Several months before Black Sunday

Today's (August 28) star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Brock Peters. This gives me the chance to do a post on a movie that's been sitting on my DVR and I hadn't seen before. That movie, Two-Minute Warning, comes up in the wee hours of the overnight at 2:15 AM, which is technically August 29 on the east coast although technically very late on August 28 if you're in the Pacific time zone and only have the east coast feed.

The movie starts off by sort of giving away something that's going to be the main plot point later in the movie. A man with a rifle and telescopic sight looks out a high window and sees a couple of bicyclists in what looks like a typical Southern California suburb. The man with the rifle then proceeds to shoot one of the cyclists dead. We don't see the shooter, which is a good thing as it adds suspense to the movie.

Cut to the Los Angeles Coliseum. "Championship X", the big football game is going to be held there the coming weekend. We do get Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford, although nothing closer than that to the NFL because they didn't permit the use of any of their properties for Two-Minute Warning the way they would for Black Sunday which was released a few months later. (I don't know the full production schedule for both movies. It's possible the NFL had agreed with pre-production on Black Sunday and didn't want to be involved in two movies with similar themes.) Brock Peters works at the Coliseum in maintenance and security, looking after the Dobermans who are partly responsible for security.

But, before the game, we have to be introduced to the requisite character types, much like any other disaster movie. Among them are a family man, Mike Ramsay (Beau Bridges) and his wife and kid; a husband and wife (David Janssen and Gena Rowlands); a pickpocket (a very elderly Walter Pidgeon a few years after Harry in Your Pocket); and Stu (Jack Klugman), a gambler who's heavily in debt but thinks he can make it back by betting on the big game. Oh, Stu also winds sitting next to a Catholic priest (Mitchell Ryan) at the game because the priest knows one of the quarterbacks.

The big football game has always had security although back in the 1970s it wasn't quite as tight as it is today. Sam McKeever (Martin Balsam) manages the Coliseum, and has the local police precinct run by Capt. Holly (Charlton Heston). Meawhile, since the sniper already killed that cyclist, we've got the SWAT team out looking for the sniper. They're headed up by Sgt. Button (John Cassavetes), and for obvious reasons wind up at the Coliseum too.

That's because the sniper, seen only in long shots until the very end of the movie, has holed up behind the scoreboard at the top of the Coliseum tower where the Olympic flame would have been in 1932 and 1984. Eventually Mike Ramsay looks through his binoculars and spots the sniper, who has also already been spotted by people in the control booth since they've got shots from the Goodyear blimp above. At this point, it's not known if the sniper has a particular target, which isn't entirely unlikely since there was talk of some elected officials showing up; or whether the sniper just wants to kill random people the way he did with the cyclist. And when is the guy going to start shooting?

Two-Minute Warning is a movie which has some decided problems, in large part down to the lack of character development. Nobody gets to be much more than a stock character, and we have no real reason to care about any of the fans. On the other hand, the main idea of the story is a good one, and fairly well executed. The plot device of not giving the sniper any discernable motive, and not showing him until the very end, is an inspired move that I thought heightened the suspense.

Two-Minute Warning is an overlooked and underrated movie in the disaster film genre of the 1970s, but one that works well despite the one-dimensional characters.

The film you have just seen is an improvisation

I'm always up for something I haven't seen before. So some time back when TCM had a double feature of films directed by John Cassavetes, I recorded both of them. It took me a while to get around to watching either, in part because I also had A Woman Under the Influence on my DVR, but recently I watched the first of the movies, which was in fact Cassavetes' directorial debut: Shadows.

Hugh (Hugh Hurd) is a black jazz singer living in New York, although he's not exactly successfull because his style is no longer in style. He's got two younger siblings living with him, both of whom are lighter-skinned than him: Ben (Ben Carruthers) and Lelia (Lelia Goldoni), although thanks in part to the low quality of the film stock you wonder whether both of them could have passed as white, which is important to the plot such as it is.

One night at a party, Lelia meets Tony (Anthony Ray), who seems like a nice enough guy, and also seems sincerely interested in Lelia. But of course, Tony is white, which is going to be a problem for some people since interracial relationships are still an issue for some people today. One of those people, in fact, is Hugh.

Meanwhile, Ben is flailing in his career as a would-be trumpeter, and seems to spend more time with his white friends Tom and Dennis going to bars and trying to pick up women than he does trying to get jobs. Ben is also obviously trying to find his place in the world, and as we'll see he's not always successful in this, although it's also not necessarily because of race since his white friends are just as aimless.

Hugh hosts a party where he tries to set Lelia up with a nice black man, and when Tony shows up later looking for Lelia who is out with the guy Hugh set Lelia up with, Hugh is none too happy. Will anybody be able to find love? Will everybody overcome racism to live in harmony?

The end of the movie contains a title card claiming that Shadows is an improvisation, which is only partly true, and also a big part of the problem the movie has. Cassavetes' original intention was for the entire movie to be an improvisation, but that proved to be a disaster when he showed the original cut to audiences. So he reworked the movie with some scripted stuff, and the result is the movie we have today.

I think Cassavetes should have spent more time coming up with a good script rather than trying to be daring and experimental. There's some good ideas here, but the actors don't come across as talented enough to be doing improv, so a lot of it feels rather amateurish. Ultimately Shadows is an interesting attempt, but one that doesn't quite succeed.

The influence above a woman

Actress Gena Rowlands died last year, and TCM ran a programming tribute to her from which I already posted about one of the movies since I had it on my DVR at the time of the tribute. I haven't really gotten around to watching the others, although recently I finally sat down to watch A Woman Under the Influence.

The movie starts in what seems the middle. Peter Falk plays Nick Longhetti, the father of a family married to Mabel (Gena Rowlands) and works for the Los Angeles sewer department, a job which entails long shifts because emergencies happen in a city of that size. It's been a bit of a strain on Mabel, and just after the opening credits, we see Mabel packing up the kids in her mother-in-law's car (played by Rowlands' real-life mother-in-law Katherine Cassavetes, mother to the film's director John Cassavetes) so that they can spend a day with grandma and Mom and Dad can have some alone time for, well, you can probably guess.

Except that Nick gets called out on another emergency, and Mabel responds by going to a bar where she has way too much to drink and gives a strange man the idea that she's coming on to him. So he takes her home and presumably sleeps with her, as she's none too happy in the morning and has to get him out of the house before Nick comes home. Nick would clearly misunderstand and think of Mabel as a loose woman.

The erratic behavior continues when Nick brings all his co-workers from the emergency overnight shift home, only for Mabel to make them spaghetti instead of a traditional breakfast food. Worse, Grandma brings the kids home to pick up some schoolbooks, and both Nick and Mabel react very badly, albeit in different ways, with just as much of Nick's anger seeming to be directed at Mabel. Is this the cause of Mabel's erratic behavior, or his having no idea how to deal with it.

There's more unstable behavior from Mabel, and finally Nick, not knowing what to do, calls in the professionals, who diagnose that Mabel has some form of mental illness and would be best served by a stay at a psychiatric institution. She spends six months there, and when it's time for her to come home from the hospital, Nick and his friends think the best thing to do would be to hold a big party for Mabel. Nick's mom knows better and thinks that everyone who isn't family should leave. Mabel comes hom, and it's obvious to the viewer that she hasn't gotten any better, although everyone around her seems to want to deny that obvious thing.

To be honest, there's not much to a plot synopsis of A Woman Under the Influence because it's more of a character study than a traditionally plotted movie. Not just a study of Mabel, but of Nick too, and neither one really passes the test, at least not as characters. Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands both pass, giving outstanding performances, albeit performances that can be harrowing at times. The movie also runs a good two and a half hours, which is rather too long for material like this. As well-made -- and even more so how well-acted -- A Woman Under the Influence is, it's not necessarily an easy movie to watch. An important one, yes, but not easy.

Mikey and Nicky

I've mentioned quite a bit how I have a tendency to put movies on the DVR simply because they have an interesting synopsis. I also mention a lot how I watch movies that have an interesting idea and that you can see why the people involved would want to make it, but that it doesn't quite work for the audience. (Or, at least me personally as a viewer.) Another example of this is Mikey and Nicky.

Nicky is played by John Cassavetes, and as the movie opens he's in one of those cheap, grungy urban hotels that were a thing especially in movies up until about the 1980s. Nicky reads a newspaper headline about a man killed by gangsters, and he realizes that he's next. He's a small-time gangster collecting betting moneys for the syndicate higher up, except that this time he's decided to try to abscond with some of that money. Unsurprisingly, the bigwigs don't like that and want him dead.

Nicky doesn't have many people he can trust, and he's even driven his wife to the point of not wanting to see him, in part because she's smart enough to understand that if Nicky comes home to her, the Mob is going to come after her, too, and not just him. So Nicky calls the one person he thinks he can still trust, old friend Mikey (Peter Falk).

The plan is for Mikey to pick up Nicky and take him, well, somewhere. There's the question of whether there's any place Nicky can go and be safe, since the Mob will follow him to the ends of the earth. Worse is that Nicky is making life difficult for Mikey to the point that it's easy to understand why everybody else has abandoned him. They go first to a diner, then to a cemetery, and eventually talk about going to and all night cinema, with a few other stops along the way, including a hopeful visit to Nicky's wife.

Meanwhile, it's up to Kenny (Ned Beatty) to find Nicky and off him if possible. Kinney is consistently hot on their trail, although for most of the movie one step behind at least Nicky. Nicky, however, does finally piss off Mikey to the point that he thinks about saying the hell with it and helping Kinney find Nicky once Kinney finds Mikey.

As I implied above, it's not hard to see why people might find the idea of Mikey and Nicky a fun movie to make. Elaine May wrote and directed, and it feels like she was able to cast several of her very talented friends who all liked the idea of a bunch of friends working together. But then the film goes wrong.

Having read a bit more about the movie, I'm going to have to put the blame on May, no Gilda pun intended. Apparently, she shot a ridiculous amount of footage, much of which was unusable. And since she went well over budget both in terms of money and time, the studio asserted its contractual right to take the final edit away from her. The version we have now may be closer to what May intended, but in any case the result is way too talky, with a main character in Nicky with whom it's extremely difficult to have any sympathy.

A lot of people, however, insist that Mikey and Nicky is a lost classic, so it's one that you might wish to watch for yourself and develop your own judgment on.

The Italian Untouchables

Another of the movies that I DVRed based on the interesting synopsis was the late 1960s crime movie Machine Gun McCain. Recently, I finally got around to watching it off the DVR to do the usual post on it here.

The movie starts off with a pre-credits establishing sequence in which a bunch of Italian Mafia types are about to pronounce death on a regional crime boss, out in the western part of the US, having heard from the soon-to-be new regional boss Charlie Adamo (Peter Falk) that the predecessor was skimming campaign money off of them. Said predecessor is summarily mowed down after dropping his kids off at school.

The credits then reveal that this is an Italian production, albeit one with an international cast, produced in English (the Italian title translates to "The Untouchables"). Adamo, having been elevated, wants to expand his power and influence, and decides that the best way to do that is to go to Las Vegas. There, he plans to buy a stake in the newly built Royal Casino. But it's actually a Mob-owned casino, so Charlie is on shaky ground trying to muscle his way in. The manager refuses to sell, so Adamo comes up with an idea to get revenge.

But Adamo is going to need help. One of his underlings is young Jack McCain, who is the son of Hank McCain (John Cassavetes), the titular McCain. The only thing is, Hank is in prison, and it's going to cost a bunch to obtain a pardon. Worse, Jack doesn't tell his father that the plan is actually being bankrolled by Adamo. That plan is to rob the casino's safe on a Saturday night, when there's bound to be a seven-figure amount of cash in the safe. Hank, who doesn't know his son very well thanks to all that time in prison, isn't all that certain that his son is up to it.

Hank is right to be worried, although the bigger issue is that they're going to be robbing from the Mob. Eventually, Charlie's superiors inform him of the Royal's Mob ownership, and the shouldn't be trying to buy a stake. Charlie wisely calls off the heist, but Jack is such a stupid SOB that he doesn't do anything about it, and Hank is so full of hubris that he thinks about going through the plan anyway. At least Hank has the smarts to realize that Jack's colleagues are out to kill them.

Hank does go to Las Vegas and pulls off the heist anyway, but obviously the Mob isn't going to let that go unchallenged, forcing Hank to go on the run together with Irene (Britt Ekland), the woman he first met after getting out of prison. Can they escape the clutches of the Mob?

Machine Gun McCain is an interesting addition to the crime and heist movie genre. I'm not certain if it's because you had an Italian production crew trying to do an English movie, or if it's because the print TCM ran isn't the Italian "original". Sources suggest that the movie has a running time of just under two hours, but the version TCM showed was in the 95-96 minute range. It's stylish enough and a nice look at the late 1960s, thanks to more than capable performances from Falk and Cassavetes. If I were going to introduce people to movies of the genre, I don't think this is the first one I'd pick, but it's definitely worth a watch.

Not to be confused with Baby Rose Marie

Another of the movies that I recorded during one of the free preview weekends and had never blogged about before is Rosemary's Baby. It's going to be on The Movie Channel Xtra tomorrow at 9:30 PM, and again a few more times the rest of the week. So, as always, seeing that, I made it a point to watch now to do a post on it.

Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) is a young wife married to actor Guy (John Cassavetes) in New York. They're moving into a new apartment that they were able to afford after the last tenant, an elderly woman, had to leave with dementia or something. Heck, she even put a secretary in front of a closet, that's how crazy she was. It's seems like a relatively nice apartment, although I personally though it looked like it was beginning to show its age. But that's not the point of the movie.

The Woodhouses live next to an elderly couple, the Castevets: Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman (Sidney Blackmer), a seemingly slightly bohemian couple who have taken in a young woman to help her, named Terry. Rosemary meets Terry down in the basement of the building while the two are doing their laundry, and the two become fast friends.

It's not a particularly long friendship, however, as Terry kills herself by jumping out a window. She was a drug addict anyway, so what are you going to do. Good news is on the horizon, however, as Rosemary gets pregnant, which she's always wanted to do. And the Castevets are nice enough to get the Woodhouses an in with the best obstetrician in town, Dr. Sapirstein (a bearded Ralph Bellamy).

But things start to go sour again. Rosemary starts suffering pains that she's convinced aren't the normal pains of pregnancy, as they just won't go away. And the Castevets are getting a little too involved in Rosemary and Guy's lives, saying that Dr. Sapirstein asked them to make up some herbal/vitamin concoction that, being natural, will be better than those pills. Rosemary just wants one night where she can have her own friends back around her.

One of the Woodhouses' old friends before meeting the Castevets was Hutch (Maurice Evans). He's got something he desperately needs to see Rosemary about. But the next day, when the two are supposed to meet, he never shows up. Apparently he suffered some sort of medical issue that left him in a coma and ultimately killed him. But his last request was that one of his books be given to Rosemary.

That book is a book on witchcraft, and after reading it, Rosemary gets the distinct feeling that the Castevets are actually witches, and they might have less than good intentions for the baby. Of course, she can't get Guy to believe her, and there's no way she'd confront the Castevets directly. She can't even trust Dr. Sapirstein.

But are the Castevets actually witches? The answer to that will be revealed in the final reel. And that's where the beauty of Rosemary's Baby lies. To me, the movie is a throwback to the old Val Lewton style of horror where instead of showing all sorts of gore and violence, the scary things are what you conjure up in your own mind. For the most part, it works stunningly well here.

The movie is also helped by good performances from almost everybody, down to smaller roles from people like Elisha Cook Jr. as their new landlord or Charles Grodin as Rosemary's preferred obstetrician. The one thing that I personally didn't find quite so effective were the dream sequences, but they're the sort of thing where I understand why they're in the movie.

Rosemary's Baby is one of those movies like Soylent Green or The Stepford Wives where you've probably heard what it's about before actually seeing the movie. But even then, the movie still definitely deserves to be seen.

The Killers (1964)

A couple of months back when TCM did a spotlight on the Film Foundation. One of the movies they showed was the 1964 version of The Killers. It's going to be on again as part of Noir Alley, overnight tonight at 12:30 AM and then again tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM. So I sat down to watch it and do a review here.

As you may know, there's a 1946 movie called The Killers based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway and building a fuller story around that short story. This 1964 version is a sort of remake in that it takes the original Hemingway story and, like the earlier movie, extends it, although as it turns out not in quite the same way. John Cassavetes plays Johnny North, who is teaching at a school for the blind. Two men come in, Charlie (Lee Marvin) and Lee (Clu Gulager), looking for Johnny. It turns out that these two are contract killers, with a $25,000 contract to kill Johnny. They find him, and Johnny seems strangely resigned to his death.

That's more or less where the Hemingway story ended, but both movies decided to add a much bigger story: why was Johnny so accepting of his fate that he doesn't do a darn thing to keep these guys from killing him? Charlie is the brains of the operation, and realizes that there must be something much more than the $25,000 out there or else why would anybody want Johnny dead? So Charlie decides he and Lee are going to find out what the bigger payoff is, to see if they can get at it themselves.

This leads them to Miami, where they meet Earl Sylvester, a mechanic working on muscle cars and other sports cars. Earl had known Johnny out on the west coast when Johnny was a racecar driver. But Johnny got in a smash-up that more or less ended his career. Along the way, he had met Sheila (Angie Dickinson) and fallen in love with her, but Earl warned Johnny that Sheila was the kept woman of Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan), so any romance was doomed.

But there's more to Johnny and Sheila's relationship. At some point after the smash-up, Johnny has been reduced to doing demolition derby and short dirt track racing, but as related by Mickey (Norman Fell), Browning's right-hand man at the time, Sheila finds Johnny again. He would be perfect as the driver in a scheme Jack is cooking up. That plot is a heist of a mail delivery which will be carrying the takings for a bunch of resorts on the Pacific coast, and should be close to seven figures. Johnny could use the money, and this is a chance to see Sheila again. Not only will he get to see Sheila; perhaps he can figure out a way to double-cross Browning so that he and Sheila can run off with the money and live happily ever after.

Now, we know from the beginning of the movie that Johnny and Sheila don't live happily ever after. But what happened to sour the relationship? Well, for that, you're going to have to watch this version of The Killers.

There's a lot different between this movie and the 1946 original, but both are absolutely worth watching. The 1964 version was originally conceived as a TV movie, but the network rejected it because of the amoral violence, so it got pitched as a movie, turning out to be Ronald Reagan's final film before he would switch to politics and run for Governor of California.

There are any number of places in which the TV movie origins are evident, most notably in the interiors, which really look like they've got a TV budget, as though they came out of episodes of the 1960s Dragnet, even though that series debuted later. There's also some scenes that are obviously done on the Universal backlot.

But the movie itself is solid, with Cassavetes good, Marvin playing a character similar to the one he essayed in Violent Saturday, and Reagan being surprisingly good cast against type since his forte was really good guys. Here, Reagan acts and delivers his dialogue as though he's channeling Jack Webb's Joe Friday, if Webb had believed that the cops weren't your friend and instead on the take. It might be a strange characterization but it works; after all, somebody like Browning wouldn't be the sort of oafish hoodlum that Clu Gulager comes close to playing (rightly, I think).

So despite the low budget, the 1964 The Killers is a very entertaining way to spend an hour and a half. Criterion released a DVD with both versions of the movie.