Another Two for One repeat

I mentioned last week how TCM is re-running the spring season of Two for One in the fall, and how this is giving me the opportunity to put up a couple of posts on films that I recorded the first time around and am now able to watch to do these posts. The guest for tonight, Sept. 19, is actress Sheryl Lee Ralph, and one of her selections is one of her first movie roles, in support of Sidney Poitier in A Piece of the Action at 10:00 PM.

An introductory sequence shows Dave Anderson (Bill Cosby), master safe-cracker, getting into the Chicago headquarters of a loan corporation where they keep the safe full of cash. Dave gets into the safe, steals a large sum of money, and is able to get away by jumping out a window into a truck below and driving off.

Cut to a completely unrelated crook, Manny Durrell (Sidney Poitier). He's studied the movements of illegal bookmker Mr. Bruno (Titos Vandis), and uses that to set up what looks like a police raid of Bruno's upscale home where the books and a lot of cash are kept. Bruno fills a briefcase full of cash and gives it to the maid to take to a trusted source. In fact, the maid is working for Manny and she's the one with the cash that Manny is bilking out of Bruno, which would also explain why she didn't get pinched while leaving the house when the police were surrounding it. Those fake police were also working for Burrell.

Meanwhile, during the raid, Bruno calls his mole in the police department to find out what's going on. That mole talks to Det. Joshua Burke (James Earl Jones), which is how Bruno learns it's a fake raid and is going to get whoever is responsible. Meanwhile, Burke is set to retire in a few months. When he does, the first thing he does is write a couple of anonymous letters, to Manny and Dave, as well as a third. Manny and Dave's notes inform them that somebody knows about those jobs we saw at the opening, with a threat to send the two of them to prison if they don't meet the writer at a certain hotel suite. The two men are then directed the next day to a restaurant where they'll learn what their "punishment" entails.

In fact, they don't meet the letter writer, but the recipient of the third letter, Lila French (Denise Nicholas). She runs a community center that is trying to help inner-city youth by doing things such as finding them jobs, even though these are clearly embittered youths. (Sheryl Lee Ralph plays one of the youths.) The letter writer has put Dave's name to the letter, saying that Dave and Manny would be happy to "volunteer" an extremely generous amount of time to the center, which they're forced into doing although Lila doesn't seem bright enough to figure out there's some sort of blackmail going on here.

At this point, the movie really starts to sag as the inner-city youths seem like a bunch of stock character types; I will admit however, that I have no idea whether inner-city adolescents would in fact have acted like that. They come across as being as much of a stereotype as the Sweathogs on Welcome Back, Kotter. But Dave and Manny have an obligation to help them get jobs since that will keep them out of jail. They also use their in at the improvement center to try to figure out who exactly is blackmailing them. Meanwhile, Bruno is busy looking for the people who robbed him out of all that money, and he's going to figure it out in time for the movie's climax....

A Piece of the Action is another of those movies that sounds like a good idea on paper, but doesn't quite work in practice. One is that I've already mentioned how the young people don't quite seem real here. There's also the fact that it's trying to be a drama with some comedy when it should really be a comedy with some drama. I have a feeling that Sidney Poitier, who also directed, wanted to have the movie serve as social commentary on the issues of the inner city. But the biggest flaw is that the film sags at a massive 135 minutes, which is really much too long for the material. It's the sort of film that should really be clocking in at an hour and a half or so.

Still, I'm sure there are people who will enjoy A Piece of the Action more than I did, since it's one of those movies that has its heart in the right place.

Matewan

James Earl Jones died last year, and when TCM did their programming salute to him, it gave me the chance to record a movie that I had seen pop up here and there over the years, but had never actually watched. That movie is the historical drama Matewan.

Matewan is based on the true story of the Battle of Matewan, part of a series of coal mining disputes in West Virginia in the early 1920s. The mine owners hold all the cards economically, and as a result are able to get away with offering little more than lousy conditions to the locals who work the mine. They've been thinking about forming a union, especially once the mine owners effectively lower the wages, but the mine owners can just bring new workers in, and we see a train of such replacement workers as the movie opens, with blacks like "Few Clothes" Johnson (James Earl Jones) and eventually Italian immigrants who speak little enough English that they're easy to exploit.

Into all of this comes union organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper). He's much like the Ron Liebman character in Norma Rae, although even more here, his involvement with the union has to be kept a secret or else the mine owners are really going to be angry and place Kenehan's life in danger. Still, a man seemingly without a job looking to stay in a company town like this is bound to be noticed, so he tries to be discreet staying in the boarding house run by Elma Radnor with her son Danny, one of those would-be child preachers who gives radical sermons about the local situation which are also a way of informing people rather obliquely what's going on.

The mine owners know something's up, so they send in a couple of detectives, Griggs and Hickey, to try to find out exactly what the deal is, along with trying to get an informant in among the mine workers. Kinehan, for his part, is no dummy, and having seen how the mine owners have brought in replacement workers, sets about trying to get the various sets of miners realize that they all have to be in it together. After all, if the replacements start disliking the conditions, the mine owners can bring in a third set of workers.

Matters escalate when the mine owners attempt to evict the families of striking miners, as the houses are technically owned by the mining company. The mayor and police chief, who are on the side of the miners, attempt to stave this off by pointing out that it might not be legal to just tell the miners they're being evicted and that they have to get court-ordered eviction notices. Some of the miners decide to decamp for the forested hills above town as this gets them off company-owned properties, although being in the hills isn't the safest thing either.

History tells us that tensions are eventually going to boil over, although how exactly that happens and what the consequences are are things that I'll leave to the viewers to find out for themselves. Suffice it to say that Matewan is a very well-made movie. It was, unsurprisingly, a hit with the critics, although perhaps equally unsurprisingly, it wasn't particuarly successful at the box office. I'd put that down partly to the subject material, and partly down to the fact that Matewan has a pretty slow build-up. Despite the box office failure, Matewan is a movie that you should see if you get the chance.

Sneakers

Many years ago, when I was in college, I saw Sneakers when somebody was watching it in a dorm lounge. I hadn't seen it since, and when it showed up during one of the free preview weekends, I made it a point to DVR it. It's on TV tomorrow, at 4:51 PM on 5Star Max if you've got the Cinemax package, but it's also available on DVD.

A prologue introduces us to Martin and Cosmo when they were college students in the late 1960s. They're lefty computer science students in the days when computers meant mainframes and time sharing, but they're able to get into the computer lab late at night to use the computer to transer money from Republicans to liberal causes. The police come and arrest Cosmo, but Martin was out getting a pizza, so he's a fugitive now.

Decades pass, and Martin Bishop (Robert Redford) is working a white hat security consultant. That is, he and his firm are hired by businesses specifically to find out the security holes that would enable a computer hacker or other criminal to bilk them out of big bucks. Among his colleagues are Crease (Sidney Poitier), formerly of the CIA; Whistler (David Strathairn), a blind expert in electronics and the sounds various electronics make; "Mother" (Dan Aykroyd), an electronics technician; and Carl (River Phoenix), who does a fair amount of the grunt work.

One day, Martin is approached by a couple of guys who know his past. Dick Gordon (Timothy Busfield) and Buddy Wallace (Eddie Jones). They know about a Czech mathematician named Janek (Donal Logue) who is giving a lecture on large prime numbers, which are a big deal in the field of cryptography because it takes a substantial amount of computing power to figure out the prime factors of very large numbers (assuming, of course, these numbers aren't simply multiples of 2 or 3 or much smaller primes) and these numbers can be used to transpose the digitl 1s and 0s into patterns it's very hard to break. (OK, this is a simplification, but going into all the details would make for a very dry movie.)

Martin goes to the lecture, and from that and using human intelligence -- basic surveillance and confidence games with people around Janek, conning people being a big part of security breaches even today -- he and his colleagues deduce that Janek had figured out a way around the factorization problem and developed a computer chip that could basically hack into any current computer, no matter how good the encryption, meaning that all sorts of computer systems are at risk. Gordon and Wallace are from the NSA, and want Martin's company to get that chip for the Americans, since this is just after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and who knows who Janek is really working for?

So Martin and company are able to get it, but when the handover is to be made, Crease reads a newspaper article about the killing of Janek which makes him realize that Gordon and Wallace may not actually be NSA. Martin goes to the former Soviet, now Commonwealth of Independent States (remember that?) attache to figure out what might be going on, but Gordon and Wallace catch up with them, killing the attaché, framing Martin for it and abducting him, and getting the chip themselves.

It turns out that Gordon and Wallace were working for... Cosmo! Cosmo (Ben Kingsley) claims to be working for some shady organized crime group, except that they really weren't that organized before Cosmo showed up. The chip, at least if you believe Cosmo, would help the Mob stay one step ahead of the government. It doesn't quite add up, though, since why would Cosmo go work for the Mob when he and Martin both had ideals?

So Martin and his friends are going to have to figure out where Cosmo's men took him, and then come up with a way to get that chip back. This leads to the finale, in a Silicon Valley company with high-tech by 1992 standards security, and them tring to figure out how to break that security.

Sneakers is an entertaining enough movie as long as you don't think too hard, something that holds for a lot of the movies at the intersection of spying and heisting. My impression is that they get a fair amount of the technicals right: prime numbers and advanced math really are important for encryption, and conning people to get around security is often more likely to work (think phishing, for example). The presentation of computers is obviously made more visual-friendly if less realistic, and I think there are certain aspects of security the writers overlooked. A lot of the more sensitive computer systems would, I think, have been using air gaps even in the early 1990s, while Cosmo's company likely would have had fingerprint access in addition to badge and voice access. (I'm not certain how far advanced facial recognition was in 1992; it's not mentioned here.)

For a Hollywood look at computers and security back in the day, you could do worse than to watch a movie like Sneakers.