Seven Miles from Alcatraz

The star for tomorrow, August 25 on TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Bonita Granville. Once again, I happen to have a movie of hers on my DVR that's showing up in the day and that I haven't blogged about before That movie is Seven Miles from Alcatraz, at 2:45 PM, so in order to be able to do a post on it before it airs, I watched it, which means that again you get a post on an upcoming movie.

Alcatraz, was, of course, famously used as a prison on an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, a body of water with a lot of shipping traffic and difficult waters so they need a lighthouse too, although that's on a different island. Meanwhile, there's a war going on even though none of the prisoners are doing their part for America by fighting in it. Indeed, one of the prisoners, Champ Larkin (James Craig), is worried that San Francisco Bay is just the place for the Japanese to bomb, meaning there's a good chance a stray bomb or missile could his Alcatraz. Champ is having none of that, so he decides he's going to break out of the most secure prison in all of the United States.

And wouldn't you know it, but pretty much in the very next scene, Champ and his fellow prisoner Jimbo (Frank Jenks) are escaping and are able to evade all the patrol boats. They don't make it to the mainland, however, instead washing ashore on the island with the lighthouse. The lighthouse keeper, Captain Porter (George Cleveland), lives there with his daughter Anne (Bonita Granville). Also working at the lighthouse is a radioman, Brenner (Erford Gage), and the custodian Stormy (Cliff Edwards). Champ and Jimbo break in and immediately set about holding the four hostage, although there's the issue that Brenner is supposed to call in at a certain time as part of his duties. Not doing so would certainly be noticed by the authorities.

On the other hand, what the Porters and the two criminals have no idea of is that Brenner is actually working with Nazis to send and receive coded messages. There's a pair of Nazis aboard a U-boat, as well as a "baroness" on the mainland who has a whole group of fifth columnists around her, because of course there's always one ringleader with a bunch of supporters in movies like this. Anyhow, the message Brenner has been sending is that that ringleader has targeting information that will allow the Nazis to target the coast better, and needs to rendezvous with the Nazis on the U-boat to give them that information.

Now, this being a World War II movie from Hollywood, you know that the two prisoners are going to have a change of heart and be instrumental in foiling the Nazis' diaboloical scheme. But it's also an RKO B movie, which means that it's all done in a shade over an hour with RKO's lesser production values. Seven Miles from Alcatraz is a fun enough premise, if one that would be done dozens of times over the course of the war. The script is a bit of a mess to the point I was wondering whether the Porters would turn out to be part of the Nazi ring, too.

Murder, My Sweet

A few months back I did a review of the Robert Mitchum movie Farewell, My Lovely, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler about the detective Philip Marlowe. I mentioned at the time that the book had been turned into a movie 30 years earlier with the title Murder, My Sweet. That earlier version shows up on TCM tonight (Nov. 22) at 11:45 PM, so I recently sat down to watch the movie so I could do a review here.

The story is mostly the same between the two movies, although Murder, My Sweet does a bit less in part because of the Production Code. Here, it's Dick Powell playing Philip Marlowe, and as the movie opens he's blindfolded in an investigation room of a police precinct being questioned about the things that have happened to him in the last few weeks as part of cases both he and the police have been investigating. Flash back to some time ago, and "Moose" Malloy comes to Marlowe asking for information about the whereabouts of former nightclub girl Velma Valento. Moose has just done a seven-year stretch in prison and, having been released recently, wants to find the girl he loved. She apparently doesn't love him enough to have kept writing, although her old boss at the nightclub claims she's dead.

The following morning, Marlowe receives a call from a Mr. Marriott, wanting him to work as a go-between. Marriott is paying a sort of ransom to get back a jade necklace that was stolen. He doesn't want to go alone because of the danger, and he's right to be afraid. At the rendezvous, somebody hits both of them over the head, knocking Marlowe out (and giving him the sort of concussion you'd think would make his memory an issue) and killing Marriott.

Also interested in the neckless is the Grayle family: elderly father Leuwen (Miles Mander), trophy second wife Helen (Claire Trevor), and Leuwen's adult daughter from his first marriage Ann (Ann Shirley). Ann shows up at Marlowe's plays with a phony identity trying to get information; in fact the necklace belonged to Ann's stepmother. Ann and Helen at various points in the story each want to hire Marlowe, so he's naturally unsure of which of the two to trust, or even if either of the two he can trust. And there are other shady figures here. Somebody's putting words into Moose's ear that Marlowe knows where Velma really is, and then someone who may or may not be the same person as the previous someone basically kidnaps Marlowe and drugs him up for three days.

Eventually, Marlowe is able to put everything together, although as with that other Philip Marlowe story The Big Sleep, how well everything winds up fitting together is an open issue.

Obviously, as this wasn't the first version of the story I watched, I found myself thinking about the Robert Mitchum Farewell, My Lovely as I was watching Murder, My Sweet. I think each of the films has its advantages and disadvantages. In the case of Farewell, My Lovely, having been made in the 70s works in that there's more that can be discussed, such as Velma's nightclub now serving a predominantly black clientele. There are also a few other subplots. But what works better for Murder, My Sweet is that it has a contemporary setting during World War II. Farewell, My Lovely is done as a flashback to the summer of 1941 and a lot of the time the movie has the look of something that's too Hollywood clean for a simulation of the 1940s as they really were.

Mitchum was a natural as Philip Marlowe; Dick Powell wanted the role (well, really he wanted Walter Neff in Double Indemnity) precisely because everybody thought he wasn't a natural to play a hard-boiled private detective. Powell pulls it off well, and it changed his career; for the rest of his career he was able to get meaty dramatic roles.

Both versions of Raymond Chandler's story are worth watching, and tonight's your chance to catch the Dick Powell version.

Raintree County

Eva Marie Saint is TCM's Star of the Month for July 2024, and one of her movies that's been on my DVR and that I haven't posted about before is Raintree County. It's on TCM again tonight at 10:00 PM, so I made a point to watch the movie to do a review on it now for the upcoming showing.

Once again, Eva Marie Saint is only a supporting actress here, although she shows up a lot earlier than the actual lead actress. The movie opens up in 1859 in Raintree County, Indiana, which is partly a sign that the Civil War is about to hit the US and change everybody's life. Everybody is about to graduate high school, and this being 1859, it's a huge deal that the class is going to be... photographed. Head of the class is John Shawnessy (Montgomery Clift), who is a bit of a dreamer. He's kinda-sort going steady, at least by 1859 standards, with fellow student Nell (that's Eva Marie Saint if you couldn't tell), and everyone expects them to get married relatively soon since younger marriages were much more common in those days.

Except that one of their teachers, Prof. Stiles (Nigel Patrick), tells the class the legend Johnny Appleseed, He went through the midwest planting trees, and supposedly he planted on specific raintree after which the county is named, somewhere in the county's forbidding swamp. Find the tree, and you'll find the secret of life. It's a ridiculous idea, but this is the 1850s when there was more ignorance in the world, and young John is impressionable. So he blows off his girlfriend to go into the swamp looking for the tree.

Visiting the county for some reason is southern belle Susanna Drake (Elizabeth Taylor). Johnny is immediately taken with her looks, and continues to blow off Nell in order to spend time with Susanna. Enough time alone with each other, in fact that there might be the opportunity for Johnny to knock up Susanna before she leaves to go back home. Indeed, they must have had sex because some time later Susanna shows up back in town to tell Johnny that she's with child and he's the father of the child. I'd guess Johnny knew enough about sex to know that if he hadn't done it with Susanna, there's no way she could be bearing his child.

Johnny does the honorable thing and marries Susanna before heading south with her to live in her part of the country. The two stop in a plantation where Susanna grew up, at least before the place burned down in a fire. Johnny, in talking to the people who still live there, learns that Susanna's mom went insane, and Susanna may in fact be inheriting her mom's mental state, not that they quite understood genetics at the time. But it's the reason for the insanity that's a problem: The woman who went insane might not have been Susanna's biological mother, and that Susanna is in fact the product of a relationship between Dad and one of the family's slaves!

Oh, the movie is going to get a lot more ridiculous. John and Susanna move back north, and the Civil War breaks out. Johnny doesn't volunteer, at least not until Susanna runs off with their child to someplace in the south, leaving Johnny to join the Union Army just so he can spend all his time looking for Susanna, which I'd think might involve a bit of desertion. Meanwhile, Nell is still around, and still pining away for poor Johnny.

Raintree County was based on a novel publised a few years after World War II that was a commercial success. It's not hard to see why MGM would want to buy the rights and think that this sort of melodramatic material that has shades of Gone With the Wind would be a big hit. But the movie wound up in production hell in part because the novel's writer killed himself. And then when it finally did get made, nobody seemed to undertand just how wacky the material is. It also didn't help that this is the movie Clift was making when he had the very serious car crash that nearly killed him and delayed production for months.

Raintree County is certainly not the best film for anybody involved in the production, I'm sorry to say.

Robert Mitchum in another invasion movie

Back on June 6 I mentioned The Longest Day about the D-Day invasion of Normandy, in which a ton of Hollywood and international stars, including Robert Mitchum, have roles of varying sizes. Several years later, for Italian producer Dino di Laurentiis, he made a movie about a different World War II invasion: Anzio.

After a horrendously awful song sung by Jack Jones over the opening credits that makes it sound like one of those 1960s potboilers instead of a war film, we see a bunch of Allied soldiers somewhere in southern Italy. The Allies had taken Sicily relatively early since it was an island, while getting across to the mainland was somewhat more difficult. They were able to take some of southern Italy before the Nazi commander in Italy, Field Marshal Kesselring (played in Anzio by Wolfgang Preiss), was able to set up a defensive line that more or less stalemated the Allies as winter was setting in.

Obviously, the Allies were going to try to break out somehow, and while the generals were preparing, the grunts are getting all rowdy in one of the palazzos, observed by war correspondent Dick Ennis (Robert Mitchum playing a composite character; most of not all of the Allies are either wholly fictional or composites based on real militry officers). But then some commanders come in, which can only mean one thing: the big invasion is about to being.

Thankfully, although this is winter, it's Italian winter, so it's not bitter cold like the Allies would get the following winter when they pushed eastward from Normandy, meaning that another invasion is doable if not necessarily easy. The big question is, how much resistance are they going to face from the Germans. In command is American general Lesley (Arthur Kennedy), who wants to make certain the Allies can secure the beachhead, that being necessary before further advances can be made.

So the Allies land at Anzio, and as Gen. Lesley sets about securing the location, everybody seems surprised at the lack of resistance that they're facing. Indeed, the lookout points for snipers seem to be completely empty. With that in mind, Ennis procures a driver and sets out for Rome, which isn't all that far away from the landing site. They even get all the way to the outskirts of Rome, basically facing no resistance whatsoever. The Allies, it appears, could just take Rome right away, which would be a major victory.

However, the difficulty lies in getting in touch with the commanding officers and getting them to believe that the Allies could in fact advance. Lesley has some reason to believe that the Germans are in fact setting a trap, trying to get the Allies to overextend themselves after which the Germans can really put a hurting on the Allies. This proves to be wrong, however, and this delay gives the Germans vital time to fortify their position, more or less trapping the Allies on the beach.

It's not hard to see why someone would want to make a movie about Anzio, and with the movie being made in the late 1960s, it's also not hard to see why moviemakers would want to make something that suggests the futility of war. However, there's something about Anzio that makes it come off as not quite right, already starting from that opening song. I think what goes wrong has a lot to do with the script, and a sense of di Laurentiis wanting to make an epic on a tight budget.

The cast is professional although a lot of them are underused. They do the best they can with the material, but ultimately, Anzio comes off as another of those movies that probably could have been so much more than the final product we get.

The Best Years of Our Lives on a budget

A movie that I recorded when Robert Mitchum was TCM's Star of the Month in January is getting another airing now in early Feburary: Till the End of Time, tomorrow, February 7, at 4:30 PM. So, I sat down to watch it in order to do the blog post just in time for the TCM showing.

The movie opens not long after V-J Day ended World War II. A bunch of Marines who served in the Pacific theater of the war are getting demobbed, which is a fairly involved process since the government has to move a massive number of people and make certain that none of them end up not getting properly listed which, as in Identity Unknown could get you declared a deserter. There's also the adjustment back to civilian life and the fact that after close to four years a lot of the old jobs have changed.

Two of the Marines getting demobbed are Cliff Harper (Guy Madison, whom RKO was grooming for stardom) and William Tabeshaw (Robert Mitchum, who of course would become the big star at RKO). Cliff was a college boy before the war, having taken one semester at school before Pearl Harbor and his voluntary enlistment in the war. He's got middle-class parents in the Los Angeles area, and Dad is convinced that the place is going to grow in the years following the war. As for William, he had been working as a ranch-hand in New Mexico, and he's hoping to take his saved-up money and buy some land back in New Mexico to start a farm or ranch of his own. But he also likes to party and gamble. And he's got a steel plate in his head as a result of his war injuries.

Cliff gets home and finds his parents out for the day, and finds that he's got new neighbors who moved in during the war. They've got a high school-aged daughter Helen Ingersoll (Jean Porter), who immediately develops a crush on Cliff because in the World War II days, who didn't like a man in uniform? Cliff humors her, but doesn't really care for her as anything more than a friend.

Someone possibly more up Cliff's alley is Pat (Dorothy McGuire), a woman he meets at what in the Andy Hardy days would have been an ice cream parlor but became a bar during the war. Cliff falls for Pat until he sees her husband's picture. Except that it's her late husband, having been shot down over France. Now, she goes on flings with one guy after another.

Cliff can't quite decide what he wants to do, except that he wants to do something different from what he was being groomed to do before the war. This really pisses off his parents (Tom Tully and Ruth Nelson), who want to go back to life the way it was but don't want Cliff to dwell on his having been in the war, something that seems really mean on their part. And, after all, there are a lot of people who can't forget what happened in the war. We see this in one scene where Pat and Cliff run into a man who served and wound up with PTSD and a severe case of the shakes as a result. There's also a subplot involving Cliff and William's friend Perry (Bill Williams). He was a boxer before the war. But he lost both his legs, so he certainly can't box. He's got a kid brother, and damn if he isn't going to take his own broken dreams and put them on his kid brother, trying to train the kid to become a boxer.

It's difficult to watch a movie like Till the End of Time and not think about the Oscar-winning film The Best Years of Our Lives. However, Till the End of Time was released first, about four months before the better-known picture. It really feels like one of those movies that RKO was trying to make into a prestige picture, except that RKO never really seemed to be able to put together the sort of budget necessary to make the prestige movies that other studios could. So there's a bit of a shabby feeling here.

This isn't to say that Till the End of Time is a bad movie by any means. It has an ensemble cast of pretty good performances. Mitchum feels underused, although part of that is because he wasn't the big star yet that he'd become not long afterwards thanks to noirs like Out of the Past. McGuire is quite good, as are several of the supporting players, especially Selena Royle as Perry's mother.

It's understandable that Till the End of Time would be eclipsed by a movie like The Best Years of Our Lives. But it still stands on its own as a pretty darn good movie, and one that you should definitely catch.

The "Human" Factor

George Kennedy is interesting in pretty much everything I've seen him in, and he had a pretty long career. Recently, while looking through what's available on Tubi, I came across a movie of his that I'd never heard of: The "Human" Factor. The plot also sounded interesting, so I sat down to watch it in order that I'd be able to do a review on it.

Unfortunately, the print that Tubi has is in 4:3 and looks like it was done on videotape and could be a TV movie, although every bit of information I found suggests it's in fact a theatrical movie. It starts off showing John Kinsdale (that's George Kennedy) looking like a typical American family man, which in many ways he is, except that he's an expat, working for NATO in their Southern Europe headquarters in Italy as a computer expert, together with British electronics expert Mike McAllister (John Mills). One night, Kinsdale returns home to what is supposed to be his son's birthday party, only to find out that a bunch of police cars are surrounding the front entrance, willing to keep even him out since they don't realize yet he's the patriarch of the family. He finds that his family has been killed execution-style, in a way completely new to the Italian authorities by police inspector Lupo (Raf Vallone).

Lupo gives Kinsdale a bit of information that perhaps he shouldn't, as it's evidence in the ongoing investigation into the murders. Even though Kinsdale has an ironclad alibi and wants the killers caught, giving out such information probably isn't a good idea. In Kinsdale's case, however, it kindles in him an idea to start his own investigation to try to avenge the murders of his wife and kids. So he steals some credentials Lupo has courtesy of the US Embassy. Being a computer expert and working for NATO, he uses his knowledge of accessing government databases to get into them and figure out who the murderer might be.

A second murder committed in the same way against another American family takes place, and Kinsdale is able to meet with a bigwig in the US embassy, George Edmonds (Barry Sullivan). Edmonds, not having been told by Kinsdale that this is the husband of the first family that got killed, reveals what is more or less classified information, that some sort of terrorist cell has contacted American authorities with blackmail demands, that they'll kill another American family every few days unless certain demands are met. This gives Kinsdale an even more urgent desire to figure out who carried out the killings and stop future killings from happening.

But Kinsdale isn't an expert in this sort of investigation, and whatever vigilante actions he's taking may only screw up the investigation being carried out by the Italian police in cooperation with the legitimate American authorities. It all leads to a climax at one of the US bases in the area....

As I said, The "Human" Factor looks, and in many times feels, like a TV movie of the week. Not that it's bad; there are quite a few TV movies from that era that were pretty darn good. The computer technology depicted here is primitive, but in some ways it only serves to add to the charm of the movie. George Kennedy does well as the man with a burning desire for revenge, while Mills, along with Rita Tushingham as the third member of their crew, provide level-headed moral support. The views of the Naples area as it was in 1975 are also worth catching.

The "Human" Factor isn't the world's greatest movie by any stretch of the imagination. But if you haven't seen it before, and just want to be entertained, it will certainly do.

The Hidden Room

Another of those movies that sounded interesting and that I had on my old DVR but never got around to watching was a British movie called Obsession, originally released in the US under the title The Hidden Room. However, TCM ran it again a few months back, and when I watched my recording, the print bears the British title Obsession. At any rate, recently I finally got around to watching it in order to be able to do a review on it.

Robert Newton plays Dr. Clive Riordan, a psychiatrist living in London with his wife Storm (Sally Gray), although as the movie starts, he's away for reasons not quite mentioned. He returns home early, where we see he's one of those fairly well-off doctor types, since he's got a butler living there, able to open the door as Clive comes home fairly late in the evening, Storm being out and not there to let Clive in or welcome him home.

It turns out that Storm is seeing another man, American Bill Kronin (Phil Brown). Clive is none too pleased, since what husband wants his wife to step out on him? So Clive decides to turn off the lights and surprise Storm and Bill once they come in the house. Clive is fairly nasty to his wife and her boyfriend, although to be fair he has a good right to be nasty. Unfortunately, he decides to be a bit too nasty, pulling a gun on the couple, but not shooting them.

Oh, no, Clive comes up with a completely different idea. He decides that he's going to commit the perfect murder, like a man cuckolded. And fortunately for him, he's got a good candidate to murder. Not Storm, since her getting murdered would attract too much attention and Clive would be the natural suspect. Bill, on the other hand, is a near perfect murder victim. He's an American in Britain in an era when transatlantic communication is nothing like what we have today with the Internet and all that. But there's still the question of how to murder Bill, and what to do with the body.

Clive comes up with what seems like a ridiculous plan. Not far from where he garages his car in the vicinity of his private practice, he's found a cellar room that's not noticed largely because it's in an area that still looks like it's got some damage from the recently concluded war. Clive kidnaps Bill, more or less, and holds him hostage in the room, with the plan to kill Bill eventually and then dissolve the body in acid. (Where's Clive going to get that much acid?)

News of Bill's having gone missing does make the papers, but since there's almost nobody around who knows him well, there's nothing in the way of clues, other than Storm's knowledge that Clive had talked about murdering Bill. But then Storm would have to reveal how much she's been unfaithful to Clive, and in the UK of this era, that's something she doesn't want to let on because reasons partly having to do with lying to Clive about getting a letter from Bill after Clive already kidnapped him.

Now, of course, since the movie got released in the US, we know that it has to conform to the Production Code. So how do things go wrong for Clive? First off, there's Detective Superintendent Finsbury (Naunton Wayne) of Scotland Yard. Finsbury is one of those detectives that dotted noir and noir-adjacent movies who serves to drive the real killer mad by intimating that he knows more about the case than he really does, hoping to get the murderer to screw up. And then there's Storm's dog Monty. One day Storm is going for a walk with the dog, and Monty runs off... precisely to the door of the underground chamber where Clive has Bill holed up. Clive knows that Monty could go back there again and bollix his plans....

The plot of Obsession is a bit far-fetched, but the movie does mostly work, effectively building suspense thanks to a bunch of understated performances from the cast. It's not a prestige movie, which I think is part of why it's not so well-remembered, certainly not on this side of the Atlantic. But it's one that's definitely worth a watch.

The old lions

A movie that had been sitting around on my DVR for quite some time that I finally got around to watching is The Young Lions.

The movie opens up on New Year's Eve in 1938, with American tourist Margaret Freemantle (Barbara Rush) visiting Germany. She's met an army officer, Lt. Christian Diestl (Marlon Brando), and the two discuss the political situation in Germany, as this would have been a few months after the Munich Conference and several months before Europe would be officially plunged into war. Lt. Diestl is apparently a career officer, since he's not the biggest fan of the Nazis although he can't really say that very directly lest he be overheard by Germans who would happily turn him in to the Nazis.

Some time passes, as it's now early 1942. The Americans are now in World War II, and among the guys who get drafted is Michael Whiteacre (Dean Martin). He's a successful stage actor and singer, who had just signed on to do a new play on Broadway. Sorry, but his understudy is going to have to take over for him. Perhaps he can get one of his friends in Washington to give him a cushier job in the Army doing goodwill tours to entertain the regular schlubs.

The other American is Noah Ackerman (Montgomery Clift), a Jew who doesn't have much family left and doesn't have much of a life, having come back east from California and only getting a job as a department store clerk. But he doesn't particularly want to be drafted earlier, so when Michael meets Noah, Michael immeidately befriends him and invites him to a party at his swanky apartment.

There, we find that Michael's girlfriend is one Margaret Freemantle. She's not particularly happy about Michael trying to avoid his duty by using his influence to get a desk job. Michael introduces Noah to another guest at the party, Hope Plowman (Hope Lange). She seems like one of those young women you'd meet in 1930s or early 1940s films who came to New York from a small middle America or New England city. They immediately fall in love and get married and even get Hope pregnant lickety split, if you try to calculate dates based on the way the plot goes.

The rest of the story cuts back and forth between the various characters' development during the war, mostly Noah and Lt. Diestl. Diestl ends up first in Paris, and then in Africa, with his commanding officer, Capt. Hardenberg (Maximilian Schell); Hardenberg grows increasingly suspicious of Diestl since Diestl seems as though he'd rather sit this war out if he could find a way that wouldn't kill him. Noah gets bullied by everybody in boot camp except Michael for no good reason, but eventually goes over to Europe and fights with some distinction. Michael leaves boot camp when his transfer to a cushy job goes through, but pangs of guilt eventually overwhelm him and send him to the regular troops. You know he's going to meet up with Noah again.

The big problem I had with The Young Lions is that it really feels as though it should be two separate films, one focusing on Diestl and one focusing on the two Americans. As things stand, it goes on for 167 minutes and doesn't really give enough character development to either Diestl or Michael. It also feels at times as though it has some plot points it wants to tick off, and does so in a rather perfunctory way. We just have to have the big reveal of a concentration camp liberation, don't we? And Diestl returning to a bombed-out building.

All three of the male leads do their best, and Martin shows that he was capable of taking on dramatic roles, something he did relatively rarely in his career. But ultimately, all three are done no justice by the script. Still, other people may be more able to overlook the script problems thanks to the good performances.

The Juggler

Back at the beginning of the year, TCM ran a couple of nights of movies appropriate for Holocaust Remembrance Day, which gave me the chance to record one I had seen show up cut to pieces for one of the digital sub-channels, The Juggler.

The movie opens with a title card telling us that this is Haifa, in 1949. Haifa is the big port city in the then newly independent state of Israel. As mentioned prominently in Exodus and one or two other movies, after the end of World War II and the liberation of the concentration camps, Jewish refugees tried to make their way to Palestine, only to be blocked by the British mandate, but once Israel became independent, the country was able to take in as many refugees as it could handle.

Among the refugees is Hans Muller (Kirk Douglas), a German Jew who had been a juggler and clown in the circus in his native country, and successful enough to be prominent and to have picked up good English along the way (in the context of the movie, Muller doesn't speak Hebrew but does speak English; this isn't just the characters speaking English for the sake of a Hollywood movie). But then he and his family were put in the concentration camps and he was the only one to survive, with his wife and children being murdered.

As a result of the horrors Muller saw, he's got a bad case of PTSD, not that anyone really knew all that much about it in those days, and certainly not in a new country like Israel which had much more pressing needs, like how to get all these new refugees into appropriate work. Muller is put in the barracks of the main refugee camp, which isn't for him because he's had enough of camps, especially if he can see any barbed wire.

So Muller escapes and makes his way into Haifa, although where he's going is a good question. In Haifa a policeman sees him and Muller sees the policeman too. Muller, thanks to his experiences in Germany, has a primal fear of the police, and acts like a cornered animal, trying to fight his way out when the policeman finally does catch up to him. Muller knocks the policeman unconscious and, thinking he's killed the guy, flees.

The cop is found by a Dutch tourist (John Banner) and the police investigate, led by Detective Kami (Paul Stewart). Muller falls in with a group of adolescents, most of whom are with a school group, although there's one kid, Yehoshua (Joey Walsh) who isn't. When Yehoshua learns that Muller was a juggler, he wants to become one himself.

The two eventually wind up at a kibbutz in Galilee near the Syrian border, an area which was mined to prevent the Syrians from invading, since at the time they still held the strategically important Golan Heights. Yehoshua goes boundering off and sets off one of the mines, knocking him unconscious and breaking his leg. The kibbutzniks save both Yehoshua and Muller, Muller being put up in a small house by Ya'el (Milly Vitale).

Predictably, Muller finds himself falling in love with Ya'el, although keeping everybody from finding out the truth about his past is in the back of his mind, and unsurprisingly, the police are closing in on him, leading to the movie's finale.

The Juggler is a movie that's fallen into relative obscurity, and I think it's somewhat understandable why. The movie was produced by Stanley Kramer and released by Columbia, and I wouldn't be surprised if rights issues help up a DVD release. Stanley Kramer's involvement, combined with the subject material, make it an obvious candidate for falling into the trap of heavy-handed social commentary, and that does happen to an extent here. In particular, the movie ends too suddenly, as if it didn't know how to resolve the issues it set up.

On the bright side, there's a good performance from Kirk Douglas, with the highlight being a performance he puts on for the children of the kibbutz. The movie was also the first Hollywood production made on location in Israel, which also works well even if it's only in black and white. Paul Stewart puts in a professional performance. I don't know that he ever got to be a lead, but it's easy to see why he was able to work for decades in so many movies and TV performances as a supporting character. Vitale and Walsh are adequate.

The DVD of The Juggler does seem to be available at Amazon, but last I checked, not at the TCM Shop.

Back to Bataan

One of my recent DVD purchases was this four-movie set of John Wayne war pictures. First up from the set is Back to Bataan.

If you remember your history of World War II or have seen enough other movies, you'll recall that the Philippines were a US possession until after World War II, and that Japan invaded and ultimately took the islands a few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, leading Douglas MacArthur to declare "I shall return!" The movie starts off with a brief scene of the US retaking the islands, flashing back to the start of the war in the Philippines.

John Wayne plays Col. Madden, who leads a bunch of US troops, which include Filipinos, such as Capt. Bonifacio (Anthony Quinn). The Japanese come, and while MacArthur retreats, Madden is ordered to get to the Filipino resistance and help them in their guerilla actions against the Japanese. Bonifacio is taken prisoner, ultimately being forced to take part in the Bataan Death March.

During the retreat, Madden and his men run into American schoolteacher Bertha (Beulah Bondi). The Japanese had stopped at her school and taken it over, hanging the principal for not taking down the American flag. Of course, the real reason for having Bertha and this school in the movie is because the schoolkids are going to make an appearance later in the movie.

The resistance goes on for about two and a half years, before MacArthur does in fact return at Leyte. But to prepare for the invasion, Madden and the Filipinos are going to have to hold off a bunch of Japanese troops, a lot more in fact than Madden has at his disposal....

Back to Bataan is in many ways a standard-issue war movie, which means that there's nothing particularly notable here, either good or bad. Part of the reason for that is that the movie was released in June 1945, and while production was going on, actual events in the war were overtaking the production, notably the liberation of the POW camps where the Bataan Death March participants were interned. All of this means that the plot, while not incoherent, seems definitely quite simplified. Then again, to be fair, American audiences in June 1945 probably weren't looking for their war movies to be particularly complex.

As for the actual box set, the one I got has two DVDs with two movies each; each DVD having its own spindle. (Some of the reviews on Amazon suggest different packaging, although with Amazon's movie reviews you often get reviews of different released mixed together.) I don't think there are any extras, but for the price you can't really expect extras. If you like war movies and/or the movies of John Wayne, this is definitely a box set for you