Hell to Eternity

I recorded several movies that I hadn't blogged about before during TCM's day of military movies last Veteran's Day. Some of them got shown again as part of the Memorial Day marathon, so I haven't quite had to worry about them expiring from the DVR, but thare are a few I need to get to. Among them is Hell to Eternity.

The movie opens up during the height of the Great Depression. Guy Gabaldon is a young student of Hispanic descent at a multiethnic school in Los Angeles who has a tendency to get in trouble. When Mr. Une, the father of one of his classmates, who also happens to be a teacher at the school, inquires as to what's going on, he learns that Guy's small house is a mess because Dad is dead and Mom has gotten sick and in the hospital. So Mr. Une takes Guy home with him to stay until Mom gets better. She doesn't get better, but dies in hospital, so the Unes make guy their foster son. Guy takes an interest in the Une family's Japanese culture, especially since the two grandparents have a relatively poor command of English.

Some years pass, and it's December, 1941, which as we all know means the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that sends the US into World War II. The other thing that it means is that Franklin Roosevelt orders all the Japanese-Americans rounded up and sent inland to be away from the Pacific coast where they're seen as a threat to America, even though grown-up Guy (Jeffrey Hunter) knows fully well that the Une family is no such thing. There's nothing Guy can do about it, and he doesn't particularly want to fight against Japan. He gets his draft notice, but it's revealed that he's 4-F thanks to a perforated eardrum.

And then, when visiting Mama-san at the internment camps, Guy learns that his Japanese "brothers" are fighting for America over in Italy as part of a regiment of Japanese-Americans that we saw profiled in the film Go for Broke!. This makes Guy change his mind and think about seeing if he can enlist, because his Japanese language skills could be useful. He just wants to make certain Mama-san doesn't object to his possibly having to kill Japanese.

The Marines accept him, and during basic training he becomes good friends with a couple of them, Sgt. Hazen (David Janssen) and Cpl. Lewis (Vic Damone). The three of them get sent to Hawaii before shipping out, which gives us time for a long and in my opinion pointless scene where the three go out on a triple date with women who are like the Donna Reed character from From Here to Eternity. They then get sent farther west, as that's where the fighting is. Eventually they wind up on Saipan, where the battle against Imperial Japan is raging. Guy, as prologue titles tell us, engages in heroic actions on Saipan that it was thought likely saved the lives of thousands.

Hell to Eternity is a moderately good World War II movie, made more interesting by the fact it's about a real subject. But it's also a movie not without its flaws, with the first one being that it's a good half hour too long, clocking in at 131 minutes. It also feels a bit too pat, in that the tragedy of having to deal with the internment camps is not something that's explored in great depth. The real-life Gabaldon was just shy of 16 on December 7, 1941, which makes me wonder what would have happened to him in real life when his foster family was sent to the camps.

All in all, Hell to Eternity is an entertaining enough movie that's worth one watch at least.

Brainstorm (1965)

Dana Andrews was TCM's Star of the Month back in July, and one of his movies that I hadn't seen before was the 1965 Brainstorm. (There's the proably more famous 1983 movie Brainstorm, the movie Natalie Wood was making at the time of her death, that has a completely different plot.) The plot of the 1965 Brainstorm sounded interesting, so I recorded it and just recently watched it to, as always, do a post on it here.

Jeffrey Hunter (billed as Jeff, not Jeffrey) plays Jim Grayam (yes, that's the spelling), who works doing computer analysis of weapons systems for Benson Industries, one of those defense contractors that dot the Southern California landscape. One night, as he's leaving work, he spots a car that's stalled on the train tracks. Worse, there's a woman in there who looks to be unconscious if not dead. And Jim can hear a train coming. Not being able to wake up the woman, Jim breaks one of the windows and gets the car off the tracks just in time.

Jim looks through the woman's belongings for identification, and finds that she's... Lorrie Benson (Anne Francis), the wife of Jim's ultimate boss, Cort Benson (Dana Andrews)! Jim is going to have to break the bad news, and worse, Jim figures out that since the car didn't have any mechanical issues, Lorrie was really trying to commit suicide. Imagine having to be the one to do that with one's boss.

Jim gets to the Benson mansion, and finds that Lorrie is deeply unhappy that Jim saved her, as she feels trapped in a loveless marriage with Cort using his power to prevent any other man from getting close to her -- there have been quite a few men before, apparently. But when Lorrie learns that Jim didn't save her for any sort of monetary or work-related reward, she decides that she's going to try to pursue him romantically.

Cort figures out what's going on, and uses his power as head of the company to make it look as though Jim is going nuts at work. Decidedly not helping Jim in this regard is the fact that he already has a history of mental instability, having suffered a breakdown in college. But this, combined with his increasingly falling in love with Lorrie, gives him a wacky idea that couldn't possibly work in real life, never mind in a movie that was made when there were still some of the restrictions of the Production Code.

Jim decides he's going to kill Cort, but also to try to get himself declared not guilty by reason of insanity, so that he'll be sent to a hospital, from where he can then fairly quickly get himself proved not insane after all. When it comes time for the psychiatrists to determine whether or not Jim is sane or not, the head of the committee examining him is Dr. Larstadt (Viveca Lindfors). Jim seems to be falling in love with her, too....

There's a seed of an interesting plot in Brainstorm, but the movie goes off the rails, I think, in no small part from the script being rather unrealistic. The only thing that it does well -- and I wonder whether this was unintentional -- is to make the viewer wonder at the end whether Jim was ever sane. But Cort is never fully fleshed out, and Lorrie seems one-dimensional in her on instability. The direction (by future TV star William Conrad) was somewhat jarring at times with its cuts and pans, but that may have been a deliberate attempt to keep the viewer off-kilter. (If it was deliberate, it succeeded.)

Brainstorm is an interesting misfire that may leave other viewers as frustrated as it left me. But it probably deserves one viewing, at least, if only to figure out where everything goes wrong.

Should be on a double bill with The Alligator People

A couple of months back, FXM put a movie into its rotation that was completely new to me: The Frogmen. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 7:50 AM and again Sunday (June 27) at 6:00 AM. So with that in mind, I went and watch the recording I had made of one of the several previous airings.

On an American ship somewhere in the Pacific theater of World War II, one group of guys is trying to relax on the top deck before the regular crew of the ship drives them off having to wash the decks. It turns out that the first group, led by Flannigan (Dana Andrews) are part of the UDT, the Underwater Demolition Team. In short, they're the titular "frogmen", whose job it is to go underwater just off shore of islands and rig things to be blown up, or do other surveillance that can't be done any other way. They're currently on a transport ship captained by Lt. Cmdr. Vincent (Gary Merrill).

From the first scene it seems like Flannigan is the frogmen's commanding officer, but that's not quite true. Their actual CO is Lt. Cmdr. Lawrence (Richard Widmark), who has only recently replaced Cassidy, who died on a mission. So there's a fair amount of enmity between Flannigan and the lower-ranking men, who all really liked Cassidy, and Cmdr. Lawrence, who's more by the books, cold and distant.

The group has three missions during the course of the movie. The first is reconnaissance to determin whether a secondary beach can be a landing point for an American assault on a Japanese-held island. Flannigan gets injured in this mission, and Lawrence thinks the mission is more important than any one man, which leads to even more enmity.

Flannigan might get a chance to prove himself to Lawrence, however. Lawrence gets an injury, having been infected through a scratch on some coral, and is in no position to actually rig the Japanese defenses to be bombed. Unfortunately, Flannigan does something really stupid, which is to have one of his men put up a sign on the beach welcoming the Marines. The man gets shot and fairly seriously injured.

But Flannigan ultimately does redeem himself when the transport ship gets hit by a torpedo that doesn't detonate. Flannigan and Lawrence are going to have to work together to defuse it, all while there's water coming into sick bay where the frogman who had gotten shot is lying, relatively immobile.

Finally, the UDT gets called over to a submarine for a super-secret mission to bomb a Japanese submarine pen. It's a much more dangerous mission, especially once the Japanese discover that the frogmen are right beneath them. One of the frogmen, played by a young Jeffrey Hunter, nearly gets killed.

There's a lot that's fairly standard in a movie like The Frogmen, starting with the whole conflict between the men who have been together a long time and their new commander. But The Frogmen tells its story well enough, with more than competent acting from the leads, and a reasonably good amount of suspense. It's not the greatest war movie made by any stretch of the imagination, but it succeeds at what it set out to do. People who want a war movie they might not have seen before would do well to catch The Frogmen..

White Feather

I only noticed this morning that White Feather is airing tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM on FXM Retro. It's airing again at 4:00 AM Monday, but there's another movie I was intending to do a full-length post on tomorrow. And it turns out that I hadn't done a post on White Feather before; I thought I had after the last time it got a couple of airings on FXM in quick succession.

Robert Wagner stars as Josh Tanner, who at the beginning of the movie is seen riding alone somewhere out in the old West. He comes across the victim of a Cheyenne attack at a river, and the Cheyenne watch him to see if he's got courage. It turns out that Tanner is making his way to the nearby fort. The river is the de facto boundary between the US forces and the native tribe, but the US are currently in negotiations with the various tribes to put them on reservations so that the US can take the land without annihilating the tribes.

Tanner is a surveyor, and his bosses are waiting for that treaty to be signed so that they can get their hands on some of that new land; Josh is being sent out in advance as a surveyor to survey the land for the land company. Not that the folks at the fort like him. The commander, Col. Lindsay (John Lund), is wary of him, while the only place he can find lodging is in the storeroom of the store run by Magruder (Emile Meyer). Magruder has a daughter Ann (Virginia Leith), but apparently she has a past, because her father thinks she's fit for no man and she makes cryptic comments about her past.

Apparently, however, the Cheyenne respect Tanner. They're the only tribe that hasn't signed the treaty to give up hostilities against the Americans, and the Americans are trying to get them to sign the treaty which all the other tribes are going to sign. Chief Broken Hand (Eduard Franz) is beginning to think that perhaps the fight against the Americans with their superior forces is futile, but his son Little Dog (Jeffrey Hunter) is not willing to give up the old ways. Tanner goes into all of this to talk to the Cheyenne.

While there, he meets not only the men in the Indian tribe, but also the chief's daughter Appearing Day (Debra Paget). She falls for him, and the feeling winds up being mutual. Needless to say, this presents all sorts of complications.

White Feather treads over some of the same territory that Fox had covered a couple of years earlier with Broken Arrow. There are also the themes of tradition versus modernity that appear in a whole bunch of movies in all sorts of genres. In White Feather, it all amounts to something that's capable, but which also feels as though we've seen it all before. Still, it's not bad, with the one exception that I wished I could have learned more about Ann, the white woman we kind of expect Tanner to wind up with when the story opens. She clearly has a past, but it's never really gone into. Oh, there's also the other problem of a bunch of white actors playing Indians, but really, there weren't enough prominent Indian actors to play these characters. On the plus side, the cinematography is quite nice if you can catch this in widescreen. I have a distinct memory that when it showed up on FXM a few weeks back, it was in fact in widescreen and not panned-and-scanned like a lot of their Cinemascope movies.

White Feather did get a DVD release at some point in the past, but I think it's out of print based on Amazon's not having new copies regularly available.

In Love and War

FXM Retro ran the retro-World War II drama In Love and War this morning. They're going to be airing it again tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM so you've got one more chance at least to catch it.

The movie starts off with three men in uniform at the rail of a US Navy ship looking out at San Francisco as the ship comes into port. Over all of this is a graphic: "1944". So we know right away that these men, who are in fact not in the Navy but the Marines, have been at war. They've got a day or two of shore leave, and they all plan to use it to the fullest. Nico Kantaylis (Jeffrey Hunter) is of Greek descent, and his family runs a fishing business in San Francisco. He sees them briefly, but has to go off to Monterey to see his girlfriend Andrea (Hope Lange). She's got bad news for him: she's pregnant. Apparently they had sex once and only once, and in the great tradition of Production Code-era premarital sex, that one misdeed must leave the woman knocked up. So Nico says he knows a judge who can perform a marriage ceremony for them, and takes her off to San Francisco to do that and have a brief honeymoon.

Frank O'Neill (Robert Wagner) stops off at Moran's bar before going home to see his family. This shouldn't be a surprise, since he's shown in the opening holding a beer bottle and drinking from it. It's clear he's a drunk. It also soon becomes clear that he's drinking in part to deal with the stress of going home. Oh, he likes his mothers and his young siblings. But Dad died and Mom remarried, and the stepfather doesn't like Frank. Indeed, he thinks Frank is just as much a drunk as Dad was, and that Frank is a coward to boot. No wonder Frank doesn't want to go home. Of course, there's a lot of truth to all of that....

The third Marine is college man Alan Newcombe (Bradford Dillman). He goes off to see his on again, off again girlfriend Sue Trumbull (Dana Wynter). She's taken to drink to, largely because she has mother issues. Her parents were extremely wealthy and she's inherited a good deal of that wealth, which she uses to try to push out of her mind the fact that there's a war on. Alan has finally had it with her partying, so he leaves her to go off with Frank who is planning a big blowout for their final night in Frisco. Frank has his girlfriend Lorraine (Sheree North), now a WAVE, who brings along her nurse friend Kalai (France Nuyen), a Hawaiian-French nurse whose parents were killed at Pearl Harbor. Lorraine has finally had it with Frank's drinking, while Kalai finds herself falling in love with Alan. Alan, however, is clearly the wrong social class for Kalai, at least as the movie morals of the day would have you think, because of that college education and because his father is fairly well-to-do himself.

So the movie spends the first half looking at all these loves and engaging in expository information, before we finally get to the war part. The Marines ship out to the Pacific theatre, which means island hopping as they take one island after another from the Japanese. However, that also means some fairly fierce fighting, as the Japanese weren't about to give up any of those islands without fighting to the last man. All three of the men learn something about themselves....

I don't spend that much time on the "war" part of In Love and War because the movie seems almost to include it as an afterthought. Although there are quite a few war scenes in the last half, they're also interspersed with the women back home. Kalai has a meeting with Sue, although not the one you'd expect; Andrea is shown with her baby; and Lorraine is written out of the movie, with the resolution of her story being mentioned in one blink-and-you'll-miss-it aside. Frank's home life does get one more scene, though.

Ultimately, In Love and War is a by-the-numbers production that probably doesn't deserve as much criticism as I found myself giving it while I was watching. It's not that the movie is bad, it's just that we've seen all of this done before, and done much better. It doesn't help that FXM is running a print that's panned and scanned -- even in the opening credits. So it really only starts obert Wagne, not Robert Wagner. The end screen, however, has been given the Cinemascope diet, squished into a 4:3 box and making Hope Lange look incredibly thin. I don't think In Love and War has received a DVD release, though, so you're going to have to see it chopped up like this.