Phaedra

Another of the movies that I recorded some time back but never got around to watching until recently was one that Anthony Perkins made when he was over in Europe: Phaedra. Now that I've seen it, I can write up the review and post it for all of you here.

We don't actually see Perkins, who plays a young man named Alexis, for 20 minutes or so into the movie. Instead, we see his father, Thanos (Raf Vallone). Thanos is a shipping magnate in Greece who is about to celebrate the launch of his new ship together with a whole bunch of people on one of the Greek islands, together with second wife Phaedra (Melina Mercouri). Thanos is divorced from his first wife (never seen in the movie), who took Alexis back with her to her native England. Alexis is a student at the London School of Economics, but he seems to have a greater interest in painting.

Thanos has a lot of business in other parts of Europe, and Phaedra is about to go to Paris on a shopping trip. Thanos decides that now would be a good time to bring Alexis back to Greece where he can be groomed to take over the family business. And since Paris isn't all that far that London, perhaps Phaedra could go over to London to meet Alexis and convince him to come back to Greece. Since Thanos is a powerful man, Phaedra more or less agrees to go to London.

Phaedra meets Alexis in London, and the two hit it off despite apparently never having met before. (I don't think the movie explicitly states how long Thanos and Phaedra have been married. She has a son, and I couldn't quite figure out if this is Thanos' biological son or stepson. The latter would make sense if Thanos wants Alexis to take over the family business.) Alexis talks about his "girl", which is actually an Aston Martin sports car. Other than that, Phaedra and Alexis don't just hit if off well, they hit it off enough that the two eventually have sex with each other, which is highly transgressive even though the two have no known blood relation. For fairly obvious reasons, Thanos would be none too happy if he found out what was going on.

Alexis decides he is going to go back to Greece after all, although he soon begins to get the impression that he did't make the right decision. He and Phaedra still have feelings for each other, but they can't exactly act on them because Thanos would find out. Worse, Thanos and a fellow shipbuilder have decided that a good thing to do would be to marry their kids off to each other as a way to consolidate their businesses. Phaedra decides she's not going to let this happen if she can do anything about it. And then the ship launched at the beginning of the movie, named after Phaedra, sinks. It's not the only tragedy that's going to happen.

Phaedra is based on a Greek tragedy by Euripides, so there's fairly good source material here. And the movie starts off promisingly enough. However, for me, the movie started to lose steam in the final third of the movie as it felt to me like it was going on too long at a shade under two hours. The other issue for me was that, when Perkins got behind the wheel of that Aston Martin, I couldn't help but think of him driving like a maniac in Rome in the movie Mahogany, which is of course a riotously bad movie.

Still, I'm glad I finally got the chance to watch Phaedra, even if it isn't the greatest movie out there.

Catch-22

Many years ago when I was in high school, one of the books we read in English class one year was Joseph Heller's Catch-22. I had learned at that time that the novel had been adapted into a movie, although I hadn't seen it in part because in those days it wasn't quite as east to watch whatever classic movie you might want to. With that in mind, when TCM ran the film adaptation of Catch-22, I decided to record it so that I could finally watch the film and do a post on it.

The story revolves around Capt. Yossarian (Alan Arkan), a bombardier at one of the Americans' southern European air bases in the latter days of World War II after the invasion of Italy had already begun. Despite the romanticization of the flyboys, bombing runs were thoroughly unromantic and suffered from a high rate of mishaps. If you could get through 25 bombing runs you were lucky and could be rotated out, at least for the most part. Unfortunately for Yossarian and the fellow crews at his base, their commander, Col. Cathcart (Martain Balsam), keeps pushing the men further and further in attempt to win fame for himself. Every time it looks like crews are going to reach Cathcart's target, he ups the number of bombing raids they have to run.

Yossarian understandably wants to get out of going on these raids and get himself declared unfit to fly. There is, however, a catch. In theory, if you're insane, you would be declared unfit to fly. However, if you say you're crazy and that flying the missions is crazy, that's a sign that you are in fact quite sane, which means that you're pretty much never going to be declared unfit for service. This despite all the things Yossarian tries to do, such as showing up to inspection stark naked. None of it is going to get him out of service.

Meanwhile, other of the people around Yossarian have come up with their own ways of trying to get out of service. Capt. Orr (Bob Balaban) keeps crashing planes before he disspears over the Baltic. The base chaplain, Tappman (Anthony Perkins) pretty much no longer believes in any sort of God. And then there's Lt. Milo Minderbender (Jon Voight), who has a rather more extreme way of dealing with things. He's gone into the black market and become a sort of king of the black market, with all sorts of enterprises throughout the part of Italy the allies control. One wonders how he has any time to do his military service, and how nobody anywhere in the military hierarchy is willing to stop him.

Eventually, Col. Cathcart and his adjutant Lt. Col. Korn (Buck Henry) offer Yossarian a deal. We'll let you get out of flight service, and even recommend you for a promotion, but you have to do something for us, which is to give us all the credit and get us the publicity we crave. Will Yossarian knuckle under, or will he find some other way to cope?

I have to admit that I wasn't the biggest fan of the book version of Catch-22 when I was in high school. As a result, I'm also not the biggest fan of the movie version. There are going to be other people who like the book and not particuarly care for the fact that a lot of changes had to be made for the movie since the book is the sort of narrative it's difficult to make a movie out of. Many people, however, recognize this and think that the changes that Buck Henry (who wrote the screenplay in addition to taking on the role of Lt. Col. Korn) made mostly work. Indeed, author Joseph Heller himself did ultimately think Henry's working the novel worked for the film. There's also a whole of other stars that I haven't mentioned yet, notbaly Orson Welles as a general who shows up at the base.

Ultimately, I think that Catch-22 is the sort of movie you're going to want to watch for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

The Fool Killer

Back in the spring, TCM ran its second season of Two for One, in which people from the movie industry select a double feature of films they feel are significant to them in some way or another. Both seasons got a rerun in the fall. One of those people was director Joe Dante, whose night is getting a rerun tonight. His first film at 8:00 PM is Night of the Hunter, with the second being a new-to-me film influenced by Night of the Hunter: The Fool Killer, at 10:00 PM.

Edward Albert (Jr.) stars as George Mellish. As the movie opens, were in rural east Tennessee some time not too awfully long after the end of the US Civil War. George lost both of his parents in a way that's not fully made clear and isn't exactly relevant to the plot anyway. Suffice it to say that George is living with foster parents, who treat him badly any time he does anything wrong. Eventually, George has enough of the abuse, so he grabs a go bag and stows away aboard the next train that comes, going west to parts unknown.

Unfortunately, when the train stops to take on water, George hops off, losing his bag when he can't get back on in time. Oops. So George becomes a sort of hobo, until he meets and old guy Jim Jelliman (Henry Hull), nicknamed Dirty Jim because he doesn't keep his house clean. Indeed, Jim calls young George a fool for trying to clean up the place, and then tells George what today we'd call an urban legend, about the so-called "Fool Killer" who stalks the countryside and chops people to death. It's almost enough to get George to run away again.

George continues to go west, with vague thoughts about wanting to become a gold prospector out west and even see the ocean. He meets another drifter, a man who for the longest time won't speak and doesn't seem to want to hear George say anything either. This man eventually reveals that his name is Milo Bogardus (Anthony Perkins). Except that he's not really Milo Bogardus, although we'll call him that because that's the only name the man has now. Apparently Milo fought in the Civil War and suffered some sort of injury that left him with PTSD and amnesia, such that when he was in the hospital recovering nobody knew his name. There was another dying soldier named Milo Bogardus, so they gave our Milo this name once the original Milo died. George seems to look up to Milo, although Milo might not be quite the role model one would like. Milo has no time for the traditional southern Protestantism of the era, so when they happen along a "camp meeting" revival show which George would like to attend, Milo is horrified.

This leads to George and Milo's parting and George's being taken in by a much nicer set of foster parents, the Dodds. But Milo eventually shows up again and is one again disgusted by the change he sees in George, leading to the film's climax.

Joe Dante suggested that The Fool Killer is some sort of tremendously good movie that never got a proper release back in the day which is why it's largely forgotten. (Indeed, the majority of the limited number of IMDb reviews date from the days immediately after the previous TCM showing.) While I'm glad Dante selected this film and gave everybody a chance to see it, I'm sorry to say it's not nearly as good as Dante makes it out to be. It's not bad, but to me it came across as the sort of movie that's trying really hard to be daring when in fact it really isn't. Perkins is given a very unappealing character to play, and I found the revival scene to be particularly badly handled. Still, as I said, I'm glad I got to see this, and will say that anybody else interested should watch and make their own conclusions.

Boomerporn

A couple weeks back, I mentioned a movie that TCM ran during Anthony Perkins' day in Summer Under the Stars. Another movie they ran is one in which he had a rather smaller part, Winter Kills.

The star here is Jeff Bridges, who plays Nick Kegan. Nick is doing some sort of work on a ship someplace not too far from Southeast Asia, in oil exploration or some other sort of research. He came from powerful stock, however; his half-brother was president of the United States, at least until he was killed by a sniper close to 20 years ago. Dad (John Huston) is the patriarch of the family, having created the family business.

One of Dad's business associates, Keifetz (Richard Boone), helicopters on board the ship to tell Nick that he's got a guest, a seriously injured man claiming to know something about the brother's assassination. Unfortunately, this man can only get part of what he knows out before he dies. But it's enough to send Nick on a possible wild goose chase back to the States to try to prove that there's more going on. Specifically, that involves a second gun which has allegedly been hidden in the same location for the 20 years since the shooting, in a building, which seems to me like utter bullshit. If it had been buried on somebody's land, especially in a rural area, that might be one thing. But between floors of a highly-trafficked commercial building? And wouldn't they dismantle the murder weapon for parts?

I suppose you could say that the conspirators wanted Nick to find this weapon that wasn't really involved in the shooting, leading him to go on a wild goose chase. But Nick and friends do find the weapon, only to have it stolen right from under their noses and Nick's two friends killed. Nick wants to go to his father for help, not suspecting that perhaps Dad might be involved in everything that's going on.

If any of this sounds familiar to you, it's because it doesn't take much of a leap to compare this to all the conspiracy theory nonsense surrounding the shooting of John F. Kennedy. But while the movie starts off as though it's going to be a political thriller (it's based on a book by Richard Condon, who also gave us The Manchurian Candidate), it eventually morphs into an extremely dark comedy with a plethora of stars. Anothony Perkins plays the executive behind the Kagan family empire. Dorothy Malone is Nick's mom, while Sterling Hayden is one of Pa Kagen's political and business rivals. Eli Wallach gets the Jack Ruby role, and so on.

My first thought was that whether you like Winter Kills or not is likely to depend on your view of the Kennedy era. If you're one of those boomer types who was around for the Kennedy assassination, as the critics who wrote the original reviews on first release were, you're probably going to love this movie.

I, on the other hand, have never bought into the Camelot bullshit, and instead see the Kennedys as little more than the Kardashians of the 1960s who gained political power. So I found the material here too obvious by half, and turgidly unfunny. Maybe when the last of the boomers die off we can finally stop comparing stuff to the 60s.

Remember My Name

I mentioned a couple weeks back that Geraldine Chaplin was honored in Summer Under the Stars with a day of her movies. But there was another movie that I had on the DVR from an earlier day in Summer Under the Stars in which she was also in the cast. That movie was Remember My Name, which TCM ran on Anthony Perkins' day.

Chaplin plays Emily, who at the start of the movie is being released from southern California prison for a crime we're not told about until much later in the movie. Apparently, whatever work she did inside prison was quite remunerative, or else she had a fair bit of money from somewhere, since she's able to go to a nice boutique and buy some pretty nice clothes for herself. She's able to get a room in a rooming house run by Pike (Moses Gunn), and is eventually able to get a job at a department store run by Mr. Nudd (a very young Jeff Goldblum) since his mom is in prison too and met Emily there.

Anthony Perkins plays Neil Curry, a construction worker building new tract housing, which is a reasonably good job since this is the era when there were still a lof of Americans moving west to the Los Angeles area. He's got a wife Barbara (Perkins' real-life wife Berry Berenson), but you get the impression there's a bit of tension between the two. Needless to say, there's about to be a lot more tension between the two.

That's because Emily shows up in the neighborhood, looking like she's casing the Curry place, even though there's not much to case since they're decidedly lower-middle-class at best. More likely Emily has another reason for being there, and that she'll reveal it soon enough. That does happen in rather more dramatic fashion when Emily breaks into the Curry plays and Barbara is the one to find her since Neil is still at work.

Barbara rather logically wants to press charges, and Emily is taken to the police station for booking, but Emily clearly has something that she can use to blackmail Neil with. This is something that Neil has been less than forthcoming with Barbara about, and when Emily uses it to get Neil to decide not to press charges, he realizes that he's going to have to tell Barbara the truth.

Remember My Name is a faily slow-moving picture where there's not a whole lot going on on the surface, but there's clearly a lot more going on underneath. This allows tension to build up while building an unsettling atmosphere. The three main characters make the material work, although it's also easy to see how Remember My Name is a movie that isn't going to appeal to everybody.

The other thing that may make it off-putting for some is the way in which it feels like there's a fair bit that never really gets answered. In addition to the way this happens with the main plot, there's a recurring theme throught the movie that seems totally unrelated to the rest of the film in which we hear TV news reports about a catastrophic earthquake in Budapest. (As far as I can tell, there's never been a serious earthquake in Hungary; there was one in Bucharest Romania a year or two before the movie was released.)

Remember My Name is a different sort of movie that those who like 1970s movies should definitely enjoy.

Mansions of Color

Audrey Hepburn had a day in Summer Under the Stars this year, and one of her movies that I hadn't seen before was part of the lineup, that being Green Mansions. So I recorded it and watched it to do a post on it here.

Audrey Hepburn gets top billing, even though she doesn't appear until a good half hour in if not longer. The real lead is Anthony Perkins, playing Abel. Abel is a Venezuelan sometime in the early 20th century, at a time when the country has regular military coups. Abel's father was a cabinet minister in one of the governments that got overthrown, and when that coup happened, Dad was killed and it became unsafe for Abel to stay in Caracas. So he makes his way to the part of the rain forest on the border of the Orinoco and Amazon watersheds, having also heard that there's gold in the area.

This being over a hundred years ago, there are still parts of the rain forest where the pre-Columbian civilizations hold sway, or at least Westerners' fictionalized vision of those civilizations. Abel winds up in the lands controlled by one of those civilizations, a tribe led by Runi (Sessue Hayakawa), with Runi's son Kua-Ko (Henry Silva) being Dad's spokesman. Kua-Ko is about the only one to speak Abel's language, and the rest of the tribe is fearful of the white man, so they torture poor Abel by forcing him to stand until he collapses.

But Abel doesn't collapse, and that earns him at least a little respect from Runi. However, in order to save his skin, he's going to have to do a favor for the tribe. They've got an enemy in the forest near their village, and since the forest is off limits to the tribe, perhaps Abel could go into the forest and kill that enemy. Since the choice is doing that or dying -- well, I suppose there might be a third choice if Abel knew his way through the forest to elsewhere -- Abel decides to go into the forest to find this enemy.

What he finds is a little wisp of a woman named Rima (that's Audrey Hepburn, dressed in her Givenchy rags), who saves Abel's life after he gets bitten by a snake. Rima, it turns out, is a beastmistress, in a time when we hadn't yet had the Beastmaster movie so nobody would have used the term. In any case, Rima has a way with animals, who seem to become less of a threat around her. No wonder the tribe is terrified of her.

Abel finds himself falling in love with Rima, because really, this is what happens in Hollywood movies and the plot wasn't ridiculous enough already. It's about to become even more ridiculous when we find out that Rima lives with her grandfather Nuflo (Lee J. Cobb, who at least is playing a white guy and not one of the native peoples) and that there's some conflict between them because Rima determines that Grandpa took her away from her home for, well, reasons. Nuflo doesn't want to lose his granddaughter and feels threatened by Abel, but he's also the only one who knows the way to Rima's birth village. They eventually go to that village, which surprisingly looks like it's in the Alabama Hills instead of the rain forest. Meanwhile, the tribe is going to be coming after Abel if he hasn't killed Rima....

The top review at IMDb has the title, "I can see why this one lost money at the box office." So can I. The movie is a mess, with talented actors expected to play people of a different race; a romantic relationship between Perkins and Hepburn that doesn't really work; and a plot that lurches from one wacky point to the next. And then there's the establishing shots that were done on location. They're nice, except that you can immediately tell which scenes were done on the backlot. Lee J. Cobb, at least, gets the chance to overact, and runs with it. And the less said about the ending, the better. The one saving grace is that there are times when Green Mansions becomes so ridiculous that it's easy to laugh at the movie.

I've said before that pretty much every prominent actor and director has at least one dud in their career. For Audrey Hepburn, Green Mansions is definitely that dud.

Tall Story

The college basketball season may have ended a month ago, but it was only recently that I watched Tall Story, the movie that introduced Jane Fonda as a movie actress.

Fonda plays June Ryder, a groupie -- not that they use the word, but she's pretty honest about what she's doing -- who enrolls at Custer College, a school known for its basketball program. She's a home economics major looking for a husband; there was a belief back in the day about women going to college to get an Mrs. degree, and Jane tells the two professors she runs into that she picked Custer because she's tall and they have that top-flight basketball team. In fact, the two professors she ran into with her bike are just the two she's looking for. Prof. Osman (Marc Connelly) is a chemistry professor, while Prof. Sullivan (Ray Walston) is hoping to get tenure in the philosophy department with his courses on ethics.

June wants to see these two because she has room in her schedule for one elective, and she somehow knows that star basketball player Ray Blent (Anthony Perkins just before Psycho) is taking an elective from each of them, and she wants to be in a class with Ray as she's decided that he's going to be the man she pursues as a husband. Ray isn't just tall; he's the star of the basketball team. Through some finagling with the dean, June is able to get into both of the electives that Ray is taking.

As you can guess, the two fall in love. Now, this being the Code era, they're not yet allowed to have sex, so we can't learn if the old wives' tale about athletes having sex just before the game is bad for performance. In any case, Blent and the rest of the team are preparing for the big game against a Soviet team that's been doing a barnstorming tour of US universities in the name of international good will.

However, some shady character gets a hold of Ray through his work-study job for the college-run taxi company, offering him big money to throw the game against the Soviet team. This is an ethical dilemma, but things get even worse for the basketball team when Ray actually fails his test in the ethics course he's taking! This one test somehow makes him academically ineligible. Most of the people at the college want Prof. Sullivan to give him a make-up test, but Sullivan actually has ethics.

Tall Story is a surprisingly limp movie, considering the caliber of talent that went into this movie. Even though it's Fonda's debut, she's already a capable enough actress, not helped one bit by the material here. Perkins was a good actor too, and the poor guy has to get this script which is full of plot holes. It feels like material that would work better for a half-hour sitcom where the writers had to come up with wacky new ideas week after week. Drawn out into a 90-minute movie, it just doesn't work. But, as always, judge for yourself.

Goodbye Again

This week sees the third night of Ingrid Bergman's turn as TCM's Star of the Month. She also got a day in Summer Under the Stars, which gave me the chance to catch one of her films I hadn't seen before, Goodbye Again. It's coming up overnight at 3:00 AM, so I made a point of watching it to do a review on here.

Bergman plays Paula Tessier, an interior designer living in Paris, and making enough money that she can have a maid of her own and live in a fairly fashionable (at least for the Paris of 1960) apartment. She's also got a boyfriend in the form of Roger Demarest (Yves Montand), who imports and exports farm tractors. It's a job that has him on the go, and one of the things that has kept him from proposing marriage to Paula. That, and the fact that he always seems to have a woman on the side that Paula doesn't know about.

One of Paula's new clients is a wealthy American woman, Mrs. Van der Besh (Jessie Royce Landis). She's got an adult son Philip (Anthony Perkins) who is learning the trade of international law, working for a firm that has offices in New York, Paris, and London. Presumably young Philip, as an American, is going to learn enough about operating in the European legal system to be able to go back to New York and liaise with the European side of things from there.

But that's not so important right now. In one of the most original plot twists imaginable, Philip finds himself immediately liking this much older woman, something which would have been mildly scandalous back in 1960 when such women weren't called cougars. And Paula, not getting enough attention from Roger, finds herself liking the attention that young Philip is giving her.

As I said, however, there are some problems. One of course is the fact that Paula is already in what is supposed to be a serious relationship. Then there's the age difference, which is liable to cause problems for Philip in his legal career. And if he has to go back to America, what are he and Paula going to do? All of it leads to Philip being showing a bit of circumspect in the relationship, but not so much so that nobody knows what's going on. Mom likes Paula professionally, but the idea of Paula and Philip having a romantic relationship, well that just won't do. And what will Roger do when he realizes what's going on?

There's not a whole lot new going on in Goodbye Again, although I suppose it may have been a bit new for the audiences of the early 1960s. Still, it's well enough acted that the acting does overcome the now trite plot. In some ways, it's too bad that it's not in color to give us some lovely color and widescreen looks at Paris as it was in 1960. Goodbye Again is the sort of movie that's good to tick off one's list of movies to watch for a completist, but certainly not the best in the career of any of the main stars.

North Sea Hijack

Quite some time back, I read a review of an interesting-sounding movie called ffolkes, originally released in the UK as North Sea Hijack. I picked up the DVD under the ffolkes title, and not too long ago finally got around to watching it to do a review on here.

Roger Moore plays Rufus ffolkes, ex-military who is now working in counterterrorism and has what seems to be his own private unit. He consults for Lloyd's of London, the big insurance firm that will insure almost anything for a price. In this case, it's North Sea oil platforms, and how to keep these remote locations from being threatened.

Cut to the other side of the North Sea. Esther is a cargo ship that supplies various oil platforms in the North Sea. Kramer (Anthony Perkins) and Harold (Michael Parks) are part of a group of journalists doing a story on the oil rigs, which is how they're boarded on the Esther. Except that these guys aren't journalists; they're terrorists whose intent is to threaten the oil rigs for a huge ransom. They get to the main rig named Jennifer and attach magnetic mines to it, doing the same to Ruth, some miles away and supplied by Jennifer. They then demand a ransom of £25 million, to be paid out equally in five different currencies.

Needless to say, this is a national security issue, and the Prime Minister (Faith Brook) calls in the Admiralty. Admiral Brindsen (James Mason) thinks about getting Lloyd's to pay the ransom, which seems like a lousy idea. Fortunately for Brindsen, Lloyd's had been talking to ffolkes about how to deal with just the sort of threat the two oil platforms now face. ffolkes is called in, and he has a good idea what to do, even though he's not thrilled having to meet the Prime Minister because of his resentment of women.

The idea ffolkes has involves going to the platforms with Brindsen, from where they'll figure out a way to infiltrate the Esther. Meanwhile, back on the boat, the crew is trying to come up with ways to fight the terrorists who have taken over their boat, although their first idea doesn't work at all. One good idea ffolkes has come up with is to create a fake explosion that looks like it has destroyed Ruth: Kramer will see the explosion but won't see that Ruth has not in fact been destroyed; hopefully, it will buy time for ffolkes and Brindsen. Eventually, the ultimate plan is to send Brindsen and ffolkes over to the Esther in a sort of hostage exchange while ffolkes' divers can infiltrate the ship from below. But Kramer doesn't like ffolkes, threatning to bollix the whole operation.

ffolkes is in many ways a standard thriller of the era, although there's a lot to recommend it. Roger Moore was in the middle of his run as James Bond when he made this, but his character is changed to have a personality much different from Bond even if the the thriller aspects seem similar. Where Bond sleeps with women left and right, ffolkes has a thing against women and authority in general because of the way he was raised by some really nasty aunts. The irony, of course, is that the one female member of the Esther crew is going to wind up helping ffolkes at a key point in the climax.

The story of ffolkes works quite well, even if again there's not anything groundbreaking here. Moore, having played Bond, is able to do ffolkes easily, while Perkins is excellent as the head of the bad guys. James Mason's role is a supporting one, but he lends the appropriate gravitas to it. The rest of the supporting cast does just fine, and the twists and turns of the plot are more then entertaining.

So if you want another movie you can sit back and watch with a bowl of popcorn, ffolkes is one that definitely fits the bill.

TCM Star of the Month October 2017: Anthony Perkins

We're in the first full week of a new month, which of course means a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time around it's Anthony Perkins, who I think is being so honored for the first time. Perkins' movies will air every Friday night in prime time. This week, I'd like to mention the airing of The Tin Star, overnight tonight at 12:15 PM, since it seems to be out of print on DVD.

The male lead here is actually Henry Fonda, not Perkins, who is a strong second behind Fonda. Fonda plays Morgan Hickman, who opens up the movie riding into town with a dead man draped over his horse. The townsfolk seem none too happy to see Morgan, which probably shouldn't be surprising. Morgan is a bounty hunter, and he's shown up in town to claim a reward. To do that, he has to contact the sheriff.

The sheriff, Ben Owens (Perkins), is a young guy who got the job by default. The old sheriff was killed and Perkins got the job by default while the town is trying to find a new sheriff. And it's clear to Morgan that Ben is thoroughly unsuited to be sheriff, as is shown when Ben has to deal with people who can't be bothered to respect the law. Ben, for his part, knows that as things currently stand he's ill-suited for the job, but he's willing to learn. And Morgan is just the man to teach him.

Morgan really just wants to get out of town, since nobody really wants him there. Indeed, he can only stay with the widow Mayfield (Betsy Palmer) who has a mixed-race son, which is what got her more or less ostracized from town. And the only reason he's staying there is because he has to wait for the town to get the money for the reward brought to them. Having nothing better to do, though, Morgan does try to give Ben some lessons, reminiscent of the later The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And then the town doctor is murdered, giving Ben the chance to be a real sheriff and bring the alleged criminals to trial. At least if the mob posse doesn't find the criminals first and lynch them.

The Tin Star is, like the recently-recommended The Third Key, the sort of movie that's representative of its genre, something I say in a good way. (And The Tin Star benefits from having Hollywood's higher production values.) Perkins is good as usual playing the man with moral doubts, while Fonda is pro at playing morally conflicted characters and beginning to develop into a sort of elder statesman of such characters. Everything else about the movie is more than entertaining enough and competent enough, although there's something about it I can't quite put my finger on that leaves it less memorable than something like Liberty Valance. Not that it detracts from the movie; it's just more the sort of movie that everybody involved can be proud to have had a part in, but which for none of them will be the movie for which they're remembered.

All of that makes The Tin Star more than worth a watch, and frankly deserving of a fresh DVD/Blu-Ray release.

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean

Last night, I finally got around to watching The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, which I had DVRed back when it was on TCM as part of 31 Days of Oscar, that's how long ago it was. It's available on DVD from the Warner Archive, so I'm OK doing a full-length blog post on the movie. Unfortunately, I can't say the movie is worth watching.

Paul Newman is Roy Bean, who at the beginning of the movie rides up to a brothel in the middle of nowhere in west Texas, west of the Pecos River. He boasts of having robbed a bank, at which point the men and women in the brothel assault Roy and shake him down (literally) for his money, before putting a rope around his neck and having a horse drag him off to his death. Except that the rope snaps and Roy, tended to by Maria Elena (Victoria Principal), recovers. Obviously he wasn't happy with the way he was treated, so he goes back to the brothel and kills the people there.

He finds there was a law book in the brothel, so he turns the place into a saloon/court, calling himself the "Law west of the Pecos". People get brought into his court, and he sentences them to hang, with little or no rhyme or reason. Along the way, he acts like a complete self-righteous jerk, reminding me of the portrayal of Theodore Roosevelt in The Wind and the Lion. (The movie has one scene praising Roosevelt as the best president the country has had.)

Bean also has a thing for singer Lillie Langtry, even though he's never seen or heard her, there not being any movies or records for him to see or hear. But still, he just knows she's unbelievable beautiful and dammit, he wants to see her. This actually leads to Bean's downfall, as his rival Gass (Roddy McDowall) is elected mayor while Bean is away trying to see Langtry in San Antonio.

After Bean is forced out of town, there's a wholly fictitious sequence about the next 20 years ending in the 1920s; in fact, Bean died peacefully in 1903. But in the movie, Bean gets to return to take the town back from the evil Gass.

Sadly, I found the movie wholly unfunny. Paul Newman's Bean (to be fair, it's not Newman's fault, but that of the screenwriters) is, as I said above, a total jerk who shows no respect for the rule of law and is basically a self-centered totalitarian. And this is presented as a good thing; we're supposed to have sympathy for him and root for him. And the whole Lillie Langtry thing was overdone to the point that I didn't give a crap about Bean's creepy obsession. Apparently, the real-life Langtry did visit Bean's town (which had been renamed Langtry) after Bean's death; that's the closing scene in the movie and Bean is portrayed by Ava Gardner. In fact, a number of well-known actors get small parts in which they only appear in a couple of scenes. Anthony Perkins gets one scene when he's burying the original brothel people; Jacqueline Bissett shows up for the last third as Bean's daughter. But overall, I found this Roy Bean such an irritating character that I just wanted to smack him.

Perhaps you should judge for yourself, however; maybe you'll like the movie. There are enough reviewers on IMDb who do.

Technically, Alfred Hitchcock is retro

FXM Retro has aired some decidedly recent movies, usually right at 3:00 AM or leading into 3:00 PM when the regular FXM block starts. Tomorrow morning at 3:00 and repeated at 1:15 PM is the 2012 movie Hitchcock.

Anthony Hopkins stars as Alfred Hitchcock, the famed movie director. In this movie, the action begins in 1959, just as North by Northwest is a big success. In fact, Hitchcock had a big string of successes in the 1950s, but the movie posits that Hitchcock still didn't have as much clout as you'd think he did. That's becautse when he comes across the source material for what would be his next film, Psycho, the studios are reluctant to let him film it the way he wants. Hitchcock has to put up a lot of his own money, and so there's a lot at stake riding on the success of that next film.

Well, not just for him, but also for his wife Alma (Helen Mirren). Alma had been one of the screenwriters for a whole bunch of Alfred's films back in Britain, and now serves a bunch of purposes for Alfred: helping deal with producers and actors, having good taste to understand what will work, and so on. But she's decidedly in Alfred's shadow, at least publicly. Everybody knows Alfred; people don't particularly know Alma.

And so, our movie version of Hitchcock looks at both the shooting of Psycho, which wasn't always easy because of the difficult subject matter, as well as the personal relationship between Alfred and Alma. It's well known that Alfred had a thing for icy blondes, which is why he cast so many of them in his movies, at least the great movies of the 1950s through to Marnie in 1964. How interested he was in the actresses themselves is a matter for debate; Janet Leigh (played here by Scarlett Johansson) supposedly said good things about Hitchcock after Psycho, while Tippi Hedren (not a character in the movie) had difficulty on the set of Marnie. As for the movie Hitchcock, Psycho costar Vera Miles (played by Jessica Biel) is shown warning Janet about the director's reputation, and Hitchcock is shown as a peeping Tom.

While the cat's away, the mice will play, so neglected Alma spends her days playing script doctor to crappy writer Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston) and eventually getting entangled enough in a relationship with him to spend her days working at his beach house. Exactly how serious their relationship was is left a bit ambiguous. But what isn't ambiguous about this movie's presentation of Alma is its presentation of her as more of a force behind Alfred than most people would think, including keeping production going while Alfred was ill. Alfred is known for having elaborate storyboards prepared such that the actual prodcution should in theory go like clockwork; supposedly this means that somebody who knew Alfred well enough would be able to make that clockwork run too.

I'm not certain just how much of the material in the movie is true; there are also dream sequences of Alfred talking to Ed Gein (the murderer who was the basis for the book that was made into the movie Psycho), but if this were a story about wholly fictitious people it would hold up quite well. Anthony Hopkins has the thankless task of trying to play a well-known larger than life figure, something that probably no actor would be able to do. Alma is less well known, so Mirren can do more of what she wants with her, and I think she does quite a good job as the woman behind the man.

Ultimately, Hitchcock is entertaining, at least if you go in expecting a dramatized version of Hollywood history.

Friendly Persuasion

A quick Blogger search claims that I haven't blogged about the film Friendly Persuasion before. Since I only first saw it last April, and I don't recall it airing that much since the TCM showing last April, the search function is probably not acting up for once. At any rate, Friendly Persuasion is airing again tomorrow morning at 8:15 AM on TCM.

Gary Cooper stars as Jess Birdwell, the patriarch of a Quaker farming family in southern Indiana in 1862. That year should give you a clue as to what's about to happen; 1862 is smack dab in the middle of the US Civil War. This presents a bit of a problem for the Birdwells, as Quakers are supposed to be devout pacifists, which is more or less currently the case. Then again, they're in Indiana, and it's not as if the war was going on in Indiana -- all the battles were in the South. But back to the Civil War later. Jess has a wife, Eliza (Dorothy McGuire), and two kids who are just about all grown up: son Josh (Anthony Perkins), and daughter Mattie (Phyllis Love). (There's a third, much younger kid as well.) Josh needs a girlfriend, while Mattie is in love with young Gard (Mark Richman), a nice young man who just happens not to be a Quaker -- which means he's also going off to war.

The first half or so of the movie deals mostly with the Birdwells' personal lives, and especially with the fact that Eliza is better at adhering to the Quaker tenets than Jess is. It's a bit sentimental, but also gives the story a good chance to develop some humor and some sympathy for all the characters. This is most notable in a scene where Jess takes Josh with him to visit the widow Hudspeth (Marjorie Main) to propose a business deal. Hudspeth has three daughters, who are all clearly looking for the company of a man, something which makes both Jess and Josh uncomfortable. But as I said at the beginning, you know where the film is going, which is that the war is going to come to the Birdwells.

This happens in the form of a Confederate raiding party. The Birdwells' farm is under threat, as is their farmhand Enoch, a runaway slave. But how to defend themselves? You'd think that self-defense ought not be a problem, but apparently pacifists do have a problem with it, at least as presented in Friendly Persuasion. Then again, if it weren't for this moral conflict, there wouldn't be a story. And even though the story is somewhat predictable, it's still very well executed, making for quite a good film.

The other Fred Astaire movie

Last Friday, I mentioned Flying Down to Rio as one of the Fred Astaire movies I can recommend for being different from his normal movie. There's another type; the movie in which he doesn't dance at all. That Fred Astaire movie would be On the Beach, airing tonight at 10:00 PM ET on TCM.

Based on a novel by Nevil Shute, On the Beach tells a post-apocalyptic story of the few remaining survivors of nuclear war. They've all made their way to Australia, the only place that hasn't been affected by the fallout. However, they all know that eventually -- and it's not too far in coming -- the fallout is going to come their way too, dooming them to a horrible death. The cast is full of stars: Gregory Peck plays an American submarine commander; Anthony Perkins plays a junior officer in the Australian navy; Ava Gardner plays an Australian woman with whom Peck enjoys a brief, ill-fated romance; and Astaire plays a cynical scientist who knew that this is what the a-bomb was going to come to.

Although everybody knows that the end is near, there's a split of opinion as to what to do. The military types are still trying to look for a way out of the situation, leading to Peck's taking his submarine back to the US West coast in order to see investigate a radio signal coming from San Diego. Even though all we see is desolation, there are still some pretty uncomfortable scenes, proving once again that you don't need to show blood and guts to have a good fright. In contrast to the military, there are a lot of civilians who just want to live out their final days in comfort, enjoying the things they used to know, as shown in a very sad sequence involving people fishing while singing "Waltzing Matilda", and a car race in which Astaire takes part. The most chilling of these sequences, however, is when Perkins realizes what the radiation sickness is going to do to his wife and young daughter, and tries to leave cyanide capsules for his wife to administer to herself and the baby should the radiation sickness come when he's not around.

Perkins might be the weakest of the major stars, because he was still fairly young and not yet up to the task of playing an Aussie; indeed, he looks like an American fish out of water, even though he's trying hard. Peck and Gardner are quite good, but Astaire really shines. Who ever knew that he could do such serious stuff? As a whole, On the Beach is very good, too, although it runs a little long. We know that the end is near, but director Stanley Kramer tries to draw this end out by showing the world be increasingly less populated, in the form of a "repent now"-style religious revival. The intended message, that nuclear weapons are bad, is fairly blunt, but at the time, the moviemakers had no idea that the theory of mutually assured destruction might actually be a correct one and that it was the presence of nuclear weapons which was preventing another European war. (Of course, one could argue that the Great Powers simply decided to use Vietnam as a proxy instead.)

Politics aside, On the Beach is a well-told, visually engaging movie, with an outstanding performance from Fred Astaire. It's available on DVD, too, so you can still watch it even if you miss TCM's showing tonight.

Cherchez la femme

TCM's "Riding the Rails" theme on Wednesdays in prime time in April brings me to two people I've profiled in recent posts.

Richard Widmark is part of an all-star cast in Murder on the Orient Express, airing tonight at 8:00 PM ET. Based on the Agatha Christie novel, Widmark stars as the victim, a man who gets stabbed to death on the Orient Express and who could have been killed by almost anybody in the car. Well, not Hercule Poirot (played by Albert Finney). But the suspects include Anthony Perkins, Sean Connery, Wendy Hiller, Vanessa Redgrave, Jacqueline Bissett, Michael York, and Ingrid Bergman (who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her part).

Dame May Whitty is the title lady who vanishes in Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 movie The Lady Vanishes, which immediately follows Murder on the Orient Express at 10:15 PM ET. One of the fellow passengers, played by Margaret Lockwood is sure that there's a lady missing, but she can't get anybody on the train to believe her, until Michael Redgrave has cause to believe she might be telling the truth.

The Lady Vanishes was remade in 1979, with Angela Lansbury in the title role as the lady who vanishes; Cybill Shepherd and Elliott Gould star as the two people who go looking for her on the train. Remakes are usually not as good as the original, especially if you're remaking a Hitchcock movie. Coincidentally, however, this remake shows up on TV this week as well, at 2:40 PM ET on Friday April 25 on Encore Mysteries, for those of you who get that channel.

All three movies are listed as being available on DVD as well.