Did Roger Corman ever work with Jack Webb?

Director/producer Roger Corman died last spring, and over the summer TCM got around to doing a multi-evening tribute to Corman. In addition to the horror movies, there was stuff presumably marketed at the teen demographic, which included the new-to-me The Wild Angels.

The movie begins with an establishing scene of a kid riding a tricycle on the sidewalkand nearly getting run over by a motorcycle, ridden by a guy called Heavenly Blues (Peter Fonda). Blues is on his way to visit his best friend and fellow motorcyclist Joe "Loser" Kerns (Bruce Dern), who is currently working on the oil rigs that are somewhere outside of the Los Angeles area. Loser's foreman is none too pleased about Loser having a guest up on the platform, so fires Loser with cause, and we learn that it isn't the first time something like this has happened.

Of course, it doesn't help that these motorcyclists also like to wear Iron Crosses. They're part of a Hell's Angels-like motorcycle gang that has taken on Nazi symbolism not so much because they seem to have any belief in Nazi ideology so much as it being a sort of rebellion about 1960s square society; in another context these people would be hippies living on a commune. Indeed, as we see, the bikers spend some time at a camp out in the middle of nowhere on their way to a place called Mecca, which also dovetails with why Blues, Loser, and the rest of their gang are going there. Loser's bike is there, and they're going to pick up it, although they have to deal with some Mexican-Americans and, this being the 60s, get in a fight with the Mexicans. The brings the police in contact with the two groups.

Most of the biker gang are able to stay ahead of the police, but Loser isn't, sending one of the motorcycle cops sliding down a ravine. Ultimately, while trying to escape, Loser gets shot, and injured seriously enough that he's taken to a hospital in the Los Angeles area. Loser's girlfriend Gaysh (Diane Ladd, Bruce Dern's real-life wife at the time), shows up at the hospital, where Loser is under observation but only by one policeman. Gaysh tries any number of ruses to draw the cop away, and this is of course a trick for Blues and the rest of the gang to "rescue" Loser. But the gang, being half wannabe neo-Nazis and half hippies, don't even seem to get the importance of the IV bad that's tapped in to one of Loser's veins. They can't properly attend to Loser's medical needs in hiding, so Loser dies.

The last third of the movie deals with the gang's desire to have a proper funeral for Loser, while also needing to stay one step ahead of the police. They're probably not going to be able to do both of those things, and as we see the funeral winds up not going to tradition, which also leads to the police finding out where the biker gang is.

As I watched The Wild Angels, I couldn't help but think of Jack Webb's TV shows from around this same era, especially Dragnet. The look at the biker gangs, despite the fact that the opening credits claimed to use real Hell's Angels, feels like the sort of utterly naïve look that someone who knows nothing about biker gangs would draw up, much like the caricatures Webb did. The only difference is that The Wild Angels isn't a springboard for preachiness on social issues of the day, especially what would have been Webb's strong anti-drug views. Heck, even the cinematography felt like a widescreen version of those cheap 1960s TV shows.

The Wild Angels is an interesting time capsule, but it's not a particuarly grate -- and most likely not a particularly accurate -- movie.

Hang 'Em High

I've got multiple movies on my DVR that are coming up on TCM in the next few days, and I haven't watched all of them yet to do reviews on here. Regardless, the first of those movies is Hang 'Em High, which will be on overnight tonight at 1:45 AM (which, of course, is still late this evening out on the west coast).

Clint Eastwood, fresh off his success in the so-called "Dollars" trilogy, plays Jed Cooper, a would-be rancher in Oklahoma just after the land rush. He's bought some cattle and has the receipt to prove it, but is stopped by a group of men who know that the cattle's previous owner had been killed and the cattle rustled; they determine not that Cooper had the bad luck to buy the cattle from the murderer, but that he's actually the killer himself. So the men, led by Captain Wilson (Ed Begley) resort to immediate justice, putting a noose around Cooper's neck and startling Cooper's horse away, leaving Cooper to hang until he is dead, dead, dead.

Except that none of these people are professional hangmen, so the positioning of the noose only results in a lingering death unlike the near-instantaneous breaking of the neck that professional hangman is supposed to achieve. This means that when the next person, Marshall Bliss (Ben Johnson), shows up on the scene, Cooper is still not dead. Bliss puts Cooper in the 19th century old west version of a paddy wagon, and takes Cooper back to the territorial courthouse.

Cooper is in a bit of luck, as he comes before Judge Fenton (Pat Hingle), who has a reputation for being a hanging judge but in this one case is able to determine that Cooper is in fact innocent. The bad news, however, is that Fenton isn't about to let Cooper go free, willy-nilly. If he did that, Cooper would obviously hunt down the men in the posse who hanged him and kill them all. Instead, Fenton is insistent that this be done judicially, probably because he wants to be the one to have the men hanged, and not just see them shot in some distant backwater. With that in mind, Fenton suggests that Cooper become a marshal himself, especially since he had already been a lawman before coming to Oklahoma.

Cooper, not really having much choice, accepts. But as part of his search for the other men, he comes across a man and two adolescent boys who have rustled cattle and killed a man. Even though only the adult, and not the two teens, killed the guy, Cooper returns to town and sees Fenton display a blood lust that won't admit any dissenting voice, and certainly not Cooper's plea for the two boys. Instead, Fenton schedules a mass hanging which is sure to turn into a circus.

Meanwhile, Wilson and the rest of his posse have cottoned on to the fact that Cooper is trying to arrest them, not having died, so they're going to try to kill Cooper, and this time make certain that he's really most sincerely dead. This will lead to the ultimate showdown between Cooper and Wilson....

Hang 'Em High is a movie that feels like there's nothing terribly original going on, while at the same time being a movie that's very competently made. Eastwood does a good job, helped out by a cast of mostly character actors, along with a few people who would go on to become much bigger. Pretty much everybody is solid, with Hingle as the judge having the biggest of the supporting roles.

Hollywood made a lot of westerns in the 1950s and 1960s; for whatever reason many of them, even the ones that were A movies at the time, are relatively forgotten. I'd guess it's that the spaghetti westerns and then The Wild Bunch at the end of the decade changed the genre. But if Hang 'Em High weren't an important film in the career of Clint Eastwood, I think it's another one that would have fallen through the cracks. And that would have been a shame, because it, and a lot of the other westerns, don't deserve that fate.

The Cornhusker State

Back in March of 2021, I recorded Nebraska when it had its TCM premiere as part of 31 Days of Oscar. If you have the Epix channels, you've got a couple of chances to see it this week, starting with tomorrow at 4:25 AM (or overnight tonight if you want to look at it that way) on Epix Hits. So I recently watched it to do a review on it here.

Bruce Dern plays Woody Grant, an elderly man living in Billings, MT with his long-suffering wife Kate (June Squibb). We learn later in the movie that Woody was a heavy drinker for much of his adult life, and now probably has either Alzheimer's or the sort of brain atrophy and dementia brought on by a lifetime of drinking. In any case, the result is that we first meet Woody walking along one of the main roads, where he's picked up by the police.

Having to deal with Woody's increasingly erratic behavior is not only Kate, but also their two adult children, David (Will Forte) and Ross (Bob Odenkirk). Ross is the more sensible man, who understands that it's probably time for Dad to go into some sort of home, while David still thinks he can deal with Dad's behavioral issues as they come up. And there's a big one that caused Dad to go walking on the highway. Dad received a letter from a Publishers Clearing House-type organization telling him that he's won a million dollars -- if his number comes up and he tells them what magazines he wants to subscribe to. But Woody only sees that he's won the million dollars, and wants to go to Lincoln, NE, to collect his winnings.

Woody is walking because he's no longer allowed to drive. And dammit, he's going to walk the 1200 or so miles to Lincoln if he has to, that's how much the million means to him. Eventually, David decides that he's going to take a couple of days out of his life to disabuse Dad of the notion that Dad is about to become a millionaire. When the two of them go off, Mom and Ross decide to follow; in their minds David never should have done this in the first place.

Thankfully for the family, Woody and Kate both grew up in Hawthorne, NE, which is right along the way to Lincoln. Mom has called ahead, and Woody's brother Ray and sister-in-law Martha are willing to put everybody up for a night. After all, it's been so long since the various sides of the family have met, Woody having left for Montana 40 years earlier, before the two kids were even born.

There's a reason the two branches of the family are estranged. Woody had all that drinking that caused a falling-out with business partner Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach), while Ray and Martha's two kids are consistently in trouble with the law, dooming themselves to an even worse existence than David and Ross, who are at least trying to get ahead in the world.

In Hawthorne, David gets to learn about Dad's younger life, and what made Dad the father he'd eventually become. Dad lost a brother as an infant, went off to Korea, and had other loves before settling with Kate. But he also relied on his family for financial support at times, and now that they think he's set to win a million bucks, they want that money back, to the point of becoming increasingly grasping over it. Mom also shows the kids a thing or two about being the rock of the family. As much as she's exasperated with her husband's behavior, deep down inside she still loves him deeply, and she won't let the other side of his family badmouth him.

Nebraska is a fine example of the road picture, filled with excellent acting performances. Dern and Squibb both received Oscar nominations; while I haven't seen all the nominated performances from that year, both Dern and Squibb's performances are worthy of the nominations. The script also deftly balances drama with humor. Anybody who's had a parent with dementia will recognize the exasperation David feels at times, but will also understand that sometimes there's not much to do but stand back and laugh at the absurdity of it all.

If the script has a flaw, it's the same one I found when I watched Antonia's Line some time back: some of the characters are just too quirky, to the point of unrealism, with the quirkiness driving the plot a little too neatly. But that's a minor flaw, and one that's easy not to spot while watching the movie.

Nebraska is a movie that you should definitely see if you haven't already seen it.

The 'Burbs

One of the movies that I had the chance to record during one of the free preview weekends was The 'Burbs. It's going to be on Flix again tonight at midnight, and is on DVD and Blu-ray, so I recently watched it to do a post on here.

Ray Peterson (Tom Hanks) is your typical middle-class family man, living with a wife Carol (Carrie Fisher) and son Dave in a well-manicured suburban cul-de-sac on the Universal backlot. There's a mix of neighbors such as Mark Rumsfield (Bruce Dern), a Vietnam vet who seems to want to relive his glory days in Vietnam; elderly Walter (Gale Gordon), who gets some joy in having his dog pee on Mark's lawn; and Art Weingartner (Rick Ducommun). There's also adolescent Ricky (Corey Feldman), although we never see his parents for whatver reason.

All of them have noticed that there's something odd going on in one of their neighbors' houses, these being the reclusive Klopeks. Their house is unkempt, the lawn is dead, there's an elaborate alarm system, and odd lights and noises emanate from the basement of the house. It's only natural that everybody should be curious about the place.

Unfortunately for Ray, it's the start of a week's vacation, and Carol would prefer to spend the week at their cabin up in the mountains. It's the source of some tension between them, as Ray and the other younger guys are not only getting more curious, they're beginning to get more worried about what's going on in the Klopek house.

What brings matters to a head is that one morning, Walter's beloved little dog is wandering the street alone, and when they bring him back to Walter's house, there's no answer at the door. They eventually break in out of concern, an find the place devoid of life, save for Walter's toupee. That's a big read flag for Ray, because just as Grace Kelly points out in Rear Window that no wife is going to leave the house without her wedding and engagement rings, no elderly man with a toupee is going to leave the house without it.

The guys all think that the Klopeks must be doing satanic rituals or something that otherwise puts people's lives in immediate danger down in that basement, and that Walter is probably already dead. But to find out what's really going on, they have to get into the house, so Ray and Carol along with Mark and his wife Bonnie make a visit over to the house. Dr. Werner (Henry Gibson), together with his brother Reuben (Brother Theodore) and a son/grandson Hans (Courtney Gains) are weird, to say the least, although Dr. Werner seems to be a researcher in, well, something. But why won't the Klopeks let them see the basement, and why do they have a guard dog down there?

Everything seems at least like something that can be answered, until Ray reveals that he found Walter's toupee in the basement along with his mail. In theory it's no big deal that the Klopeks might be picking up Walter's mail, but Ray deliberately left the toupee in Walter's house, and that shouldn't have been picked up. To figure things out once and for all, the guys are going to have to make a commando raid on the Klopek place, something that's just the thing for a Vietnam vet with delusions of glory.

There's the kernel of an interesting story, if nothing new, in The 'Burbs. Unfortunately, the movie is largely let down thanks to the direction, combined with some overbearing music cues. There's one scene, for example, in which director Joe Dante wants to show suspense by doing exaggerated closeups on everybody's faces (including Walter's dog). It goes on too long; it's clumsily handled; and, combined with the obvious music, it doesn't work at all. Bruce Dern's character is written as too much of a stereotype; unlike, say, Terry-Thomas in Make Mine Mink, he's not somebody you'd want to follow but someone you'd want to avoid.

Corey Feldman and his friends playing spectator for the climax are one of the high spots, but The 'Burbs is a film where the high spots are too few and far between. But, as always, watch and judge for yourself.

Number One

With this being football season, I recently had the chance to watch a new-to-me movie about football: Number One.

Charlton Heston plays Ron Catlan, quarterback for the New Orleans Saints. As the movie opens, it's the week of the final preseason game, and Catlan isn't doing very well. He's pushing 40, and although he led the team to a championship in the past, there's a young gun looking to take his place, and all the hits have been taking their toll. However, Catlan insists he can still lead the team to another championship.

Ron's long-suffering wife Julie (Jessica Walter), a successful fashion designer, wants to pick him up right after the game because they're supposed to be hosting a party, but Ron would rather drown his sorrows at a local restaurant. He does get picked up, however, by Ann (Diana Muldaur), a guest at a party being held by one of Ron's old, now-retired teammates, Richie Fowler (Bruce Dern).

Richie, having retired, has made the brilliant decision of going into business with a car dealership, leasing luxury cars to well-heeled clients. He suggests to Ron that perhaps Ron should hang it up and join him hawking cars. Later on, an executive at a computer company (these being the days of room-sized mainframes) offers Catlan a job, but he's going to have to take it now; it might not be there in even just a few months.

Ron, for his part, decides to sleep with Ann, something that's going to piss of Julie when she finds out, except that she's seen it before. In some ways she's to the point that she just doesn't care. Eventually, we get to opening week, at home against the Cowboys....

Number One is a movie that in theory has a lot going for it, but ultimately winds up falling well short of anything that it sets out to do. Probably the best thing is the vintage look at late 1960s football. The movie was released in 1969, and was made with the full cooperation of the New Orleans Saints (and presumably the NFL). Real Saints players and coaches of the time appear, although I don't think any of them are major characters. We also see the old Sugar Bowl stadium, since the Superdome wouldn't start construction until 1971.

As a narrative movie, however, the film is a mess. I suppose it's supposed to be more of a character study of Catlan, and anybody who's reached the end of the line should probably be able to identify with the character. But there's not much narrative here, and not much character in Catlan either. The structure of the movie isn't helped out much by an overuse of flashbacks. It ultimately feels more like a series of disconnected scenes rather than a coherent whole.

Still, I think anybody who's interested in vintage football when the sport was really beginning to take off thanks to color TV will probably be interested by the internal look at the Saints, as well as what the movie gets wrong because Heston was decidedly not a football player. Heston was 45 at the time and looks it. Also, although Heston had the size to be a football player, the Saints involved in the making of the movie said that he didn't look like a football player at all and certainly didn't have the ability.

Number One finally got a DVD release a few years back.

Coming Home

During TCM's spotlight on the 100th anniversary of United Artists, one of the movies that they ran was Coming Home. Not having done a post on it before, I DVRed it to watch and do a post on here.

The movie starts off in 1968. Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern) is a captain in the US Marines who is about to go off and fight in Vietnam, which means he'll be leaving his wife Sally (Jane Fonda) behind. Sally, despite knowning this could happen, isn't really ready for it. She commiserates with a friend, Vi Munson (Penelope Milford) who has a boyfriend about to go off to fight with Capt. Hyde, as well as a brother Bill (Robert Carradine) who fought and has returned injured.

Vi has been dealing with it by volunteering at the local VA hospital where the returning injured soldiers -- some of them very badly scarred both physically and emotionally -- are housed in pretty lousy conditions while the government that sent them off to war treats them, being unable to figure out how. Vi suggests to Sally that perhaps she too should volunteer at the hospital. It would give Sally something to do, since Bob is insistent Sally not get a job, these being the days when it was still perfectly normal for a woman to be a housewife.

Sally eventually goes to the hospital, where she runs into Luke Martin (Jon Voight). Literally, she runs into Luke, who is a double amputee who hasn't been able to get a wheelchair yet and uses a cane to propel his gurney. He's also got a catheter to empty his bladder, and when Sally runs into the gurney, it spills the bag of urine onto the floor, which as you can guess pisses off Luke. But this galvanizes her into deciding that yes, she will volunteer.

It's not easy work considering that the hospital is severely understaffed and doesn't necessarily want the volunteers doing stuff that medical staff should be doing. It also turns out that Sally and Luke have a past acquaintance, as they had gone to high school together. They weren't necessarily friends back then, but since they already sort of know each other and both are currently more or less alone, they decide to start a friendship. Unfortunately, it evolves into something more, as both of them also have physical needs that nobody else can really satisfy. Luke still has his emotional needs, which cause him to go on an anti-war rant for the local news.

Eventually, the two decide to break things off for a pretty good reason: Bob is coming home, having been shot accidentally. It leaves him with a limp, which means he can't really fight any more. Sally really does still love him despite having had sex with Luke, and with any luck they'll be able to pick up where they left off when Bob left for Vietnam. Except for one small problem, which is that when Luke went on that rant, military intelligence decided to do some surveillance on him. You can probably put two and two together.

I've stated before that I don't particularly have a problem with movies having obvious messages if there's a good story advancing that message. Coming Home is a movie that most definitely succeeds in that regard. Jane Fonda was far more controversial in the late 1970s than today for her actions during the Vietnam War, so it's easy to see why some people might be wary of a movie with her at the center. While the movie is clearly anti-war, it's only in a couple of Voight's speeches that it could come across as being too blunt with the message.

Fonda and Voight are both excellent, and won Oscars for their roles. Dern is slightly miscast, as he looks much too old to be a Marine going off to Vietnam in a front-line role. He does well with what he's given, as do all the supporting cast. The one problem I had was with the music score, which used a bunch of late-1960s hits but came across to me as overpowering at times.

Still, Coming Home is a movie that deserves a strong recommendation. It's available on DVD should you wish to watch.

Bloody Mama

So I got to watch Bloody Mama a few weeks back having recorded it when it showed up on TCM as part of the salute to American International Pictures. It's available from the TCM Shop, so I'm OK with doing a full-length post on the movie.

The movie starts off telling us that any reference to Ma Barker is wholly intentional; that's followed by the four Barker brothers: Herman (Don Stroud), Lloyd (Robert De Niro), Arthur (Clint Kimbrough), and Fred (Robert Walden) chasing after a young woman. Apparently they do something less than gentlemanly to the young woman, because her father shows up with vengeance on his mind. Their mother, "Ma" Barker (Shelley Winters) is tired of life in the middle of nowhere in the Ozarks and would like something better anyway, so she takes the four sons and goes off with them.

But what to do? It's the early days of the depression, and honest work is hard to come by, so they turn to a life of crime! Herman takes up with the prostitute Mona (Diane Varsi), while Fred winds up in prison which is where he meets Kevin (Bruce Dern), who's up for a little prison rape. Fred and Kevin break out of prison, reunite with the rest of the family, and the seven of them (the four boys, Ma, Kevin, and Mona) all start running around the south.

But it's not a particularly happy family. Ma is a bit of a tough taskmaster, and wants to run things her way. When they kidnap a wealthy man (Pat Hingle) for the ransom it will surely bring, Ma thinks that actually letting him go will cause problems, so she instructs her sons to kill the man! More disturbing is that she has an incestuous streak in her, wanting to sleep with her grown sons. It warps all of them in their own way, most notably with Lloyd turning to whatever drugs he can find.

Eventually, of course, Ma Barker was killed by the feds. The movie shows that, although it takes considerable liberties with the rest of the gang. In real life, Herman was already dead before the events of the movie. Only Fred would die in the shootout that also killed Ma; the other two sons and the genesis for the Kevin character all survived. And there's some debate over whether Ma was actually involved in the crime to any extent greater than being an accomplice and protecting her sons.

Still, Bloody Mama is interesting to watch. It's a flawed movie in many ways, thanks in no small part to Winters going way over the top, and the movie veering wildly in how Ma's personality should be portrayed. But all of that makes it entertaining in a low-budget fascinating way. I'm not certain how much money I'd drop on the DVD, but watching it if it shows up on TCM is certainly worth the hour and a half.