Teddy the Rough Rider

Title card from Teddy the Rough Rider

Quite a few years back, I made mention of actor Sidney Blackmer playing US President Theodore Roosevelt on multiple occasions. One of these is in the Oscar-winning short Teddy the Rough Rider. This was part of a series of two-reelers that Warner Bros. made in Technicolor in the late 1930s and early 1940s about American history.

As the short opens, it's 1895, and Theodore Roosevelt has just been named police commissioner for New York City. There, he roots out corruption with his usual bluster, and starts setting his sight higher. He talks about the need for a strong national defense, which ultimately leads to his leading the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War of 1898. This makes him such a hero that he's catapulted into a run for Governor of New York state, which he wins.

But his aggressive policymaking doesn't exactly please the national Republican party. They respond by getting the incumbent president, William McKinley, to nominate Roosevelt for the vice-presidency in the presidential election of 1900. (McKinley's first vice-president had died in office and since this was before the 25th Amendment the office was vacant, necessitating the nomination of someone new anyway.) The plan is that the vice-presidency is the graveyard of politicians, while Roosevelt won't be able to refuse because of the clamor from America as a whole. Of course, McKinley is assassinated in office. Roosevelt then proceeds to act in ways that would theoretically make the "No Kings" people blanch in horror. Except that as we all know they want their own guy to be king and use the power of the presidency to punish the people they oppose politically. In any case, Roosevelt's actions are portrayed here as an unalloyed good.

Finally, Roosevelt leaves office. A few years later comes the Great War, and all of Roosevelt's sons go off to fight, with one losing his life in the war, something that according to the short was a mortal blow to Theodore Roosevelt too. All of this is compressed into the running-time of a two-reel short.

Teddy the Rough Rider is a hagiography that I suppose could serve as a jumping-off point for a deeper look into the life of Theodore Roosevelt, although the mythology around him and the praise for his imperial presidence means even the deeper looks would be superficial. Blackmer does well with the material he has.

One interesting thing is that although the short was released in 1940 and won the Academy Award for two-reel shorts that year, the print TCM ran was a re-release print as there's a clear copyright date of 1947 on it.

TCM Star of the Month November 2026: Burt Lancaster

Burt Lancaster and Shirley Jones in their Oscar-winning performances in Elmer Gantry (Nov. 17, 10:45 PM)

We're into the first full week of a new month, and that means that once again it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time, that star is Burt Lancaster, since his birthday is in November; indeed, he was already Star of the Month back in November 2013 for his centenary. Lancaster's movies will be on TCM every Tuesday in November, starting in the afternoons and continuing through the prime time lineup. One good thing about this is that it gives me the chance to take a couple of the photos that I had posted back in the days when I was using Photobucket to host my pictures, and re-upload them to Blogger. Not that I care about Google having my classic Hollywood publicity stills and movie photos, since they're not really mine to begin with.

Burt Lancaster in The Killers (Nov. 3, 8:00 PM)

As far as I can tell, the tribute is roughly chronological, in the sense that the movies aren't strictly in chronological order, but each week is a later period in Lancaster's career than the preceding week. So today's first day is the 1940s and some 1950s; Nov. 10 is mostly 1950s; the 17th focuses on the 1960s; and the last week is the 1970s and the couple of 1980s films Lancaster made at the end of his career. This, as opposed to some tributes that group movies together by genre.

Burt Lancaster romping on the beach with Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity (Nov. 10, 8:00 PM)

As an example, From Here to Eternity of course won Oscar's Best Picture for 1953, and it kicks off the prime time portion of the lineup at 8:00 PM on November 10. Immediately preceding that is Sweet Smell of Success, at 6:00 PM, although that movie was released a couple of years later.

Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success (Nov. 10, 6:00 PM)

Finally, I'd like to mention that I'm always thrilled to see another showing of Seven Days in May (Nov. 17, 2:00 PM), since the idea of the permanent bureaucracy and politicized officer corps of the military trying to do an end-around against a democractically elected president is something that's still relevant today.

Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in Seven Days in May (Nov. 17, 2:00 PM)

Not a cartoon

Back in August, I did a post on the Charlton Heston movie 55 Days at Peking, I think for Ava Gardner's day in Summer Under the Stars. It's a movie that I couldn't help but think of as I was watching another Heston film, Khartoum.

Khartoum is the capital of modern-day Sudan, but a bit of a history lesson is in order. Back in the 1880s much of what is now Sudan was a sort of protectorate under Egypt since the two countries were both Muslim, although of different ethnicities, causing no end of friction. Meanwhile, Egypt wasn't particularly strong itself, being more or less a vassal to the Ottoman Empire. Egypt, however, was home to the Suez Canal, completed about a dozen years earlier and a vital transport link. So the British had troops stationed in Egypt to keep the Suez Canal open and the Egyptian government stable.

Further south in what is now Sudan, a man named Muhammed Ahmed (played in the movie by Laurence Olivier) claimed that he had been called upon by the original Muhammed to be the Mahdi (this is how I'll refer to the character for the rest of the post since that's also how he's referred to in the movie), which is a sort of Islamic version of the Messiah that to Christians is supposed to come in the end times. Further complicating matters is that other branches of Islam certainly weren't about to believe that this upstart from backwater Sudan was a Mahdi. So the Mahdi needed to assert absolute political power able to drive out the Egyptians to get the other Muslims to notice. As the movie opens, a former English soldier leads an Egyptian army south, only to get ambushed by the Mahdi's men.

This is a problem for the government of the day back in London, led by William Gladstone (Ralph Richardson). They can't really let the Mahdi overrun Sudan, or even worse get farther north. But there are a whole bunch of Egyptians stuck in Khartoum, and the British can't really let them get stranded to their fate. The fact that the ambushed Egyptians were led by a Briton makes action more necessary, at least for domestic political purposes. An envoy returned from Sudan, Col. Stewart (Richard Johnson), comes up with an idea which is to send Major-General Charles Gordon (Charlton Heston) back to Sudan. Gordon is known among the Sudanese people, and has a good reputation there as a more honest broker who helped destroy the slave trade. Perhaps Gen. Gordon can get the Egyptians out of Khartoum. If not, the British can wash their hands of the whole thing because Gordon's reputation means there's not a need to send the British army yet, which would provide its own set of political difficulties for the Gladstone government.

Gordon decides to accept the mission, but Gladstone, not trusting him, requires that Col. Stewart go along as an attaché. When the two finally get to Sudan, they realize that the Mahdist army has advanced farther north along the Nile than anybody knew, and that they threaten to surround Khartoum and besiege it. Gordon, with his reputation, is able to go to the Mahdi alone and unarmed, which creates a degree of trust between Gordon and the Mahdi to the point that the Mahdi reveals his true intentions.

So a war of waiting ensues, as the Mahdi waits for the right conditions to begin the final assault on Khartoum with Gordon figuring out a way to defend the city long enough for another way to get the Egyptians out besides sending them straight down the Nile which isn't an option. Political pressure mounts on Gladstone back in London, and he finally relents and allows the creation of a relief force under Maj. Kitchener, although he doesn't imbue the force with any urgency. Since all of this is based on real events, you can look up the history yourself to find out how it ended if you want to know going into the movie.

Khartoum is the sort of movie that I don't think could really be made today, at least certainly not in the form that it was made back in the mid-1960s. Modern sensibilities in the filmmaking community would probably insist on the portrayal of the British as unambiguously villanous. As for the film that we have, it's certainly competently made, and well acted, but the screenplay is the weak point here. It's slow, with a story that's more character driven than plot driven, and runs too long at over two hours (the exact running time will depend on whether the print includes the overture and exit music).

It could have been a Crime Does Not Pay subject

A short B movie that had been sitting on my DVR for quite some months that I recently got around to watching was the 1944 film The Last Ride. There's another film from 2011 with the same title about country singer Hank Williams, but this is a completely different film and story.

The movie's release date of 1944 puts it squarely in the middle of World War II. As you'll recall, there was a lot of rationing going on. No new automobiles were being made since all of the factories were converted to making vehicles for the military, and rubber for tires was in short supply too. So the young people who feel they're having their lives taken away from them through no fault of their own are not exactly thrilled. One group of youths finds that the tires on their car have been stolen, which is fact part of a tire racket. Joe, whose tires were stolen, learns from his friend Harry about the tire bootleggers, who are actually part of that racket by stealing the tires and then adulterating the rubber to turn one tire into more, and then charge through the nose for it. After getting his "new" tires, Joe goes for a drive, only for the tires to go bad, killing Joe and his girlfriend.

Virtuous policeman Pat Harrigan (Richard Travis) just knows that this is really a case of murder, but getting the goods on the people in the tire racket is going to be difficult. Indeed, he thinks he's got a couple of witnesses to Joe's being sold the illicit tires, but they get killed before they can testify. Pat's going to have to come up with another way to bring the gang to justice.

Worse, Pat's brother Mike (Charles Lang) sees to be making money on other people's misery, even though there's a war going on and a lot of propaganda about how everybody needs to do their part. Worse, a subplot has Mike as a romanti rival for Pat's girlfriend Kitty (a young Eleanor Parker). On the other hand, Mike's knowing a bunch of bad guys gives Pat an idea. He goes undercover with almost nobody other than the police chief (Wade Boteler) knowing. He takes a bribe in a way that's going to become very public and then punches the police chief to get himself "fired", which is quickly revealaed to be a ruse, not that you didn't know this before it's known.

If it's obvious to the viewer that Pat is going to be going undercover, it ought to be obvious to the bad guys too, although they seem to be surprisingly stupid for a gang that's been stealing people's tires for the rubber and making money hand over fist by doing it. They seem not to know that Pat is undercover, except for one guy who has the good sense to trail Pat to the otherwise deserted apartment house that serves as the rendezvous spot for Pat and the Chief. It puts Pat in danger, but since there's a Production Code and there's a war on anyway, you know that Pat is going to foil the gang at the end.

The Last Ride isn't a great movie, but it is a good example of what Warner Bros. could do with its B movies. It's also an interesting example of how the studios were contributing to the war effort in all sorts of ways, even to the propaganda of why we had to sacrifice our rubber for the war effort. For that reason alone the movie is worth one watch at least.

Madam Parton

Dolly Parton died back in September, and since the death was unexpected, I didn't really think about the movie of hers that I'd had sitting on my DVR since TCM ran it back in March or so. That movie is The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and recently I got around to watching it.

Jim Nabors plays Fred Wilkins, deputy sheriff of Lanville County, TX, under sheriff Ed Earl Dodd (Burt Reynolds). Linville County is famous for one thing: the Chicken Ranch, a brothel which had been open for decades. In an opening sequence, Fred informs us of the founding of the brothel at the beginning of the century, how it survived both the Depression as well as transfer in ownership from one madam to the next, and remained open until recent times, with the most recent proprietress being Mona Stangley (Dolly Parton).

Mona has some strict rules for her girls, but they're rules with a purpose, part of which is that the brothel not be hated by the people in town. In fact, thanks to those rules and Mona's charity work, the people in the county mostly like the brothel because it's fairly peaceful apart from the fact that it's selling sex. In short, they tolerate it, with even the sheriff not doing anything about it in part because he's in a fairly committed relationship with Mona, even if he doesn't plan to marry her.

But then big-city reporter Melvin Thorpe (Dom Deluise) comes onto the scene. He's a muckraker who plans to advance his career by, well, raking muck, so when he learns about the open secret of the Chicken Ranch, he decides he's going to whip up people in the rest of Texas against the Ranch. Somehow he does do this, with political pressure being put on Sheriff Dodd to close the place down. Dodd impresses upon Mona the fact that she should probably lay low for a while, at least until the political furor dies down, at which point she can quietly reopen the Ranch.

Except that the Ranch is also at the center of a tradition. Every year over Thanksgiving, the University of Texas and Texas A&M play the big in-state football game, and the alumni backers of both schools had a scheme whereby the team that won the game would be driven to the Chicken Ranch to have a night with the girls there. Unfortunately, the Ranch is supposed to be closed still over that Thanksgiving weekend, but the alumni don't care, and drive the winning team to the Ranch for a night of debauchery that really makes the news and pisses Thorpe off even more.

The plot of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is a really good plot for a light comedy, the sort of thing that Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds excel at. Unfortunately, the movie is based on a Broadway musical, and naturally, the idea in producing the movie was to keep it a musical. The musical numbers mostly don't work here. The Melvin Thorpe numbers don't fit local TV news, with it making Thorpe come across as ridiculously obnoxious. And then the locker room number after the big football game absolutely brings the movie to a screeching halt. It's a bit of a shame becaus Parton and Reynolds are both likable here. Charles Durning, who plays the governor, earned an Oscar nomination and is qutie good too.

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas really deserved a better fate than it got.

Briefs for Halloween 2026

We're up to Halloween for another year, which means a usual crop of horror movies on all the channels, including FXM. Granted, the schedule this morning started off with Black Widow which isn't exactly horror, but it's always nice to see something like The Innocents show up. As for TCM, they've got some Looney Tunes horror cartoons in the end-of-the-morning block. The first of them is Transylvania 6-5000, a short that I haven't seen. YouTube TV, unsurprisingly, lists it as the feature frilm from the 1980s that had the same title, which I also I have to admit that I've never gotten around to seeing. My memory is of Ed Begley Jr. being on The $25,000 Pyramid whichever summer the movie came out, promoting it to the hilt.

Tonight is also the night when the clocks go back one hour. Unfortunately, none of the schedules I've found mention what's going to be filling that extra hour. That hour comes during The Seventh Victim, which is listed as starting at the first 1:30 AM with the following movie starting at 3:00 AM. The Seventh Victim is only 71 movies, so there's clearly that extra hour there.

There are several deaths worth mentioning this week. Of course the first two that people are going to notice are the two Star Trek-related deaths. Walter Koenig, who played Chekov on the original series, died on Sunday at the age of 90. And then on Wednesday, Patrick Stewart died aged 86. He'll be best remembered for having taken his career in a completely different direction by playing Capt. Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but before that he was a Shakesperean actor.

Dying the same day as Patrick Stewart, and a death more likely to be overshadowed by Stewart's, is Elke Sommer, who was about a week shy of her 86th birthday. I first saw Sommer as part of the team doing the Miss Universe beauty pageants back when that was a a big thing on CBS and I think still hosted by Bob Barker. At the time I had no idea what she was famous for, but she was one of those European actresses that Hollywood brought over in the 1960s to try to turn into the next big European star. Sommer had the great good luck to be in A Shot in the Dark, but she was also in some stinkers.

The Bat

A movie that's suitable for Halloween although, as of the time I wrote of this post wasn't yet mentioned on the TCM schedule for October, is the Vincent Price movie The Bat. But since it was on my DVR about to expire, I made a point of watching it to be able to write up this post. And, sure enough, it wound up as part of the schedule since it is after all Halloween and this is a Vincent Price film. The Bat is showing early on Halloween at 5:30 AM.

Vincent Price plays Dr. Wells, the town doctor in one of those Hollywood small towns that's small enough to apparently have only one doctor and be close enough for people to get away to secluded cabins. Getting away is local bank (there only seems to be one bank in town) president John Fleming, who confesses to Dr. Wells that he's embezzled $1M in securities from the bank and would give up half of that to Wells in exchange for Wells helping him fake his death. Dr. Wells responds by killing Fleming, thereby saving his own life, but having the problem of being on the hook for a killing in an era where there's still a production code.

Meanwhile, back in town, Cornelia Van Gorder (Agnes Moorehead) has come to visit in order to get away from it all and work on her next book. To do that, she's rented a house owned by Fleming, not realizing or caring that the house has a history. After all, Cornelia isn't a local, so why should she believe any of the stories about what might or might not have gone on in the house? That, or the idea that there's a killer on the loose called The Bat, who has an ability to get into places humans can't? Of course, all of the servants in the house believe in it, and don't want to work in the house.

And, wouldn't you know it, but Cornelia and her secretary Lizzie actually see the hand of The Bat, before seeing an actual bat that bites Lizzie and starts flying around the house before the two women are able to trap it in a closet. The police come out, and then discover that Dr. Wells is doing scientific research that involves experimenting on bats. This last bit, combined with the fact that we already know Wells is going to have to face the Production Code, makes Wells one of the prime suspects for being The Bat.

And there's also the issue of the embezzled securities, which ties into the rest of what's going on in the movie. The viewers of course know that the deceased Fleming, who is still assumed to be off in the mountains getting away from it all, is responsible, but nobody else knows, so there are all sorts of suspects. The learn from the deceased Fleming's nephew that the house Cordelia is renting is one of those Hollywood houses that has secret hiding places, so perhaps the securities might be somewhere in the house. So all of the main characters wind up at the house, at which point the identity of The Bat is revealed and the innocent people get to have a reasonably good ending for them. The wicked, of course, get punished.

The fact that there was still a Production Code in force makes The Bat a bit of a mess. But thanks to the presence of Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead, the film is raised above the level of schlock to something that is at least reasonably worth watching. It's not a great movie by any means, but it will certainly entertain you.

Well, the character is named William Bonney

It wasn't uncommon back in the Hollywood studio era for studios to produce biopics that were ostensibly about a famous subject, but barely reflected reality. Recently, I watched another film that fit that description: the 1941 version of Billy the Kid.

Robert Taylor plays Billy Bonney, aka Billy the Kid, and as the movie opens he's climbing into the living quarters above a jail in what is probably Lincoln County, NM (although the location backgrounds are very obviously Monument Valley in Utah) where he overpowers a sheriff's deputy and frees his friend Pedro (Frank Puglia), whose main purpose in this story is to provide some musical background and then be a key plot point later in the movie. Billy takes Pedro to a saloon run by cattle baron Dan Hickey (Gene Lockhart). Hickey makes his money selling cattle to the US government, who need the cattle to feed their soldiers.

But it's a bit of a ruse, as what Hickey and his men really do is cause competing ranchers' cattle to stampede, which means that Hickey's cattle would be the only ones left to sell to the government. Unfortunately, this time, the stampede kills one of the opposing farmers, which is a big problem. Meanwhile, one of the men affected by the stampede is Jim Sherwood (Brian Donlevy), who knew Billy when the two of them were kids.

Jim is working for one of the competing ranchers, Eric Keating (Ian Hunter), so Jim brings Billy and Pedro to the Keating ranch with the possibility of jobs. This is the depiction of the Lincoln County War, which has been depicted by Hollywood several times, notably in Chisum and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, although it's even more fictionalized here than in other movies. Keating has a sister Edith, and Billy falls in love with her, not that they're romantically suited for each other. And there's also the issue that people are still getting shot. The sheriff, McAndrews, has been working for Hickey, so Keating decides that he's going to go see the territorial governor (which would be Lew Wallace of Ben-Hur fame although he's not a character in this movie) with the aim of being deputized into law enforcement.

Keating, however, gets waylaid and ever returns to his ranch, leading Sherwood to go and get deputized himself; he's the Pat Garrett character even though the names have changed. Billy, here on the side of Keating's men, decides to go into town to get Hickey and the men Hickey sent to kill Keating, but Hickey is no dummy and sends the actual killers away so that they can't be found. Now, we know that the real life Billy the Kid was killed at the tender age of 22, so the question remains of how this movie version of Billy is going to get it in the end.

One of the reviews of Billy the Kid that I read made the argument that this is a generic Hollywood western, except that MGM decided to attach the name of Billy the Kid to is, which causes all sorts of problems considering the liberties that they had to tak with what's known about the real Billy Bonney's life. If it had been about totally fictitious people, the movie might be better. But what we actually get is a bunch of nonsense that probably looked nice on screen back in 1941 since it's in Technicolor. But even then, the print that TCM ran isn't all that good, so we don't even rally get the benefit of Technicolor.

Neither Charles Laughton nor Richard Widmark

When I was a teenager I was able to see the 1987 film No Way Out, I think courtesy of my late uncle who ran one of the local movie theaters. I learned fairly early on that it was a remake (or, based on the same source material) as The Big Clock. It was quite a bit later that I learned about the 1950 movie also titled No Way Out which has a completely different story. Anyhow, I finally watched my recording of when TCM ran the 1987 No Way Out, which is the first time in many years that I'd seen it.

The movie opens by setting up Yet Another Flashback. Lt. Cmdr. Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner) is being interrogated by a couple of military intelligence guys about his relationship with the Secretary of Defense, David Brice (Gene Hackman). Flash back to six months earlier -- we know it's six months because the film puts this right up on screen. Farrell went to school with Brice's chief of staff, Scott Pritchard (Will Patton), who invites Farrell to a party where Pritchard introduces Farrell and Brice. Also at the party is Susan Atwell (Sean Young), and somehow, the two of them wind up in a limousine together on the way back to Susan's apartment and immediately begin a one-night stand.

Farrell has to ship out to the Philippines, but he gets recalled to Washington because the Secretary of Defense wants him as his liaison between the Department of Defense and the CIA: presumably, being a friend of the Secretary's chief of staff is a good enough character reference. Getting to go back to Washington also means that he's going to be able to see Susan again. They resume their relationship, with Susan even taking a fateful Polaroid of Farrell.

What Farrell doesn't know is that Susan is also having a relationship with... Secretary of Defense Brice! This is obviously a problem for all three of them, and causes what is at first an awkward situation when Brice knocks on Susan's door while she and Farrell are having a tryst. Things get much worse when Brice and Susan get in an argument where Brice accidentally knocks Susan over a railing, sending her falling to her death. It should be manslaughter, but even manslaughter is a serious problem for a Secretary of Defense.

So how to frame somebody else? Well, there are two lines of attack here. One is that Polaroid, which didn't actually develop well, leading to a blurry image. Allegedly even primitive computer technology of the 1980s can clean up stuff like this, so that we'll find out who Susan's other lover is. Now, Farrell is no dummy, and he begins to cotton on to the fact that he's going to be implicated in Susan's killing even though he's quite innocent. This again being the 80s, there's also the Cold War going on, which offers the Secretary of Defense a convenient way of throwing the dead Susan under the bus by intimating that the other lover was actually a well-known Soviet agent named Yuri. The CIA is investigating, and this being a pre-Trump movie the intelligence services are portrayed as being dishonest and more than willing to go around the law to get what they want.

No Way Out is a well-made movie, and it's easy to see why it was a box-office hit. For me there was an issue with the ending. I also had the feeling, watching it a second time, that it's a bit more rooted in the 1980s than The Big Clock was rooted in its era. It's a minor quibble, however, and No Way Out is definitely still entertaining almost 40 years on.

Der amerikanische Freund

Another of the foreign films that was sitting on my DVR about to expire that I had to make a point of getting around to before that expiration was Wim Wenders' The American Friend.

The movie is based on Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley (played here by Dennis Hopper) character, as Wenders was apparently a big fan of Highsmith but couldn't get the rights to the particular Highsmith book he wanted to adapt. Ripley here is an underworld gangster shuttling between New York and Hamburg. In New York he commissions art from Derwatt (director Nicholas Ray), who has faked his own death because this raises the price of his art at auction; the auction is held in Hamburg. At the auction in Hamburg, Ripley meets Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz), a gallery worker who frames artwork, but the two don't get along.

Ripley has his life, and gets approached by Raoul (Gérard Blain), a French gangster, as part of a murder for hire plot in the Paris Métro. Jonathan has his life, which isn't much, considering that he's been diagnosed with a blood disease that may or may not be terminal. And he's got a wife Marianne (Lisa Kreuzer) and young son to look after. Ripley isn't exactly pleased with the idea of killing this guy in Paris, but he has an idea which is to rope Zimmermann into killing the guy in Paris.

Raoul is no dummy, so he comes up with a good idea of his own to get Zimmermann to agree to do the murder. This is to take Jonathan to Paris for a second medical opinion, only to have the test results faked so that Zimmermann will believe he has a very short amount of time to live. So it won't really matter if he gets found out in the murder; he'll be dead soon anyway. That, and the money could leave his wife and kid financially secure.

Zimmermann is actually good at luring the guy to his death, but things get more complicated because Ripley and Zimmermann begin to form a friendship. So when Raoul wants to use Zimmermann to help commit another murder, Ripley is horrified. And he's right to be horrified, since this killing is going to set off a gang war that will leave Ripley in danger, but even more so the much less guilty Zimmermann who, after all, has been roped into something not of his own making.

The American Friend is a Wim Wenders film, which means that it runs at a leisurely pace and is more about the characters than the story. This may not be to everybody's taste. And, I have to be honest, I think I prefer some of the other Wenders films I've seen to The American Friend precisely because this one needs to be more story-focused. Hopper and Ganz both do a good job with their roles, and the film is visually interesting for its look at the late 1970s. But I think it could have been a better film.

Once again, for some values of "loved"

I'm always interested in early talkies, even if they turn out not to be so good. The way at which America looked at itself and some of the cultural norms that are different from today, close to a century on, are sometimes quite interesting. An example of this that really isn't a very good film is Three Who Loved.

One of the three is John Hanson (Conrad Nagel), presumably a Swedish immigrant although he's lost his accent and is working as a New York bank teller in an era when this was considered a highly respectable occupation. He works with his best friend Phil Wilson (Robert Ames), and both of them live in a rooming house run by fellow Swedish immigrant Anna Larson (Bodil Rosing). Anna is the aunt of Helga (Betty Compson), who happens to be the longtime girlfriend of John, or at least was back when he was still in Sweden as comment is made that John hasn't seen Helga in ten years.

But Helga is coming over to America to live, with John planning to marry her. In addition, in order to improve his life, John has been studying law at night and is hoping to take the bar exam as he's got a law firm already willing to take him on once he passes the bar exam and is admitted to the bar. Helga likes John and Anna does too, so there's the chance for them all to live happily ever after.

Yeah, right, since we're only about 15 minutes into the movie. John is supposed to be a good guy, but he's so busy tring to improve his life so that he can provide better for Helga that he doesn't have enough time for her. And he can't even bother to get engaged to her the day she steps off the boat. Phil, on the other hand, has no compunctions about putting the moves on Helga although it starts off innocently enough when John suggests Phil show Helga a bit of New York and John can take her out the following night. Helga falls in love with Phil, although he's not as much in love with her as she is with him. Anna can see the former and warns John, but even she can't see the latter.

And then the characters start to make really stupid decisions. The movie starts off in the mid-1920s, when the economy is going great guns. And John spends money he doesn't have -- an idiotic lack of probity for a banker -- first by buying stocks on margin and then putting $7500 down as the "first payment" for a house, a ridiculous sum for 1926. (IIRC, the house I grew up in was a 1974 new-build that cost maybe $50K in inflated money.) When John's stock tout shows up saying John needs to back his stock or lose his entire investment, what does John do but embezzle $10K from Phil's till. (What were bank tellers doing with this much cash on hand?) Phil is absent because he's just about to walk out on Helga after telling her he's going to get a marriage license.

Needless to say, the bank examiners show up and find Phil $10K short and about to leave for South America, so he is to them and the police obviously guilty. And John won't admit guilt because he knows Phil was about to walk out on her anyway and can't leave Helga high and dry. So John lets Phil be wrongly convicted and marries Helga, fathering a son (a very young Dickie Moore) by her.

Five years pass and Helga is trapped in a loveless marriage, at least from her point of view, because she's still busy pining after Phil not realizing he was going to jilt her. John sees Helga treating him and the kid not so well by constantly partying with her friends, while Phil is in prison vowing revenge against whoever sent him up, not realizing that the person in question is in fact John. And then Phil escapes and goes to Helga and John's house for help....

As you can tell from the synopsis, Three Who Loved is certainly interesting, although the plot becomes a complete mess in the second half. That, and it was produced by RKO, who at this early stage seemed to be making movies competently, if cheaply with the result being things that provided product for the exhibitors without being terribly memorable. The three main characters all need to be taken by the neck and shaken to get some sense into them. And poor Betty Compson has to put on that accent. Three Who Loved is definitely worth watching as a product of its time, even if it's not very good.

Dr. Cyclops

Horror movies tend to get overlooked at Oscar time, I think, with the exception of the effects awards. An example of a film that TCM was in fact able to show during 31 Days of Oscar because it got a Visual Effects nomination is Dr. Cyclops.

As we saw a few months back when I reviewed The Invisible Ray, radium was considered something of a great hope in terms of its potential medical uses, despite the radiation also being extremely dangerous. The ore was often found in exotic out of the way locations which, in the case of Dr. Cyclops means the Amazon jungle of Peru. Dr. Thorkel (Albert Dekker) is working on the good use of radium together with Dr. Mendoza (Paul Fix). But, Thorkel is beginning to lose his eyesight along with going mad, the latter of which Mendoza is noticing. So Thorkel kills Mendoza, and writes to America to get research help.

The American institute sends Dr. Mary Robinson (Janice Logan) and Dr. Rupert Bulfinch (Charles Halton). They suspect there might be some sort of major discovery, so they engage Bill Stockton (Thomas Coley), a mineralogist who can't really refuse the offer because of the debts he's racked up. Getting overland to Thorkel's jungle research station is going to be difficult, and the pack animal owner Steve Baker (Victor Killian) is only going to rent the animals if he's able to go along. Rounding out the cast is Thorkel's servant Pedro (Frank Yaconelli).

The group gets to Dr. Thorkel's station, only to learn that all he wanted was for Bulfinch or Robinson to look at a couple of slides because of Thorkel's declining eyesight. This, along with other things such as bones that might be the harbinger of a new species, pique the group's curiosity, which is heightened when Bill determines this is the motherlode for some of the best pitchblende (the ore of radium and uranium) out there. And, Thorkel has learned how to harness it much more precisely than anybody before him.

Except there's the issue of how he's planning to use those radium rays. Thorkel has been experimenting on reducing the size of man in order to decrease man's environmental impact. But anybody figuring this out is going to be a danger to Thorkel's insane plans. And now this group of interlopers from America has come and seen those plans! So Thorkel locks them in the radiation chamber and shrinks them down to size, with the plan to kill them after subjecting them to suitable horrors since the group knows what's going to come and Thorkel is Bond-villianous in the way he reveals his plans. He could step on them, or let the cat kill them the way it kills mice.

Of course, the group isn't about to let any of this happen, and try to figure out a way to fight back. They being human, they really are the most dangerous game. Also, being miniature, it's a good excuse for the movie to engage in creative special effects, leading up to the climax.

Dr. Cyclops is another of those movies where they splurged on special effects, and Technicolor, to the point that the screenplay suffers. This isn't the most original plot by any means, and the cast shows that having the best actors in it wasn't that terribly important. Still, because of the effects, even a recycled plot works well enough to entertain. Only the effects that involve the players against rear-projection photography don't work so well, since the backgrounds look grainy from being so blown up. That's a minor objection. Dr. Cyclops, while not being great, succeeds at what it sets out to do.

He chews to talk

I knew I was going to have a post on a short going up today since I was planning to do that in conjunction with mentioning the Eva Marie Saint tribute. With that in mind, I pulled out my Will Rogers box set since when I watched Mr. Skitch I saw that there was a short on it. In fact, all four of the discs include one featurette. One is a standard 15-minute or so bio type piece, so no need to review that here. A second is Jane Withers remembering Rogers, which is a bit odd considering that the two of them never appeared in a movie together, at least not according to IMDb. Withers had been in several films by the time Rogers died. A third is a real short, which I'll post about some other time. Finally, there's one that the DVD case calls He Chews to Talk.

Having watched it, I'm not 100% sure of the provenance of this one. There's no opening title beyond a brief newsreel-type card of Rogers speaking on the radio. And that's about all this is, with Rogers delivering a monologue of about nine minutes starting with a take-off of ads of the day, before talking about the Depression. Now, considering some of the comments Rogers makes, this seems pretty likely to date to 1931, since he mentions Republicans delivering three bad years and then one good year at election time, with the Democrats being the other way around. Also, most of the commentary is the populist sort that you might have heard from blue-collar labor union types: there's enough wealth to go around, but also not 100% thrilled with Democrats.

As for the title, apparently Rogers wrote a series of "campaign" articles for Life magazine which got the title "He chews to run", which fits with the sort of homespun corn-pone humor you'd expect from Rogers. That and the fact that Rogers was well known for chewing gum. So it seems a bit obvious that somehere along the way this might have gotten a note of "He chews to talk" or something like that internally at Fox. However, IMDb doesn't list any Rogers short by that title and searching for it on the web only yields collections of his writings or this particular short on YouTube, which is probably the same print that appears on the DVD.

However: One of the copies on YouTube was put up by The Will Rogers Museum, calling it "Bacon, Beans, and Limousines", which doesn't seem to be an official title either, although they date it to October 1931.

TCM's Eva Marie Saint tribute

Eva Marie Saint in the scene that I think of as winning her the Oscar in On the Waterfront (Oct. 25, 8:00 PM)

Oscar-winning actress Eva Marie Saint died on October 6 at the age of 102. I mentioned when I posted about her death that I figured the TCM schedule for October was such that they probably wouldn't be able to get around to a proper tribute until November, but I was wrong. Saint didn't make a whole lot of movies, and TCM will be showing five of her best-known roles starting tomorrow afternoon:

12:00 PM Raintree County, which is really an Elizabeth Taylor movie;
3:00 PM All Fall Down, with Saint again playing more of a supporting role with a young Warren Beatty starring;
5:00 PM 36 Hours, an underrated suspense movie about Nazi Rod Taylor trying to extract information from James Garner, helped by Saint;
7:00 PM Eva Marie Saint: Live from the TCM Classic Film Festival, an interview she did with Robert Osborne at the 2013 TCM Classic Film Festival;
8:00 PM On the Waterfront, with Saint playing the woman whose brother was murdered by corrupt union thugs;
10:00 PM North By Northwest, in which Saint helps Cary Grant foil a ring of spies, with him not knowing she's actually working for the government.

Note that the TCM Film Festival interview is listed as running 59 minutes and is in a one-hour time slot. I don't know if anybody will be introducing the film, although since this a Sunday afternoon there normally is someone presenting the movies on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

Note also that the schedule as it leaves time for the normal Silent Sunday Nights and TCM Imports selections.

Wee Willie Winkie

There aren't all that many movies airing in the FXM Retro block that I haven't blogged about before, mostly because I've been blogging for closing in on 19 years. One that hasn't gotten a post yet and is on my DVR is Wee Willie Winkie. Since it's getting another airing tomorrow, October 24, at 6:00 AM, I figure that now is a good time to watch it and put up the obligatory post on it.

In frontier India in 1897, Joyce Williams (June Lang) is an American widow with young daughter Priscilla (Shirley Temple). Apparently her late husband's father is an Englishman, serving with the British Army in India, and Joyce must not have any American relatives. Otherwise there would be no reason for Joyce and Priscilla to go all the way to India. Already on the train, we see that Priscilla can be rather annoying as she asks all sorts of obnoxious questions. As the train gets to the station in Raj Pore, Priscilla witnesses the arrest of Khoda Khan (Cesar Romero), a rebel leader who has been attacking the British.

Mother and daughter get to the army base just as Grandpa, Col. Williams (C. Aubrey Smith) is disciplining Lt. Brandes (Michael Whalen), the sort of young dashing officer who would be just right for Joyce; indeed, that's going to be one of the subplots of the movie as Brandes also likes little Priscilla. Meanwhile, there are other women on base who are trying to set up their adult daughter with Brandes, although that's more comic relief and a minor subplot. Priscilla continues to be naïvely mischievous, in the sense that she should be smart enough to know not to do the things she's doing but is either too young or too stupid. For this, she gets taken under the wing of Sgt. MacDuff (Victor McLaglen), who makes her a mascot of sorts for his platoon as well as a bit of a soldier. Not that a kid of Priscilla's age is actually going to do any real soldiering. Certainly not when that kid is Shirley Temple.

One of the stupid things Priscilla does is to give Khoda a religious pendant he lost when he was getting arrested that she picked up. Later, the colonel's manservant Mohammet Dihn gives Priscilla a "prayer" message to take to Khoda, who is being held in the garrison jail where the army is stationed. This is actually a message from Khoda's fellow rebels beyond the border about how they're going to spring him from the jail. Worse, in the ensuing attack, Sgt. MacDuff gets seriously injured.

Priscilla is too young to understand everything that's going on, and as far as she knows Khoda is a decent enough fellow. She figures that if she could just talk to Khoda she could get everybody to see reason and come to a peaceful settlement. So she gets Mohammet Dihn to take her to Khoda's headquarters through the well-defended pass that's a chokepoint such that if the British try to go through, they'll get slaughtered. Khoda thinks he's got a wonderful bargaining chip in the garrison commander's daughter, but then again, he's also got Shirley Temple and you know how a Shirley Temple movie is going to end....

Shirley Temple is appealing enough in Wee Willie Winkie. Certainly, I can see how audiences in the 1930s would have loved her in a movie like this. However, I find the plot here a bit weak and taking a bit too long to get to the real action. Also, Shirley Temple is being asked to be even more naïve than you'd expect a child to be. So this one wasn't quite as good in my view as some of Shirley's other movies. But it's still worth watching.

From Beyond the Grave

The second half of tonight's lineup on TCM, after midnight, includes several horror anthology movies. One that I hadn't seen before, but was sitting on my DVR from the last time it aired, is From Beyond the Grave, which comes on overnight at 2:00 AM.

The establishing story, or what connects everything together, is an antique shop in London run by an unnamed proprietor, played by Peter Cushing. Each of the stories is started by a different person coming into the shop looking to buy an item; whether the person has a positive or negative outcome in the story depends in part upon how honest they are.

First is Edward Charlton (David Warner), who buys an old mirror for his apartment. When he has some guests over, one of them comment about the mirror looking like it could have been in an old-timey ghost story. So the group decides to host a séance, not that anybody really believes in that stuff. Of course, this time it turns out that the other side is actually real, in the sense that there's a ghost in the mirror. And it decides to possess poor Edward, telling Edward that he needs to kill people in order to satisfy the ghost with the dead people's blood. But will the ghost ever be satisfied? And won't somebody figure out that Edward is killing people?

Next up is Christopher (Ian Bannen). He hasn't got much of a life. Since getting demobbed from the military, he's wound up in a loveless marriage to Mabel (Diana Dors) with a son Stephen and a low-paying, low-status job as an office manager. One day on the way to the office, he meets Jim (Donald Pleasance), an older man who sells matches and the like. Jim is pushy enough that Christopher should see warning sirens, but instead he pilfers a military medal from the antiques shop, feeling the need to go over to Jim's apartment and visit. Meanwhile, Mabel has weird feelings that there's somebody else in the room trying to stab her or something.

Reggie (Ian Carmichael) is a businessman with a wife Susan (Nyree Dawn Porter) who cheats the proprietor out of a snuff box before heading home to Sussex. On the train to Sussex, he shares a compartment with Madame Orloff (Margaret Leighton), who claims to be a clairvoyant and claims that Reggie has some kind of being on his shoulder that's all sorts of bad juju and that's trying to escape into the real world. Once again, no reason to believe any of this crap, at least not until Susan first tells Reggie there's a sudden bad smell followed by Susan realizing someone -- or something -- is trying to kill her.

Finally, William Seaton (Ian Ogilvy) sees an antique door he likes, even if he's only going to use it to replace the door to his stationery closet. His wife Rosemary (Lesley-Anne Down) jokes about using such a door for a terribly mundane purpose, but surprise surprise, installing this door opens a portal so a world from several centuries earlier inhabited by a magician only William can see, and not every time he opens the door. At least, not until the magician decides he wants Rosemary....

From Beyond the Grave is more than competent for the genre of horror anthologies. It's not great, certainly not as good as something like Dead of Night, but it's certainly good enough to entertain. And as always with anthologies, the stories are short enough that if you don't like one, you don't have to wait all that long for the next story.

Buford Pusser

Another of the stars who died in 2025 who got a one-movie salute on that night at the end of the year when TCM runs a salute to various people who weren't quite as prominent is consistent 1970s supporting actor Joe Don Baker. The movie that TCM selected for him was one of his starring roles in Walking Tall. So I watched it before it expired from my DVR, and wrote up this post to schedule for a suitable later date.

Baker stars as Buford Pusser, a real person who, as the movie opens, is giving up his career as a pro wrestler. He'd been criss-crossing the country in a trailer with his wife Pauline (Elizabeth Hartman) and two children. Pauline had been pushing him to retire, so he's returning to his roots in Tennessee to be close to his parents (Lurene Tuttle and Noah Beery Jr.) in rural Tennessee not far from the border with Mississippi.

Buford was known enough in town that his return is news, and showing up the next day is old friend Lutie McVeigh. Lutie wants to take Buford for drinks as well as show him the "entertainment" places that have sprung up in recent years, meaning the gambling joint the Lucky Spot outside of town along with the brothel that's sprung up to service the drunks. Buford isn't exactly pleased with this, and calls out the cheating that he sees going on at the casino. This causes the propietor's henchmen to beat the crap out of Lutie and Buford, as well as give Buford cuts that require hundreds of stitches.

Buford responds by showing up at the Lucky Spot after he recovers and holding up the cashier at gunpoint, which obviously leads to a trial but one that Buford wins by ripping off his shirt and showing off his wounds. The jury acquits, which makes him a hero to some as well as an enemy of the current sheriff, Al Thurman (Gene Evans), who is on the take from all the vice house owners in the county.

Seeing that nothing is being done about the rampant immorality occurring in his county, Buford decides that you can indeed fight city hall, which he plans to do by running for sheriff. He is, of course, going up against some powerful entrenched interests. The sheriff tries to get dirt on Buford in any way possible, and when he chases Buford to catch him speeding, it's the sheriff that drives off the road, getting in a fatal car crash.

Buford gets elected sheriff, and he now has to worry about the corrupt vice owners as well as the fact that the deputies are on the take. He also hasn't worked in law enforcement, so he doesn't know any of the niceties about things like constitutional rights that people under arrest have or how to properly draw up a request for a search warrant. Buford is unfazed and continues to go after crime in his community, even though it puts him in increasing danger.

It's easy to see why Walking Tall became a cult hit when it was originally released. Rural southern whites had been at the bottom of Hollywood's pecking order since the days of films that led Variety to write the "Stix Nix Hick Pix" headline all the way back in 1935. Just like blacks had the blaxploitation movies of the 1970s, here the southerners get what can easily be called for lack of a better term a "hixploitation" film. It's campily violent and gives people the thrill of being able to get revenge in a way they wouldn't have been able to in real life. This, especially because Buford Pusser was a real person. It's also fun, if a bit slow clocking in at over two hours. Walking Tall should really have been plotted to run 90-100 minutes.

Not mentioned in the movie, since nobody could have known it at the time (at least, not the people involved in making the movie), is that the real-life Buford Pusser's life was not quite as it was portrayed here, with later investigations (long after Pusser's death) revealing something darker that I don't want to mention since it would contain major spoilers. But Walking Tall is still worth watching, just like other Hollywood biopics that might be even more inaccurate.

That Lonelyhearts column again

Back in the studio era, it wasn't uncommon for studios to remake their B movies. After all, the previous versions weren't really showing up anywhere to remind people of them, and it was a budget saver on the screenplay. Paul Muni's Hi, Nellie! was remade three times within about 15 years. The third of four versions of the movie is titled You Can't Escape Forever and aired on TCM back when George Brent was Star of the Month.

Brent plays Steve Mitchell, editor of a big-city paper whose girlfriend Laurie (Brenda Marshall) is trying to make it as a reporter. However, she has issues like fainting when she covers an execution only to discover too late that the condemned man was pardoned. For this, she gets demoted to the "advice to the lovelorn" column. Meanwhile, the condemned man was believed to be working for Greer (Eduardo Ciannelli), the local crime boss, since this was an era where all of the crime was managed by gangsters, or so it seemed if you watched the movies.

A man named Crowder shows up at the newspaper having written a manuscript by hand that he claims will blow the roof off of the Greer gang. Not long after, Crowder dies in what is an accident to everybody but Steve. So Steve publishes a headling claiming it wasn't an accident, only for the autopsy to say otherwise. So this time it's Steve who gets demoted to the lonelyhearts column.

Thankfully, there's a singles' club in town meaning there's ample work for a romance columnist. But there's something odd about this place and the weddings it performs, so Steve decides to investigate, figuring he can use this as a way to get out of the newspaper building and try to get the evidence that will prove he was right all along about Crowder's death. And, as it turns out, Crowder met his wife at the club, and wasn't the first person to get married at the club and die under mysterious circumstances.

Steve and his photographer Mac (Roscoe Karns) go to the club with Laurie following along, and she sees that the club is indeed a "respectable" front for a criminal organization, and probably laundering money to boot. Furthermore, the owner of the club, Robelink (Gene Lockhart) is the brother-in-law of Greer. Robelink, for his part, got the manuscript that Crowder wrote, but he's not planning to tell anybody where it is if he can avoid doing so.

You can probably guess how all of this is going to go, which is that Greer figures out Robelink may crack and that Steve is a threat. But this is the sort of movie that's going to have a happy ending. Crime does not pay, especially during the Production Code era.

I think now I've seen all four versions of this movie. I think my favorite is Love Is on the Air, which moves the story to radio and benefits from the presence of Ronald Reagan who was well-fit to Warner Bros.' B movies. In You Can't Escape Forever, Brent comes across as a bit of a conman and mildly unsympathetic, while Roscoe Karns is obnxiously incompetent at times. But this was B material, and released in the midst of World War II when audiences wanted escapism. You'll definitely escape here.

Canine HOMe Protection System

Another of the live-action movies that TCM ran as part of their salute to Hanna-Barbera is one that was more squarely aimed at kids than the previous movie Baxter!. This time, the movie in question is C.H.O.M.P.S..

Rascal is a dog owned by Brian Foster (Wesley Eure), who works for the home-security company run by Ralph Norton (Conrad Bain) and is dating the boss' daughter Casey (Valerie Bertinelli). The opening scene has Rascal being chased by a dog owned by neighbor Mrs. Flower (Hermione Baddeley), who doesn't have all that much to do with the plot other than her dog whistle causing a major plot point. Brian is a bit of a tinkerer, and in his garage/laboratory, he's working on an animatronic but hyper-realistic dog that could be used in building security the way a German Shepherd or Doberman might: the hope is a dog that can guard but have more strength and energy than a real dog.

The prototype, named "Chomps" for "Canine HOMe Protection System", shows potential, but also has some glitches since it's activated by numerical voice command to the point that anybody who knew about such a thing could just start calling out numbers to get the dog to stop. And who's going to remember all of the numerical commands out in the real world? Also, Brian hasn't bothered to file for a patent on his invention, something which would obviate much of the plot of the movie. The other issue is that, as I implied above, Mrs. Flower's dog whistle also causes Chomps to go haywire.

Brian thinks he's finally gotten Chomps to work, and wants to show him to Mr. Norton, who obviously (and understandably) doesn't believe that this sort of invention can actually work. But Chomps actually foils a crime where there's a TV reporter watching, leading Norton to be more interested in the idea. Norton, however, isn't the only one interested. Since Chomps shows up on a live TV news report and Norton is stupid enough to use the incident for publicity purposes without having all the IP rights to Chomps locked up, Norton's rival Gibbs (Jim Backus) also wants Chomps. And Gibbs has a plant, Ken Sharp (Larry Bishop) in Norton's business. Sharp has hired a couple of small-time incompetent crooks, Bracken (Red Buttons) and Brooks (Chuck McCann) to get Chomps.

Gibbs offters to buy out Norton, but Norton also has another much more lucrative offer to merge with a major defense contractor, pending an experiment with Chomps. Unfortunately, Norton unwittingly brings Rascal to the experiment since Chomps was designed to look like a real dog and Brian used his own dog Rascal as the model. At the same time the defense contractor trial is set to take place, Sharp has his two hired burglars trying to get the plans to Chomps while Gibbs has secretly shown up to where the trial is taking place. Can Chomps save the day? Of course he can, since this is the sort of movie that couldn't possibly have anything but a happy ending.

Frankly, C.H.O.M.P.S. is a dumb movie, but it's endearingly dumb because it's so unbelievably amateurish. The plot is paper-thin, the acting on par with the sort of sitcom that's churned out in one take, characters like the two burglars are impossibly stupid, and Chomps is repeatedly shown in slow-motion in a way that looks obviously phony and bad. I can see why it didn't get very good reviews on its release. But is has a bit of charm.

Dancer, Texas Pop. 81

TCM did a spotlight some months back on films set in Texas. One of the more recently films that I had never even heard of was Dancer, Texas Pop.81. But it was another of those movies where the synopsis sounded interesting enough, so I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it.

The movie opens with four adolescent boys sitting in the middle of the road and one of them doing a voiceover about the town of Dancer in west Texas and how Rand McNally doesn't have it on their maps apparently because it's so small. The four young men are about to graduate high school in what is Dancer's largest graduating class in years: five of them, with one girl in the graduating class. (You'd think they'd go to a larger school, but questions about things like groceries are never quite answered.)

The young man doing the narration is Keller Coleman (Breckin Meyer), who lives with his grandfather because his parents have died. So Keller and the other three boys made a pact years before, when they were maybe 10 or 11, that they would get on the first bus out of town and go to Los Angeles to try to find a more successful life for themselves, something millions of small-town people in America have done for generations. The other three young men are:

Terrell Lusk (Peter Facineli). He's the son of one of the richer families in town, as his father works in the oil industry. Mom expects Terrell to go straight into management at Dad's business and is quite insistent on it, to the point that you can see why Terrell would want to get out of town.
John Hemphill (Eddie Mills). John's father runs a ranch, so there's definitely a career waiting for John if he wants it. And he could even go off for a few years to study at the nearby ag school.
Squirrel (Ethan Embry). Squirrel is the one who really has no prospects, as he's got an alcoholic father (Keith Szarabajka) who's screwed up his life so much that he lives in a trailer that's not even level.

So as we see, all four have good reason to leave. But there's also things that could lead each of them to stay: Keller's grandfather is doted on by the town's elderly widows to the point that Grandpa can't give the various Tupperware bowls back to the right people. Terrell and John both have jobs waiting for them if they want, while Squirrel could be seen as basically abandoning his father to die if he goes off to Los Angeles, even though you couldn't really blame Squirrel for doing so. Additionally, town members put subtle pressure on the four young men to stay, to the point that some of them place bets on how many of them are going to get on the bus. All of this leads up to the point where the bus does pull in to town and... how many of them leave?

There's a lot to like about Dancer, Texas Pop. 81, certainly for anybody who grew up in a smallish place. I went to a large high school, but it was a "consolidated" school district and I grew up in one of the outlying areas that was small even if it was a lot closer to a fairly large (and giant by Dancer standards) place, so I get a lot of the vibe here. The movie, however, does have some problems, mostly relating to the fact that although this is supposed to be a town of 81, the way the peripheral characters act and the number of them implies that this is a rather larger place even it if it a small town. (Wikipedia says it was filmed in Fort Davis, Texas, a town of about 1,000 people.) The relationships between the four young men also seem more Hollywood than small town. But overall, if you want a more loving look at small towns than you normally get from Hollywood, I can certainly recommend Dancer, Texas Pop. 81.

Briefs for October 18-19, 2026

As I've intimated on several occasions, I live not all that far from Woodstock, NY, where the infamous concert was conceived, but rather farther from where the concert was held, which is in Bethel down in Sullivan County probably a good 90 minutes from here if not more. Woodstock being an arty tourist trap, I'm sorry to say, they have an annual film festival that was held this week. Forgive me for not mentioning this earlier, not that I was planning on attending anyway. Just for kicks I looked at the prices of the festival tickets a few weeks back, which were way out of my league. And I can only imagine how much virtue signaling there's been. Somewhat surprisingly, the local paper's website hasn't put up any articles about the festival since the opening festivities.

YouTube TV's cloud DVR saves multiple airings of a program if you've got it set to "record", so if you watch something like Noir Alley you'll see both editions of it when you click the movie title. Sometimes when a movie is run weeks or months apart, the two will have different running times. I recently watched one such film where one of the airings was an hour longer than the other. It turns out that TCM was re-running Some of the Best to fill out the longer time slot. I actually watched a bit of it again, curious to see what movies MGM picked for which year since, as presenter Lionel Barrymore informs us, they only have time to highlight one movie from each of MGM's first 25 years. What I found interesting this time is how MGM fudged the years. James Stewart won the Best Actor for 1940 for The Philadelphia Story, which presumably got a 1940 release in Hollywood to be Oscar-eligible. IMDb says it got a December 1940 release in several cities, but the main page for the movie lists a January 1941 release, which I'd guess was broader national release, not that movies in those days were released in large nationwide premieres the way they've been since Jaws really ramped up the idea of the summer blockbuster. Similarly, Dinner at Eight only got a broader US release in January 1934 even though IMDb says the Hollywood premiere was in August 1933.

Tonight's TCM Imports is a pair of Carl Theodor Dreyer movies that I think show up often enough but for some reason I've never actually recorded and watched. The first one is Day of Wrath (2:00 AM) from 1943, which is of course smack dab in the middle of World War II, something that always makes me wonder how such a film could be made considering Denmark was occupied by the Nazis at the time he made it.

So This Is Love

I've commented before on how there seemed to be a vogue of musical biopics in the decade or so after World War II. One that I hadn't seen before it showed up on TCM is So This Is Love. Unsurprisingly, not having seen it, I recorded it so that I could do my usual thing here of watching it and then writing up a post on it.

So This Is Love tells the story -- or the first half of the story -- of Grace Moore (Kathryn Grayson). Moore was a multitalented singer who transitioned into becoming a film and radio star before her untimely death in a plane crash in 1947, half a dozen years before this movie was made. But as the movie opens, Moore is backstage at the Metropolitan Opera, about to make her debut there in 1928. Grace talks about how this was always her dream, so as you might guess, we get another highly original flashback here....

The flashback is to about 1906, when Grace would have been eight years old, living in the small town of Jellico, TN with her parents (Walter Abel and Ann Doran). She's a precocious and somwhat mischievous girl, as we see her having gotten atop a circus elephant of her own initiative to advertise the circus coming through town! Her "trouble" raising gets to be too much, and Mom gets Grace enrolled at a Washington DC finishing school.

There, Grace and the other students meet singer Mary Garden, and Grace is forward enough to get an invitation to do a guest spot in a year's time. But Dad finds out about the singing, and is not pleased about it, coming up to Washington to get Grace. Grace learns what her dad is planning, and runs away to New York to pursue her musical dreams. But New York is a big, tough place, especially for someone who hasn't worked professionally in any of the entertainment fields before, and she almost fails.

She does finally get a job, with the help of promoter boyfriend Buddy Nash (Merv Griffin). But just as she's about to get an audition for a better role, she develops a severe case of inflamed vocal cords. the cure for this is complete rest without talking. Buddy, meanwhile, has been putting pressure on Grace to marry him, but with the expectation that she more or less give up her career to have children. So after the three months of enforced silence at a cabin in Maine, Grace learns that Buddy has gotten married to another woman.

Grace returns to New York and is able to get roles in musical comedies, but still harbors the dream of appearing in serious opera. As we know from the beginning of the movie, as well from Moore's real life, it's a dream that comes true. It all happens fairly quickly to wrap the movie up too.

So This Is Love is the sort of movie that Hollywood liked to make back in the Studio Era, but the sort of film that I can't imagine a studio putting money into today. The movie is competently made, although it's clearly a vehicle for Kathryn Grayson and not a "serious" biopic. Ending the night of Moore's met premiere isn't the best choice, although I read the suggestion that this might have something to do with the movie being made at Warner Bros. and Moore's Hollywood career not being at Warner Bros. (In that regard, it would be like The Will Rogers Story overlooking Rogers' sound era movie career with it having been at Fox.) Grayson does well, but there's nothing terribly original here and Grayson's vocal stylings are definitely an acquired taste.

Maynila, sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag

Another of the foreign films that was just about to expire from my Youtube library that I had to make an express point of watching before it expired is Manila in the Claws of Light. (Youtube's library calls it Manila in the Claws of Neon, but every other source uses "light" instead of "neon".) As always, having watched it, now I can write up the obligatory post on the film.

Julio Madiaga (Rafael Roco, Jr.) is a laborer in Manila, in a time when the Philippines was poor enough that the construction laborers were the sort of men who migrated from the even poorer outlying islands to the big cities. Julio had been a fisherman living with his siblings after the death of their parents, something we see a bit of in flashbacks. But the flashbacks reveal the much bigger reason that Julio left for Manila.

Back on his home island, Julio had a girlfriend Ligaya (Hilda Koronel), whose family seems to be poor but not quite as poor as Julio's family. They also don't think a fisherman is a good choice of boyfriend for Ligaya. So when Mrs. Cruz shows up from Manila looking for people to work in the factories of Manila, Ligaya's mother signes her up. It'll be a chance for Ligaya to make a better living, possibly send some remittances home, and complete her education. Except that this isn't why Cruz came to a small village like this. Ligaya sent a couple of letters home, but then everything stopped.

So Julio went to Manila to look for Ligaya. Of course, having no idea where Ligaya is, Julio does the next best thing, which is to find where Ligaya sent the letter from and look for Mrs. Cruz is. Meanwhile, Julio is also learning that life as a construction worker isn't all that it's cracked up to be, as the contractors building the buildings are notoriously scammy and not paying the workers what they're really worth. Presumably there's such a glut of people coming in from the outlying regions that it's a buyers' market for labor.

Julio eventually spots Mrs. Cruz, and ultimately learns that Mrs. Cruz works for what we might call human traffickers, except that it's all domestic here and not crossing international borders. The young women are brought to Manila to brothels and service rich men, usually multiple men in one night. Ligaya's story is, however, a bit atypical in that she has a different sort of sadness from the other women. She was noticed by Ah Tek, a Filipino of Chinese descent who took a liking to Ligaya and protected Ligaya from the worst predations of the traffickers. There's a quid pro quo, of course, which is that Ligaya is supposed to marry him and live with him. But, Ah Tek is extremely possessive of Ligaya, and doesn't let her leave the house, which is why it's a bit of a shock when Julio is able to find Ligaya in a church. She wants to escape, but there's a catch, which is that Ah Tek knocked her up and keeps the baby with a nanny so that Ligaya could only escape without her baby.

Manila in the Claws of Light isn't a bad movie, although I have to say that it's overlong. It's a story that could have been told in 90 minutes but runs over two hours. It's also the sort of movie that Hollywood could never have made, in part because even the socially conscious Warner Bros. of the 1930s would have found it too depressing. That, and as poor as America was during the Depression, it was never this poor. I don't know if I'll be watching Manila in the Claws of Light again, but I'm glad I watched it once.

James Bond mines for coal

Another of the movies that was just about to expire from my DVR that I was glad to see show up on TCM was The Molly Maguires. I think I'd come across it on one of the FAST channels that's part of Pluto's set of channels, the movie having been made at Paramount and Pluto being owned by Paramount. I'd wanted to watch it so when it wound up on the TCM schedule I made a point to put it on the DVR.

It's Pennsylvania in 1876, in one of those coal-mining towns that nobody ever really gets out of, or didn't in those days, although it's the sort of town that immigrants came to because the work was less bad than what they faced in their home countries. In this case, the immigrants are Irish, and we see before the opening credits just how hard the mining work is. They have to set charges to open up new tunnels to dig out more coal, although in this case they're actually setting the charges to blow up the mine as a part of protest as to how brutal their conditions are.

Into all of this comes James MacParlan (Richard Harris). Nobody knows him, and he walks into a bar talking to the miners asking about how to get a job. They don't trust him, and for good reason, when they see his hands and realize he's the sort of person who hasn't done a day of manual labor in his life, because look at his hands. He gets in a bar fight, observed by Black Jack Kehoe (Sean Connery), and gets arrested for it. The arrest is a ruse, however, as we learn MacParlan's real reason for being here. MacParlan is working for the Pinkerton detective agency, and they want to learn who's responsible for the sabotage. They've heard of an organization called the Ancient Order of Hibernians and their support for the Molly Maguires who they think are behind the sabotage. MacParlan's job is to get work at the coal mine and figure out who's leading the Molly Maguires to commit all this sabotage.

Now, any number of the miners are suspicious of him, to the point that he finds it hard to get a place to stay, under the fake name McKenna. Eventually, a poor spinster living with her father, Mary Raines (Samantha Eggar), takes him in. As you might guess, the two begin to fall in love, although things are going to be difficult because of his job being to take down the Molly Maguires and not being able to be honest about why he's in town.

Still, Kehoe and the other miners suspect him, even after he claims he fled here after murdering a man (a lie, of course, but he has to have some back story). Still, there's the old line about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer, so they bring him into the fold if only to be able to catch him out at working for the bosses. There's also the sabotage from the miners, as well as the revenge from those members of the police who are violent enough that simply taking the guilty and imprisoning them isn't enough. Will MacParlan be able to catch out the Molly Maguires before they discover he's a spy?

The Molly Maguires is the sort of movie that I don't think would have been able to be made under the Production Code, or at least would have had to be severely sanitized. A movie like Black Fury comes to mind: well-made, but a bit tame and studio-bound. The Molly McGuires has the benefit of location shooting, along with excellent performances from Connery and Harris.

I'm very glad I got around to watching The Molly Maguires, and am not sure why it isn't as well known at it should be considering the presence of Connery and Harris.

Anastasia

I've been mentioning a couple of times how FXM runs most of the movies it runs multiple times, although currently it feels as if there are a few more movies in the rotation than normal. One movie that only seems to have gotten one ainig that that I haven't seen on the schedule in months is Anastasia.

Russian Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917 after the first of the 1917 revolutions in Russia, but stayed in the country with his family. After the Communist October Revolution, the Tsar and his family were placed under house arrest in western Siberia, and ultimately murdered in the summer of 1918. However, the Communists initally only announced the death of Nicholas.

In 1928 in Paris, it was well known among the Russian émigré community that there had been at least one woman claiming to be Anastasia, the youngest of Nicholas' children, who had shown up in various parts of Europe. General Bunin (Yul Brynner) leads a group of émigrés who is trying to get at the money that Nicholas had deposited in a bank in the west, since the western countries weren't about to hand this money over to the Soviets. But to do it, he's going to need to find somebody descended from Nicholas to get the trustees to release the funds, and time is running out.

Enter Anna Anderson (Ingrid Bergman), who has previously been in Berlin and Bucharest claiming to be Anastasia but having spent time in various institutions with a substantial case of amnesia. Now, in this version of the story, Bunin considers Anna a fraud, and we're in on that knowledge. (DNA evidence from after the fall of the Soviet Union confirms Anastasia did not survive the killings.) In the 1920s, there were a lot of skeptics, but no way to confirm that Anna was in fact not Anastasia beyond intuition. So Bunin plans to train Anna to pass herself off better as Anastasia, in the hopes that this time people might actually believe that she is in fact Anastasia.

Bunin can't get the proper people in Paris to believe Anna's story, so the only other option is the long shot of going to Copenhagen, where the Dowager Empress Maria (Helen Hayes), mother of Nicholas and grandmother of Anastasia, lives after having to been able to escape Russia before the Bolsheviks took over. She understandbly doesn't believe Anna's story at all. But a member of her retinue, Prince Paul (Ivan Desny), either does believe it or is going along with it because he has a romantic interest in Anna. Meanwhile, there's also some suggestion that perhaps Anna and Bunin are also developing a romantic relationship. If Anna isn't Anastasia, perhaps she can live happily ever after some other way.

Ingrid Bergman won the Oscar for Anastasia, but after having watched the movie again (I first saw it ages ago, probably before I started this blog since a search of the blog claims I haven't done a post on it), I have to admit that I'm a bit surprised by the Oscar win here. I suppose you can argue that having to play an amnesiac pretending to be royalty is a demanding role, but it doesn't seem all that great a role to me. Then again, the other nominees aren't a particularly strong lineup. (Looking at the other nominees, I think I would have voted for Deborah Kerr in The King and I.) I'm also not certain what the Academy boters would have thought of Bergman at this point. She had been forced to leave Hollywood after her marriage to Roberto Rossellini, and this was her first role back in Hollywood. I wonder if perhaps they had more sympathy than objectivity.

Anastasia is certainly competently made, and a good example of the studio system making an opulent movie to compete with television. But I can't help but think it could have been better.

Michael York and Germany don't mix

Another of the movies that I forgot to record off of TCM and had to watch on the Watch TCM app before it expired was Zeppelin.

The year is 1915, which means that the UK and Germany are at war during the Great War. As you may recall, back in that war the Germans hoped that their relatively new airships would be able to bomb London from the air, since planes were not advanced enough to drop bombs until the next war. The British are well aware of what the Germans are doing, setting up the sort of searchlights that you've seen in a hundred other movies about the two world wars.

Stationed in London is British army lieutenant Geoffrey Richter-Douglas (Michael York), who, as you might be able to discern from the name, is of mixed heritage, both Scottish and German. Now, for various reasons, including the fact that his girlfriend is a spy, both the Germans and the English have reason to believe that Geoffrey might be useful to their side in intelligence gathering. With that in mind, Geoffrey's commanding officer suggest that he fake a defection back to Germany.

The reason for this is that the British have reason to believe the Germans are working on a more powerful zeppelin than what they've been trying to deply up to this point. Geoffrey's mission would be to get the information on the new Zeppelin, code named LZ36. He flees to Germany, even getting himself shot in the process, which also helps in that the Germans might be more likely to believe that he's sincere about his defection should anyone question him.

And as you might guess, people are going to question him. Working on the LZ36 is Prof. Altschul (Marius Goring), who has a much younger trophy wife named Erika (Elke Sommer), although she's no dummy herself and is actually working on the zeppelin, not just married to the professor. Erika thinks Geoffrey might be a spy. Some in German intelligence think so, too, but need him in part for his knowledge of the Scottish coastline which is going to be necessary for their mission. Besides, if they take him aboard the LZ36, they can keep their new friend close and enemies closer, as the phrase go.

As for that mission involving knowledge of the lay of the land in Scotland, it's a fairly audacious mission. One is to bring paratroopers armed with mustard gas over to Scotland; the other is a morale-sapping mission to invade the castle where a whole bunch of historical documents have been moved to to get them out of London where the documents would be in greater danger of being destroyed. Crazy, I know, but some of these war movies have even dafter missions.

Zeppelin isn't exactly great, but it's definitely modestly entertaining. It's definitely worth watching if it shows up again, but I'm not certain I'd pay the Warner Archive prices for it.

The Thin Man Goes Home

Myrna Loy is the Star of the Month on TCM for October, presumably because of her well-known association with the horror genre that's appropriate for Halloween. Or maybe not. Anyhow, six of her movies were part of the Thin Man series with Willam Powell, and unsurprisingly TCM are showing all six of them in a row, tonight in prime time. The fifth movie in the series, The Thin Man Goes Home, comes up overnight at 3:30 AM.

Nick Charles (William Powell again) grew up in a typical-for-Hollywood small town called Sycamore Springs, where his father Bertram (Harry Davenport) is a prominent research doctor hoping to get the money to build a new hospital with more laboratory space for him. You'd think Dr. Bertram would be old enough to retire, but he still works and his wife (Lucile Watson) is alive, the two of them living with maid Hilda who seems obnoxiously nervous all the time.

Nick and Nora (Myrna Loy, again) are returning with Asta, but not with their son who was conceived at the end of the second or third movie, the excuse being that the son is in kindergarten and Nick and Nora don't want to disturb that. Just running off and leaving him with the hired help, is, however, perfectly OK apparently. Nick has father issues, or perhaps it's Dad who has Nick issues, as Dad isn't too happy about Nick's drinking and being a police detective. But in one of this film's running jokes, Nick has given up drinking for the duration, since the film was made in 1944 at the height of World War II.

And with the war on, it's unsurprising that the murder that Nick winds up investigating is going to involve the war effort, although that's not totally revealed until the end of the film. The first night Nick and Nora are in Sycamore Springs, a man shows up at the house and wants to see Nick, only to get shot for his troubles. Obviously not by Nick, although that might make for a more interesting movie. The man in question is Peter Berton, a young but not very talented artist. In fact, Nora buys one of Berton's paintings not knowing it's by the guy who got shot in Dr. Charles' living room.

As you might guess, there are several suspects. Berton was seeing a young woman, Laura Ronson (Gloria DeHaven) although Laura's father Sam (Minor Watson) doesn't exactly like Peter as a suitable romantic match for Laura. Meanwhile, when Nick goes to the auto camp where Peter is staying to investigate Peter's death, he gets hit over the head by Crazy Mary (Anne Revere). He doesn't seem to suffer much of a concussion, however. Then there's Crump (Donald Meek), the art store owner who deals Berton's paintings, as well as the Draques, who had purchased one of Berton's paintings. There's a fairly convoluted mystery that Nick solves, bringing together all of the suspects for the final reveal that this time is a bit self-referential as Nora explains to the local police how Nick brings everyone together and how these reveals generally go.

I found The Thin Man Goes Home a rather weak entry in the series. Part of it is that the murder doesn't happen until a third of the way into the movie, and it seems unlikely that anybody would be able to put all the pieces together to solve this one. The humor isn't as funny as you might expect from a Thin Man movie, with the portion before Nick and Nora arrive in Sycamore Springs as well as every scene involving Hilda being particular weak points.

Still, the movie was a success because fans were so happy to see Nick and Nora Charles back together, and it is still William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Another movie with 1960s views of Italy

Back in the 1960s, international travel was nowhere near as easy as it is today, so one of the drawing cards of certain Hollywood movies was to film in "exotic" locations in Europe that the viewers in America would enjoy seeing, especially if people could look glamorous in such locations. The movies are of varying quality, with an example of one of the lesser movies being Three Bites of the Apple.

Chelsey Tours is one of those British companies that ran guided bus tours of Europe, making it easier for people to see a checklist of the important sites for a modest amount of money. Not that I'd want to be stuck with such touriss for a week or more. Working for the company as one of their guides is Stanley Thrumm (David McCallum). As the movie opens, the tour bus is arriving in France, on its way to Italy. They get stuck in a small town in Italy when Mrs. Tomlinson (Avril Angers) gets sick and her husband (Harvey Korman) buys her some medicine. So they have to stay in a small town for a few days longer than expected.

This gives Stanley the opportunity to walk into a building that happens to be a casino. Due to a comedy of errors a chip gets put on a number and, wouldn't you know it, that's the number that hits. Stanley feels that, being honest, he didn't intend to make the bet, so he's OK letting it ride in the hopes that it will lose and he'll be even. Instead, the number hits two more times, leaving Stanley with gambling winnings just shy of £12,000, which was a huge sum for the mid-1960s. At the casino, Stanely meets a glamorous young fellow gambler, Carla (Sylva Koscina, obviously being groomed for American stardom that never came.

Stanley likes Carla, although that's going to be complicated by the fact that another of the tourists, Miss Sparrow (Tammy Grimes), is interested in Stanley to an extent that would really be unprofessional for Stanley to get involved with. More pressing is the thought that it's going to be tough to get those gambling winnings out of Italy because of capital controls and the thought that the money might be taxed to a substantial extent. Stanley comes up with a plan that perhaps Carla can help him get the cash out of Italy.

Carla starts thinking about a way to get the money for herself. She's got an ex-husband, Remo (Domenico Modugno), who might be able to help, although he's also going to get in on the deal for his own interests and not so much Carla's. Stanley seems to be oblivious to all this as he brings Carla on the tour. Miss Sparrow gets jealous of Carla and threatens to bollix everything as the tour goes through various scenic spots in Italy and into Switzerland.

The plot of Three Bites of the Apple doesn't really work, and it's remarkable that a guy like Stanley could seem so stupid. The movie also tries to inject comedy into the proceedings, which also doesn't really work. I couldn't help but wonder whether the studio and second-tier director cared more about showing scenery than moving the plot along and making the story work.

Harry and Walter Go to New York

One of the movies that TCM ran on Diane Keaton's day in Summer Under the Stars was Harry and Walter Go to New York. As is my wont, a made a point to watch it since I had never seen it before, which would give me the opportunity to put up a post on it.

The movie opens up in Sudbury, MA, in 1892. Harry Digby (James Caan) and Walter Hill (Elliott Gould) are a vaudeville double act doing a musical number, although they also do other stuff like a phony clairvoyant bit. In between the two acts, the action shifts to New York. Adam Worth (Michael Caine) is a gentleman thief who likes to rob banks, keep the cash, and then sell back the bonds. Indeed, he's about to sell the bonds back that he robbed from a bank in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, the bank president brought some police with a Massachusetts bench warrant.

As for Harry and Walter, their clairvoyant act is an excuse to pilfer cash out of the paying customers' wallets. Multiple men figure out that they've been robbed, and they too bring in the police. So as you can guess, Harry and Walter also get sent to prison, and it's the same prison where Adam is sent. Why else would the characters be introduced in this way? Anyhow, Adam has the sort of pull that Noël Coward's character in The Italian Job does, and is able to get the plans to a bank in Lowell, MA, that he's planning to rob just to show that any bank can be robbed.

This gives Harry and Walter an idea. When the reformer Lissa Chestnut (Diane Keaton) shows up with a newspaper photographer, Harry and Walter plan to get a picture of the plans, so that they can rob the bank themselves. Not that they know anything about how to carry out a bank robbery. And not that Adam is going to be happy with them if he finds out, which he is because in their attempts to get the photo they burn the plans. But they're able to escape prison with the help of some nitroglycerin, while Adam gets pardoned and goes back to New York. Unfortunately Harry and Walter have to go to New York themselves to get the picture they took of those plans, meaning they run into Adam again who is really pissed.

Eventually everybody gets to Lowell for the climactic bank robbery. The bank is next to a theater, and Harry and Walter plan to blow the door off the vault during the big musical number near the end of the show so that nobody will hear the explosives. Of course, the plans don't quite go off as planned, forcing Harry and Watler to take more drastic action while both Adam and the bank president Crisp (Charles Durning) are on their tails.

With a cast like this and a wacky heist plot, you'd think you're in for a fun little caper movie. Unfortunately, the movie totally fails. Caan and Gould are both irritating in their comic mugging, and the plot is full of incongruencies, with no good reason for Harry and Walter to wind up in the same cell as Adam as one example. It also goes on much too long, at 111 minutes.