The Last Station

I mentioned last August when Christopher Plummer got a day in Summer Under the Stars that I was interested in the movie The Last Station because of its subject matter. Naturally I recorded it, but having recorded so many of Plummer's movies, I had to space out watching them since I didn't want to put up a bunch of posts on one star's movies in close proximity if I could avoid it.

Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) was one of the best-known writers of the second half of the 19th century, writing from his estate in the country south of Moscow. However, he had some rather idiosyncratic ideas on Christianity that displeased the Orthodox Church as well as the Tsar. On the other hand, those views gained a modest but extremely devoted following to the point that there was a Tolstoyan colony on some lands near Tolstoy's estate. As the movie opens, it's 1910 and Tolstoy is past 80, so there's naturally some thought being given to what's going to happen after he dies. He's got a devoted wife of many years, Sofya (Helen Mirren), and a couple of adult children. Sofya wants to ensure that she and the family will be looked after financially after Leo dies.

Meanwhile, Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) heads the Tolstoyan organization in Moscow. It's something that comes with some political risk and he feels like he's being watched by the authorities. But he's also worried about what's going on down at the Tolstoyan estate. He and the other Tolstoyans feel that, in conjunction with Tolstoy's stated beliefs, the copyrights to Leo's works ought to go into the public domain after he dies. He's trying to get Leo to sign a new will that will do just this, while Sofya is understandably concerned that such a will not be signed. Chertkov, in order to see that his interests are seen to, and wanting to know exactly what Sofya is up to, sends a new secretary, young Valentin (James McAvoy) down to the estate partly as personal secretary and partly as a sort of spy.

Valentin finds a, shall we say, interesting situation that's not quite like the family in You Can't Take It With You, but something that's not too far off. There's that farming commune, while there are all sorts of hangers-on at the actual estate. And a lot of them want to get in Leo's good graces, in part by showing just how Tolstoyan they are, in a belief system that supposedly requires chastity. Valentin does the same thing, although as time goes on he begins to develop quite a bit of sympathy toward Sofya. Meanwhile, one of the working girls, Masha (Kerry Condon), whom you might think is almost a sort of groupie, decides to seduce Valentin: these Tolstoyans apparently need to learn about sex.

As the dispute over whether a new will is going to be signed rages on, we also learn that the marriage between Leo and Sofya is hitting a rough patch. That's partly because of Leo's advanced age; familiarity breeds contempt and all that. There's also Sofya's understandable feelings that Leo isn't looking after her. And with as busy as the estate is, matters are bound to come to a head, and sooner rather than later.

Now, you may not know this bit of history if you didn't study Russian in college like I did, but the end of Tolstoy's life involved him basically getting sick of it all and literally running away from home. However, he wasn't able to run too far as the strain of this resulted in his final illness and death in a country train station, with a bunch of assembled press holding vigil since Tolstoy was after all a prominent celebrity.

The Last Station is a movie looking at something that I don't think has gotten much attention in English-language cinema, although Tolstoy's works themselves obviously have. The movie gets high marks on all of the technical aspects, although filming was done with eastern Germany standing in for Russia. Plummer and Mirren both take the roles they're given and play them for all they're worth, which means extremely showy. I, however, was left at the end wondering why anybody became a Tolstoyan in the first place.

International Velveeta

I was coming up against the day when the movies that I recorded as part of Christopher Plummer's day in Summer Under the Stars in August 2025 were about to expire, so I made the point of watching International Velvet. It's another of those movies that was released when I was a kid so remember hearing about the title but not knowing a whole lot about it; I would have been much too young to know about the original National Velvet from 1944 as well.

This is, as you could probably figure out from the title, a sequel to National Velvet, albeit set quite a few years later. Velvet Brown, all grown up and played by Nanette Newman (wife of the film's director, Bryan Forbes), is living in Devonshire together with her boyfriend but not husband, writer John Seaton (Christopher Plummer). Velvet is walking along the coast, talking about how, eight years earlier, her life changed when her niece Sarah (Tatum O'Neal) came into her life. It seems that Velvet's brother moved his family to America when Sarah was just an infant, and then Mom and Dad up and died in a car crash, leaving poor Sarah alone with no family in the US. So that's why Sarah is coming to live with her aunt and not-officially-an-uncle, although we'll call him uncle because it makes things easier to follow.

In any case, with all that upheaval in Sarah's life, losing her parents and being stripped from her friends, it's easy to see why she spends the first act of the movie being horrendously sullen and trying to run away on multiple occasions. The second time, she rides off on Pie, who was Velvet's horse that she rode to win the Grand National back in the original movie. Sarah's riding Pie as part of an attempted getaway really pisses Sarah off until she realizes that perhaps she can use horsemanship to try to get closer to Sarah. Pie has reached retirement age and gets a special ceremony for it before his last foal is born. (It's been ages since I've seen the original National Velvet but some reviewers say that the original Pie was a gelding. Good luck getting any foals out of a gelding!)

And Sarah wants that foal, dammit, even though she doesn't have the money for it. So she does odd jobs for Uncle John, at least until Velvet decides to buy the foal which is another thing that helps bring aunt and niece closer together. Sarah enjoys riding, and eventually becomes good enough at it to be entered into a local show-jumping competition. She doesn't win, but her performance brings her to the attention of Captain Johnson (Anthony Hopkins), who won an Olympic medal back in 1968 and is one of the selectors for the British equestrian team for the Olympics. He's a very tough taskmaster, but ultimately fair.

Sarah is good too, although there are multiple good riders so that Sarah's first international experience is only as an alternate. It's also a harrowing experience, as one of the horses doesn't take well to international travel. Sarah gets good enough to qualify for the next Olympics, and the final act of the movie deals with the Olympic three-day equestrian competition, which requires horse and rider to engage in three different aspects of riding: dressage, cross-country steeplechase, and show jumping.

Once again it's easy to see why someone somewhere along the way would want to take a property like National Velvet and write a story about what happened to Velvet when she grew up. However, the story we ultimately get is one that's full of plot holes (although to be fair, since the climactic Olympics are the Moscow games set a year and a half after the movie's release, there's no why Bryan Forbes could have known about the boycott). The story is also mawkish and slow at 127 minutes, with Tatum O'Neal giving a particularly poor performance. And it doesn't help that the print TCM ran is in such soft focus that you wonder whether they got a blurry print.

Maybe fans of the equestrian scene might like this one, but as for me I'm glad I checked this one off my list of movies to watch and don't have to revisit it.

Twilight glory

Christopher Plummer was honored last year in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, with several of his pictures that I hadn't seen before. One of those was Stage Struck, which came early in Plummer's career.

Plummer isn't really the star here; that honor goes to Susan Strasberg, also early in her career. She plays Eva Lovelace, a young woman originally from Vermont who goes to New York City because she just knows she can make it on the stage. Indeed, she basically shows up unannounced at the office of theatrical producer Lewis Easton (Henry Fonda). Why not start out at the top, after all? Also waiting to see Easton are an actor on the glide path to the end of his career, Robert Hedges (Herbert Marshall), and an up-and-coming playwright, Joe Sheridan (Christopher Plummer). Nice people to meet if you're trying to make it on Broadway, I suppose.

Eva is so obnoxiously pushy that Easton, just to get her out of his hair, has Joe tell her to come for an audition for a suppoting role in Joe's new play where an aging diva of an actress is starring. Eva has her own ideas about how the role should be played which conflct with what the producer and playwright want, so of course the audition goes badly. Eva's pushiness causes even more problems when she runs into Joe outside the premiere of that new play and gets him to invite her to the afterparty at Easton's swanky apartment. She has too much to drink and, when she's stonking drunk, starts doing impromptu Shakespeare readings in front of the embarrassed guests!

Worse, she passes out drunk in the guest room and tells Lewis she loves him. Now, if all of this sounds familiar, that's because it's a remake of Morning Glory from 25 years earlier, in which Katharine Hepburn played the aspiring young actress. So you may know where the story is going. Eva has to suffer for her art before triumphing on the stage. Lewis is of two minds about her as she's really not right for such an older man. So he has his secretaries lie to her about his being out of town, and tries to get Joe to send her away from New York. But events conspire to bring us to the final act where Eva gets the leading role and makes a success of it.

I'm not the biggest fan of Katharine Hepburn, so Morning Glory isn't exactly a favorite of mine. Amazingly, Susan Strasberg takes the role and runs with it in what feels like a desperate attempt to be even more obnoxious than Katharine Hepburn ever was. Stage Struck feels artificial, like somebody who knows nothing about the Broadway stage writing about it, and Strasberg is so unlikeable here that it makes the rest of the movie hard to watch. Everybody else tries and is professional in their roles, so I suppose it's a good thing that this didn't sink Christopher Plummer. The movie does have some nice period photography, in color, of the way Broadway was in the late 1950s, but that's about the only thing good about this movie.

Somewhere in Time

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for quite some time that I only recently got around to watching is Somewhere in Time.

Christopher Reeve, fresh off Superman, plays Richard Collier. As the movie starts, it's 1972, and Collier is a college senior drama major who has just written a play and is getting it presented on stage. Sitting in the audience is a mysterious old lady, who approaches Collier and gives him an expensive pocket watch and makes a comment that implies they've met before or will meet again.

Fast forward to the present day, in 1980. Collier has moved from the small college town to Chicago, where he's become a published playwright who has had several of his plays staged. But his personal life remains unfulfilled, and that's beginning to screw up his professional life too. So Richard decides what he needs is a break from Chicago, going back to his old college town. He's also earned enough that he can finally stay in the Grand Hotel that served wealthy tourists in the summer and, one might guess, wealthy alumni in the other three seasons.

A small museum in the hotel celebrates actress Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour), who gave her final performance at the hotel's summer theater back in 1912 before retiring like Greta Garbo. But for whatever reason, Richard is intrigued, and decides to study up on her career, leading to the startling conclusion that this must have been the woman who gave him the pocket watch several years ago. Laura Roberts (Teresa Wright) worked for Elise in her later years and literally wrote the book on her, and still lives in town, rather conveniently. Richard goes to see her, showing her the pocket watch which is a pretty good way of showing he really does have a connection. Richard also learns that Elise had an interest in time travel, and had a book by one of Richard's old college professors.

Richard talks from the old professor and learns the professor's theory that through the power of self-hypnosis, time travel just may be possible. Richard gets obsessed with doing the same sort of self-hypnosis experiment that his college professor did, but with the difference that he's going to wake up on that day in the summer of 1912 when Elise retired from the stage, as Richard now believes he's fated to meet Elise again even though in the real world she's been dead for eight years already.

After the first experiment goes wrong, Richard wakes up from a second experiment to discover that it seeming is 1912! And young Elise is there, looking just like she did in the photos at the Grand Hotel. However, meeting her is going to be a bit difficult, as the 1912 version of Richard doesn't have any relations or good excuse for seeing Elise. She's also got a somewhat complicated personal life. Her manager William (Christopher Plummer) holds a fairly tight rein over her career, as he's grooming her for stardom. When he finds that Richard is in his view harassing Elise, he's none too happy.

Needless to say, Richard continues to pursue Elise, and perhaps it really is because of Richard that Elise retired from acting, staying here to look for him. But then how did young Richard wind up being reborn in time to graduate from college in 1972?

Upon its original release, Somewhere in Time got fairly poor reviews, although in the intervening years it's developed a cult following for various reasons. The good reason for that is the location shooting on Mackinac Island, a resort located on an island between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. James FitzPatrick did a Traveltalks short on the island, since even in the early 1940s it was known for not allowing motorized vehicles. The location shooting is lovely, and it's easy to see why people with a love for Mackinac Island would have a soft spot for the film. As for other people, I'm not quite certain why. I don't think Somewhere in Time is as bad as the critics of 1980 thought, but it's still a movie with a ridiculous premise and for me a ton of plot holes that aren't well explained. But it's definitely another of those movies you'll want to watch for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Another spiral staircase

Christopher Plummer was honored back in August as part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars, which gave me the chance to record quite a few of his movies that I hadn't seen before. Among them was a 1975 version of The Spiral Staircase. According to the TCM schedule, it's appearing on TCM again in the early hours of the morning tomorrow (Jan. 18) at 4:30 AM. (It's theoretically possible the TCM schedule has an error and this could be the more famous 1946 version, but considering the following film stars Jacqueline Bisset as does the 1975 The Spiral Staircase, I'm presuming this is no mistake.)

The movie starts with neither Bisset nor Plummer; instead we get a blind woman walking someplace with her guide dog. It's the sort of urban landscape that involves going on a pedestrian walkway that goes under a roadway. This is as always the perfect sort of place for something untoward to happen, since the place is perpetually in shadow. And, sure enough, something does happen, which is the the poor woman gets shot to death with her poor guide dog standing watch over her until the police and coroners can come.

Cut to a shot of our heroine, Helen Mallory (Jacqueline Bisset). She's seeing a doctor whom you could be forgiven for thinking is also her husband. But she's really seeing him because she's lost her ability to speak for psychological reasons that are continually hinted at later in the film through vision-like flashbacks: she survived a house fire in which a little girl, presumably her daughter, died, with Mom unable to help her. But the big reason this and the opening scene murder fit together is that the murder is the latest in a series of murders that all have one thing in common. The murder victims all suffered from one disability or another. Being a mute (although not a deaf-mute; Helen can still hear just fine) is a disability too, so perhaps Helen should get out of the city for a while.

Thankfully, Helen's grandmother, Mrs. Sherman (Mildred Dunnock), lives out in a suitable big house in the middle of nowhere that's theoretically a wonderfully safe place to be but in a movie like this is bound to be a bigger danger to Helen than staying in the city would have been. Grandma Sherman uses a wheelchair as she's got diabetes, and lives in the house with some servants as well as her son, the respected psychologist Dr. Joseph Sherman (Christopher Sherman). Also in the house is another son, Steven (John Phillip Law), who seemingly just got out of the military and, now back with his family, is carrying on an affair with his brother's secretary Blanche.

Helen gets to the house just before a big rainstorm is about to hit, which is a big plot point because the house is isolated enough that power outages are not infrequent. Indeed, they happen often enough that the house has a generator, but just rarely enough that the generator doesn't get used enough to be checked as frequently as it should be. The manor also has a couple of outbuildings, and a strange man who may or may not be the unseen murderer from the opening scene is found in one of them. However, we learn quickly enough that he wasn't the murderer, as he himself gets bumped off. And, as you might guess, this spells danger for Helen as it's not going to be the last killing in the story.

It's been quite a few years since I've seen the 1940s version of The Spiral Staircase, so I can't quite come up with a good list of the ways in which the plots of the two movies differ. This 1970s version feels a bit convoluted, which I'm guessing is based on the fact that it had a fairly small budget without being part of the studio era where lower budgets could be covered by regular studio overhead. As a result, this remake is always a bit of a mess. It tries hard, but at times comes across as though it's trying too hard. You can see why the cast would want to make a newer version of The Spiral Staircase, but ultimately it feels like less than the sum of its parts.

Julie Andrews at 90

Today marks the 90th birthday of actress Julie Andrews. As such, it's not a surprise that TCM is spending the evening with a night of her films. Not too many: just four, since all of the movies are over two hours. The night kicks off with a movie that premiered on TCM only a few months ago: The Sound of Music, at 8:00 PM.

Now, this isn't going to be the biggest of synopses, since I presume most people know the basic story of The Sound of Music. Maria (Julie Andrews) is supposed to be a student and possible novitiate at a convent in Salzburg, Austria, but she's a flighty young woman who would rather go up in the mountains and sing. Indeed, I don't think we have a line of regular dialogue until about 15 minutes into the movie as we get the title song followed the nuns singing about how to solve a problem like Maria. They decide to solve that problem by sending her off to be the governess of the von Trapp children. They're a wealthy family of seven children whose mother died some time back but who have a way of scaring off would-be governesses.

Part of that is the children's pranks, but just as much of it is because of the father, Captain Georg von Trapp (Christopher Plummer, for whose Summer Under the Stars day the movie got its TCM premiere). He's humorless, runs the family like clockwork, and doesn't expect the kids to do such normal kid stuff like play or, God forbid, sing. Meanwhile, he's on-again, off-again seeing a baroness (Eleanor Parker), and there's an expectation that Georg is going to marry her since she seems like she'd be a good stepmother to the children. They do genuinely seem to like her, as well has her producer friend who comes from Vienna, Max Detweiler (Richard Haydn).

Of course, the viewer knows that Maria winds up a von Trapp. Her presence fairly quickly brightens the children's lives as she's willing to take them out for a day on the town to play, as well as hike up mountains and sing. This is also going to piss off Dad. But Max likes their singing, and Maria is just so damn nice that Georg starts to warm to her. However, there are going to be many complications along the way.

One of them is the class difference and the expectation that George should marry a woman of the Baroness' social standing. But the Baroness eventually realizes Georg and Maria are meant to be together. The bigger problem is the political situation. The Nazis had been putting all sorts of political pressure on Austria, with the eventual result being the Anschluss, when Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. George was not pleased with the Nazis, and this was obviously going to be difficult for him. In the movie, he receives a telegram from Berlin informing him that he's being voluntold to go to Bremerhaven to join the German navy and take up his old job as a ship's captain. This is what convinces him that he and the rest of the family have to escape.

I am not, as I have stated here quite a few times over the course of the years, the biggest fan of musicals. To me they're incredibly artificial. The Sound of Music is no different. It also goes on incredibly long, lasting a shade under three hours. But I can't deny that the movie is extremely well made from a technical point of view, with a fine performance from Andrews and a lot of lovely cinematography. Not that it's difficult to make the Austrian Alps look good on screen. So for anybody who likes musicals, they're going to love The Sound of Music. Granted, such people have probably already seen it. But if anybody who likes musicals has not yet seen The Sound of Music, do yourself a favor and watch it tonight.

The Silent Partner

TCM's Star for today in Summer Under the Stars is, as I mentioned a few days back, Christopher Plummer. I have one of his lesser-known movies on my DVR, although unfortunately it's not airing on TCM today. Still, I figured that with his being honored today, it would be an appropriate time to put up a post on that movie, which is The Silent Partner.

Technically, the star of the movie is Elliott Gould. He plays Miles Cullen, who works as a teller at a branch of the First Bank of Toronto in a major Toronto shopping center. As the movie opens, it's the Christmas season, and Miles is romantically interested in one of his co-workers, Julie Carver (Susannah York). He uses some of the bank's carbon paper deposit slips to write love messages to Julie, although it turns out that she's interested in the branch manager even though the manager is already married. At the end of the day, Miles plans to throw out these deposit slips, but notices that one of them has a message on it of the sort that would be written by a bank robber. Except, of course, with it being the end of the business day, nobody's actually held up the bank.

But Miles notices something. The letter G as used in the hold-up note is typographically weird in that nobody else writes a G like that. And Miles sees a sign with the same G, which is being used by one of the shopping center's charity Santas. So Miles obviously has a good idea of who the robber -- if there'Bs going to be a robbery, of course -- would be. But Miles does something stupid. Instead of telling his bosses and the authorities, Miles comes up with a plan to reduce how much money a robber could get by putting the cash that's supposed to go in his teller's till into a separate cash box such that with the money there instead of the till, the robber won't get away with so much.

Sure enough, Santa comes in to the bank. His real name is Harry Reikle (Christopher Plummer), and surprisingly, the bank guard doesn't require him to take off his Santa hat and beard to transact business at the bank. Santa goes up to Miles' window and asks for all the money, which isn't very much since most of the cash is not actually in the till. Harry gets away and nobody can identify him since he's dressed as Santa. But at this point, there's another major security breach, in that the news reports interview everybody without the bank management coordinating this. That, and it's revealed how much money the bank was robbed of, which as far as they know is how much they're short.

What the bank doesn't know is that Miles has a bunch of the money, which he subsequently puts in his safety deposit box. However, when the news reports mention how much money was stolen, Harry sees the news reports and realizes he's been robbed, or at least that somebody else has the cash that he would have gotten had the money been in the till as it should have been. Harry wants that cash, and with the news reports clearly identifying Miles as the teller, Harry knows just whom to contact to get "his" money.

Miles has no intention of giving up that money, either to Harry or back to the bank, since if he gave it to the bank they'd know he didn't follow procedure and would be out of a job. What Miles doesn't know at first is just how violent Harry is. Miles comes up with a way to get Harry arrested, but certainly this is only going to be a temporary way of getting Harry off his back. Certainly Harry is going to get out of jail and immediately come looking for Miles, who doesn't even bother to move to a new apartment.

How will the plot be resolved? Will Miles be able to live happily ever after and avoid jail time? After all, we no longer have a Production Code (and the movie was made in Canada anyway), so it's certainly possible for Miles not to have to face any punishment despite basically embezzling the bank's money. But to see how things work out, you're going to have to watch the movie for yourself.

I'm surprised that The Silent Partner isn't well-known at all, since it's got a pretty good cast (there's also a young John Candy in a supporting role), as well as a very entertaining plot that's expertly handled. It's a shame that it's been largely forgotten, and certainly it's something that ought to be better remembered.

Eyewitness

Christopher Plummer died at the beginning of last month. By coincidence, FXM had brought one of his lesser-known movies out of the vault for putting in the rotation: Eyewitness. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 3:10 AM with a repeat at 1:15 PM tomorrow, so I recently watched it to do a blog post on it here.

Plummer isn't the star, of course, that honor goes to William Hurt. He plays Daryll Deever, a Vietnam vet who now works as a janitor in a Manhattan office building. Among the offices is one Mr. Long and his son, both of whom emigrated from South Vietnam after the war. Daryll also has a friend Aldo (James Woods) who is a former co-worker at the building, and who believes Long might have been responsible for costing Aldo his job. (In an unrelated subplot, Aldo is trying to hook Daryll up with Linda, Also's sister.)

After getting home from work, Darryl likes to unwind by watching a recording of the local news, since he has the hots for one of the members of the late news, Tony Sokolow (Sigourney Weaver). In addition to being a newscaster, she's an amateur pianist whose parents (Irene Worth and Albert Paulsen) set up salon-type concerts to help raise money for their pet project, which is using that money to get refusenik Jews out of the Soviet Union. Plummer plays Joseph, who works with the elder Sokolows and is Tony's boyfriend.

All of this comes together one night when Daryll is doing his rounds in the building, and, when he gets to the Long office, finds that the elder Mr. Long is very much dead, having been murdered. Somehow, there's no suspicion on Daryll, which I'm guessing has to do with janitors and night watchman types having to check in and those records being checked. But at any rate, the TV station sends Tony over to cover the story and interview the people.

In order to get closer to Tony, Daryll decides he's going to intimate that he knows more about the case than he really does. Amazingly, it works, as Tony winds up over at Daryll's apartment on several occasions and even in bed with him once. This seems like a pretty blatant violation of journalistic ethics, at least if you ever thought that journalists had any ethics to begin with.

The police are obviously investigating as well, in the form of Lt. Black (Morgan Freeman before he really became a star) and Lt. Jacobs (Steven Hill). It's their cursory interviewing of Daryll that gets him off the hook, while they seem to imply that they've got their eyes on Aldo, who seems like a natural suspect. And he's not doing anything to make himself seem any less guilty.

Eyewitness goes on like this for about 100 minutes. It's an interesting enough premise with a lot of fine actors. But they've got a script that really lets them all down. Tony getting in bed with Daryll that quickly, especially if she knew about his crush on her, seems out of character, as does a decision later on to quit being a newscaster. I mentioned the irrelevant subplot of Aldo's sister; there's another irrelevant subplot involving Daryll's father. One moderately interesting section is the climax, which takes place in what are presumably the stables for the Central Park horse-drawn carriages. There's also nice vintage footage of Manhattan circa 1981.

Unfortunately, none of this is enough to make Eyewitness anything more than one of the least notworthy pictures in the filmography of any of the main stars. And as far as I can tell, it's not available on DVD or any of the main streaming services right now.

Daisy Clover's Insides

Tomorrow, July 20, is the birth anniversary of actress Natalie Wood, so it's unsurprising that TCM is running some of her movies on Monday. One that I haven't blogged about before is Inside Daisy Clover, which comes on at 4:45 PM.

Natalie plays Daisy Clover, who at the start of the movie is turning 15 (in reality, Wood was 26/27 when she made the movie). She lives in a trailer near the boardwalk in Angel Beach, CA, with her mother (Ruth Gordon), who makes a meager living as a card dealer on the boardwalk. Dad took a powder ages ago, and Daisy's sister Gloria (Betty Harford) got married to a rich guy and left too.

Daisy supplements their meager income by running some sort of stall on the boardwalk that's Hollywood-related. She's got a love for Hollywood, and one day she goes and records her voice for 25¢ to send to the Swan Studio, run by producer Raymond Swan (Christopher Plummer). Somebody at the studio hears it, and decides that Daisy should be brought in for a screen test. Not that Mom wants any of it. She's either going senile or has some other mental illness and, while Daisy loves her mother, the mental problems can also be embarrassing.

Sure enough, Swan likes Daisy's performance and wants to make her a star. But this is where the problems begin for Daisy. The studio decides that her life story as is is not something audiences accept, so they're going to say that both of her parents died young, putting Mom in a sanatorium to hide her from the public. (What's going to happen if Dad comes back?) Daisy can't really resist, because she's a minor who can't legally sign a contract on her own, which is where Gloria comes in again.

The studio tries to build Daisy up, but she's lonely in Hollywood, especially without Mom. One night, when running out on a party at Swan's house, she runs into Wade Lewis (Robert Redford), who is also running out on the party, which is because he's got secrets of his own. But he's a charming man, and he probably really does like Daisy as a friend, even though she naïvely thinks he's much more than that.

The studio does make Daisy into a star, but she's still not satisfied, in part because the studio bars her from seeing her mother. Wade tries to get her out of her predicament by proposing marriage to her, but it's on the day of their marriage that Daisy learns the truth about Wade when he walks out. And then Daisy's mom dies and Swan pressures her into completing the movie she's working on, something that may destroy her.

I'm sorry to day that I didn't find Inside Daisy Clover appealing. It runs 128 minutes, and it's something that probably could have been cut down by a half hour. It's overlong and self-indulgent. I couldn't believe Wood as a teenager either, which is a problem since she's the main character of the movie The musical numbers don't really work either. All of the actors do the best with the material they're given, but it's not the best of material.

As always, however, I suggest that if I don't like a movie, you might still want to watch and judge for yourself. Inside Daisy Clover is avaialble on DVD and Blu-ray courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection.

Hanover Street

A few weeks back TCM had a night of movies starring 1970s British actress Lesley-Anne Down. I've already blogged about The Great Train Robbery; I hadn't blogged about Hanover Street before. So, I made it a point to DVR it and watch it so I could do a post here, since it's on DVD.

Harrison Ford plays David, a bomber pilot in the US military in World War II. Since he's going on raids over Europe, he and his crew are stationed in England, and he goes to London on his days off. On one of those days off, he gets caught in a Nazi bombing raid in the titular Hanover Street, which is where he meets Margaret (that's Lesley-Anne Down); the two had been waiting for the same bus. Anyhow David saves Margaret during the raid, and the two immediately strike up a relationship from that instant emotional bond.

There's only one problem: Margaret is already married and has a daughter. Her husband Paul (Christopher Plummer) works for military intelligence, although he works in the boring part of it back in the offices in London rather than doing the risky work. As such, Paul begins to feel that he's not his part in the war effort. Back to that later, however. Margaret, for whatever reason, just couldn't bring herself to tell David that she's already got a husband. Maybe she figured the relationship was going to end whenever David went back to the US and didn't want to hurt him, but for whatever reason she's stuck between two lovers, neither of whom is really guilty of anything.

Things take a dramatic turn, however, thanks to Paul's feelings of inadequacy. British intelligence needs to get a file out of Nazi headquarters in one of the French cities, and to do that they're going to have to parachute a man into France to pretend to be an SS agent and get that file. Paul's job is to train that man for his mission. It's a vital role, although you can see why Paul might feel he really isn't doing enough. So when the time comes for the mission to parachute the guy into France, Paul gets on the plane. And it's piloted by David and his crew.

Things get much more complicated when that plane then gets shot down by the Nazis, forcing David and Paul to bail out. David intends to go one way to get to that part of the Resistance that's going to get him out of the country, while Paul goes in the other direction toward his mission. But Paul badly sprained his ankle during the landing, to the point that there's no way he's going to be able to carry out his mission alone. The only problem is, David doesn't speak a word of German, which is a problem since they're going to have to deal with Nazis at the headquarters.

I won't say where it goes from here since I don't want to spoil the ending. I can say, however, that the movie does ultimately wind up being successfully entertaining. I have to admit that I didn't care as much for large portions of the first half, which include some love scenes from David and Margaret, as well as some scenes at the air base showing the crews' briefings; those scenes I felt went on too long. But the movie really picks up once the mission over France starts. All three actors are more than capable, and I found the set design really looked nice.

Hanover Street is available on a standalone DVD, while Amazon and the TCM shop each list as being available in a different box set too.

Cross cross cross

Another recent movie viewing for me that's available from the Warner Archive is Triple Cross.

The movie starts off with a bang, quite literally, as an explosion goes off opening up a safe somehwere in fashionable London of the 1930s. Rifling through the safe and walking off with the valuable jewels is Eddie Chapman, played by Christopher Plummer. As you can tell by the link, Eddie Chapman was a real person, leading what was known as the "Jelly Gang" or "Gelignite Gang", after the explosive used to crack the safes.

Anyhow, the law was about to catch up with Eddie, so he fled Britain for Jersey, in the Channel Islands because apparently the Channel Island's semi-autonomous nature made extradition to Britain more difficult. Of course, Eddie kept committing crimes, and would eventually be caught and jailed on Jersey.

If you noticed the date at the beginning, you should know that the late 1930s means World War II was on the horizon. And if you remember your history, you'll recall that the Germans occupied the Channel Islands starting in June 1940. So Chapman eventually ended up in a prison in France. With all those criminal skills and a possible 14-year sentence awaiting him back in Britain, he presented himself as a model candidate to spy against Britain for the Nazis, with his handlers in the movie taking the form of a Baron (Yul Brynner), a Countess (Romy Schneider), and a Nazi colonel (Gert Fröbe). They eventually decided that Chapman was loyal enough that they could send him on a sabotage mission to Britain.

Of course, Chapman was only loyal to himself. Once in Britain, Chapman started meeting with the British, in the form of a "Distinguished Civilian" (I believe his name is never given), played by Trevor Howard. Now, the British think Chapman is dead because of course the Nazis made a point of staging a phony execution. Why the British in the movie didn't fingerprint him is beyond me. Chapman is willing to work for the British, but as the cost of them pardoning him for all crimes he committed in the past.

Once the British decide that Chapman probably is loyal to them, or at least as loyal as he's ever going to be, they prepare him for a mission back in occupied France.

Eddie Chapman's story sounds like an exciting one, full of twists and turns and the backstabbing that a title like Triple Cross implies. And yet, the movie makes Chapman's story seem decidedly pedestrian. It's not that the movie is bad by any means, but it seems slow and makes it feel as though there was really surprisingly little going on with Chapman's service during the war.

The acting is uniformly competent if not great, and the cinematography is nice. But the movie feels like it could have been so much more.