Thursday, February 13, 2025

Midnight Run

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for several months is another relatively recent movie, at least recent by the standards of this blog in that it was released in the summer of 1988: Midnight Run.

Robert De Niro stars as Jack Walsh, and as the movie opens he's trying to pick an apartment lock in a seedy part of Los Angeles, only for the person inside the apartment to shoot through the door at him and try to flee via the fire escape. Jack chases the guy down, but as he's doing so, another guy drives down the alley and opens his car door, deliberately hitting the fleeing suspect. Sounds like two undercover cops, but in fact they're not. Jack and the other guy, Marvin Dorfler (John Ashton), are rival bounty hunters. Jack generally works for bail bondsman Eddie Moscone (Joe Pantoliano), and the next time Jack meets up with Eddie, Eddie has another job for him.

Eddie provided a substantial bail bond for Jonathan "The Duke" Mardukas (Charles Grodin), an accountant who is alleged to have stolen several millions of dollars that were illegal profits for mobster Jimmy Serrano (Dennis Farina). The feds need Duke out in Los Angeles for an upcoming trial, while obviously Serrano would like Duke really most sincerely dead. In any case, Duke fled bail and went to New York, stiffing Eddie on that bail bond. So Eddie would like Jack to fly out to New York, pick up Duke, and fly him back to Los Angeles. It's so easy, it's a "midnight run" since they can just take a redeye back to Los Angeles. Jack wants a substantial sum himself, since he has the good sense to understand it's not going to be so easy.

Jack is, of course, right. And the problems start even before he gets to New York. While doing a bit of research on where in New York to find Duke, Jack is accosted by the FBI, in a group of agents headed by Alzono Mosely (Yaphet Kotto). They want Duke as a witness to testify in that trial, while they also can plausibly tell Jack that he's putting himself in danger by trying to fetch Duke in addition to screwing up the pursuit of real justice. Jack sees dollar signs and a chance at redemption, since his back story involves quitting the police force in Chicago over corruption. Jack somehow steals Mosely's ID and uses that in his quest to get Duke and bring him back to LA.

Amazingly, the quest starts off relatively smoothly once Jack get to New York. He's able to tap into phones and get the location of Duke straight away, and even get Duke onto a plane relatively unseen. But then Duke says he's got a terrible fear of flying, and suffers a panic attack just before the plane takes off. The pilot forces Jack and Duke off the plane, and Jack has to try to get Duke across the country some other way. Further complicating matters, Feds have tapped the line at Eddie's bail bond office. Serrano has also figured out what's going on, and hires Dorfler to try to fetch Duke to bring him not to justice in Los Angeles, but to Serrano so that Serrano can dish out his own form of justice. And Serrano has no qualms about using violence against anybody.

As you can guess, the rest of the movie leads to a cross-country chase, with added shades of the buddy picture genre as the wildly different Jack and Duke begin to develop a bit of respect for each other. Jack, at least, seems to be the one person who wants to keep Duke alive, even if it's only for his own selfish monetary purposes. You can probably deduce that Jack is likely to make it back to Los Angeles as Hollywood wouldn't make a movie that has some unhappy ending, at least not in this genre.

Midnight Run is not exactly a movie I would call "unoriginal", since that work carries a lot of negative connotations. And that would be mean to the movie. Sure, it's not breaking any new ground, but damn if it isn't terribly entertaining for what it does. Midnight Run isn't exactly a comedy, but it's definitely a light action picture, and who knew Robert De Niro of Yaphet Kotto were adept at comedy?

Midnight Run is also a movie that, being of the genre it is, has a lot of plot holes and things that you'd think should make Jack's journey end right then and there. (He only carries one credit card, and the issuer has such lax security for cancelling it? Both of those set of my sense that this isn't right.) But if you don't think too hard, the movie is a lot of fun, and definitely worth watching.

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

A season of dryness

I'm coming down to the end of the movies that TCM ran during the tribute to Marlon Brando as Star of the Month. Next up is one in which Brando appears, but it's a small supporting role: A Dry White Season.

Brando isn't the star here; that honor goes to Donald Sutherland, playing Ben du Toit. Ben is a schoolteacher in South Africa in 1976. Now, if you know your history, you'll remember that this was still well during the apartheid era in South Africa, when a white minority ran the country and black majority and Asian minority were second-class citizens, with blacks having it far worse than the Asians (mostly from pre-partition India; you may recall Gandhi's sojourn in South Africa in the Gandhi biopic). The racial divide means that whites are able to live comfortably; Ben has a wife, adult daughter, and young son and is able to afford a black gardener all on that teacher's salary.

The black majority, of course, has it badly. Worse, they don't like the state of their education. Although the British had held South Africa as a colony, once it gained its indepence, the Afrikaaners, descended from the Boers who had colonized the place from the Netherlands, gained power, and tried to make their language Afrikaans the dominant language. The black ethnic groups, even though they all had their own languages, were being forced to learn in Afrikaans, and started protesting. At one protest, they refuse to disperse when the police order it, and the police release tear gas and go after protesters, many of them child students. The son of the du Toits' gardener is one such person, who eventually gets tortured to death.

Ben's attitude has largely been one of benign neglect, at least insofar as we can glean from the way he's treated the blacks around him up until now. He doesn't seem to have the disdain for blacks that a lot of the Afrikaans community seems to have, and cares for his gardnerer the way wealthy whites in Hollywood movies liked their black household help, but other than that has apparently been happy to live quietly. But because of it being his gardener's son, and because of the respect a teacher has in the rest of the white community, Ben goes to a policeman he knows, Capt. Stolz (Jürgen Prochnow), to try to intercede. This gets Ben put on a list. The police and the rest of the Afrikaaner power structure had it in for the blacks, but to keep control, they also had to put down any opposition from the white community, and there certainly were dissident whites.

Ben starts working secretly to get evidence from black people, being able to move around somewhat freely since white people did have more freedom to do so. He sees a journalist from an English-language paper, Melanie Bruwer (Susan Sarandon), and ultimately brings the case forward to an attorney, Ian McKenzie (that's Marlon Brando if you couldn't tell), who tries the case at the inquest and trial. Of course it's a rigged trial, and the powers that be win.

Ben's activism is beginning to radicalize him, and this means all sorts of trouble. He loses his job, and his wife is getting extremely resentful. His son still loves him, while his adult daughter joins her mother in being against what Dad is doing. And the authorities have no compunction about resorting to violence to get their way.

A Dry White Season is a well-acted movie, and it does drive home the interesting and often overlooked point that the apartheid regime had to restrict the rights of the white minority to keep its hold on power, even if those restrictions were far less onerous than what befell the black majority. Even without the rest of the world boycotting the country, South Africa would have been a gilded cage, much as was the case in Communist countries for anyone not at the very top.

Looking back 35 years after the movie was made, it's easy to say that it's pat, and that it focuses too much on white people. But it's also the case that history often has more than two sides, and the idea that there were white people on the inside who opposed the idea of apartheid was worthy of telling a story about.

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Benny's Video

Unfortunately, I think I've got enough foreign films on my DVR that I'm not going to get through all of them before they expire. One that was about to expire that I wanted to watch more than some of the French films that I recorded more because French cinema has the reputation of being "important" is a more recent film from Austria: Benny's Video. TCM ran it quite as part of a double bill of movies by director Michael Haneke; I already did a post on The Seventh Continent at the end of October.

Benny (Arno Frisch) is a 14-year-old living in Vienna who seems to have a thing for video, both watching movies on video as well as videography. His parents have encouraged this hobby by moving the TV into his bedrood, as well as getting him multiple video cameras, although the question of how they can afford that isn't quite answered. They're part of some sort of farm scheme where they get a fraction of the proceeds of a farm out in the country, and that gave Benny the chance to record a disturbing video: the farmers slaughter a pig using the same sort of stun gun that Anton Chigurh uses in No Country for Old Men.

Benny's parents don't know about this video, as they're absent a lot spending weekends at that farm, which I suppose is part of why they indulge Benny. This also gives Benny's adult sister Evi a chance to use the apartment to run her pyramid schemes, with Benny recording that as well. Benny also likes to hang out with his friends in between going to the video rental place to pick up the latest set of videos that he's going to be renting. It's there that he sees The Girl, a student his age but not at his school. She lives out in the suburbs and commutes to presumably a specialized school, and hangs outside the video shop watching the movies they put up on the screens that face the street. Benny, seeing her a lot, invites her over to his place since his parents are once again away for the weekend.

There, he shows her how he's got a surveillance camera watching the street, and can switch between that and a camera in his room facing the other direction. He also shows her the pig video, before revealing that he stole the stun gun from the farm. He even dares her to shoot him in the abdomen. She doesn't, for obvious reasons, but then he turns the gun around and shoots her! This hurts her enough to stun her and leave her bloody and screaming. Benny, not knowing how to deal with the screaming, shoots in the head enough times until she shuts up, which she does because she's really quite dead.

This presents all sorts of problems. How do you dispose of the dead body and all the other evidence that goes with it? They're in an apartment, so it's not as if Benny has a place to bury the body. And if he tries to leaving the building with a body-sized package, people are going to notice. Hell, Thelma Ritter noticed when Raymond Burr used his salesman's case to take out parts of his wife's body in Rear Window.

So some time after his parents return, Benny nonchalantly shows them the video. Benny's all of 14, so this being a European country perhaps he'd be tried as a juvenile. But Dad thinks that would wind up with Benny being put in some sort of psychiatric institution, and what would that do for the family's reputation, which seems more important to Dad than the dead body. So Dad comes up with a plan that can't possibly work: make up a grandma who retired to Egypt and died there so that Mom and Benny can leave Austria for a week, during which time Dad will dispose of the body. The plan can't possibly work, can it?

Benny's Video is a movie that, like The Seventh Continent, is fairly disturbing and a bit hard to review. One gets the impression that perhaps Michael Haneke was trying to make a commentary on absentee parenting or the effect of media violence on the young. But he sets himself a problem that he doesn't quite know how to solve. The movie is interesting if a tough watch up until the point that mother and son head off to Egypt, at which point it loses steam and also feels like it requires an even bigger suspension of belief than the first half. But I think that people who don't have a problem seeing this sort of violence depicted on screen will find something in Benny's Video worth watching.

Monday, February 10, 2025

An incident out west

Another of the movies that I recorded off of TCM because I hadn't seen it before and am always interested in new stuff to be able to blog about here, and because it sounded interesting enough to give it at least one watch, was a western called The Plunderers. Recently, I finally got around to watching it to do the obligatory post on here.

The movie starts off with a pre-credits sequence of four young men riding into a town called Trail City. Jeb (Ray Stricklyn) is the leader of the group, accompanied by Mexican Rondo (John Saxon), muscle Mule, and the "baby" of the group Davy, who hasn't really had enough life experience to be considered fully a man. Coming in to town, they need a drink, so stop at the saloon where they order one drink each. However, they don't seem to have any cash on them, so when it comes time to pay, they can't. Mike, the owner of the bar, calls in the sheriff (Jay C. Flippen), who puts the four young men in jail for the night. At the bar watching is Sam Christy (Jeff Chandler), who owns a ranch just outside of town. Sam served in the Civil War and wound up with a bum left arm as a result.

Come the morning, the sheriff should order the four men out of town, but he doesn't. By this time, we learned that they had to leave their previous town under cloudy circumstances, but they decid that they like this place and want to spend a bit of time resting up here. They go to the local general store and stiff Ellie (Dolores Hart) and her father the owner, before getting a hotel room from Kate (Marsha Hunt), who didn't know how they had already scammed the store owner. Nobody seems to want to do anything about the four men.

Of course, part of the reason for that is that they're all afraid of the four young men who are armed. And yet, it should be the sheriff's job. When he goes to the hotel room and they humiliate him, they realize they're helpless. The one person who might be able to do something is outsider Sam, although he seems to have more of a past than just having served in the Civil War.

The interlopers are also smart enough to know that it can't stay this way; they're pissing off enough people that somebody could ambush them at night or something. So they decide to confiscate all the guns in town, an effort that is not without violence and results in at least one person getting killed. They're also smart enough to realize that Sam outside of town is still going to have guns at his place. But thanks to the Production Code, we know that the bad guys aren't going to win in the end. It's the question of how exactly the loss comes about that remains to be answered.

As I watched The Plunderers, I noticed a directorial credit for Joseph Pevney. It's a name that I recognized first from the episodes of the original Star Trek series that he directed. Pevney directed more movies than I realized, but still The Plunderers made me think of something that was more suited to TV than the big screen. It's not bad, but it doesn't feel terribly imaginative. Definitely a suitable enough time-passer, though.

Sunday, February 9, 2025

The Man Who Walked Alone

I've noticed that a lot of the old movies that Tubi has are from Producers Releasing Corporation or other non-major studios. One that I watched recently was The Man Who Walked Alone, still available on Tubi as of this writing.

The man in question is Marion Scott (Dave O'Brien), who as the movie opens is walking along a country road trying to hitch a road into town when he comes along a farmer on the other side of the fence who thinks Marion looks familiar. Marion not having Claudette Colbert's legs, nobody is stopping for him, at least not until he goes out in the middle of the road. A woman swerves to miss Marion, and blows out a tire as a result. She's none too happy about it, and generally a bit of a spoiled brat in general, this being a would-be screwball comedy. So Marion offers to change the tire in exchange for a drive into town.

The woman, who eventually reveals her name to be Willie, wonders why Marion isn't in uniform, the movie having been released in early 1945. But when the car runs out of gas and Marion goes to buy some, Willie looks in Marion's bag and sees a uniform, implying that Marion was probably injured in the war and demobbed after recovering or somesuch. But Willie doesn't let on about having found out. Indeed, she doesn't reveal anything about who she is, which is an issue when the cops pull her over claiming she's driving a stolen car.

Thanks to the Production Code being in effect and this being a light comedy, you can guess that Willie isn't really a car thief, but she's still stringing Marion along. Next, she claims to work for the Hammonds, a wealthy family in town, as their secretary. But she claims doesn't have a key to the home office, goading Marion to break in which of course brings the police back and get the two of them in trouble with the law again.

However, it's finally revealed that Willie is the daughter in the Hammond family and that the car is owned by Willie's fiancé, whom she isn't really in love with. She gives Marion a job, leaving him around the Hammond estate and giving him the chance to pursue Willie romantically. Eventually, Willie's family and fiancé return home, leading to the finale in which everybody's true story is revealed and you can guess who winds up with whom in the final reel.

The Man Who Walked Alone is a serviceable enough B comedy. It's nothing great and definitely formulaic, but it entertains for its brief running time. Still, the B nature of the movie combined with it's not having been made at one of the big Hollywood studios, it's obvious why the movie is one that's largely forgotten. Good enough to pass the time on a rainy day, but nothing great.

Briefs for February 9, 2024

I'm sorry to say that I haven't been paying quite as close attention to the upcoming TCM schedule as I probably should. There are a couple of movies that showed up in the past few days that I wouldn't have minded putting on my DVR but didn't notice aired until looking at the schedule this morning and seeing that they showed up over the past few days. I guess I'll have to open up the Watch TCM app (and sign in, since that one doesn't like to keep people logged in for more than a month or so, which is another story) to see if they're available.

The reason I looked up the TCM schedule is to see what TCM was showing tonight since it's Super Bowl Sunday here in the US. Specifically, I was wondering where there are enough Oscar-nominated movies about football for TCM to do a night of it in this year's 31 Days of Oscar format. Maybe, although I think fewer old movies about football actually got Oscar nominations. Crazylegs, which aired last year, got an editing nomination. And, of course, Walter Matthau won a Supporting Actor Oscar for The Fortune Cookie, which isn't even on this month's schedule. But Knute Rockne, All American? No Oscar nominations. Good News did get one in the original song category. But it all reminded me that back in the day, football wasn't really the subject of prestige movies. Boxing seemed to be a bigger deal, and TCM is doing a night of boxing movies on Wednesday.

For the record, tonight's TCM lineup is movies with trials, starting with To Kill a Mockingbird at 8:00 PM and including the always underrated Arthur Kennedy in Trial (2:45 AM).

I suppose TCM could have done movies in honor of somebody's birthday. Ronald Colman was born on this day in 1891. There's also Kathryn Grayson (born 1922), and among the living, Joe Pesci (turning 82) and Mia Farrow (turning 80). TCM seems to do well at getting the rights to Woody Allen's movies, but using those to honor Mia Farrow might be a bit of a touchy subject for some considering how their relationship ended.

My looks at the TCM schedule have been disproportionately looking at what's already on my DVR that's coming up again soon, since YouTube TV catches every showing of something you've put on your DVR until you tell it not to. The upcoming showings include America, America, tomorrow at noon; The Red Shoes at 5:30 PM Monday; and a couple of musicals on Wednesday, Easter Parade and Oklahoma. Several other recordings are on FXM, since they have a much more limited library.

Saturday, February 8, 2025

The shallow six

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for several months is one from the later part of Alan Ladd's career, a new-to-me war film called The Deep Six.

Unforunately, the first thing I noticed is that the print TCM ran was in 4:3, and considering the image quality, it really did look panned and scanned. (IMDb says the original aspect ratio was 1.85:1.) After the opening credits, we go to Madison Avenue in New York, in September 1942. The war is on, of course, so we've got a lot of women working, such as Susan Cahill (Dianne Foster). One day, she travels out to Long Island to meet with one of the graphic artists, Alec Austen (Alan Ladd). It's quite surprising that he hasn't been called up into service yet, since he was in naval ROTC in college and the navy needs officers like him. Of course, that call up is going to come the following day. In the meantime, Alec develops feeling for Susan even though she's engaged to another man, and spends an afternoon with her on the beach.

Alec does eventually tell both Susan and his mother (Jeannette Nolan in a small part) about the call-up, since he kind of has to lest everyone wonder why he suddenly disappeared. This presents a problem, because Alec was raised Quaker, and Mom's still a practicing Quaker. Now, as you may know, one of the tenets of Quakerism is pacifism, so you might wonder why a Quaker would go into ROTC, but apparently Alec isn't particularly practicing any religion. Alec is stationed aboard the USS Poe, which is scheduled to sail from Brooklyn to San Francisco before heading out to action somewhere in the Pacific.

On the Poe, Alec meets the captain, Cmdr. Meredith (James Whitmore) and the executive officer, Lt. Comm. Edge (Keenan Wynn). Edge is responsible for assigning duties to each of the officers, which includes Alec who has the rank of lieutenant. So of course Edge is going to find out that Alec is Quaker by birth. Edge hates hates hates Alec for this, as he just knows that Alec is never going to be able to be a proper military man. Alec is quartered with the ship's doctor, Lt. Blanchard (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.), although the only true friend he makes over the course of the voyage is CPO Shapiro (William Bendix), nicknamed Frenchy for, well, reasons that are explained although it's not particuarly relevant to the plot.

Of course, the other officers eventually learn that Alec is a Quaker, and it also goes without saying that Alec's ability to perform combat duties are put to the test and found wanting because without that the movie wouldn't have much in the way of conflict or plot development. When the Poe makes it to San Franciso, Alec finds Susan waiting for him. She's willing to marry him now, and I mean now, and is also out there to visit her sister. But then a telegram comes that Susan's brother-in-law has been killed in action, and Alec doesn't want to put Susan under the emotional anguish of wondering where she too will lose a husband to the war.

The final destination for the Poe is Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutian Islands, which is one of the last outposts before the US Navy can head southwest to Japan. Of course, the Japanese did take Attu Island, one of the westernmost of the Aleutian Islands, and that's a plot point in the climax of the movie.

For me, the problem with The Deep Six is that it doesn't feel terribly original. Granted, there's only so much you can do with a war movie, but in the case of The Deep Six the unorigionality felt like a lot of clichés. There's a subplot about an Armenian-American sailor (played by Ross Bagdasarian) that to me came across as particularly tedious comic relief. It also doesn't help that it feels like the stars are mostly going through the motions. So The Deep Six is a decidedly lesser World War II movie.

Friday, February 7, 2025

Two weeks with sex

I'm getting close to the end of the movies that I recorded while Debbie Reynolds was TCM's Star of the Month back in March. This time, it's another of her supporting roles from early in her career: Two Weeks With Love.

As this was early in Reynolds' career, she was not yet the star here; that honor goes to Jane Powell. She plays Patti Robinson, eldest daughter in a middle-class family from the turn of the last century. The family goes up to the Catskills for a summer vacation at the same resort every year, and Patti, just having turned 17, is at the point where she wants to be treated like an adult and is none too pleased by having to go to this resort with her family. She's also irritated with other ways she's not treated like an adult, such as not yet being allowed to wear a corset. Dad (Louis Calhern) loves his family, but like a lot of fathers, doesn't quite know about teenage daughters, while Mom (Ann Harding) doesn't see Patti as an adult. Younger daughter Melba (Debbie Reynolds) is definitely not grown up, and there are two even younger brothers here for comic relief.

The Robinsons aren't the only people who go to the resort every summer at the same time, and the proprietor, Mr. Finlay (character actor Clinton Sundberg) knows all of them, while many of the guests, such as budding actress Valerie (Phyllis Kirk), a year or two older than Patti, looks forward to seeing Patti again. Meanwhile, Finlay's son Billy (Carleton Carpenter) is in the same position as Patti in that he's on the cusp of adulthood but his father won't treat him like a man yet. Billy has a thing for Patti, but she's not into him; instead, it's Melba who would like Billy.

There's one new guest at the resort: Cuban Demi Armendez (Ricardo Montalbán). He's apparently got enough name recognition, and is glamorous enough that any young woman would love to be approached by him. So it's no surprise that both Valerie and Patti express an interest in Demi. Patti, however, screws things up by tripping in the dining room and sending the contents of Billy's serving tray onto poor Demi! Demi forgives her though, and is willing to go with Patti for an ice cream soda, if only Mrs. Robinson weren't there to inform Patti that it's her bedtime. Valerie, of course, has no such curfew, and is there to pick up the pieces.

But Jane Powell is the star here, so we can expect that she's going to end up with Ricardo Montalbán in the final reel. However, it's going to take some twists and turns. Also, it's going to require both of the parents to come to their senses and realize their "little" girl is growing up. Likewise, you can expect Debbie Reynolds and Carleton Carpenter to end up together, especially when they sing the big hit "Abba Dabba Honeymoon".

Two Weeks with Love is an enjoyable piece of fluff, showing the sort of movie that the studio system could churn out and imbue with charm back in those days, and the sort of thing that I don't think could possibly be made today. Sure, it's all backlot stuff, and a latter-day version would look more realistic, but a version made today just wouldn't have the charm. So definitely catch Two Weeks with Love.

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Hotel New Hampshire

Another of those movies I had sort of heard about when it first came out ages ago, but obviously never got to see because I was much too young when it was first released was The Hotel New Hampshire, based on a novel by John Irving. It finally showed up on TCM some months back, so I recorded it and only recently got around to watching it.

The movie opens up with a sort of introductory sequence of the parents in the Berry family (Beau Bridges and Lisa Banes) telling their kids yet again the story of how they met. Before World War II, they were working at a hotel and also at the hotel is an Austrian named Freud (Wallace Shawn, and this isn't Sigmund) who has a bear in what is not quite a sidecar. Freud goes back to Europe and survives the war, while the couple obviously gets married.

In the main action of the movie, it's the late 1950s or so, and the couple has five kids. Three of them are high school aged, and going to the same private school where Dad works. Frank (Paul McCrane) is gay; John (Rob Lowe) and Franny (Jodie Foster) share an incestuous love for each other; Lilly is a neurotic who thinks she's never going to grow any bigger; and Egg is the little kid. The Berrys are bullied at school by the richer kids, with the jocks going so far as to rape Fanny. (Seriously, and the movie is supposed to be more comedy than drama even if the rape scene is decidedly not comedy.)

And then one day Dad gets the idea to open a hotel since he teaches at a boarding school and the parents are going to have to have someplace to stay. So they buy an old Catholic girls' school and set about renovating it, eventually calling it the Hotel New Hampshire. They also bring in Grandpa (Wilford Brimley) to live with them. At the hotel, the three eldest kids use the public address system that the school had to eavesdrop on the various rooms, including listening to people having sex, including John when he loses his virginity with one of the maids.

The Berry family continues to have quirky adventures, such as a dog having to be put down and Frank wanting to learn taxidermy so he can stuff the dog; that move however backfires pretty seriously. John takes up weightlifting, which is just an excuse to get him out of his shirt more and have him be even more sex-obsessed. All of these adventures come to and end, however -- are at least become a decidedly different set of adventures, when Dad receives a letter from Freud. Freud has gone blind and is trying to manage a Pension in Vienna and suggests that perhaps the Berrys could come over and take over the place.

Amazingly, they drop everything and do, and wind up at a place that's functioning as a brothel on the top floor, while also being home in the basement to a bunch of Communist revolutionaries who are perfectly willing to undertake a bombing campaign.

For me, the problem with The Hotel New Hampshire is that it's way too quirky for its own good and trying to jam way too much stuff into the movie. I haven't read John Irving's original book, but from the reviews I read this movie is considered to be a pretty faithful adaptation of something that's not a particularly cinematic book, which is why the movie has the problems it does. Never mind the iconoclastic treatment of certain topics, either. I'll also add that as a measure of the complexity of the movie, there are a couple of main characters I haven't even mentioned.

At the same time, because of the quirky nature of the movie, there are going to be people who absolutely love The Hotel New Hampshire. So definitely watch and judge for yourself.

Wednesday, February 5, 2025

You've got a lovely daughter

TCM's 31 Days of Oscar tends to bring a selection of movies to the channel that is on average more recent. I do, of course, say "more recent" in the sense of only being closer to the present day that the regular selection of TCM movies. One such film that I've got on my DVR only goes back to 1997: Mrs Brown, which airs tonight (Feb. 5) at 8:00 PM on TCM.

Judi Dench plays Queen Victoria, and the opening title cards give some background information to anyone who might not know that much about British history. Victoria came to the throne at the age of 18 in 1837, even before she got married to Prince Albert. By all accounts this was a happy marriage, right up until Albert's death at a relatively young age even by the standards of the day back in 1861. As a result of her beloved husband's death, Victoria went into a period of mourning that lasted for years. This greatly worried many of the people around Victoria, both for personal reasons and the fact that some in Britain began to question the institution of a monarchy.

With that in mind, someone in the entourage around Victoria comes up with an idea. Prince Albert liked to go horseback riding and hunting up at Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands. There, he was assisted by an able servant and highlands guide named John Brown (Billy Connolly). Why not bring Brown down to the Isle of Wight where Victoria is holed up, if you can call it that for such a large entourage, and perhaps Victoria can, with at least horseback riding, take the first steps toward resuming her public duties.

John heads south, and shows able duty, although to the point that it's irritating for the rest of the folks at court because he's so unorthodox and doesn't understand the first thing about royal protocol. He reasons he has no way of knowing when Her Majesty is going to ride, and since not being there when she does would be a problem, he stands in the courtyard with her pony waiting, which is just not the way things are done. And logically, you'd think Brown should know that they'll come to the stables to look for him. Eventually, however, Victoria does want to go for a ride, and Brown accompanies her.

It's the start of a devoted friendship, the nature of which is not truly known by historians even to this day. Brown has an inability to adhere to strict protocol, and his blunt ways shock both the court and the servants. At the same time, however, it seems to be having a bit of a positive effect on Her Majesty, resulting in Brown's promotion. And she really lets loose, at least by the stereotypical standards of Victorian propriety people generally think of when they think of the morality of that era, when the court goes up to Balmoral.

And Her Majesty still hasn't really resumed public duties in the way she's supposed to, such as the "throne speech" that opens a new session of the House of Commons. Prime Minister Disraeli comes north to try to persuade Victoria to do her duty. And with Brown taking an increasingly active role in the royal household, others are resenting him to the point that there's some palace intrigue. Brown is accosted in the stables and beaten, with it being made to look like he was extremely intoxicated. Brown offers to resign, but Victoria won't have it. Brown eventually becomes head of security, but the power is going to his head and his devotion is making him paranoid.

Mrs Brown is another example of the sort of historical drama that the British seem to do such a fine job of making, especially in the era once movies didn't become so tied to the studio lots and moviemakers could do more location shooting. Britain has much more heritage than the US and uses it to full advantage in movies like this. Judi Dench, unsurprisingly, does an excellent job as Victoria, picking up an Oscar nomination. Billy Connolly is also quite good, and the movie is always relatively lovely to look at although it doesn't have that rich a color palette. (There's a lot of green and brown in the Scottish Highlands, I guess.)

I had never actually seen Mrs Brown before, but I'm definitely glad I did watch it. You should too.

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

The front something, but not a page

Some material gets turned into movies over and over again. I mentioned Somerset Maugham's novel The Painted Veil the other day, but there are other examples, as can be seen by watching the movie Switching Channels.

Kathleen Turner plays intrepid lady journalist Christy Colleran, working at a news channel called the Satellite News Newtork, based out of Chicago. An opening montage shows her doing all sorts of stories that, in a 1930s movie, would have been covered by someone like Bette Davis playing a lady reporter. (I don't think Front Page Woman had such a montage, but there's another very brisk 1930s movie about an intrepid female newswoman.) However, all this reportage -- Christy seemingly works nonstop -- has left her frazzled. So one day when she has a meltdown on air, she goes off on a vacation to a tony isolated resort. This is much to the chagrin of her boss, John Sullivan (Burt Reynolds), nicknamed Sully, who also just happens to be Christy's ex-husband. You can probably guess where this is going if you know your classic films.

At the resort, Christy meets Blaine Bingham (Christopher Reeve), a New York businessman who owns multiple companies, all in the sporting goods field. Their first meeting at the reception desk is a bit of a mess, but again, you know that's just a bit of a comedic device for the two of them to fall in love. So by the end of her time at the resort, Christy knows she's going to get married to Blaine. Not only that, but she's going to move to New York with him, which of course will necessitate her leaving SNN. (In this version of the story, however, she's not retiring, but getting a job with a New York morning show.)

John doesn't want to lose his best reporter, and this particular version is enough of a jerk and rich as Croesus that he can buy up all the plane and train tickets back to New York. (You'd think Blaine would fly by a private corporate jet, obviating all of Sully's machinations.) But Sully has one other trick up his sleeve. There's the Democratic primary for Governor, and this being Illinois, the winner of the primary is going to be elected governor in the general election. Running in that primary is State's Attorney Roy Ridnitz (Ned Beatty), who prosecuted a very high-profile case involving one Ike Roscoe, a man whose son was addicted to drugs, and shot the guy who he thought was supplying his son. That guy, however, was an undercover cop, which means there's all sorts of possibility for corruption here, never mind the fact that this is Chicago which is already corrupt. Ike is scheduled to be executed for the murder tonight, and Sully wants an interview with Ike. Who better than his best reporter Christy, who is still technically his employee?

You've probably already figured out if you didn't already know it about the movie going in, but Switching Channels is yet another remake of the play The Front Page from the late 1920s, which got turned into two movies with the title The Front Page (one in the early 1930s and one in the mid-1970s), as well as the most famous remake titled His Girl Friday. Switching Channels and His Girl Friday added the conceit of having a female reporter that the two versions titled The Front Page and the stage play didn't. Also, being in the 1980s, the movie was updated to be set in the world of television as opposed to the golden age of newspapers.

Switching Channels was not a box-office hit and didn't receive the best of reviews, and it's easy to see why. The movie isn't as stuck in the past as the 1974 version, but there are times where it really feels like it doesn't know what tone to take: an homage to the 1930s, or fully a product of the 1980s. One positive for me, however, was that the story actually introduces us to how Christy meets the new love of her life, something I don't think we see in any of the other versions (the male reporter in the play and movie versions The Front Page is leaving to get married as well).

So Switching Channels isn't particularly great, but I didn't dislike it to the extent that contemporary critics did. And it's also interesting to see an attempted 80s update on a play from 60 years earlier. Like a lot of the movies I blog about, it's certainly worth one watch.

Monday, February 3, 2025

The Miracle Woman

Another of TCM's spotlights from some months back was a comparison of pre- and post-Code films, looking at a particular subject and how the studios had to make films about it -- if they could mention the topic at all -- that were rather different after the enforcement of the Code started in July 1934. One such subject is religion; after 1934 the suggestion that there might be a bunch of con artists in religious clothing was given more of a soft-shoe treatment. For the example of how you could be harsher toward organized religion, or the abuse of it, the movie that was selected was 1931's The Miracle Woman.

The woman in the title is played by Barbara Stanwyck. She's Florence Fallon, daughter of a minister in one of those small-city churches of no named Protestant denomination, but of the sort it seems like everyone in town attends. Think David Niven in The Bishop's Wife, although there his character is explicitly Episcopalian. Anyhow, Florence's father is about to give his final sermon, because the congregation has decided to hire his replacement. Dad is unwell and can't deliver the sermon, so Florence does. But she has a shocking message for the congregation: their callousness broke Dad's heart and killed him, and can anybody really believe in God when faced with a congregation of such venal hypocrites? Florence drives the congregation away, with one exception.

That exception is Hornsby (Sam Hardy), a PR guy, who has the idea that somebody like Florence, now clearly bitter, should use the congregation's hypocrisy against them. Rather than true Christianity, just give them what they think they want, which is feel-good Christianity, and they'll bang down the doors to donate to her. So Florence becomes one of those radio evangelists, TV not being a thing yet. It's obviously dishonest, but a lot of people want to believe.

One such person is John Carson (David Manners), although his belief is somewhat different from that of others. He's a songwriter now, but used to be a flyboy until an accident left him blind and just as bitter as Florence, albeit in a different way. He's gotten to the point where he's ready to kill himself, until he hears one of Florence's radio sermons. This changes his life, and he shows up at Florence's revival, willing to be a "witness" when the shill doesn't show up. John also falls in love with Florence, not knowing anything about Florence's hard edge.

John's faith stirs pangs of conscience in Florence, but here's the rub. She's been working with Hornsby, and Hornsby has been far more dishonest than even Florence. Hornsby has been taking all the money the rubes are donating and embezzling it, while cleverly having the books be in Florence's name so that when the financial crash does eventually come, Florence will be the one left on the hook. Hornsby's blackmail becomes more strident when he learns Florence loves John. He announces, without telling Florence, that the two of them are going to go to the Holy Land. This is a lie, of course; Hornsby is just going to take her away from John, but to Europe to live the high life.

As you can guess, things don't end that way, but to see how they do end, you're going to have to watch The Miracle Woman.

The Miracle Woman was directed by Frank Capra, who had some very dark movies in the early part of his career, despite what many people may think considering his optimism for the American spirit. It's the sort of hard edge that Barbara Stanwyck was excellent at portraying, and it comes as no surprise that she's a standout here. David Manners does well, although he's definitely not on the level of Stanwyck. He probably should have had a better career, but never got good enough roles from the studios.

The Miracle Woman is a very good early talkie, and a fascinatingly cynical one.

Sunday, February 2, 2025

For some values of love

Eva Marie Saint's turn as TCM's Star of the Month for her centenary last July gave me another opportunity to record some movies I'd never heard of. One such film was the 1970 film Loving, one I didn't know much about because the 1970s are one of the eras of fim I don't know so much about.

The real star here is George Segal. He plays Brooks Wilson, an advertising artist working out of an office in New York and commuting back to Connecticut, where he lives with his wife Selma (Eva Marie Saint) and two daughters. As the movie opens, Brooks is out of the office for a tryst with his mistress Grace, eventually rushing home because one of his kids is in a school recital. There, he runs into Nelly Parks, wife of his neighbor Will. Brooks really doesn't want to be at that recital however, as he has a lot on his mind.

Much of what's on his mind is a contract for the Lepridon truck company. The owner Mr. Lepridon (Sterling Hayden) is coming to New York from the company's midwestern headquarters, and wants to meet with Brooks. If Brooks can get the contract, it would mean a lot of money, and the Wilsons would be able to move to a bigger house in town, which would make the family look better. It's the sort of town where appearances matter, at least to everyone else in town, if not so much to Brooks, who's been worried about the Lepridon contract for months. And then when Brooks gets to Grace's apartment in New York, he finds that there's another man in the apartment. Talk about awkward.

Brooks turns to alcohol and drinks enough that he nearly misses the important meeting with Lepridon, who seems unhappy with Brooks' drawings on the grounds that he wants photographs that are honest since the trucks are used by unemotional engineering types. It seems enough to doom Brook's chances, and he's still going to have to wait for a while to find out whether he gets the contract. In the meantime, Brooks and Selma go to a home viewing for a home that's being sold because the couple that lived there are getting a divorce.

Eventually, Brooks finds out the good news that he does indeed get the contract. However, it's on the same day as a big party in their neighborhood given by Grace's relatives and inviting a bunch of young smart-set types. In an obvious bit of foreshadowing, it's revealed that the owner has a bunch of closed-circuit cameras installed around the property, and can watch them on one monitor in the study with a remote control switching from camera to camera. Brooks drinks some more and eventually takes Nelly, not Grace or Selma, to an unoccupied playhouse outbuilding, where you can guess what happens.

Loving comes across as emblematic of the sort of "daring" film Hollywood tried to make in the years following the end of the Production Code. It deals with grown-up themes in a way that films from just a decade earlier couldn't possibly do, and does so with location shooting and cinematography that are again totally different from what Hollywood gave us through the early 1960s. However, as a story, for me Loving doesn't quite work. It's not that it's a particularly bad movie or anything; it's more that I find it hard to feel an attachment to any of these characters. It's as if the characters are all supposed to feel a sense of disillusionment or something, but that the end result is the viewer feeling disillusioned with the characters.

I think, however, that people who are fans of the American cinematic style of the early 1970s will probably enjoy Loving. It's more that it's not a film for everyone.

Saturday, February 1, 2025

Pony Express Days

One of the movies I watched off my DVR recently had almost 25 minutes between the end of the film and the start of the next feature, so it gave TCM the chance to run a two-reel short. That short was one of the films from the series of Technicolor historical movies Warner Bros. did in the years just before World War II, Pony Express Days.

The US gained a lot of land to the west of the Louisiana Purchase after defeating Mexico in the Mexican-American War. Gold was discovered in California, swelling the population enough that it could apply for statehood. Ten years later, it was realized that a better connection was needed with the west coast since the Civil War was rapidly approaching and the northern states wanted California (and Oregon) to remain in the Union. To that end, a couple of retired army men set up the "Pony Express", a chain of stations that kept fresh horses for young, thin men to ride in a relay to get the mail across the west much quicker than anything crossed the land before. In reality, the express only ran for about 19 months until the first transcontinental telegraph line was completed, and by the end of the 1860s the first transcontinental railroad had been built.

Anyhow, two young men come in to the Pony Express office wanting to ride. One is Johnny Frey, claiming to be 5'11" and 125 pounds, that last number being important because the horses can only carry so much weight. The other man is one Bill Cody (George Reeves), but he's already too tall and heavy to ride for the express. Cody would have been 14 at the time, and while he claimed to have ridden for the Pony Express, he probably only ran errands for the company that set up the express, and possibly did some work at the corrals and stations that this short has him doing.

Cody works together with a man called Nevada Jim (J. Farrell MacDonald), who tells Bill a whole bunch of tall tales that if you believe this version of history form the backbone of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Meanwhile, it's the autumn of 1860, and a presidential election is brewing. Who wins will be critical to whether California stays in the Union, and the Pony Express realizes they have to get the news west as quickly as possible. The previously mentioned Johnny Frey is one of the riders bringing the news west, but he gets killed in an Indian attack and it's left to Bill Cody to get the news through. Yeah, right.

I doubt there's much accuracy in Pony Express Days, although Warner Bros. at least had the decency to point out how the express only ran for those 19 months as well as getting the names of the men who founded the company correct and the fact that they felt they needed a government contract to survive economically. All that aside, however, the short is entertaining enough and certainly would have served its purpose in 1940 of entertaining audiences before the feature.

It's time for 31 Days of Oscar

So we've reached the beginning of February. In previous years when the Oscars were awarded in February, that meant Feb. 1 was the first day of TCM's annual 31 Days of Oscar programming salute, in which every movie was either an Oscar-winner or nominated for at least one Oscar. I don't remember the first year TCM did 31 Days of Oscar, although dollars to doughnuts it was at a time when the ceremony was still held in March, hence the 31 Days name. (My educated guess is that TCM got the rights to use "Oscar" only in conjunction with "31 Days of Oscar", which would explain why it's remained that even when it's been run in a month without 31 days.

Last year, the Oscars were held in the second week of March, so TCM tried something different, which was to have the programming run mid-month to mid-month, with the final day being the same day as the Oscars ceremony. Unfortunately, this year, the Oscars are being awarded on Sunday, March 2, which means that if that were day 31, the first day would have been Jan. 31. So TCM decided to start the programming on Feb. 1, and run it to one day after the awards are handed out, which is I suppose not unreasonable.

In any case, the programming this time around seems to have daytime centering around individual awards, with prime time being done thematically. Also somewhat surprisingly, there's a small handful of older movies airing this month that I haven't blogged about before, and that are sitting on my DVR, surprising because this includes a couple of older movies. TCM does run more recent, at least as in having been relased after the founding of the channel back in 1994, and one of the posts will be on such a more recent movie. One such more recent movie that I have blogged about before and which, as far as I know, is a TCM premiere is The Madness of King George, at 12:30 AM in the overnight between Feb. 5 and Feb. 6, as part of a night of films on British monarchs.

In any case, I'll also point out that the month is starting with a couple of movies that are on my DVR and that I've already watched to blog about. Today at 2:00 PM there's Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which actually aired not that long ago. Tomorrow at noon you can watch A Passage to India, and at 8:00 AM on Monday is the 1940 MGM version of Pride and Prejudice.

Note, of course, that all of this means that the regular programming features like Noir Alley or Silent Sunday Nights are taking the month off and will return in March.

I haven't watched any of this year's Oscar-nominated pictures, so I can't say much about them or what might/might not be worthy of getting the statuettes.

Friday, January 31, 2025

Eraserhead

Director David Lynch died a couple of weeks back. I mentioned at the time that I had Eraserhead on my DVR, and that it would be airing in a couple weeks' time. That airing is coming up at the end of tonight's TCM primetime lineup, overnight tonight, or early Feb. 1 depending upon your point of view, at 4:15 AM.

Eraserhead is another of those movies that's very difficult to give a reasonable synopsis of, largely because it doesn't have much in the way of a plot. John Nance plays Henry Spencer, a man who seems to have weird dreams, although they might not be dreams considering what Lynch's version of the "real" world here is like. That real world has the feel of a post-apocalyptic cityscape. Henry had a job, but he's currently claiming to be on "vacation", one that seems permanent, and you wonder how anybody in this world supports themselves.

Henry seems interested in the woman who lives in the apartment across the hall, but he's not going to have the time to pursue her, in part because he spent time in the past pursuing another girl, Mary X, who is still living with her parents. They tell Henry that Mary got pregnant and gave birth, and since Henry is obviously the father, he's going to have to marry her. They go back to live in Henry's apartment, bringing the baby with them. Except that it's an inhuman baby, looking reminiscent of ET from the Steven Spielberg movie except without any wrinkles or light-up fingers. They don't know how to take care of the "baby", which cries all night as a result and drives Mary mad. She leaves Henry.

Henry starts to have more weird dreams, involving a deformed woman in his radiator who performs to Fats Waller organ music. There's another dream about a pencil factory, and Henry's head getting cut off so that his eraser-like hair can be used to make the pencil erasers. He also finds that the human woman across the hall has a human boyfriend. Henry tries to take care of the baby, but his attempt isn't particularly successful.

Eraserhead is another one of those movies that sharply divides opinion, which to me makes sense because it's a fairly surreal, plotless movie. It's easy to see why a lot of people would dislike it or think it pretentious. Indeed, as I said a few weeks ago, I had tried to watch it once before and gave up because of how I found it directionless. Giving it a second chance, I have to say that I still had a lot of difficulty warming up to Eraserhead. On the plus side, however, it's fairly clear that even at this young age Lynch knew how to compose striking shots and make something memorable. I found myself thinking that he probably could have benefited from some sort of co-auteur on his works balancing out his worst pretentious impulses.

I'm glad that I've finally seen Eraserhead, but I don't think it's a movie I'm really going to revisit.

Thursday, January 30, 2025

One Cossack or another

John Gilbert was honored last year in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, and once again that gave me the opportunity to record a couple of silent movies that I hadn't seen before, or hadn't blogged about before. One of those was The Cossacks, and recently I finally got around to watching it.

The Cossacks as a people were a semi-nomad group of Slavs who were allowed in Tsarist Russia to live in semi-autonomous regions, in exchange for providing military service to the Tsars so that the Tsars wouldn't have to draft so many more settled Russians into the military. One result of this is that they become renowned for their military prowess, while at the same time not having that great a respect for outside authority. This movie version has the Cossacks living in a time when Russia was busy fighting the Turks, which would place it in the 18th or 19th centuries; the movie is based on a book by Leo Tolstoy.

John Gilbert stars as Lukashka, a Cossack who, unlike the others in his village, isn't all that interested in fighting. This ticks off his fater Ivan (Ernest Torrence), but also his girlfriend Maryana (Renée Adorée). She wouldn't want to marry Lukashka if he's going to be the laughing stock of the community. Not only that, but she's more than willing to take part in the ridicule that everybody else is heaping toward him.

Lukashka is determined to prove that he can be just as brave as his fellow villagers, and gets the chance to prove it when some of the Turkish POWs stage a prison break. Lukashka could have Maryana now, but there's one problem: the Tsar needs them to go off to war again, and Lukahska goes with his fellow villagers. While he's away, the Tsar sends Prince Olenin (Nils Asther) to the Cossack village. In the name of ethnic harmony, the Tsar wans some of his princes to marry Cossack women, and Olenin has been given that task. Olenin falls for Maryana, and even proposes marriage to her, but she doesn't want it. Of course, there's the question of how much choice she has.

Things go from bad to worse when Lukashka comes home from the latest military campaign to find a prince putting the moves on what should be his girlfriend. Now, since John Gilbert is the star here, we can expect that he's going to wind up with the girl in the final reel, but how? That's going to involve some more battles with the Turks.

There were, to me, multiple problems with The Cossacks. One is that the story didn't seem to know where it wanted to go. Apparently, the screenplay was altered several times during shooting, which would explain why it's such a mess. Also, the movie starts off slowly, really boring me for the first half hour. This is a fairly obvious problem as well, although things pick up in the second half of the movie. And then it also doesn't help that both of the leads are miscast here. John Gilbert seems to be playing John Gilbert, Hollywood Star, while Renée Adorée doesn't come across as Cossack peasant at all.

So I have to say that there are better John Gilbert movies out there to watch than The Cossacks.

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

A less grand hotel

Another movie that's been sitting on my DVR for a while that I've finally gotten around to watching is Hotel Berlin.

The opening credits mention that this is based on a book by Vicki Baum, the Austrian-born writer who wrote Grand Hotel. I knew the famous Greta Garbo version of Grand Hotel had received a remake, but then I remembered the remake was titled Weekend at the Waldorf, which I also happen to have on my DVR and will eventually get around to doing a post on. In any case, both stories have the same basic conceit of having the lives of a bunch of people all come more or less together over the course of a few days at a luxury hotel.

Hotel Berlin, however, is different in that it was filmed around the turn of the year between 1944 and 1945, a time at which it was clear that Germany was going to lose World War II. A man comes into the hotel, and we see that the Gestapo are pursuing a Professor Koenig (Peter Lorre), as they think he has information on the whereabouts of one Martin Richter (Helmut Dantine). Richter was in one of the German concentration camps but escaped. Before the Gestapo can get any information, however, there's another air raid, and everybody has to go to the air raid shelter in the basement. This brings most of the main chracters together, and brings up all of the plots:

Richter is indeed in the hotel, and is given a waiter's uniform to hide his identity. He then provides room service to Lisa Dorn (Andrea King), an actress whose fame gives her a fair bit of pull in dealing with all of the daily hardships of life.
Lisa's boyfriend is General von Dahnwitz (Raymond Massey). Despite his being a general, he's understood for a while that the war is lost. With that in mind, he was part of the plot to kill Hitler in the summer of 1944. He's a wanted man, and hoping to escape Germany to neutral Sweden, even better if he can do so with Lisa. Meanwhile, a soldier on leave, Maj. Kauders (Kurt Kreuger), sees Lisa and falls for her.
Kauders, for his part, is pursued by Tillie (Faye Emerson), who works at the hotel but also provides "information" to the Nazis. She needs a new pair of shoes, and is desperate to get those shoes. As a result, she goes to Lisa's room, which brings her into the Lisa and Richter story line. Some other people from Tillie's past also show up at the hotel.
General von Dahnwitz has a friend, von Stetten (Henry Daniell), who informs him that trying to escape from Germany is hopeless and that he'd be better off taking the honorable way out of committing suicide. What von Dahnwitz doesn't know is that von Stetten is also one of those Nazis who himself is hoping to escape before the Allied victory, albeit for a different reason: he's one of the group that wants to reconstitute the Nazis down in South America.

Hotel Berlin was released to theaters in early March 1945, again before the German surrender, but close enough to the end that the writers were rushing to include topical references. More importantly, we know that the film is going to require that the bad people are going to get what's coming to them, and the good guys are going to have at least an honorable ending if not a happy one.

Hotel Berlin is interesting as a lower-budget version of those ensemble movies that Hollywood liked to make back in those days, only this time with almost no A-list people. (Compare this to Weekend at the Waldorf, which has Ginger Rogers and Lana Turner among others.) It's not exactly a bad movie, but it's a little complicated. Too much so for its own good considering the B-list cast, however. For me, when the stars are much more recognizable, it's easier to separate all the story lines. Andrea King and Faye Emerson in particular are weak links here. Still, Hotel Berlin is definitely worth a watch.

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Needs more sin

British author Somerset Maugham has had his work adapted for movies a surprising number of times, with several of the works getting multiple adaptations over the decades. One such story is Maugham's 1925 novel The Painted Veil which I haven't read, but which was adapted under that title as a Greta Garbo vehicle in the 1930s, and again about 20 years ago (I haven't seen the 2006 version). In between, in the 1950s, the story got another film version, but this time with the title The Seventh Sin.

In the Greta Garbo movie, and apparently in the novella, the story begins with the early adulthood of the main female character, who marries a doctor who is going to do charity work in China at a chaotic period in Chinese history. In The Seventh Sin, however, the action opens in Hong Kong, 1949, which is a big issue for multiple reasons. One is that we miss all of the main characters' back stories, especially the main female character Carolyn (Eleanor Parker). Plus, by this time in 1949, the Communists would likely have been causing westerns to leave China, especially missionaries; see the movie Satan Never Sleeps.

In any case, Carolyn is married to Walter (Bill Travers), a doctor whom she had met when he was in the US trying to requisition medical equipment some time back. They got married and moved out to Hong Kong, but it's a boring life for Carolyn, who has taken on a suave lover in the form of Paul (Jean-Pierre Aumont), who himself is married with a wife and kids although we never see those. Indeed, we barely see Paul. Walter returns from work one day to the signs that Carolyn has been carrying on a relationship with some man not her husband, and confronts her about it. On learning his wife has betrayed him, Walter gives Carolyn a choice: face a messy divorce or convince Paul to get a divorce from his wife, knowing full well that Paul doesn't want the public humiliation and that Paul's wife wouldn't grant the divorce anyway.

The other choice involves not only staying with Walter, but accompanying him into mainland China: there's yet another cholera epidemic in one of those Hollywood Chinatowns, and the western doctors and Catholic convents are doing the good work of treating those poor benighted Chinese. Carolyn can follow Walter to the hinterlands, basically in exile.

When they reach their new home, they find they have a neighbor in Tim (George Sanders), who seems to know all the local gossip but has no other real purpose in the story. Carolyn grows tired of the loneliness, and decides she wants to go to the convent and find out what she can do to the locals to help as a layperson. Complications ensue in that she finds out she's pregnant, while Walter contracts cholera.

There are multiple problems with The Seventh Sin. One is how we never see the back story that would drive Carolyn to start an affair in the first place. Walter here is mildly neglectful to the extent that he's consumed with his work, but other than that he's presented as bland, not even enough of a sufferer to be a saint. Aumont is also underused, while the mainland part of the story goes on too long.

Ultimately, The Seventh Sin feels like a movie where someone took part of a story and padded it to feature length, when what really should have been done is to take a whole story and adapt it to that feature length. I'd definitely rather recommend the Greta Garbo movie instead.

Monday, January 27, 2025

Catch Us If You Can

In addition to a bunch of foreign-language movies sitting on my DVR that I have to watch before they expire, I've also got what feels like a disproportionate number of British films from various eras. A different sort of movie is the "British Invasion" movie Having a Wild Weekend (originally called Catch Us If You Can in the UK, although the print TCM ran has the US title on it.

The movie stars the British band the Dave Clark Five, who were pretty big in the 1960s although compared to the Beatles and Rolling Stones they're largely forgotten today. He and the rest of the band don't really play a band in this movie (Dave Clark plays a character named Steve, although the other band members play characters with their real-life names), but a bunch of stuntmen who live in a converted church; the opening scenes show the men goofing around London of the 1960s. After they get ready for the day, they go off to their current job, which is shooting a commercial for an ad campaign with the slogan "Meat for Go!"

The current campaign has a girl named Dinah (Barbara Ferris) in a butcher shop playing the part of some masked criminal. Part of the ad requires Dinah and her male companion to get away from the butcher shop, driving off in a Jaguar; Steve plays the stuntman who drives the car since the first bit drives them out of the market hall. Dinah has done enough of this that she's getting tired of it, especially being under contract for two more years. So this time, when Steve starts to drive off and decides he's not going to go back to the meat market after the director yells "cut", Dinah is willing to go along with it.

The two young people have a bit of fun in London in what seems like a lot of not-quite guerrilla footage; at least, most of the bystanders look like extras who aren't expecting a film crew. Eventually, the two head toward Devon in the southwest of England. Dinah is looking at getting away from the whole celebrity lifestyle, and thinking of buying a place out that way to be able to live in some privacy. Steve also knows some people out that way, so he's perfectly willing to drive Dinah there. As you can guess, they develop a bond along the way.

But, of course, they're driving a car that's not Steve's to drive. Zissell, who is in charge of the ad campaign, comes up with the brilliant idea of using all of this as a publicity stunt. The police, for their part, are not far behind, since Steve is technically breaking the law. And Steve's friends also come along to Devon, trying to help Steve and Dinah escape.

Having a Wild Weekend is an interesting movie more for its look at England in the mid-1960s and the way at least some people might have liked the country to be. As far as the story and acting go, however, it's not terribly good. Apparently, Dave Clark was trying to build himself into an actor as well as a singer, but he doesn't have the chops to do it. (That lack of charisma may also be why the Dave Clark Five didn't have the staying power other acts did.) So the movie winds up being more of an oddball failure than anything else.

Sunday, January 26, 2025

Egypt is exotic, don't you know

I've got several Egypt-themed movies on my DVR, and I've been trying to go through them at a pace so that I don't have to blog about two of them in quick succession. It looks like it's been a good two months since the last one I did a post on, so now it's time for another: Sphinx.

The movie opens up with a pre-credits sequence set in the Valley of the Kings in ancient Egypt, specifically 3300 years ago. I don't know enough Egyptian history to know what makes this particular point interesting, but the scene involves an architect of a tomb of one of the pharaohs who is being tortured to death, presumably for letting on the secrets of how to get into the tomb the pharaoh is having built. Grave robbers were a big deal back then since the pharaohs buried a substantial amount of wealth with them to accompany them into the after life; naturally, people in this life wouldn't mind having some of that wealth as it would make their lives easier.

After the credits, we go to the present day, or at least cica 1980 when the movie was made. Lesley-Anne Down plays Erica Baron, a British-born American-resident Egyptologist who is in Egypt to do research on Pharaoh Seti I, or at least on Howard Carter, the man who found the tomb but died suddenly like a bunch of other people on his final expedition. That expedition also revealed some historical anomalies, and that seems to be what really interests Erica. (The date given in the opening scene, and the dates given for his reign in Wikipedia, don't coincide.)

Following her work at one of the museums, Erica visits Abdu Hamdi (John Gielgud in a cameo), who deals in antiquities and supposedly knows something about them, but is more of a forger who makes fake antiquities to sell to unsuspecting people. Well, not all of them are unsuspecting. At the end of her visit, Abdu Hamdi gives her a book to take to Luxor as he claims not to trust the mail. Erica stays behind a bit and sees Abdu Hamdi get stabbed to death. She has to beat a hasty retreat as she realizes the people who murdered Abdu Hamdi are looking for something there, and eventually looking for her.

One can guess that they're looking for the book that Abdu Hamdi gave to Erica, but what's in that book that's so valuable? Erica is in danger for the rest of the movie, and a recurring theme is her crossing paths with people who are not really dangerous to her. The ultimate plot deals with people who are trying to keep the antiquities for themselves, rather than having the antiquities be part of the world's cultural heritage -- or something like that.

The big problem with Sphinx is that it's an absolute mess of a movie. It's slow, feels utterly confusing as to what's going on, and also gives the impression of people who knew nothing about ancient or modern Egypt -- or had a view of the place frozen in the time of Howard Carter's find of King Tut's tomb -- trying to write about the place. The result is a movie that has a bit of nice location shooting, but that's about all that's going for it.

Briefs and programming notes for the final week of January 2025

I didn't realize that today is the centenary of the birth of actor Paul Newman, and that TCM is running a half day of his movies. Otherwise, I probably would have done a post yesterday instead. Of the movies, the one that's most worth mentioning is what I believe is the TCM premiere of Nobody's Fool, at 10:15 PM.

TCM is only doing a half day for Newman because they're still running Silent Sunday Nights and TCM Imports. The silent film, at 12:15 AM overnight, is one I first blogged about in April, 2020, The Outlaw and His Wife, directed by Victor Sjöström when he was young, 40 years before acting in Wild Strawberries. One of the foreign films worth mentioning is Loves of a Blonde, early tomorrow morning at 4:15 AM. Hard to believe it's been nearly 15 years since I blogged about it.

Monday brings a full day of movies appropriate for Holocaust Remembrance Day. That includes a morning of documentaries, followed by the first narrative film of the day, Kirk Douglas in The Juggler at 2:45 PM Jan. 26. The Pawnbroker (8:00 PM) doesn't show up all that often, while I don't think I've seen The Man in the Glass Booth (1:00 AM Jan. 28) before; that one is loosely based on the forcible extradition and trial of Adolf Eichmann.

Over on FXM, a film back in the rotation that I blogged about ages ago is the fine World War II picture Sink the Bismarck!; that gets its next airing at 10:45 AM on Tuesday, Jan. 28.

Finally, I don't think I mentioned this obituary yet, but cartoonist/screenwriter Jules Feiffer died on January 17 at the age of 95. I'm not certain how many of his movies I saw, but the one I remember for unfortunately having major problems with was Little Murders, where all of the characters are very difficult to have any sympathy with. Apparently he also wrote the original play version of the movie Carnal Knowledge, which I actually haven't seen.

Saturday, January 25, 2025

Indochine

Another foreign film that TCM ran during 31 Days of Oscar that I only got to watch just before it expired from YouTube TV's cloud DVR is Indochine. It's one of those movies that I think I'd heard about when it was first released 30-plus years ago back when I was in college, but never had the chance to watch until TCM finally showed it. Having watched it just before it expired, I've written up this post and held it back for when I needed to put up another post here.

Cathrine Deneuve, the one cast member whose name will be recognizable to people who aren't fans of French cinema, stars as Éliane. She's a widow in French Indochina in the early 1930s, at a time when the French had one large territory that would eventually be split up into Cambodia, Laos, and first North and South Vietnam before those two entities were reunified in 1975. Specifically, Élian owns and manages her late husband's rubber plantation in the Mekong river valley not far from Saigon. She also manages a second plantation that was owned by the Vietnamese parents of a young girl named Camille (Linh-Dam Phan) before they died. Éliane, who was very close to the couple, is now Camille's foster mother as well as managing the plantation for Camille to take over after she reaches adulthood.

Camille is ethnically Vietnamese, but part of that upper-crust of Vietnamese that tried to become much more culturally French. She's kinda-sorta engaged to Thanh, the son of another wealthy ethnic Vietnamese but culturally French family. Thanh has been studying in France with the view that he and Camille should marry after he finishes his studies. Except that he gets himself expelled from metropolitan France for engaging in political protests on behalf of Vietnamese independence activists.

All of this is upset by the arrival of Jean-Baptiste Guen (Vincent Pérez), a young French naval officer who has been stationed in Saigon. He and Camille meet at an art auction, and it's more or less love at first sight, even though there's a substantial age difference between them. Camille knows nothing about this relationship, in part because she's away at a Catholic boarding school. She and her fellow students are out on the streets of Saigon when a prisoner tries to escape from a prison transport. This results in shooting, with the prisoner being shot dead and bleeding out on Camille, who faints from the horror. But because she's got blood on her the natural assumption is that she's been shot. And who should come to provide first aid but Jean-Baptiste? As a result, Camille thinks he's saved her life and falls in love with her.

For all this, Jean-Baptiste gets exiled to northern Vietnam, eventually to a really faraway outpost that serves as the point where unscrupulous people bring laborers to be transported south to work as essentially indentured servants on the plantations in the south. Thanh, who by this time has become a relatively high-ranking Communist activist, lets Camille head north to try to find Jean-Baptiste. She does and the two consummate their relationship. But tragedy is going to ensue because Jean-Baptiste becomes a deserter and the French are going after the Communists even harder.

Reading the reviews on Indochine, I see that it's one that rather divides opinion. Having said that, I come down on the side of really liking it, in fact for what is probably the reason that is engenders such divided opinion. The thing about Indochine is that, although it's a French film (although filmed in part on location in Vietnam), it's one that, had the story been filmed in English, would fit in very well with Hollywood conventions. There's nothing arthouse here. Some people will argue that Indochine is framing the story too much from the French point of view, and that may be true, but frankly, I didn't care. The story is engaging on its own. Deneuve also gives a very good performance, while the location cinematography is gorgeous. If the movie has one flaw, it's the fact that it's pretty darn long at close to 160 minutes. I do think it would have benefited from a tighter script.

In any case, Indochine is definitely a movie that deserves to be seen.

Friday, January 24, 2025

More American than Knute Rockne?

The next movie on my DVR that's coming up soon on TCM is the sports biopic Jim Thorpe -- All American. That next airing comes tomorrow, January 25, at 4:15 PM.

The movie opens up at a banquet in Jim Thorpe's (Burt Lancaster) honor later in his life, where he's getting a portrait in Oklahoma's equivalent of Statuary Hall or something similar. Speaking on behalf of Thorpe is a former coach of his, Glenn "Pop" Warner (Charles Bickford, and yes, it's that Pop Warner of youth football fame). This, as you can guess, is a plot device to fade into the inevitable flashback which gives the movie version of the story of Thorpe's life.

Jim Thorpe was a member of the Sac and Fox tribe of Native Americans, living on a reservation in the Oklahoma territory. His father wants him to get a good education so he can make something of his life rather than just making tchotchkes for white tourists to buy. Young Jim doesn't seem to care much about education, consistently running away from school but showing himself to be a pretty good distance runner, or at least one with stamina. Eventually, Dad deals with his problem child by sending the kid to a boarding school the federal government set up back east with a student body of mixed tribal heritage, the Carlisle School

Jim is still a good runner, but knows nothing about football, failing when one of the upperclassmen tries to get him to break a tackle. But he eventually tries again and, showing himself to be a good runner, comes to the attention of the aforementioned Pop Warner. Jim also proves to be good at pretty much every sport he tries, dominating the track team and doing fairly well at baseball however. Meanwhile, in his personal life, he falls in love with nursing student Margaret Miller (Phyllis Thaxter).

But Jim's personal life requires him to work in the summers to have enough money to pay the bills on campus. One summer on the farm, he's invited to play some semi-pro baseball, which is going to have severe consequences later on in life. He doesn't think anything of it and goes back to Carlisle, where he decides that after college he'd like to go into coaching. The only thing is, he's not white, and constantly feels like that white society isn't giving him an equal chance which is why he can't get that coaching job.

And then the chance for glory comes with the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. Jim decides that he's going to compete in both the athletics pentathlon (different from today's "Modern Pentathlon" in that it was five track and field events), and the decathlon, an absurdly grueling physical challenge. And yet, Thorpe wins gold in both! However, it's later discovered how he had spent that one summer playing semi-pro baseball. Professionalism was profoundly discouraged in the Olympic movement in those days, so Thorpe is stripped of his gold medals.

This begins a downward spiral; even though Thorpe is playing sports professionally, he's also turning to drink, destroying his marriage and his sporting career. In the movie version of Thorpe's life, however, Pop Warner gives Thorpe the chance to redeem himself.

I'm not certain exactly how much of the story is slightly less than true but for the required dramatic effect; Thorpe as I understand it had multiple failed marriages but it's not really necessary to show marriage after marriage to get the point across. On the other hand, some of the "dramatization" is fairly egregious. Thorpe did not have the happy ending that the movie seems to give him. Burt Lancaster is the one Hollywood actor of the era who had both the star power and the athletic prowess to play Thorpe, and does as well as a white person can playing the character. (I don't think there was anyone even of mixed race at that time who could have been cast.)

Jim Thorpe -- All American is another good example of the Hollywood biopic of the studio era: a movie that's never not entertaining, but also never fully accurate.

Thursday, January 23, 2025

Only the Strong

FXM has been running a bunch of stuff that I've mostly blogged about already, although to be fair to them it's not as if Fox has as big a library as TCM does with the whole former Turner library, never mind their bigger budget allowing to get more other stuff. There is one film in the current rotation that I hadn't blogged about before, a 1993 film called Only the Strong. It's getting another airing tomorrow, January 24, at 3:10 AM, so I finally watched it to do a post on here.

The movie opens up with an introductory scene in Brazil. Louis Stevens (played by martial artist-turned actor Mark Dacascos) is a member of the US Army assigned to Brazil to help in what I'm guessing was fighting the War on Drugs. But he seems to have taken to the local culture. He's watching a couple of locals practice capoeira, a martial art that looks a bit like dancing, at least when they're just practicing, in that it has a lot of balletic kicks and flips. Frankly, this seems like it would be suboptimal for real life, but that's beside the point. Stevens likes capoeira so much he strips down to his undershirt and joins in, until a jeep with some superiors shows up and tells him he's getting shipped back to the States.

Now out of the army, Stevens goes back to his home town of Miami, specifically Lincoln High where he attended. It's turned into your stereotypically Hollywood view of an inner-city high school, with violence, drugs, and a totally trashed appearance. There's even drug dealing going on in the courtyard. Stevens, having had enough, uses his capoeira moves on one of the dealers, winning the respect of the other students there. More surprisingly, he's approached by some of the other teachers, who say that this the first time in years that the students have actually paid attention to any of the adults.

With that in mind, they come up with a ridiculous idea: take a dirty dozen of the school's most incorrigible students and teach them capoeira. Somehow, this will completely transform the school. One of the teachers helps Stevens gain possession of a disused firehouse and convert it both into a place where he can live, as well as training those dozen boys in the art of capoeira. It goes about as well as you can expect at first, which is to say it's going to take Stevens kicking the snot out of one of the students for them to start respecting them. And yet, somehow, it seems to start working.

Except, there's a catch, in that one of the students, Orlando, is part of Miami's Brazilian-American community. He's got a cousin Silverio who is both the local drug king, and a practitioner of capoeira himself. And he's better at it than Stevens seems to be. Silverio also has absolutely no compunction about using violence to get what he wants, as we see when he has his underlings try to burn down the school, killing one of Stevens' students, and then trying to kill Stevens at a car chop shop. As you might guess, it's going to come down to a final showdown between Stevens and Silverio with a whole lot of capoeira.

I'd say that Only the Strong one of the better 90s comedies that I've seen, except for the fact that the movie was decidedly not meant to be a comedy. Instead, it's laughably bad, for a whole bunch of reasons. One is that the leads aren't particularly good actors, with a cast of mostly unknowns (at least to me). It's also horrendously formulaic. Now, there are some other movies with similar themes set within a subculture that are just as formulaic; I found myself thinking of Gleaming the Cube which is set in the world of skateboarding. But that movie has charm, while Only the Strong is completely lacking.

There's also a whole bunch of plot holes -- why would everybody other than Stevens insist on using capoeira in their fights just because that's Stevens' preferred martial art? Oh, and it's a technical mess with a big overuse of slow-motion in the capoeira scenes. It's no wonder Only the Strong was a critical and box office bomb.

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

U-Boat 29

TCM ran a tribute to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger a few months back, and I've already done a post on one of the movies I recorded then since it showed up a few weeks back, The Red Shoes. Another of the movies is now on the TCM schedule again: The Spy in Black, airing tomorrow (January 23) at 9:00 AM. (Ben Mankiewicz said in his intro that when the movie was released in the US it was retitled U-Boat 29, and that's the title on the IMDb page, but the print TCM ran had the title The Spy in Black.)

The movie opens up in March 1917 in Kiel, which was the big port for the Imperial German naval fleet in the Great War. (The movie was released in August 1939, just before the start of World War II in Europe.) Hardt (Conrad Veidt) is a U-boat commander who has just returned to port. The propagranda press is saying England is in trouble, but Hardt knows otherwise, especially when the hotel restaurant can't serve him meat or much of any other food. On the way up to his room, Hardt is stopped by a junior sailor, who informs him that the Navy has more orders for him, and that he's going to have to go out to sea. The next day in the submarine, Hardt and his officers learn that their orders are to proceed to a point just off one of the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland, where they'll put Hardt ashore on the isle of Hoy to meet and English contact, Miss Tiel, who is getting information on the British fleet movements in the area.

Cut to someplace in mainland Scotland. Anne Burnett (June Duprez) is a woman in her early 20s who's going to Hoy to be the new schoolmistress, at least until her fiancé, Rev. Harris, marries her. She's worried about missing the train, so when two women stop at the teahouse where Anne is, they offer to take her. It's a ruse, as the older lady chloroforms poor Anne and the younger woman is actually Miss Tiel (Valerie Hobson). They forge Anne's passport, that being necessary to enter a sensitive area like the Orkneys, and send her on her way, throwing poor Anne over a cliff.

Tiel gets to the island and, although nobody knows why she's really there, everybody wants to offer her the sort of hospitality that would prevent her from carrying out her mission. She says she's an independent woman who can take care of herself, and gets to her residence near the school just before Hardt gets off the boat. Hardt is able to evade the constabulary and get to Tiel. Joining them is a Lt. Ashington (Sebastian Shaw), a former ship's captain who was demoted for drunkenness, and is now willing to help Germany to get back at his commanders.

Their plot is going along fairly well, at least until an unexpected visitor shows up: Rev. Harris. This is a big problem since it's supposed to be Anne Burnett staying at the house. There is of course a woman there with a passport identifying her as Burnett, but Harris is the one person on the island who is going to know that this is not in fact Burnett. So the three people working for Germany have to start working much more quickly before everybody figures out that there's trouble afoot on the island. There are a lot of twists and turns before the resolution, although you can probably guess that since the movie was released in 1939, the British are going to win out in the end.

Despite the necessity of having the British triumph and that dictating some of the twists and turns, The Spy in Black is actually a pretty darn good movie. As with Powell and Pressburger's later 49th Parallel, it also portrays the Germans as intelligent and human, instead of the over-the-top evil that Hollywood films portrayed Germans as. Granted, these are not World War II Germans, but still, with it being obvious that there was a war coming, and soon, it was obvious that the Germans were going to be a big enemy in fairly short order.

The production values are also on a level with the movies Alfred Hitchcock had been making in the UK before leaving for Hollywood, which is to say not quite as high as what you'd get from a Hollywood studio film, especially the prestige productions. But the sort of material here means that a non-prestige level of production actually works in the movie's favor. The Spy in Black is a winner all around, and definitely a movie that should be better known.

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Background to Danger

George Raft is TCM's Star of the Month, and it turns out that I've got a film on my DVR that is part of the tribute and that a search of the blog claims I haven't blogged about before. (And, having watched the movie for this post, I don't think I'd seen it before.) That movie, Background to Danger, airs tonight (January 21) at 8:00 PM on TCM.

Although George Raft is the nominal star here, we don't see him for several minutes. Instead, we're transported to Ankara, capital of Turkey. The movie was released in 1943, the middle of World War II, and Turkey was one of the few countries in the region that managed to stay neutral, meaning that both Axis and Allied powers had embassies in the country and there was all sorts of opportunity for espionage hijinks to ensue. One such example in the movie, that actually did occur in real life, was a failed attempt on the life of the German ambassador to Turkey. In the movie, the attempt is portrayed as a false flag operation by the Nazis to attempt to stoke fear in Turkey that the Soviets are going to invade and get Turkey to join the Axis powers. German involvement is quickly determined, and the Nazi behind the scenes, a Colonel Robinson (Sydney Greenstreet) is seen in Berlin very annoyed at the failure of the scheme.

Cut to Aleppo, in northern Syria. It's a main stop on board the rail line from Istanbul to Baghdad. Getting on the train in the same car are American businessman Joe Barton (George Raft) and a mysterious woman named Ana Remzi (Osa Massen) who comes across as though she's clearly lying about who she is. She's also being followed by a slightly burly guy of vaguely not-quite western European appearance with a big bushy moustache. So she asks Joe to hold on to an envelope so that the authorities don't get it when the train crosses the border.

Joe, being a curious sort, rifles through the envelope when he gets to his hotel room, and finds what appears to be photostats of documents that would suggest someone is about to do something to Turkey, but who and why? In any case, Joe goes to return the envelope to Ana at her hotel, where he finds that she's been killed and he's been spotted at the scene such that he's a logical suspect. The police notify him of this, but these aren't real Turkish police. Instead, they're some of Robinson's men who take Joe to a secret location and rough him up to the extent that you'd think he'd have a pretty serious concussion and be out of commission for as long as it takes the events in the rest of the movie to transpire. But they didn't worry about concussions in those days.

Joe is magically saved by a man claiming to be Nikolia Zaleshoff (Peter Lorre), who is coy at first about who he is but then claims to be working for the Soviets, who were nominal allies of the US in the war leading to all sorts of hideous propaganda from Hollywood movies about the virtues of Soviet anti-fascists. He's in Turkey with his purported sister Tamara (Brenda Marshall), and they want that envelope too. As it turns out, Robinson wants the envelope because the documents are propaganda claiming that the Soviets are planning an invasion of Turkey, although again you'd think the Nazis could just draw up some more forgeries to have printed in the Turkish press. But are the Zaleshoffs really who they claim they are? And who was that man following Ana?

Background to Danger was apparently put into production after the success of Casablanca, and based on a novel from the interwar period by Eric Ambler. That would probably explain why when I came across this movie and the plot summary I couldn't help but wonder if I was getting it confused with Journey Into Fear, a Joseph Cotten film about war intrigue in Turkey. Background to Danger is moderately entertaining, at least in the way that a TV show like Columbo was entertaining 30 years later: you knew what you were going to get and that the bad guy was going to get his comeuppance, but the whole production has a perfunctory by-the-numbers feel to it. Background to Danger isn't terrible, but it's no surprise why so many other World War II movies are better remembered today.

Monday, January 20, 2025

Queimada

I've still got multiple Marlon Brando movies from his time as TCM's Star of the Month to get through watching before they expire from the DVR. Up next is one I hadn't heard of before seeing it show up was Burn!. Since the premise sounded interesting enough, I decided to record it.

Marlon Brando plays Sir William Walker, a British man in the 1840s who is clearly based on the American mercenary of the 19th century who fomented rebellions in Central America in order to benefit US business interests. The movie Walker is being sent to an island called Queimada, a Portuguese colony in the Caribbean Antilles that produces a goodly amount of sugar, having burned the original inhabitatns out. The British would like an interest in the sugar, and figures that the best way to do that is to get the African slaves to revolt against the Portuguese. Once the place is independent, it will willingly trade with the British instead of the Portuguese.

With that in mind, the British have sent Walker, who they think is a master manipulator. And he is that good. But he decides to manipulate multiple sides. He meets with one of the slaves, José Dolores (Evaristo Márquez, not a professional actor at the time he made the movie), and gets him to lead the revolt, in part by robbing the territory's national bank. But Walker is playing both sides of the street, as he talks to Teddy Sanchez (Italian actor Renato Salvatori), leader of an influential group of landowners. The plan is to get them to agree to revolt too, and with Sanchez having been influenced by Walker, they'll agree to let the British control the island's sugar trade.

The rebellion is more or less successful, in that Portugal gives up control of the colony. But there's the question of who should leave it. Walker puts Sanchez in control, getting Dolores to agree to this arrangement in exchange for the abolition of slavery. Walker has satisfied his British masters, so he's free to leave Queimada and foment his next rebellion.

However, he's left behind a relationship that's clearly unstable both politically and socially, and it's only going to be a matter of time before things spiral out of control. Sure enough, the former slaves, although nominally free, are no better off than the sharecroppers of the American south and, having led one rebellion, decide to rebel again. The Sanchez government is unable to put this down, and the British, wanting a stable government, call on Walker again to try to put down another rebellion. It's not going to be so easy.

Burn! was directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, who is probably most famous for The Battle of Algiers, a deeply political film about the Algerian war of independence against France. As such, it's no surprise that Pontecorvo takes the political views with which he imbued The Battle of Algiers and brings them to Burn!. However, I don't think he's quite as successful this time. That might be down to the editing; Pontecorvo's original Italian version was apparently a good 15-20 minutes longer than the English-language version that gets shown in the US. I get the feeling however, that it might be more down to the fact that Burn! is based on a completely fictional place, and portraying a time long in the past. To me, it felt like it was too easy for Pontecorvo to take the route of letting a political message overwhelm the narrative story, unlike The Battle of Algiers where the events were fresh in people's minds and the movie has more of the feel of a docudrama.

As a result, Burn! winds up being an interesting premise that doesn't rise to much more than a curiosity. To me, it's more worth watching to see why it doesn't succeed.