Six years before the Dixie Dancekings

Tomorrow's (August 27) star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Ossie Davis, who was generally more of a supporting player as well as the husband of actress Ruby Dee. One of the movies that I hadn't seen before is Sam Whiskey. But since it's available to stream from Pluto TV, I decided to watch that (granted, with commercials) in order to be able to do a post here for the TCM showing tomorrow at 2:00 PM.

Once again, it's not Davis who is the star here, although he has a fairly large role playing one of the second bananas to the star. The star here his Burt Reynolds, playing Sam Whiskey. Some time not overly long after the Civil War (the movie plays fast and loose with time and geography) Sam rides into a small town that's been around long enough to have fences and a full range of services. He walks into a bar where he runs into the local blacksmith Jed Hooker (that's Ossie Davis) and getting into a fight with Hooker. Sam is really there to meet a woman, however, Laura Breckenridge (Angie Dickinson).

Laura has a job for Sam. Laura is a widow, but the Breckenridges have a positive reputation. What the people don't know, however, is that her late husband did something that runs the risk of sullying that family name. To wit, he stole a whole bunch of gold bars from the US Mint in Denver, replacing them with gold-plated lead bars. Now, you'd think that Laura might be happy with those gold bars. But she never got them, as the riverboat her husband was on sank in the Platte River, with the bars still aboard. Worse, an inspector from the Treasury Department is supposed to visit the Denver mint soon, whereupon he'll find out about the heist and destroy the Breckenridge name. So Laura wants Sam to find the gold bars, but instead of bringing them to her, put them back in the mint in Denver!

As with any good heist movie, Sam sets out to look for help to carry out the heist-in-reverse. As you might have guessed, Jed Hooker is going to be one of his partners. But he's got a third for the scheme, an inventor named O.W. Bandy (Clint Walker) who can fashion all sorts of devices to help them get the gold bars and then put them back where they belong.

There are several catches, of course. Even before you try to figure out how to get the gold into the vault, there's the issue of getting it off the bottom of the river. The three men are also being followed by another gang of crooks, a gang of whom Laura was aware but never informed poor Sam. They, unsurprisingly, want the gold, but have no intention of putting it back in the vault. And they're willing to kill to get it.

However, Sam and his two friends do get the gold bars out of the boat and then to Denver. But how are they going to get it back into the mint? And surely, even though there's no longer a pesky Production Code to deal with, something's bound to go wrong, isn't it?

As I was watching Sam Whiskey, I couldn't help but find myself thinking of another Burt Reynolds movie, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings. Now, I happened to like that later movie, even though I realize it's not a particularly great movie. The reason for liking it comes down to Burt Reynolds' easygoing charm. The same holds true for Sam Whiskey. It's full of plot holes that you'll spot if you pay too close attention. But Reynolds again shows what a charming little rascal he can be, elevating not terribly good or original material into a film that entertains. Just don't think too hard about it.

Scenery vs. Story

Tomorrow (July 18) on TCM is a morning and afternoon of the movies of Constance Ford. One of the movies airing happens to be on my DVR from a recent showing, so I watched that movie: Rome Adventure, which will be on at 4:30 PM.

Ford is in a supporting role, as the real star is a woman who gets an "Introducing" credit, a young Suzanne Pleshette. She plays Prudence Bell, who at the start of the movie is an assistant librarian at a conservative women's college in New England. So conservative, in fact, that they ban books like Lovers Must Learn, which is a bit of an in-joke since that's the book on which the movie is based. Prudence has suggested to one of the students that the student read it, and this ticks off the faculty council enough that they're going to fire her. Prudence, however, knowing that, quits before they can fire her.

Prudence's plan is to go off to Italy to learn about love, which seems a bit nuts because who knows where she's getting her money from, and it's not as if she's got a place to live once she gets to Rome. Well, I suppose she's getting her money from her wealthy parents. At the pier, the Bell parents run into a Mrs. Stilwell, whom they met at a charity function and whose son is also heading off to Rome to study the ancient Etruscans. The younger Albert Stilwell (Hampton Fancher; for some reason I was thinking this was Chad Everett whose name appears down the credits) is actually standing right next to Prudence on the boat, so Mrs. Bell tries to hook the two young Americans up. However, Prudence misreads the signals and turns to the passenger on the other side of her, an Italian named Roberto Orlandi (Rossano Brazzi).

Both of these men are decent people, but since neither of them are at the top of the credits, we can guess that they're not going to wind up with Prudence in the final reel. But Roberto is so good that he directs the two Americans to the villa where he rents a room from a contessa, and both of them take him up on the offer to take rooms. (How many bathrooms did those old villas have?) Among the younger set of Americans living in the villa is Don Porter (Troy Donahue), who is finishing up his graduate degree in Rome. We first meet him as he's leaving the villa in a huff, having learned that his girlfriend Lyda (Angie Dickinson) is dumping him to spend time in Switzerland.

Now, Troy Donahue is top-billed, with Angie Dickinson second, but because of Pleshette's "introducing" credit and the fact that she's clearly the lead here, you know who is going to wind up with whom. Don falls for Prudence, and the feeling is mutual, and he starts showing her around Italy, even though by this time Prudence has gotten a job at the American bookstore run by Daisy Bronson (that's Constance Ford). How Prudence can just take the time to go traipsing around Italy and blow off her job is another unanswered question.

But Rome Adventure is one of those movies where you don't really care about the plot. It was released in 1962, at a time when travel to Europe still wasn't such a common thing, so movies like this set in "exotic" locations in lovely color were still a bit of a big deal in allowing American moviegoers to see these places as glamorous. I think I said in my post about Three Coins in the Fountain that somebody must have seen Roman Holiday and thought that what was needed was Technicolor and widescreen. It's a thought that's not wrong, but a movie still needs a good plot, or else you just have a Traveltalks short. Rome Adventure, I'm sorry to say, doesn't have that plot.

So watch Rome Adventure for a look at Italy as Americans might have wanted to see it back in the early 1960s. Just don't expect a good story.

The Art of Love

Norman Jewison died back in January. I knew that TCM would likely wait until after 31 Days of Oscar to do a programming tribute to him; looking ahead to the March schedule I see that there is one planned for some time after 31 Days of Oscar. But I'll post on that closer to the day of the actual tribute. I had a movie on my DVR that was directed by Jewison and is unsurprisingly not part of the programming tribute, so I've decided not to delay my post on it to coincide with the tribute. That movie is The Art of Love.

After an animated opening credits sequence that looks like it's imitating the Pink Panther style in large part because it was made by the same people (DePatie-Freleng), we cut to a shot of Dick Van Dyke punching his fist through a bunch of art canvases. It's more or less OK, however: Van Dyke is playng Paul Sloan, a starving artist living in a garret apartment in Paris, together with his friend, equally struggling write Casey Barnett (James Garner). Paul has decided to give up the dream of becoming an artist and plans to move back to America to marry his fiancée Laurie. Casey is distressed by this because the two of them have been living off allowances sent by Laurie's wealthy father. If Paul goes back to the US, so do the allowances.

Casey tries to sell some of Paul's canvases, and comes up with an idea. He's trying to write a book based on the American owner of a dive nightclub, Madame Coco (Ethel Merman) and the young women who make up the floor show there. Madame Coco is struggling too, so Casey comes up with the idea that she should buy a couple of the paintings in order that Paul will have enough money to stay in Paris, at which point Casey will too, and can complete the book that will be a big advertising boost to Madame Coco.

Paul, meanwhile, has gone to his art dealer, Zorgus (Roger C. Carmel). In a conversation, Zorgus mentions that a lot of artists are bums, but that bums have a way of becoming famous after death and their paintings suddenly becoming worth a lot more even though they're no better artistically than before the artist's death. With that in mind, Paul mentions it to Casey, and they joke about suicide, with Casey beginning to write a phony manifesto on one of the bridges over the Seine.

But Paul sees a car on the bridge with the headlights still on and the doors open. A woman is threatening to jump off the bridge! Paul doesn't think about his own life any more and decides he's going to try to save her. She falls in the river while he falls on top of one of the barges carrying cargo down the Seine. Thankfully, he's able to save the woman, a young girl named Nikki (Elke Sommer) who had been living with an uncle in Strasbourg but tried to make it in Paris. Not having done so, she decided to try to kill herself instead of going back to Strasbourg. The next day, after the trip has traveled some distance away from Paris, Paul convinces her to get on a bus for Strasbourg.

But at the bus stop, Paul sees a newspaper that has announced the suicide of an American in Paris. As you can guess, that American was one Paul Sloan. Paul of course knows he's not dead, but since he doesn't have any ID with him he wouldn't be able to prove it to the authorities. Or he just doesn't think about that, this being a comedy. Instead, he decides to make his way back to Paris. There, he finds that with his suicide having been publicized in the media, his paintings are selling like hotcakes. Casey concocts a nutty plan to keep Paul in hiding, making new paintings, until showing up at an art show claiming amnesia.

Complicating all of this is that Laurie has decided she's going to come to Paris, although she doesn't know about Paul's supposed suicide or any of the stuff that's followed from there. (She not being the wife, the embassy wouldn't inform her, I guess.) Things fairly quickly spiral out of control from there, as you wonder how the writers are going to extricate themselves from all of this and come up with an ending that satisfies the still-in-place Production Code along with giving viewers the requisite happy ending.

The Art of Love was part of an evening of Dick Van Dyke movies on TCM, presented by Dave Karger. In his outro after the movie, he mentioned that it was a flop. It's really not hard to see why. The movie is an absolute mess. It's not nearly as funny as it would like to think it is, and it seems like there are so many absurd plot holes surrounding Paul's "death" not being found out. It also doesn't help that the Casey character becomes increasingly mean, and taking big part in one of those "comedies of lies" that I tend not to like.

I can see why the people involved with The Art of Love wanted to make it, but can also see where it fails. But as always, judge for yourself.

Angie Sinned

Today's star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Woody Strode, a supporting actor in a bunch of interesting movies in the late 1950s and 1960s. I had one of those roles on my DVR, so when I saw that it would show up in Summer Under the Stars, I decided I'd watch it so I could do a post on it today. That movie is The Sins of Rachel Cade, which concludes Strode's day at 3:30 AM (so, the early hours of August 30).

Once again, Strode is not the star, and he's certainly not playing the role of Rachel Cade. That honor goes to Angie Dickinson. As the movie opens, Rachel is on a train in the Belgian Congo in 1939. Now, if you remember your history, you'll recall two things. One is that up in Europe, the Nazis are about to invade Poland, kicking off the European theater of World War II, with the conquest of Belgium not far behind. The other is that Belgium had a reputation for being even worse to the locals than other colonial powers were in Africa, but surprisingly that bit is almost entirely overlooked.

Rachel gets off in the backwater town of Dibale. She's a missionary nurse, and a Protestant American one at that, which is equally surprising since Belgium was a largely Catholic country and I've have thought the Belgians would only allow Catholic missionaries. Running the local district, or at least the town, is Col. Derode (Peter Finch), who isn't very religious and certainly doesn't think having a woman at the mission is a good idea. He knows what the locals think of the missionaries.

Rachel is about to find that out as she makes her way to the mission to meet her nominal boss, Dr. Bikel (Douglas Spencer). Bikel desperately wants the supply of drugs that was sent along with her, in part because it includes his heart medicine. But that's not going to be necessary much longer, since Dr. Bikel drops dead mere moments after he first meets Rachel. I guess Angie Dickinson's beauty was too much for the old man's heart to take. Rachel and any westerner understands that Bikel died of a heart attack.

The locals, however, would beg to differ. The locals in this part of the interior believe in a religion that has a god up at the top of a sacred mountain which Dr. Bikel tried to climb, a big no-no. As such, the local chieftain, Kalanumu (Juano Hernandez), put a curse on Bikel that seems to have come true with his death. Rachel, meanwhile, tries to go on practicing western medicine, which brings the ire of both Kalanumu and medicine man Muwango (Woody Strode in a horrendous wig at least part of the time).

What Rachel really needs is another doctor to help run the mission clinic. But with a war on, fat chance of that happening. At least, not until a miracle literally falls from out of the sky. An RAF plane crashes, and on that plane was badly injured survivor Paul Wilton (Roger Moore). Paul happens to be a doctor, and, quite surprisingly, an American (pay no attention to Moore's intermittent attempts at an American accent) who's hoping to become an orthopedic surgeon in Boston after the war. He can do basic doctor stuff while he's recovering! As he recovers, he begins to recognize his biological needs, and Rachel is the only white woman around for hundreds of miles.

You can probably guess how soapy it's going to get from here. Rachel wants to stay in the Congo even though she winds up pregnant and Paul is going to be called back to fight with the RAF, or maybe the Americans if the movie ever gets to December 1941. Derode serves as a sort of intermediary, trying to solve everybody else's problems even though he's got his own problems with that Nazi threat always on the horizon.

One of the reviews I read of The Sins of Rachel Cade suggested that the main storyline could have been set pretty much anywhere, and it would be easy to see it as a sort of early precursor to the TV show Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. The movie is a slow, plodding mess, and one where it would also be easy to see modern-day movie historians commenting very negatively on the portrayal of Africans, who seem to fit every stereotype westerners had in those days about the continent.

It further doesn't help that Roger Moore is badly miscast here, and doesn't even show up until halfway through the movie. Dickinson and Finch do the best they can to try to save the movie, but there's not much they can do.