Paris, Texas

Another of those movies that would probably have been on my "Blind Spot" list if I took part in the "Blind Spot" blogathon is Paris, Texas. I've stated before that I don't take part mostly because it requires me coming up with a series of movies that I'm going to be watching over a full year. Since I generally don't know what's going to be showing up to watch that far in advance, I don't take part and just get around to watching the movies I haven't seen before when they do show up. In the case of Paris, Texas, that was quite some time back that TCM ran it and I recorded it. Once again, I watched it before it expired, and then wrote and scheduled this post.

A man walks through a desert in west Texs with just a gallon jug of water in his hands. Stupidly, he discards the jug upon emptying it. He makes it to a building that has what looks like an honor bar: take a drink and pay for it. The man takes some ice, but eventually faints on the floor. Thankfully, there was another person in the bar who takes the man to the closest thing there is to a doctor. When said doctor goes through the man's things looking for some ID, he finds a card with the name and phone number of a Walt Henderson (Dean Stockwell).

Walt lives in the Los Angeles area, where he works as a graphic designer designing billboards and lives with his wife Anne (Aurore Clément). Walt isn't exactly pleased to get the phone call, since taking time off work is going to be a hassle although that's really the least of the issues. Walt knows that the man in Texas is actually his brother Travis (Harry Dean Stanton). Travis dropped out of life four years ago, and worse, put his kid in a taxi and sent the kid to Walt and Anne's place because Travis' wife Jane similarly dropped out of life. The kid was almost too young at the time to remember his biological parents, and Walt and Anne have raised the kid, Hunter, as their own, not having any biological children themselves. So how is the kid going to deal with having this stranger back in his life?

Of course, simply getting Travis to LA is going to be tough. Travis goes on about Paris, since his and Walt's parents joked about conceiving Travis in Paris. Travis has a photo of a plot of land that he claims to own, and Walt doesn't get what this has to do with Paris since Walt doesn't yet realize that there is a town in Texas also called Paris which is where the land is. Also, Travis keeps trying to run away and doesn't talk for the longest time.

Eventually, however, they do get back to Los Angeles, and Travis starts talking. At this point, you'd think Walt and Anne would start talking with Travis about whether he might try getting a job and reintegrating into normal human life. Instead, Anne tells Travis about a bank account that Hunter has, one which gets regular deposits by wire transfer in the days when there was no internet to do such electronic transfers. The money is presumably coming from Hunter's mother Jane, and those transfers are coming from a bank in Houston, so Travis takes Hunter and drives off toward Houston in the hopes of finding Jane since apparently not so many branches could do these transfers at the time.

Travis and Hunter basically set about stalking the bank, and find a woman who looks like she could be Jane (Nastassja Kinski) and start following her, eventually coming to a nondescript building in a crappy part of Houston that serves as the home for the sort of business you wouldn't want your mother to be working for. But is this woman really Jane? And if so, will Travis be able to make real contact with her?

Paris, Texas is a movie that certainly has an interesting premise, although it's another one that I found myself thinking is full of characters who certainly wouldn't be acting that way in real life. It's also one that definitely goes way too slowly at times. The running time is about 145 minutes, and is the sort of story that I think could easily have been edited to get down to under two hours. Still, I can understand why there are a lot of people who would find Paris, Texas to be interesting for how different it is from traditional Hollywood fare. Definitely watch and judge for yourself.

Wild At Heart

Actress Diane Ladd died earlier this week at the age of 89. I just happened to have Wild At Heart on my DVR from when TCM showed it as part of their programming tribute to director David Lynch, so I decided I'd watch it as soon as possible to put up a review here. (Now watch it get added to the December night of movies for people who died in 2025.)

Nicolas Cage stars as Sailor, who at the start of the movie is at a hotel ballroom in Cape Fear, NC, together with girlfriend Lula (Laura Dern). As he's walking down the stairs, he's stopped by another man who says he saw Sailor and Lula doing the nasty in the bathroom, which is a big no-no because Lula's mom Marietta (Diane Ladd) doesn't like Sailor. This other man then concludes by pulling out a knife with which he clearly intends to stab poor Sailor to death. Sailor is able to get the knife out of the other man's hand and then proceeds to beat this other man quite violently, eventually bashing the guy's head in well past the point of death.

So, obviously, this is at the very least manslaughter: while Sailor had reason to fear for his life, beating the other guy all the way to death wasn't quite called for. Sailor spends just shy of two years in prison, and when he tries to call Lula, it's her mom who answers, and who is absolutely pissed about Sailor's trying to contact Lula. Lula, for her part, loves Sailor, so she shows up at the prison on the day Sailor gets released on parole. There's a catch of course, which is that Sailor is supposed to stay in the area or else it's a parole violation. But that would mean staying near Marietta. Sailor decides, screw it, he's going to violate parole by going all the way off to California, and would Lula be willing to join him? She does, and they set out on the road.

Marietta is again unhappy about this, and gets in touch with her boyfriend Johnnie (Harry Dean Stanton). Johnnie's job is to find Lula and Sailor, and get them back to North Carolina. But at the same time, Marietta has another boyfriend, Santos (J.E. Freeman). Marietta gets in touch with him, too, and gives him a contract to kill Sailor. Santos being much more violent, also gets in touch with contract killers to have Johnnie killed to, presumably so that only Santos can get the money for dealing with Sailor. Sailor is bright enough to know that he's probably not quite safe on the run, and not just safe from the legitimate authorities.

As Sailor and Lula make their way down first to New Orleans, and then to middele-of-nowhere Texas, we learn more about Lula's past. She was raped at 13 by her father's business partner, while Dad responded by setting himself on fire and killing himself. Except that we learn later that perhaps this wasn't a suicide but Mom and Santos killing Dad, with Sailor having witnessed what happened, which would certainly explain why Lula's mom has it in for Sailor.

Stuck in Texas, the couple stays at a hotel full of weirdos, including Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe). Sailor needs money in order to be able to support Lula as a wife, especially because she's pretty darn certain she's pregnant with Sailor's child. Bobby gets Sailor involved in a scheme to rob an agricultural feed store, but that robbery goes wrong, leading to the movie's denouement....

Wild At Heart got mixed reviews on release, and it's easy to see why. It's decidedly violent, although I don't necessarily have a problem with the violence. However, as with the other of Lynch's films that I've seen, it's also highly stylized, and that Lynch style isn't something that's a favorite of mine. I didn't care for it at all with Eraserhead; with Blue Velvet I didn't dislike the movie although the mannered execution of it is disconcerting at time. In Wild at Heart, everybody's weird for no good reason, to the point of being highly artificial. Some people are going to love this, but for me it's also easy to see how some people are absolutely going to hate it.

Of course, if you're already a fan of David Lynch, you've probably seen Wild At Heart, so none of this is going to be new to you. Sit back, watch it (again), and enjoy.

All About the Benjamins

Another one of those movies that I saw ages ago, before I even started this blog, and never got around to watching another time is Private Benjamin. So, when it showed up on TCM last year on Veteran's Day, I recorded it so I could watch it and finally do a post on it here.

Goldie Hawn plays Judy Benjamin, a Jewish woman from an upper-class Philadelphia family who's about to get married to Yale Goodman (Albert Brooks). Judy has lived a life of leisure and, marrying a rich lawyer-type, she's going to be able to continue that by being the rich wife instead of having to go out into the professional world. The wedding goes off without a hitch but, as Yale is consummating the marriage later that evening, he suddenly drops dead of a heart attack, literally right on top of poor Judy.

As you might guess, Judy is disconsolate, with nobody being able to cheer her up, which frankly is perfectly normal considering her husband not only died on their wedding night, but died under rather morbid circumstances. So she calls up one of those late-night radio shows to pour her heart out, which brings her into contact with an army officer who also calls in, Sgt. Ballard (Harry Dean Stanton in a small role). Ballard pretty much lies to her about what life in the army is like and, being armed with all these lies, Judy decides she's going to enlist as a wy to try to turn her life around.

Judy gets sent to basic training in the Deep South with a bunch of other stock character types you've seen in pretty much every other service comedy, and it's here that Judy realizes she's been fed a bunch of lies, with her superior officers, Capt. Lews (Eileen Brennan) and drill sergeant Ross (Hal Williams) belittling her for her naïveté. Pvt. Benjamin decides she's going to stick it out and not give her superiors the satisfaction of her quitting, while she also makes friends with her fellow recruits. They dumb luck their way into winning war games and, on a weekend furlough to New Orlenas, Benjamin meets a French doctor, Tremont (Armand Assante) who tells her to look him up if she's ever in Europe.

Fat chance of her getting to Europe. Except that she's given the chance to try out for the paratroopers, where her new CO, Col. Thornbush (Robert Webber) goes too far in trying to encourage her to overcome her fear of jumping out of a plane. Rather than create controversy, it's decided among everybody to get Pvt. Benjamin as far away from Thornbush as possible, which means transferring Benjamin... to NATO headquarters in Brussels, where Capt. Lewis just happened to get transferred herself a few months earlier.

At this point, the movie takes a decidedly uneven turn, as it becomes less about Pvt. Benjamin's adventures in the army and more about her relationship with Tremont, a subplot which doesn't always work. Tremont keeps giving Benjamin reasons to believe that he might not be faithful to her or that there are other bits of his past that he's hiding. What future with Pvt. Benjamin choose for herself?

Goldie Hawn received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Private Benjamin, although I have to say that after watching three of the other four nominees (I still haven't seen Ellen Burstyn in Resurrection) that the other nominees were phenomenal while Hawn was "only" very good. Hawn is quite good when the movie requires her to be comic, but the script somewhat lets her down when it moves to the romance portion in Paris. Eileen Brennan also got an Oscar nomination and she's really good, although I can't judge her against the other nominees since I haven't seen all of them. Of course, Brennan isn't really in the romantic part of the script.

Private Benjamin is mostly a good movie, but it is somewhat uneven due to the two plots. Still, it's decidedly worth watching.

Not mine to give, or Our Father's House

Another of those movies that I recorded because the synopsis sounded interesting, even though I had never heard of the movie before I saw it on the TCM schedule, was Where the Lilies Bloom.

The story is narrated by Mary Call Luther (Julie Gholson, who didn't have a movie career other than this as far as I know), the second daughter of Roy Luther (Rance Howard, father of Ron). Roy is a widower living with his four children in the hardscrabble mountains of western North Carolina. They eke out a meager living as subsistence farmers -- well, not even that any more since Roy couldn't afford the taxes on the land and his rival Kiser Pease (Harry Dean Stanton, along with Howard one of the few "names" in the cast) bought the land, making the Luthers effectively sharecroppers and making a little extra money by scrounging for herbs and roots.

Mary Call is the narrator despite being the second child, largely because she's got a good head on her shoulders, as opposed to eldest daughter Devola (Jan Smithers, the one other "name" in the cast, who would go on to WKRP in Cincinnati) who is more of a dreamer. So it's Mary Call that Dad confides in and who is sort of the woman of the house with Mom dead, this despite the fact that she's only middle school aged. Dad tells her that he's getting sicker and doesn't expect to live that much longer and that she's going to have to keep the family together after he dies. The Luther's don't seem to have much in the way of relatives, and Dad doesn't want the kids split up and put into various foster homes, although you have to wonder what's going to happen to a family like this once the kids all grow up.

Anyhow, Dad has one other wish for Mary Call, which is that she keep Devola from marrying Kiser, since Dad sees Kiser as his enemy for having taken the land out from under him. Kiser kinda sorta has his eye on Devola in spite of the age difference, although I get the impression that in Appalachia generations ago (the movie seems contemporary to at least 1969, when the book on which it is based was published), such an age difference wasn't quite as big a deal. Mary Coll agrees, and starts getting ready for when Dad finally dies.

That happens maybe a third of the way into the movie, and much of the rest of the movie deals with Mary Coll trying to keep the outside world from finding out that Dad died, which seems like it would be a pretty hard ruse to keep up, especially by the 1960s. Despite having both Kiser and some other busybodies visit, everybody acts like they don't realize that Roy Luther is actually dead. But you can guess where the movie is going to go.

Where the Lilies Bloom isn't a bad movie, helped by production having been done on location, that being the Wataugh County, NC, where Appalachian State University is located, in the era before it changed the demographics of the region. The production also hired a bunch of locals as extras, which also adds a lot of local flavor.

However, the story does strain credulity, since I find it hard to believe nobody could figure out how Dad had died. It's the same issue Our Mother's House does, although that's mostly a pretty darn good movie. All Mine to Give at least figured out that everybody was going to know the kids were now orphans. Where the Lilies Bloom isn't quite as good as the other two, although the location shooting makes the story worth watching.

Straight Time

This month, TCM has been doing a different salute than the normal Star of the Month programming feature, instead honoring stars of the 1970s with more or less one film each. On this final Friday of the month, we have a movie that was in my YouTube TV "library" (the equivalent of the DVR for those who don't do YouTube TV), so I made a point of watching it in order to be able to do a post here. That movie is Straight Time, which kicks the night off at 8:00 PM.

The star being honored here is Dustin Hoffman. He plays Max Dembo, a man who at the start of the movie is just getting out of prison, having been in and out of prison his entire adult life. He meets his parole officer, Earl Frank (M. Emmet Walsh), who informs Max that among the other rules of his parole is that he get a stable job, which sends him to the employment office. There, he meets social worker Jenny (Theresa Russell), new to the job, and he's clearly taken with her. The feeling is apparently mutual, as she's willing to go on a date with him, which seems like it would be a violation of the rules, but then that's just the first violation.

Max gets a job as a cannery, a job that's fairly mind-numbing and doesn't seem suitable to somebody like Max. He also gets a room in one of those "hotels" that's really closer to a rooming house, and it's there that his old buddy Willy (Gary Busey) visits him, shooting up in the hotel room, which is a major no-no for max. Needless to say, Earl visits and finds evidence of the drug use, sending Max back to jail until he's able to have a clean drug test. But it's already cost him his job, and Max realizes he's not going to be able to stay straight, at least not with the friends he has. (One could say with friends like that, who needs enemies?)

But Max, now having nowhere to go and no knowledge of how to stay straight, decides he's going to go back to crime, as long as he can keep from getting caught. He meets fellow robber Jerry (Harry Dean Stanton), and the two of them set about on a series of robberies at least until something goes wrong to screw one of them up. Meanwhile, Jenny is putting her own life and career on the line by continuing to be a romantic partner of Max....

Straight Time is one of those 1970s movies that I think will sharply divide opinion. Some people are going to love that it's daring and willing to challenge the stereotypes of old Hollywood, while others are probably going to feel as though it's a bit aimless, with a lot of gaps left for the viewer to fill and really demanding the viewer's attention. I found myself a bit split on this one. It's not my favorite by any means, but at the same time I didn't exactly dislike it. At the same time, I can easily see why some people would really like it, especially those who see 1970s Hollywood as a breath of fresh air after the strictures of the old Production Code.

So I'd give Straight Time a qualified recommendation. If you know what you're getting into and that's your thing, I think you'll definitely like it. But it's not a film for everybody by any means.