched.

Judy Davis plays Adela Quested, a young woman in 1920s England. As the movie opens, she's booking passage to India, together with a much older traveling companion, Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft). Mrs. Moore has a son, Ronny, who's part of the British administration, and Adela is set to marry Ronny at some point in the future. Mrs. Moore books a round trip, but Adela only books one way, as she is uncertain when she's going to come back.

Adela and Mrs. Moore get to India, where they find that the British have mostly tried to bring a piece of Britain to India, living as rich feudal lords and using the local Indians as hired help. Some of the local Indians, however, are taking the opportunity to get into the good graces of the British colonial authority, from where they'll try to agitate for independence. One example is the widower Dr. Aziz (Victor Banerjee), whom we first see being very obsequious to a British school headmaster, Fielding (James Fox).

Fielding is a bit different from the other British in that, while he certainly hasn't gone native, seems to have more sympathy towards the Indians. And, of course, they certainly have legitimate grievances. Fielding even has a friend in the form of the guru/scholar Godbole (Alec Guinness), whose presence in the film seems to serve the purpose of being the detached person who can look at events from both sides and with the view of someone never directly involved.

It's through Fielding that Adela is introduced to Dr. Aziz, which Adela is happy for as she doesn't want to be part of an insular British community. Aziz, ever eager to do the needful and curry favor with the British, takes Adela and Mrs. Moore on a tourist excursion to some local caves.

But something happens in the caves, something that's never made quite clear. Adela seemingly gets separated from Aziz in the relatively dark cave, before running out of the cave, down the hill, and winding up terribly bloodied. But what actually happened? To save her honor, Adela says that Aziz attempted to rape her. (I think the plot would make a bit more sense if Adela had accused the local guide, who may or may not have met up with her again after being separated.) The rape trial becomes a sensation as the local Indians start showing their nascent political awakening. At the same time, however, they feel like they can't really get justice from British courts, who are always going to stand with one of their own.

A Passage to India is a visually beautiful movie, largely because director David Lean did a lot of location shooting and had access to very lovely places to film. The movie is also well acted, although 40 years on some people will argue whether Alec Guinness should have been playing a non-British character. The movie, however, runs at a very leisurely pace, lasting 163 minutes for what really isn't all that much story. Some people may find it a bit too slow.

Overall, however, it's easy to see why critics and the Oscars loved A Passage to India, ad why it generally gets positive reviews to this day. It's definitely worth a watch if you can block out the 160-plus minutes it lasts.

Friday, October 11, 2024

A Global Affair

Bob Hope's movie career really tailed off sometime around 1960, as he made one subpar comedy after another. An example of this that showed up on TCM some time back is A Global Affair.

A Global Affair is one of those 1960s films that opens with a terribly dated MOR song. After that, Lisette (Michèle Mercier) is leading a tour of the United Nations building. Just at the end of the tour, she discovers that sombody has abandoned a baby in the building! There's a note attached to the baby, and when Lisette takes the baby to the boss, it's revealed that the mother left the baby there after having heard the radio speeches delivered by UN official Frank Larrimore (Bob Hope).

Now, it seems like the obvious thing to do would be to call the local authorities both to help find the biological mother as well as to find someone suitable to take care of the baby. But the UN building is technically sovereign territory, or at least not US territory, and the UN jealously guards its jurisdiction, so they're not about to call the New York police. Instead, they give the baby to Frank for him to take care of until they can find a suitable solution. Of course, that comes with its own set of problems.

Frank is a bachelor, so there's no woman to be the mother of the child. And then there's the fact that he lives in an apartment building that's for the childless, and having a child would break the lease. Frank calls in his friend Randy (Robert Sterling), and he invited a bunch of nubile young women over, theoretically in the hopes that a suitable mother can be found, but more because Randy is just into beautiful young women. Lisette sees the party going on, and she's pissed.

The next day when Frank takes the baby to the UN building on his way to work, the subject of what to do with the baby is discussed. Segura (Nehemiah Persoff), the delegate from Peru, rightly realizes that the baby is liable to cause an international incident, although he does admire the things Frank has had to say about children's rights. So Frank can keep the baby a little while longer until a decision is reached.

The eventual idea is for all the member states of the UN to put forward proposals as to why they'd be the best place for the kid, and somehow somebody will make the right choice about which country gets the child. At the same time, the Soviets send over a pediatric researcher, Sonya (Lilo Pulver), to research the kid.

A Global Affair goes on like this, combining unfunny humor with a large dollop of UN propaganda. Thankfully, it only runs for a brief 84 minutes. Some people may like A Global Affair, but I'd rather recommend Bob Hope's earlier movies.

Thursday, October 10, 2024

The Pride of the Yankees

We're into the baseball playoffs now, and I don't think that I've done a post on a baseball movie in a while, so it's time to watch one that I recorded during 31 Days of Oscar: The Pride of the Yankees.

The Pride of the Yankees is, actually, a bit tough to do a good full-length post on, in part because most people are already going to know the story. Lou Gehrig (played here by Gary Cooper) was the son of German immigrants who found baseball as a kid and played professionally after college, eventually making it to the big leagues on the big team of the day, the New York Yankees. When he made it into the lineup, he didn't give up his spot, playing every game for nearly 14 seasons, until... he was diagnosed with ALS, which is still commonly referred to in the US as "Lou Gehrig's disease".

Complicating matters is that apparently Gehrig wasn't the most exciting person. Not that I mean this in a bad way; it's more that he was clean enough that he didn't get himself involved in the sorts of things that made, say, his teammate Babe Ruth (who plays himself) a larger-than-life figure. (Or, in a later Yankees generation, someone like Mickey Mantle.) In short, Gehrig's life seems relatively cinematically boring. There's no real plot conflict here of the sort that might drive other Hollywood biopics.

So the scriptwriters have to try to create something, which here is a conflict between baseball and family, if you will. A young Gehrig is seen finding a sandlot game at the opening of the film, and we pretty quickly get to Gehrig's college days at Columbia. His parents (played by Elsa Janssen and Ludwig Stossel), like a lot of immigrant parents, want him to go into something professional, much like his unseen uncle Otto did, becoming an engineer. Mom for the longest time can't understand why her son loves baseball.

There's another conflict, which isn't really that much of one, involving Gehrig's devotion to his mother and the fact that, well, he's going to grow up and find a woman to be his wife. That woman is Eleanor Twitchell (Teresa Wright), a Chicago socialite who first sees Gehrig when he's in town to play the White Sox. He trips over a bat and she calls him "Tanglefoot". They eventually meet again and ultimately get married, with Eleanor scrapbooking Lou's career. After his retirement and young death, she would preserve and safeguard his legacy until her own death; she never had children and never remarried.

If you haven't noticed, there's actually precious little baseball action in the movie, as a lot of it is done with montages and shots of pennants with the different American League cities on them. There's also a subplot about two sportswriters with opposite views of how to cover the players. Sam (Walter Brennan) is more protective of Lou and one of his best non-baseball friends, while Hank (Dan Duryea), while not an iconoclast, doesn't seem to want to be a hagiographer.

The acting in The Pride of the Yankees is all well done; the problem with the movie is that there's just not a dynamic story to be told from the material. And certainly not one that runs over two hours. Still, The Pride of the Yankees is a beloved movie, probably in part because of Gehrig's tragic story. So definitely it's worth a watch.

Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Briefs for October 9-10, 2024

I probably should have mentioned when I did the post on Star of the Month Bela Lugosi last Wednesday that among his movies is Zombies on Broadway, which I did a brief post on back in October 2010. It's showing up in a few hours, tonight at 9:30 PM. Apologies for not mentioning it sooner. But I assume it's going to be on the Watch TCM app, since it's an RKO movie.

Over on FXM, October 1 did bring a few films out of the vault, although much of what's new is stuff I've already blogged about. Desiree, which was the subject of a post five years ago, showed up today; it's actually showing up on TCM later this month. The Barbarian and the Geisha is another on that's back and ran today, although it's not on in the next two weeks. One that is is As Young As You Feel, an early 50s movie about forced retirement, which you can see at 4:40 AM Saturday. That's immediately follows one of the few movies in the rotation I haven't blogged about, Only the Strong. That one seems to have several airings, although I don't know exactly which one will get the post on it, since I've got enough other stuff on TCM that's also on my DVR to blog about and I'm already ahead through almost the end of October in terms of posts scheduled on the blog.

Today was the birth anniversary of Jacques Tati, who was born on this day in 1907. Tati is probably best known for M. Hulot's Holiday, although I've also blogged about Mon Oncle before.

I just don't get Albert Brooks

I reveiwed the movie Lost in America some months back, and found it not as good as a lot of the critics seem to think it is. Then, on one of the movie channels on I think PlutoTV, I saw another of Albert Brooks' films show up: Modern Romance. I gave up on this one after maybe a half hour because it just wasn't funny. So it was with some trepidation that I sat down to watch my recording of Albert Brooks' directorial debut, Real Life.

Albert Brooks got the idea for this from an early 1970s PBS documentary series, An American Family, which focused on a real family in California. Apparently, the family's consent to having PBS come in and record a whole lot of their personal interactions had a profound effect on the family, and not for the better. In Real Life, Brooks plays a documentary filmmaker named Albert Brooks, contending that his new film is about to change forever what film can be, as it's going to show real life.

The movie starts off with Brooks leading a press conference in the rapidly-growing metropolis of Phoenix, AZ (the city population at the time is about half what is is today while the metropolitan area is three times the size it was hen the movie was made). Brooks and his crew are announcing that they've picked a family from Phoenix to do their documentary on "real life" about; the family isn't introduced because they've been sent on vacation to give the crew time to prepare. Brooks concludes the conference with a song that makes no sense but you get the sense Brooks thought people would find funny.

We then get an extended back story about the Institute for Human Behavior and how they conceived a study and picked the family, as well as all the pseudoscientific stuff that's going to go into making a documentary like this about a family. As for Brooks himself, he buys a house across the street from the selected family, the Yeagers, in order to set up shop. He's working with a psychologist, Dr. Cleary, while having regular contact with the researchers from the Institute as their experiment is supposed to run an entire year.

Needless to say, the experiment doesn't go as planned. On the Yeagers' first night back, Mrs. Yeager seems depressed, and decides that she's going to have the implanted birth-control device removed. Eventually she calls Brooks, who decides to take the totally unprofessional step of having a "private" (well, with cameras in tow) conversation with her, convincing her to let the cameras in on the appointment with her gynecologist, who, in turn, was the subject of a 60 Minutes exposé some years prior.

As for Mr. Yeager (Charles Grodin), he's a veterinarian who seems to have started off more positive about the idea of the documentary. But his wife's depression has a strain on him, as he accidentally ODs a horse during surgery, killing the horse and leaving him depressed for several weeks. Things continue to spiral out of control, with matters finally coming to a head when local news figures out (really? It took them this long?) what family is being filmed and starts following the family themselves.

Surprisingly, for once I'm in agreement with Roger Ebert about a movie. He really hated Real Life, and I didn't care for it either. It's supposed to be a mockumentary, which implies comedy. But most of the comedy doesn't work. Brooks' character is also terribly self-centered and obnoxious, starting with that song in the opening scene. The script also fails in that Brooks seems to have had no idea how to resolve the conflict at the heart of the movie. There's also a race-relations scene between him and the Dr. Cleary character that brings the movie to a screeching halt.

But, as I implied at the beginning, there are people who really seem to love Brooks' films, not that he directed that many. So if you liked Lost in America, you might be the sort of person who will like Real Life.

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Before the foxes were even little

I did a post on the movie The Little Foxes some time back. Some years late, Lillian Hellman wrote a play that was a prequel to The Little Foxes, called Another Part of the Forest. It's unsurprising that the play would get turned into a movie, and it's one I'd been curious to see for some time. Several months back, TCM finally ran it, and I recently got around to watching it to do a post on here.

The Little Foxes tells the story of the Hubbard family in a small town in Alabama circa 1900. As Another Part of the Forest opens, it's Confederate Memorial Day in the year 1880, so 15 years after the war ended. Col. Isham leads the entire town -- well, almost the entire town -- in remembering their defeat, specifically a massacre of local boys that Isham just knows someone local had to clue the Union Army into, at the local war memorial, and watching from the nearby woods is Lavinia Hubbard (Florence Eldridge), the matriarch of the Hubbard family. I metioned that almost the entire town is there. Conspicuously not there are most of the Hubbards. Oscar (Dan Duryea, who in the earlier movie played Oscar's son) shows up, but Isham tells him he's decidedly not wanted. This especially because he cavorts with a dance-hall girl.

Oscar's brother Ben (Edmond O'Brien) comes to town having been in the big city, where he was hoping to invest some money. But he was called back home by his father, Marcus (Fredric March), who runs the local dry goods store with an iron fist. Dad was ruthless in making his fortune, and he thinks that all of his kids are varying sorts of weak, and doesn't necessarily care for any of them. As for Lavinia, she seems to think the family has some sin to atone for, as she shows up at the Confederate memorial statue talking about taking some of the family fortune and using it to start a local hospital.

Rounding out the family is daughter Regina (Ann Blyth). She's been carrying on with a rather older man, John Bagtry (John Dall), who was injured in the war and who still hasn't gotten over it. Regina is hoping he'll marry her and take her away to Chicago to get the heck away from the rest of her family. Ben thinks she should marry one of the richer guys in town, but Regina is having nothing to do with that. Indeed, she's perfectly willing to use her brothers' secrets to try to get Dad to do her billing. It's clear that nobody in the family loves one another, with the exception of Lavinia. But then Lavinia is the sort of woman who, in that era, might have been a candidate for a sanitarium, if only for the rest of the family to keep her silent.

Lavinia reveals what she knows of the family secrets, which is that Marcus made the family fortune by smuggling salt during the war and then selling it at inflated prices. That too explains why the rest of the county seems to hate the Hubbards. But there's a lot more in the way of secrets, and as the family bicker with one another, those secrets are about to come out.

I mentioned at the beginning that Another Part of the Forest was based on a stage play, and once again those origins seem fairly clear. Another Part of the Forest, however, is helped by a bunch of fine performances, as well as a script that while not great, is so overripe that it makes the movie fun. The movie winds up being good, although probably not for the reasons Lillian Hellman would have wanted.

Monday, October 7, 2024

A Black Cat in a Bamboo Grove

One of the movies that TCM ran last year for Halloween that I hadn't seen before is the Japanese ghost story Kuroneko. So I watched before it expired from my cloud DVR in order to be able to do a post on it this October.

The movie is set sometime during the samurai period; I don't think it mentions specifically when. It's a warring samurai period, however, which if I understand correctly would place it before the Edo period that began in 1600. There's an introductory scene of two women who live by themselves, a mother and wife of a man who's gone off, although more on that later. Their house is in the middle of nowhere, and a bunch of samurai show up, raping and killing the two women. After their deaths, a black cat passes by and licks them, apparently not realizing the two are dead.

Black cats apparently have some of the same supersitions attached in Japan as in the west, as we see the two women show up at the gates of one of the fortresses that dot the region since Japan isn't unified at this point. Of course, they didn't survive; these are just the ghosts or spirits of the two women, in a way that the Japanese would visualize such spirits. The samurai who killed them show up, and the women get their revenge by taking the samurai away from the fortress and killing them.

Cut to northern Japan, where a different part of the warring period is going. A man who looks like he's seen better days is being chased through the reeds by another man who is much better dressed. The two meet up and fight a duel to the death, with the peasant winning. That peasant, calling himself Gintoki, is, as you can eventually deduce, the man whose mother and wife are killed in the opening scene. He shows up back on his home turf, first stopping at his old house, which burned down after the women were killed. He's been away for several years fighting, so there are new people here who don't remember him.

The local chife, Minamoto, however, is impressed by Gintoko's courage, and gives Gintoko the task of finding those spirits who are showing up outside the fortress gates every night and doing away with them so that the people can be safe again. But what's going to happen when Gintoko finds out who the spirits really are?

Being a Japanese "horror" (really, supernatural) movie, Kuroneko has a decidedly different tone from Hollywood or even Hammer horror movies. On the one hand, that makes it an interesting watch. However, I also get the impression that it would probably help to be fairly familiar with both Japanese culture and history to get more of the subtler nuances of the movie. As a result, I didn't dislike the movie, but I can also see where other people are really going to enjoy it.

Having said that, Kuroneko is definitely quite well-made technically, with the black-and-white cinematography often being quite crisp and striking. So Kuroneko is definitely worth a watch for anybody who's a fan of horror movies.