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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Raisin in the Sun

Tomorrow, January 20, is Martin Luther King Day here in the US. As always, TCM is programming the day with films from a limited set of movies, since of course in the days before the civil rights movement there weren't lot of Hollywood movies that gave a prominent place to black actors. A movie that shows up a lot is the 1961 version of A Raisin in the Sun. This year, that airing comes on at 3:30 PM.

The movie opens up one Friday morning in a cramped apartment in Chicago. Ruth Younger (Ruby Dee) wakes gets out of bed, and goes to the living room/kitchen to wake up her son Travis, who sleeps on a day bed since the family doesn't have the space to give him a room of his own. Also in the family is Ruth's husband Walter (Sidney Poitier), his sister Beneatha (Diana Sands), and family matriarch Lena (Claudia McNeil). There's no patriarch in the family because Lena's husband recently died, and that in fact is a major part of the story.

The late father Younger had a life insurance policy, and that's about to pay off $10,000, which was a nice chunk of change back in 1961 when the movie was released. Everybody has something they could do with the money. Beneatha is a college student who has hopes of going to medical school, and a portion of that insurance money could really help her in that regard. Walter is forced to work as a chauffeur for a rich white guy, something that's been eating away on him as he thinks this is a horrendous indignity. He's got a couple of friends who would like to go into business together by opening a liquor store; some of that money would go a long way to paying Walter's portion of the down payment. And Lena would like a better house for the family, where Travis can have a room of his own and a yard to play in. And it's her money after all.

Further complicating matters is that this is the America of the early portion of the civil rights era, with all the racial issues that entails. Beneatha has two suitors competing for her affection. George (Louis Gossett Jr.) would be the safe choice, but Beneatha has become more radical on race relations, embracing Africa in a way that previous generations didn't; this is influenced in part by the other suitor, Joseph Asagai (Ivan Dixon), actually being from Nigeria. As for Walter, he finds that Mom is profoundly opposed to using the money for demon alcohol, one of many things driving Walter to drink. Ruth finds out that she's pregnant again, and worries about how they're going to be able to afford another child. She even thinks about getting an abortion, but that's another thing that absolutely horrifies Mom.

So Lena decides to force matters by going down to the bank and using a portion of that money for a down payment on a house in a nice neighborhood, part for Beneatha, and the rest for a checking account in Walter's name. Everybody kind of comes around to the idea of having a house of their own. Well, not quite everybody. The Youngers will be the family integrating the neighborhood, and the neighborhood "improvement association", represented by Mr. Lindner (John Fiedler), tries to put the matter delicately that blacks and whites would be better off living apart.

A Raisin in the Sun is a movie with a lot of cultural imporantance, being based on a play that was one of the first big productions by a black playwright and dealing with the racial issues that it does. For me, the movie is a bit of a mixed bag. Parts of it are quite good but at the same time it feels like the movie takes a while to get to the big conflict over segreagation. And when it does get there, the last half hour or so of the movie has the cast, especially Poitier and McNeil, engage in some shocking overacting. I'm not certain whether that's an issue with the screenplay or the director not reining the actors in, but the histrionics are way over the top.

Still, the significance of A Raisin in the Sun makes it a movie that should be seen; tomorrow's airing is your chance to see it.

Avalon

I mentioned yesterday evening that British actress Joan Plowright died on Thursday at the age of 95, and that I had her role in the movie Avalon on my DVR. Not only that, but I'd already watched it intending to do a post on it and schedule it in my queue of movies to blog about. But with the death of Plowright, I've decided to move up my post on Avalon to now.

Sam Krichinsky (Armin Mueller-Stahl) is the youngest of five brothers living in Baltimore in the late 1940s. As the movie opens, it's Thanksgiving, and Sam is telling the generation of grandchildren, who would be roughly in the single digits in terms of ages, how he emigrated to the US when his older brothers could afford to bring him over, which resulted in his arriving in Baltimore on July 4, 1914. Of course, we know what a big day July 4 is, but a newly-arrived immigrant probably wouldn't, so for him all the fireworks and such are a shock and a metaphor for the land of opportunity that America is consistently presented as in the popular culture. The Krichinsky brothers work as wallpaper hangers, which doesn't seem like much but then the trades have always been important. It's at least enough to earn a living.

You get the impression that everyone in the family, even the grandkids, have heard the stories from Sam and the other patriarchs of how they came to America, and were also able to marry nice Jewish immigrant women; among the wives is Eva, who is the character played by the aforementioned Joan Plowright. She eventually gave birth to Jules (Aidan Quinn), and Jules would grow up to marry Ann (Elizabeth Perkins) and start a family of their own. It's not all a bed of roses, of course, as this is still the generation where it wasn't uncommon for three generations to live under one roof, something which grates on poor Ann who only married into the family.

All of the kids in this generation want something better out of life, while one thing the first generation still wants is to make certain the cousins don't grow too far apart, which is why there's still a big family council every week. It's also why, when Jules and Ann finally earn enough to move out of the Baltimore row houses into a nicer place in the suburbs, some relatives aren't happy about having to travel so far to see Jules and Ann. But while Jules and Ann do well, it's as much because the one cousin who's the biggest risk taker in trying to advance the family is Izzy (Kevin Pollak). He comes up with the big idea on going all in on the the new technology of television and opening up a discount appliance warehouse to sell TVs and other stuff to a population that has an increasing postwar affluence.

Along the way, there are all sorts of other vignettes about the immigrant experience: having difficulty with the English language; finding out about a relative who hadn't emigrated; dealing with changing times; and the like. Eventually, Avalon winds up with a sort of coda set in the late 1970s when Jules' kid has graduated college and has a kid of his own, and takes that child to see great-grandpa Sam, by now pushing 90 and in a nursing home.

It's easy to see why director Barry Levinson would want to make a movie like Avalon, which you get the impression was a deeply personal experience for him, he being the child of Russian-Jewish immigrants. In that regard, it's like Elia Kazan's America, America, although it focuses on the American half of the immigrant experience. The personal nature of the movie, however, is not always a help. For someone like me, whose father would have been in the same generation as the Jules character and whose grandfather was the immigrant, there are certainly things that resonate. (Unfortunately, my grandfather wasn't quite so pushy about telling immigrant stories, and my dad being an only child, we didn't have the large family gatherings seen here.) For people not of the generation to have personal knowledge of the immigrants in their family, however, I'm afraid Avalon will come across as a bit too distant and stylized as well as possibly clichéd. It also didn't help for me that much of it comes off as a pastiche of nostalgia for the first half of the Baby Boomer era. As a classic film blogger I obviously have no issue with films made contemporary to that (or pretty much any) era, but I've always been uncomfortable with the doe-eyed nostalgia for the Baby Boomer years.

So Avalon won't work for everybody, but it may well work for you. Give it a chance.

Obituary after obituary after obituary

This has seemed like one of those weeks where an inordinate number of well-known names, and a few lesser-known names, have left us. Some of the people probably deserve a separate post, and I assume there will be at least one standalone TCM programming tribute down the road, but I haven't seen anything of that yet. And with February being 31 Days of Oscar I'd guess that any programming tributes wouldn't be until March.

The first person I had been intending to mention was child actor Claude Jarman, Jr., who died on Sunday at the age of 90. He was the young friend of Juano Hernandez in Intruder in the Dust, which will be on TCM on Monday (Jan. 20) at 2:00 PM as part of TCM's Martin Luther King Day programming. Jarman also played the boy who works for Jeanette MacDonald in the Lassie film The Sun Comes Up. I blogged about that one on Christmas this past year obviously not knowing that Jarman was going to be dying in January, and also not having looked at the January TCM schedule. The Sun Comes Up is on TCM on January 30. Jarman was also in The Yearling, which I thought I had on my DVR to do a post on but apparently don't. That one's going to be on TCM as part of 31 Days of Oscar in mid-February.

The person who probably most deserved a standalone post is director David Lynch. Lynch directed such films as Blue Velvet and Mulholland Falls, as well as the TV series Twin Peaks that I never cared for. Lynch died on Wednesday at 78. It turns out that I've got one of his films on my DVR: Eraserhead. I tried to watch it some months back, but had difficulty getting into it. I'll have to give it another try, as it's coming up on TCM as part of the prime time lineup on January 31, although it's technically in the early hours of Feb. 1. So as of now I'm planning to do a full-length post on it in two weeks' time.

Then there's British actress Joan Plowright, who died yesterday aged 95. Like a lot of British actors and actresses, Plowright did a lot of work on the stage. But she's also known for having married Laurence Olivier, meeting him while they were making The Entertainer. For some reason, I thought that one was also getting an airing during 31 Days of Oscar, but a search of the February schedule doesn't yield any hits. Among Plowright's other movies -- and one that's on my DVR -- is her turn as a Jewish immigrant mother in Avalon So that one is going to be showing up on the blog fairly soon, most likely tomorrow, although I've got a fair bit of schedule juggling to do with my posts since I have a handful of posts on movies that are actually going to be on TV over the next week.

I didn't recognize the name Phyllis Dalton, but she was the sort of behind the scenes person whose work is as important to movies as all the bigger names. Dalton was a costume designer for a bunch of very high-profile movies, most notably Lawrence of Arabia, although that one surprisingly didn't get her an Oscar nomination. She would go on to win two Oscars, however, for Doctor Zhivago and the Kenneth Branagh version of Henry V. Other films included Alfred Hitchcock's remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Dalton was 99.

Finally, I should probably give brief mention to Jeannot Szwarc. Szwarc directed some films whose names you might recognize, most notably Jaws 2; he died on Wednesday at the age of 85.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

TCM's "Is it a dream" spotlight this month brings a movie from a star I don't get to mention very often, I think because his movies are generally not from studios part of the old TCM library: Danny Kaye. That movie is The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which comes on tonight at 9:00 PM. (Yes, 9:00 PM ET might seem like an odd starting time for a TCM presentation since prime time begins invariably at 8:00 PM, but the first film at 8:00 is the 51-minute silent Sherlock Jr..)

Danny Kaye plays Walter Mitty, and you probably already know a bit about the character because the movie is loosely based on a short story by James Thurber; the Mitty name has entered the lexicon as a byword for a daydreamer; and there was another film version about a decade ago. Walter Mitty here is a daydreamer mostly to escape his crappy personal life. He lives in the New Jersey suburbs with his overbearing mother Eunice (Fay Bainter); commutes to New York to work as a proofreader at a publishing company that puts out pulp fiction, where his boss Mr. Pierce (Thurston Hall) steals his ideas; and has a fiancée Gertrude (Ann Rutherford) who you wonder whether she's part of an arranged marriage just to give Walter someone for a wife. Indeed, she's got another guy pursuing her. Dr. Hollingshead (Boris Karloff) comes along to give Walter a bad, unoriginal idea for another dime novel, and it's all too much.

So when Walter has to deal with the doctor, he finds himself imagining that he's a doctor, specifically a surgeon performing a celebrated new operation. Later, he sees himself as an RAF pilot fighting the Nazis in World War II, which also gives him the opportunity to sing a song when he's celebrating after another great aerial success. In all of these fantasies, there's a woman involved, a very pretty one indeed. It's also well known to everyone around Walter that he has a tendency to fantasize and is terribly absent-minded as a result, which is why nobody is going to believe him for the second half of the movie.

One day on the commuter train to work, whom should Walter see but the woman who's been in all those daydreams he's had! And, she approaches him! This time, it's a story that you'd think is so crazy even Walter can't believe it. The woman says her name is Roasalind van Hoorn (Virginia Mayo), and that she's being followed by another passenger on the train. So would Walter be so kind as to pretend to be Rosalind's boyfriend? Walter, being a fantasist, goes along at least until he gets to his office. But he forgets his briefcase, and his need to go back and get it is going to bring him much further into the intrigue with which Rosalind is involved.

The actual nature of the intrigue, and what everybody is looking for, is of course a macguffin. Suffice it to say, however, that the bad guys know Walter has (or had) what they're looking for, and they're willing to kill him for it. Moreover, because of all of Walter's daydreams, nobody believes him when he says that there are well and truly bad men after him.

James Thurber didn't care for this movie version of his work, and I can understand why. There's not enough in a short story to turn it into a full-length movie, and the Goldwyn studio both had to do a lot of padding and tailor the material to Danny Kaye's talents, which are not going to be to everyone's tastes. I didn't dislike this version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, but it's also certainly not a favorite movie of mine.

Tower of London (1962)

Roger Corman died last year, and a few months later TCM had a multi-night tribute to Corman with some movies he produced as well as some he directed. Surprisingly, I haven't seen as much of the Corman oeuvre as you might think, so this gave me the opportunity to record several movies. Among them was the 1962 version of the movie Tower of London, directed by Roger and produced by his younger brother Eugene.

The movie opens up in April, 1483, and as the narrator (Paul Frees, if you couldn't tell by the voice) informs us, it's the night that England's king, Edward IV, is dying. Edward is going to leave behind quite the family. This includes two minor children and two younger brothers. The more notable brother from history is Richard (Vincent Price), at the time Duke of Gloucester. Richard is hoping to become regent, raising the children until they become adults, at which point son Edward V would be a king with full power. However, Edward IV, on his deathbed, announces that the other brother, George, will be regent.

This enrages poor Richard, who responds by inviting George down to the wine cellar to have a talk in private, away from all the wailing women, or at least that's his stated reasoning. In fact, he's down here so that he can murder George without anybody seeing it, and then dumping George's body in a vat of wine! And he does so with a knife that belongs to someone in the family of the Queen Consort. Richard is very clearly guilty, to the point that he sees the ghost of George shortly before some stones fall from one of the parapets, nearly killing Richard. Perhaps he's going nuts.

Of course, there are still those two sons of Edward IV, and they have more of a right to the throne than Richard does, at least in the order of succession to the throne. Richard knows this, and the two kids being relatively young and having no power base, it's not too difficult for Richard to get them confined to palace chambers. Worse, Richard kills one of the ladies-in-waiting as part of a plot to spread rumors that Edward V and his brother are illegitimate. There's a lot of palace intrigue trying to keep the child king and his brother safe, while Richard tries to stop all of this. Eventually, he's successful, at least for some values of successful, in that the two children die (by murder in the movie, of course; how exactly they died in real life is not 100% certain). Richard becomes King Richard III.

Now, as we also, know the Wars of the Roses were convulsing England at this point in history, and if you remember your English history or your Shakespeare, you'll recall that the humpbacked Richard will meet his end on the field of battle at Bosworth Field. This happens here, and along the way Richard sees a lot more ghosts, implying that he's going insane.

This version of Tower of London is never less than entertaining, showing how Roger Corman was adept at taking a modest budget and making something reasonably worthwhile with it. It's not great, in part because it's material that should have been done in garish color but got black-and-white; the other reason being that Vincent Price is not the right actor to play Richard III. But it still succeeds at what it did, and entertains six decades later. Definitely worth at least one watch.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

I've mentioned before that musicals aren't my favorite genre of movies, in part because they're even more artificial than other movies in that nobody just breaks out into song like that in real life. Never mind that I don't always care for the voices of the singers. So I have to admit that as a result I've put off watching Seven Brides for Seven Brothers for a while. It was on TCM last month, and is on again tomorrow, January 16, at 6:00 PM, so I've finally gotten around to watching it to do a full-length review.

A title card just after the opening credits informs us that the action is set in the Oregon Territory, 1850. Adam Pontipee (Howard Keel) is a farmer out in the backwoods who has come into town in part because he's in want of a wife. Outside one of those hotel/restaurants you see in old westerns, he meets Milly (Jane Powell). Seeing the way she can handle the rough men who pass through town, he realizes she can handle life on a farm, and so almost immediately proposes to her. This is a rather shocking idea, but back in those days it wasn't as if there was much way for men and women to meet, so she takes him up on the marriage proposal.

It's only when the two of them get back to the farm that Adam informs Milly that he's got six brothers, all of whom work the farm with him. Amazingly, none of the brothers gets jealous and tries to do anything inappropriate with Milly, at least not in the way you'd think of men doing in a place where there's only one woman around. But they are uncouth, not having had the civilizing presence of a woman around, and poor Milly has to try to civilize them.

The brothers go to a barn raising, which is an excuse for the big dance number in the film and the number that everybody remembers with good reason. More importantly, however, its a chance for the brothers to be around women, and for them to cotton on to the idea that they need wives as well. However, they come up with a rather dumb way of trying to find themselves wives. As winter is setting in, they go into town and look for the women they met at the dance... and basically kidnap the women to bring them back to the farm for a marriage ceremony. And they set off an avalanche on the way back so that the women's angry fathers and brothers won't be able to follow them until spring, which will give the women time to accept the situation and fall in love with the brothers the way Milly has fallen in love with Adam. The only thing is, they don't have anyone to perform the wedding, and there's no way the brides are going to consummate a non-marriage relationship. Never mind what the Production Code says. Adam is disgusted with this behavior and goes to a trapping cabin to spend the winter, even though Milly is now pregnant with his child.

Of course, there is that pesky Production Code, so we know that in the end everything is going to be made right. The fact that Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is also supposed to be a light musical also requires the sort of happy ending that we're going to get once spring comes and the brides' families come for the brothers.

Fans of musicals will love Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, although most of those will probably already have seen the movie. I didn't dislike it, although I have to say that I'm still generally more of a fan of backstage musicals about putting on a show like 42nd Street or Gold Diggers of 1933 or biographical musicals since songs and dance numbers tend to make more sense there. It's easy to see why Seven Brides for Seven Brothers has such high critical praise.

Ah yes, it's Tennessee Williams

I think we're up to the first of the movies that ran in TCM's 2024 Christmas marathon that I'm doing a post on this year. That's because the movie is getting another airing on TCM less than a month after its previous showing: Period of Adjustment, which you can see tomorrow, Jan. 15, at 9:15 AM.

Over the opening credits, we see George Haverstick (Jim Hutton). He served in the Korean War, and wound up with some sort of condition that put him in a hospital for it. There, among the nurses treating him, is Isabel (Jane Fonda). The two fall in love during his treatment, and get married when George finally gets out of the hospital. And they live happily ever after, ending the movie. Yeah right. This is based on a Tennessee Williams play, so you know it's not going to be happy ever after, especially considering all of the above finsishes with the end of the opening credits.

George has also been somewhat dishonest with Isabel about his personal life. He'd decided to quit his old job in search of better pastures, and when they get in the "just married" car to head out into their new life, Isabel finds that it's not a regular sedan, but a hearse! Worse, George is only able to take the couple to a cheap roadside motel on their first night to try to consummate their marriage, which he doesn't seem to be able to do.

The couple continue to drive on until they reach the home of George's old army buddy Ralph Bates (Tony Franciosa). Ralph has been married rather longer, to Dorothea (Lois Nettleton), and has a son by her. She comes from money, with Ralph working for her father's (John McGiver) business. Perhaps George may be able to make a fresh start there. But then again, George and Isabel aren't the only unhappy couple, as there's a good bit of strife in the Bates marriage too. Dorothea's father is beginning to think that perhaps Ralph only married Dorothea for the family money. And when George and Isabel show up, it's not hard to give her the impression that perhaps Ralph and Isabel are beginning to develop some sort of feelings for each other.

It's all enough to give everybody in the piece good reason to get overheated and start bickering with each other through the use of overheated dialog, much as in most of Tennessee Williams' other work that I've seen. Now, I'm not the biggest fan of Williams' work, in no small part because it's consistently too overheated and loud for its own good, leading to none of the characters being particularly likeable. And because it's a Tennessee Williams work, Isabel is written as a southern belle, leading to Jane Fonda essaying an obnoxious accent.

People who like Tennessee Williams may enjoy Period of Adjustment. I didn't.

Not at the end of the soufflé

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

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

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

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

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

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

TCM's Kris Kristofferson tribute

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

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

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

The Promoter

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

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

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

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

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

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

The shoes of color

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Faces East

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mine Wolf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TCM's Teri Garr tribute, and other briefs

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

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

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

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

The shakedown of size

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two from Vitagraph

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

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

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

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