Cross No. 7

I've got a couple of World War II movies that I haven't blogged about before on my DVR. One that's technically not a war movie, although it was released during the war and is set in Nazi Germany, is the Spencer Tracy movie The Seventh Cross.

The movie opens up with a shot of several crosses outside one of the old concentration camps inside the borders of Nazi Germany as it was before they annexed any territory or other countries declared war on them; these were not quite the same as the extermination camps set up in present-day Poland to kill the Jews, and had a bunch of political prisoners. Seven men escape from the camp, and one of them, Wallau (Ray Collins), narrates their story, even though he gets captured early on and killed. Since most of them get caught, and Wallau is narrating from beyond the grave, it's mostly the story of one escapee, Georg Heisler (Spencer Tracy).

Heisler along with the others, escaped, but doesn't really have anywhere to go. At least, not many places that could offer him any amount of safety. However, Wallau had been talking about going to Mainz since he had a friend there who is part of the anti-Nazi resistance and might be able to help the men get forged documents that would allow them to travel somewhere, hopefully out of Germany. So Heisler heads there even though he's got a badly injured hand.

The Nazis are making a big deal out of trying to find Georg, no surprise, and are watching as many people who knew Georg as they can think of. As a result, those people who would like to help Georg find themselves unable to do so since they can't reach Georg. The best he can do is see an old girlfriend Leni (Kaaren Verne), but she's no longer able to help him. He's able to get help from a couple of Jews who already know what's coming for them in Nazi Germany, but that is once again only temporary.

Eventually, Georg can only think of one person left who knew him and who, as far as Georg knows, doesn't have any political views, which seems astonishing in a country like Nazi Germany: factory worker Paul Roeder (Hume Cronyn). Paul now has a wife Liesel (Jessica Tandy, who was of course Paul's real-life wife) and kid, and doesn't seem to know anything about Georg's wanted status or why he just suddenly dropped out of society. Paul, however, is fundamentally decent, so he decides that he's going to try to come up with some way to help Georg, even though it's going to put himself in great danger.

There's still a good ways to go in the movie, however, so Georg has a lot more hiding to do until he can either get out of the country or be caught. Considering when the movie was made, I think you can guess how the movie ends.

The Seventh Cross is one of the earliest movies directed in Hollywood by Fred Zinnemann, who does a fine job here. Unsurprisingly, Tracy is also quite good even though I don't think of him as realistically German. Neither is Hume Cronyn, who got an Oscar nomination for his part. If the movie has any flaws, it's in the script which doesn't really get to be subtle since the movie had to be something that would please American audiences during the war. In that regard it succeeds in spades. The Seventh Cross is a fine example of a World War II-era suspense movie.

The Opera phantom of 1943

I'm not certain how many horror movies I'm going to be blogging about in October, just because I haven't examined the schedule closely enough to see what's on my DVR that's also airing in October to do posts on, or which horror films are worth blogging about in general more than the stuff that's in my queue of movies to post about. So since a horror film has made it to the top of my queue, I'm not going to wait until October to mention it: the 1943 version of Phantom of the Opera.

Claude Rains plays the phantom here, although as the movie opens he's decidedly not the phantom, but still looking as elegant as Claude Rains always did. Rains plays Erique Claudin, and at the start of the movie he's one of the violinists in the orchestra at the Paris Opera House. But the conductor can tell that one of the violinists is off, and he's pretty certain it's Erique. So after the show, the conductor calls Erique into the office to play for him. Eric plays a simple tune of his own composition, something that's easy to play. The conductor isn't fooled, and on learning that Erique has some sort of neurologic issue affecting his hands, forces Erique into a pension.

It's a modest pension, but the conductor knows that Erique lives modestly and his savings combined with the pension should provide a comfortable enough requirement. What the conductor doesn't know is that Erique has been stupid, thinking with his little head instead of his big one. Christine Dubois (Susanna Foster) is an understudy to the lead in the opera, and Erique has fallen head over heels in love with her. She doesn't know this, however, and already has two other suitors, the opera's baritone Garron (Nelson Eddy), and police inspector Daubert (Edgar Barrier). In fact, Erique has spent all his money anonymously paying for music lessons for Christine so she can make it as the lead soloist.

Erique doesn't have any money to pay the rent, but he has been working on a concerto that he hopes can be published. The publisher he submitted it to, Pleyel (not the piano maker), tells he hasn't gotten around to it, but then in the background Erique hears the concerto being played. So he naturally assumes Pleyel is trying to steal it, copyright law not being so strong in those days, and doesn't realize that Franz Liszt has shown up and taken a look at the new concerto. (You may recall from other movies that Liszt was a champion of young composers.) Erique gets in a dispute with Pleyel, and in the resulting fracas a tray of printer's etching acid gets thrown in his face, badly disfiguring him. So this is how he became the Phantom.

Now a wanted man and with little money and a horrible face, Erique retreats under the Paris Opera House, and sets about figuring ways to get revenge on the people who wronged him as well as getting Christine her chance to be the lead soloist. He drugs the actual female lead, and this brings the police in. And wouldn't you know it, but Daubert is the detective on the case! Erique makes more threats (amazingly, nobody recognizes his handwriting), and the threats become increasingly violent. However, the Code won't allow Erique to get away with murder, and the story was always intended to be tragic anyway, at least for the Phantom.

As I watched this version of Phantom of the Opera, it seemed to me rather different from how I recalled the Lon Chaney silent version, which I'll admit I haven't seen in quite a few years. Reading up on it, Universal made quite a few changes to Gaston Leroux's original story, a lot more than the 1925 film version did. Universal also sprung for Technicolor on this version, having access to the lovely three-strip Technicolor process that they didn't in 1925, when only the two-strip process that didn't produce such lifelike or vivid colors was around. Technicolor is a great choice here, as the color is beautiful and the cinematography is quite good. The acting, however, apart from Rains, is mediocre, a lot because the story puts more emphasis on opera singing than on opera acting.

But while this 1943 version of Phantom of the Opera is a bit of a mixed bag, for the most part it's a more than adequate production that's definitely worth watching.

Rollover

Another of the movies that I watched because it was about to leave the Watch TCM app was one that sounded like it had an interesting premise, and turned out to have a far more interesting, if flawed ending than the rest of the movie: Rollover.

The movie is set in the world of high finance, with the opening credits over shots of one of the trading floors at Boro National Bank in New York at night, when there's no trading going on. Boro National Bank is in a spot of financial difficulty, as they've got a bunch of international accounts, and the holders of their accounts want to repatriate their holdings, leading to a sort of run on the bank. Meanwhile, over at competing First New York Bank, the executive Maxwell Emery (Hume Cronyn) seems to be OK with this, as it will allow his bank to purchase a distressed asset at rock-bottom prices, much like buying a foreclosed house.

Also worried about the state of Boro National is Charlie Winters, head of a petrochemical company and one of the biggest American accounts at the bank, one that has no need of repatriating its accounts. Charlie is doing a bit of financial digging, and determines that money is being moved from places like Boro National to a mysterious account #21214 at First New York. But that's as far as he gets, because he's murdered.

Charlie leaves behind a widow, Lee (Jane Fonda) who, like Joan Crawford before her, was a Hollywood actress. Unlike Joan, however, Lee doesn't go back to acting and putting product placement of petrochemicals in her movies. Like Joan, however, she gets named to the board of the company, in fact becoming head of the company. She's no dummy, either, and has found a Spanish company whose assets would be perfect for her company, except that she's going to need financing through Boro National.

Maxwell, of course, is trying to get control of Boro National, and to that end sends executive Hub Smith (Kris Kristofferson) to work there to investigate the soundness of the underlying assets. Hub isn't so sure, and as he investigates of course he too is going to learn about that account #21214. Lee is going to discover it too, although in her case it's because she serendipitously finds a surreptitious recording her late husband had made talking about the account.

Eventually, it's discovered that the account is for another repatriation account, this one for Arab oil producers. They've been putting mid-seven-figure amounts of dollars into the account on a monthly basis, which is fairly substantial by early 1980s standards but not enough to cause bank runs. However, the Arabs have enough money that it could cause a run if they all decide to pull out their dollars in one fell swoop, and even Emery doesn't want that.

It's all an interesting premise, but one problem that a movie like Rollover faces is trying to present the world of high fiance in a way that's cinematically interesting, while also being intelligent and entertaining. One of the things Rollover does that doesn't work is to create a love interest between Lee Winters and Hub Smith. Rollover also posits an outcome of a liquidity crisis that to me didn't seem quite so realistic. Some might look at the politics of Jane Fonda and director Alan Pakula and blame this for the movie's conclusion, although I think that's a bit harsh.

Still, Rollover is interesting, at least as speculation and a look at how people saw the world of high finance circa 1980. It apparently got a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive, and can be streamed on at least Amazon Prime Video.

Sunrise at Campobello

Another of the movies that TCM ran during the 100th anniversary salute to Warner Bros. is one that has a fairly well-known story, if the actual movie itself may not be quite so well known. (Indeed, I was surprised by the low number of reviews on IMDb.) That is the movie version of the play Sunrise at Campbello.

Ralph Bellamy plays Franklin Roosevelt, but this is well before he became President. Instead, it starts in the summer of 1921, at the Roosevelts' summer home on Campobello Island in New Brunswick just across the border from Maine. Those who don't know US history quite so well may not recall that Franklin Roosevelt had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the Woodrow Willson administration, which included World War I. In 1920, he was nominated for the Vice-Presidency by Democratic presidential candidate James Cox, an election that saw heavy defeats for the Democrats and kicked Roosevelt into the political wilderness. His grasping wife Eleanor (played by Greer Garson) wanted him to keep campaigning for progressive causes, while his more stately mother Sara (Ann Shoemaker), who had been part of the upper-class for some time, wasn't so sure.

And then the non-political thing for which Franklin Roosevelt is best known happened. Franklin and the kids went swimming in the Bay of Fundy one day, and Roosevelt didn't get out of his wet bathing suit for some time. He developed pains in his legs, and then a fever which did not subside for some time. Doctors were called in and diagnosed polio (although some modern-day authors think it might actually have been Guillain-Barré instead). As we all know, Roosevelt would need a wheelchair for the rest of his life, while everybody around him tried to keep that a secret from the public.

That's actually the main plot of the movie; the debilitation led Sara to suggest even more strongly that Franklin should retire to a life of writing at the family estate at Hyde Park. Eleanor and, to a lesser extent, Franklin's best friend and advisor Louis Howe (Hume Cronyn) thought that there might be some chance of recovery and encouraged Franklin to stay active. Meanwhile, Eleanor especially doesn't want it known by the public just how sick Franklin really is. Eleanor, however, keeps her husband's name in the public eye by going out and campaiging for Democrats in the 1992 elections, when they made big gains, coming just short of a majority in the House of Representatives.

The 1924 presidential election was on the horizon, and Franklin had no political capital or experience to make a run himself. Instead, he supported his ally in his home state of New York, Governor Al Smith (Alan Bunce). There was a thought that the Republicans might be weak, with many who had served under Harding compromised by the Teapot Dome scandal and Calvin Coolidge, who became president when Harding died suddenly, not having much of a political base within the Republican party. Now, I knew that Smith would gain the 1928 nomination for the Democrats, and that he didn't gain the nomination in 1924, so I was mildly surprised to see this show up in the movie. When I did a bit of research, I was reminded that in those days the political parties didn't have the long string of primaries that we see in the US today. Smith and a former Treasury Secretary from California, William Gibbs McAdoo, were the two leading nominees, although delegates deadlocked with the result that after dozens of ballots a compromise candidate, John Davis, was ultimately selected.

Anyhow, the movie deals with Franklin Roosevelt's role in the convention, which was to place Smith's name in nomination and give a speech. However, Eleanor and Louis Howe didn't want Franklin to deliver the speech from his wheelchair as everybody would see just how weak he was. Instead, Franklin was going to have to make the ten or so steps from the curtain up to the podium from which he'd deliver his nominating speech (this is the speech in which the term "Happy Warrior" was coined for Al Smith). The movie more or less ends with Roosevelt placing Smith's name in nomination. Since this is all based on real history, we know what happened and I don't think I'm giving much away.

Sunrise at Campobello is definitely hagiography, although it's fairly well-made hagiography. Also, it should be unsurprising that the movie takes such a positive tone toward Franklin Roosevelt. At this point in time, nobody would have greenlit anything that wasn't overly positive toward him. Certainly not somebody like Dory Schary, who wrote the play and was a decided Hollywood liberal (remember, a decade earlier he took over from Louis B. Mayer at MGM and changed the tone of the studio's output). To add to that, Eleanor Roosevelt was an advisor, and there was no way anything strongly negative would have passed her approval.

Still, Bellamy and Cronyn both give pretty good performances, although Garson is rather weaker in giving what seems more like a parody of Eleanor Roosevelt like what Louis B. Mayer gave us in Babes in Arms 20 years earlier. Bellamy has gone on to be thought of as the definitive FDR thanks to his performance in the play and later movie; this is your chance to see the movie.

The Years of Color

One of the movies that I hadn't seen before this years 31 Days of Oscar is The Green Years. It's going to be on TCM tomorrow at 1:45 PM, and fortunately, I had it on the DVR to watch and do a review here.

Robert Shannon (played by Dean Stockwell as a child) is a young boy circa 1900 whose mother moved to Ireland to get married, but she and her husband have both died, leaving poor Robert an orphan. His family is mostly living in Loganford, Scotland, so the people who took care of Mom at the end of her life ship Robert off to that family.

The patriarch of the family is Papa Leckie (Hume Cronyn), Robert's maternal grandfather, married to Mama Leckie (Selena Royle), even though there are two great-grandparents around, known as Grandma Leckie (Gladys Cooper) and Grandpa Gow (Charles Coburn). There are also a couple of adult children who are Robert's aunt and uncles, but they mostly move out, having grown up, only to return now and then.

There are all sorts of conflicts right off the bat. Papa Leckie works for Loganford's sewer department, hoping to get a promotion when his boss leaves. Meanwhile, he's a severe penny pincher, to the point that it annoys everybody else in the house. Papa is more or less waiting for his father-in-law to die so he can get his hands on that sweet sweet insurance money. Grandpa Gow is also disliked intensely by Grandma Leckie, since Gow is a bon vivant and inveterate teller of tall tales who also has a taste for the drink.

Robert's entrance into the family also means that there's another mouth to feed. He shows quite a bit of aptitude at school, to the point that Papa will consistently point out later that he made a big sacrifice by not pulling Robert out of the Academy at the legal school-leaving age but letting him go on to graduate. Also complicating things is that he's Catholic, his Mom having converted while the family back in Scotland having remained whichever Protestant denomination they were.

So that's more or less the first half of the movie. The second half opens after several years have passed and Robert is about to graduate from the Academy. He's grown up and Dean Stockwell is obviously too young to play the ~18-year-old Robert, so he's now played by Tom Drake. He's got a best friend who's relatively well-to-do and can go off to university, and a girlfriend who's got a good enough singing voice that she might have a shot at a scholarship to the conservatory. As for Robert, he's in line to take the examination to get a scholarship to go to university with the aim of studying medicine and become a doctor. But there's a catch: Papa Leckie is going to have to sign off on it, and dammit, he only sees Robert as a source of revenue, so it's off to the local boiler factory for Robert, Papa having no qualms about crushing his grandson's dreams.

Thankfully, despite being three generations older than Robert and having had a lifetime of heavy drinking, Gow still hasn't dropped dead. He's the one member of the family who has always been kind to Robert (well, Mama Leckie has generally been on his side too), and even at this advanced age he's going to do all he can to try to fulfill Robert's dream, because, after all, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.

The Green Years is the sort of movie that MGM was good at making, and the polish that MGM could put on a movie like this really shines through. Now, a lot of it is probably nonsense; Coburn has a truly awful beard and I don't know that any two characters have the same Scottish accent. But, minus a couple of musical numbers since the studio was trying to promote Beverly Tyler, it's amiable enough. It runs a bit long at just over two hours, though, so be warned.

The Green Years did get a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection, but the TCM Shop has it on backorder, while Amazon has it listed as avaialble to buy from a bunch of non-Amazon sellers. Make of that what you will.

Cocoon

I can't recall the last time Cocoon showed up on FXM. It's been on TCM a couple of times, and I recorded it the last time it showed up. But it's finally on the FXM schedule, having gotten an airing today and on again tomorrow morning at 11:10 AM. So I sat down to watch it and do a review on it here.

Wilford Brimley plays Ben Luckett, who lives at a senior citizens' community together with his wife Mary (Maureen Stapleton) and several of his more recent friends. Ben being a bit younger (in real life Brimley was 20-25 years younger than most of the other retiree co-stars), he can still drive at least for the time being, and is somewhat more independent, as opposed, say, to the Lefkowitzes, Bernie (Jack Gilford) and Rosie (Herta Ware), the latter of whom has some form of dementia.

While a lot of people are doing the standard old-fart group activities that the retirement home puts on, Ben breaks in to the unoccupied home next door, which has a nice pool house that nobody is going to notice him and his friends using. These friends are unmarried Art (Don Ameche), and Joe Finley (Hume Cronyn), married to Alma (Cronyn's real-life wife Jessica Tandy).

Meanwhile, at the marina nearby, Jack Bonner (Steve Guttenberg) is running a struggling charter boat business. He's lucky to be able to pay off his dockage fees, but other than that, he's had a terrible string of bad luck. So how does all of this come together?

One day, Walter (Brian Dennehy) shows up along with friends including Kitty (Raquel Welch's daughter Tahnee) and Pillsbury (Tyrone Power Jr., although he's really the third or fourth member of the acting family with that name, since "Tyrone Power Sr." was a silent film star and there was one before that). They offer Jack a substantial sum of money in exchange for exclusive use of the boat for the next month. They also show up over at the unoccupied home, looking to rent that for a month, too.

This puts a crimp in the plans of Ben and his friends, who might not be able to use the pool any longer. They decide that they'll still go in when they see Walter and his friends go out on the boat; that way they know they'll have the pool for a while. As for Walter's group, they go scuba diving and bring up what look like large shells that have been lying on the sea floor for who knows how long, bring them on the boat, and then store them in the pool.

This last bit, unsurprisingly, gives the three old men a bit of pause, but they still go into the pool even with these rocks or whatever they are in the pool. They find out after getting out of the pool that they feel much younger -- and hornier -- with all sorts of similar anti-aging effects. Ben had failed the eyesight portion of his license renewal but now passes with flying colors, while Joe finds that his terminal cancer is suddenly in remission.

This should be good news, but there are consequences that aren't entirely positive, such as when Joe starts flirting with other women and it threatens to break up his marriage to Alma, whom he loves dearly.

As for that pool, it turns out that Walter and his friends are aliens, which we first learn when Jack is watching Kitty undress through a small hole in the boat. She doesn't just undress; she takes off her skin, revealing a bright light/pure energy being that obviously throws Jack for a loop. The big surprise is that the aliens don't seem to be afraid of Jack when he finds this out. Nor do they seem afraid of all the old people when Walter finds Ben and his friends in it.

As for those rocks or shells, they're actually the titular cocoons. Walter and his friends had led an expeditionary force from another star system millennia ago, but were forced to leave, putting their friends in these cocoons and depositing them at the bottom of the sea until they could return. (You'd think 10,000 years of geological processes might have done something to the cocoons, but apparently not.) Walter is back to retrieve his friends, and filled the pool with some sort of life force energy that would keep the cocoons and the beings in them alive until they can get back to the spaceship, where they'll live out their immortal days until the heat death of the universe.

But there's a limited amount of life force in that pool, and the energy revitalizing Ben and friends and making them young again ultimately saps all of that energy, making it no longer a fountain of youth and even resulting in the deaths of one of the beings, this being the first death Walter has experienced personally. It's that bit of emotion that leads Walter to accept Ben's sincere apology as well as Ben's offer to help put the remaining cocoons back on the sea floor until Walter can come one more time to retrieve them. In exchange, Walter offers to take Ben and his friends on the spaceship where they can be eternally young and a useful part of some alien society. But will they be willing to leave everything they know behind, and can they even escape?

Cocoon for much of the first half seems like a light silly science fiction fantasy, but with the draining of the life force in the pool it really turns into something thought-provoking and interesting. Of course the idea of not having to grow old and decrepit like Rose is appealing, but most of the time we don't really think about the consequences of an action like that. The material is handled well, and the performances of all these older actors getting another chance at a third act in life are reasonably good, even if Don Ameche's Oscar really seems more like a career award.

Cocoon is absolutely worth a watch, and I was surprised to see that it seems to be out of print on DVD. It does, however, seem to be available on Amazon streaming if you don't have FXM.