The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm

Tomorrow, February 13 is the start of this year's 31 Days of Oscar on TCM, with the schedule looking like it's being done by themes this year. The first morning starts off with several fantasy-type movies, with different types of fantasic material. Among the movies is The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, at 7:45 AM.

Now, as you probably know, brothers Wilhelm (played here by Laurence Harvey) and Jakob (played by Karlheinz Böhm) Grimm were a pair of brothers in the German-speaking lands in the first half of the 19th century who today are best known for their compilations of fairy tales from various parts of the German-language area. (Remember also that Germany was not a unified country at this time.) They did more, however, such as write books on German grammar and start an etymological dictionary of German, in part because it took a while for the fairy tale books to sell. The original versions of the tales, after all, were decidedly dark and not quite for children.

In this version of their lives, the two are working for a duke (Oscar Homolka) who is interested in having a biography of his family line written because the duke wishes to impress the king of Prussia. This at least gives the two brothers and Wilhelm's wife Dorothea (Claire Bloom) a place to stay while they're trying to sell their other books at Stossel's (Walter Slezak) book store. Meanwhile, a wealthier family from closer to Berlin comes to visit with adult daughter Greta (Barbara Eden), who falls in love with Jakob except that Jakob and especially Wilhelm are too much into those fairy tales.

That backstory takes up about half of the movie, with the other half consisting of three fairy tales -- lesser-known ones, which was a deliberate choice on the part of the moviemakers because they wanted stories the audience would be less likely to know the ending to, as well as many of the better-known ones already having been done by Disney. This also enabled the moviemakers to have a cast with a lot of guest stars if you will, each of whom only appeared in one of the stories. The first one, which Wilhelm tells to his own children, is The Dancing Princess. Jim Backus plays a king with a daughter (Yvette Mimieux) who loves to dance at night. Russ Tamblyn plays a man who, with the help of an invisibility cloak, is abble to discover the daughter's secret.

Later, Wilhelm wants to convince his publisher that there are people out there who would buy the books, so he brings in a bunch of kids and tells them the story of The Cobbler and the Elves about a cobbler (Harvey himself) whose elves come to life at night, aided by the special effects of George Pal.

Finally, as part of a plot point that has the brothers traveling to get information on an obscure branch of the family, Wilhelm runs into an old lady in the middle of the woods (Martita Hunt) who tells the story of The Singing Bone. Nobleman Sir Ludwig (Terry-Thomas) and his servant Hans (Buddy Hackett) find a magical dragon in a cave, with Hans killing the dragon. Ludwig tries to take credit for it, but the titular singing bone tells the real truth of what happened.

The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was filmed in Cinerama, and the print TCM ran is in the "smilebox" format which is supposed to simulate the curved screen that the Cinerama movies were originally projected onto. To me, it's always seemed as though the smilebox is a bit too exaggerated. Yes, there was some curvature, and people would mostly be farthest away from the middle section (considering vertical sections) of the screen, but the photographs I've seen don't look as curved as what the smilebox gives us. Cinerama also had serious issues where panoramas looked good -- and the location photography here is quite good -- but not suited to the sorts of closeups needed for traditional narrative storytelling. The "real life" sequences here are by far the weakest part of the movie. Ultimately, we get a bit too much of the back-story to be really interesting to children. That's a shame, because the three fairy tales aren't that bad.

So overall, I think The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm is an ambitious project that falls a bit short of its intended goal, but a movie that's still worth watching if you haven't seen it before.

For some values of "loves"

Up next on TCM is a day of movies dedicated to Shirley MacLaine. One that I hadn't heard of before the last time it showed up on TCM is Two Loves; it gets a showing tomorrow, August 13, at 8:15 AM. And now, having watched it, I can see why I hadn't heard of it before.

After the credits, some titles inform us that the setting is North Island, New Zealand, although I wonder how much northern California stood in when they have establishing shots and how much is the MGM back lot. A car shows up at a severely underfunded school, and getting out of the car is one of the teachers, Anna Vorontosov (Shirley MacLaine). She's an American who wound up teaching here presumably to get away from America, and perhaps to do good work, since she's teaching a class of mostly Maori children. Anna has unorthodox ideas about teaching, but fairly orthodox ideas about life, which might be part of why she ended up in New Zealand, as she never found anyone to marry.

As she makes it to school today, she's informed that there's a new chief inspector of school who will be visiting, William Abercrombie (Jack Hawkins). But before that, we meet another of the teachers who's come here from far away to teach: Paul Lathrope (Laurence Harvey). Now, as you might guess from a title like Two Loves, Paul is likely to be interested romantically in Anna. But there are a couple of catches, like his having served in the war and that scarring him emotionally. It's also led him to drink and take all sorts of inappropriate risks on his motorcycle. Anna also doesn't want to go too far too fast with him.

Eventually, Abercrombie also gets to know Anna better. Abercrombie is originally from the UK but came over to New Zealand. His wife and kids, however, didn't like New Zealand, so they went back to the UK although the wife will never grant him a divorce. Abercrombie reads a book that Anna has put together of stories from the Maori kids that talk about social issues "proper" white kids would never discuss and, while Abercrombie is shocked about it at first, he thinks their stories have potential.

One more subplot involves an adolescent Maori student, Whareparita (Nobu McCarthy), and the way she fits into the life of the school with the teachers. She's asked to be an assistant with Anna as it's thought this will make Anna's clasroom look better in the eyes of Abercrombie. But it's really Lathrope who is of more importance to Whareparita's subplot.

I mentioned at the top that I hadn't heard of Two Loves and that this was for good reason. The reason is that the movie got savage reviews at the time of its release. It's based on a book, and apparently the author of that book said the movie deserved the bad reviews and that the direction mangled her story. The story lines here are very muddled and it feels hard to have much interest in any of the characters: the Maori are almost cartoonish; Lathrope is, at least as played by Laurence Harvey, over the top; and Anna isn't really given much depth.

But, as always, judge for yourself when you watch Two Loves.

Do you remember this movie?

Another movie that's close to coming off my DVR is one that in some ways is a bit difficult to do a good post on, in part because everyone already knows what it's about: John Wayne's 1960 version of The Alamo. But, having finally watched it, I feel obligated to do a post on it.

I'll admit I don't know how well the story of the Alamo is known by people not from the US or Mexico, but the basic story takes place in what is now the million-plus city of San Antonio, TX when it was a much smaller settlement. Texas at the time was part of Mexico, but Americans coming west from Louisiana looking for land. The Mexican government under Santa Anna unsurprisingly didn't want a rebellious population and tried to put down the rebel forces. The rebel leader, Gen. Sam Houston (played here by Richard Boone in a small role) tried to get a small band of soldiers to hold a point along the way -- that mission in San Antonio known as the Alamo -- long enough for Houston to shore up his troops. The Mexicans laid siege to the Alamo, killing all of the defending soldiers, but of course the rebels won the war, winning independence for Texas before it eventually joined the US in 1845.

This version of the movie starts off with Col. William Travis (Laurence Harvey) in command of the soldiers sent by Houston to hold the Alamo, but they're still a good ways away from the Alamo. Travis is trying to recruit soldiers, and has some soldiers in the form of men commanded by Col. Jim Bowie (Richard Widmark). Travis and Bowie, however, are consistently at odds with each other. Coming in from Tennessee is Davy Crockett (John Wayne) with his own band of men. Travis thinks of Crockett as a backwoods hick, not knowing that Crockett had been elected Senator and is actually quite intelligent.

In addition to the subplot of the officious Travis conflicting with the other officers under his command, there's another subplot of Crockett coming across a Mexican wido, Flaca (Linda Cristal), to whom Crockett takes a liking. She, however, is set to marry a local businessman even though it's obvious that this would be a bad marriage for her. Flaca tells Davy that she's grown up enough to handle things herself and doesn't need Davy to save her. However, she does help the Americans by giving them the location of a weapons cache, which will give the Americans some valuable weaponry for when they get to the Alamo.

They get to the Alamo and the officers all realize how hopeless the situation is, although things are about to get even worse because another officer who was supposed to provide relief was ambushed along the way. Eventually Santa Anna shows up, and the rest is, as we say, history, although the movie version of history doesn't always agree with the real version of history.

Rounding out the cast is a young Frankie Avalon, presumably there to appeal to the teenage set; he plays a messenger type called Smitty who is under Crockett's command and who Crockett sends away to spare his life. Then there's the drunkard Beekeeper (Chill Wills in an Oscar-nominated role) who is supposed to be providing comic relief although if I were one of these military men and had to deal with a character like this in real life I'd smack him into the next state.

John Wayne directed, and supposedly didn't want to act in the movie, only being forced into it by the other producers because they wanted yet another name star to help bring people to the theater. I didn't have any big problems with Wayne's direction here. For me, the bigger problem was with the screenplay. Never mind the historical inaccuracies; that's to be expected in any movie like this. Instead, it's that the film runs over 160 minutes, and this is cut down by a good half hour from the roadshow version. The movie takes way too long in getting to the actual Alamo and then gives the battle short shrift.

The Alamo is a nice try at an epic from yet another actor-turned-director, albeit one that doesn't always work. It's not terrible by any means, but it's certainly not great.

The Good Die Young

Earlier this week, I mentioned The Voice of Bugle Ann, which I happened to watch back in July not realizing it would be part of Summer Under the Stars. Another movie that I watched some weeks back not seeing that it would show up in this year's Summer Under the Stars is The Good Die Young. It aired last year as part of a day of Gloria Grahame films; this year you can see it during a day of Laurence Harvey movies, at 8:00 AM, Thursday, Aug. 11.

Grahame definitely wasn't the star here; Laurence Harvey is closer to the star. However, it's Richard Basehart who handles the narration and shows up enough that I guess he'd be the nominal star. He plays Joe Halsey, who at the start of the movie is in the car on the way to a bank robbery with three people he had a modest acquaintance with. He's wondering how all of them got themselves into this situation, which fairly obviously means we're about to get a flashback, or a series of them since we've got four different characters with back stories.

First up is Joe, an American with a British wife Mary (Joan Collins). Mary has a clinging mother who claims that she's got some sort of illness that's going to kill her soon, which is why Mary returned to the UK. And now, Mary's mom (Freda Jackson) won't let her go, which is why Joe has run off from his job to come over to the UK to get Mary. The fact that Mary is pregnant complicates matters and makes things more urgent for them.

Another American abroad is Eddie (John Ireland), who is serving in the Air Force and somehow wound up with a trophy wife in the form of actress Denise (Gloria Grahame). However, she's only a trophy in the prestige department, as she's carrying on an affair with the star of the movie she's making over in Britain. This leads Eddie to commit desertion to try to get his wife back, and that's a serious problem. He needs money and a way to figure out his legal problems.

The first of the two Brits is Mike Morgan (Stanley Baker). He's a boxer who is going to have to retire from the fight game due to his injuries. However, he was at least modestly intelligent enough to try to save up some money. Except that his wife took that money and used it to bail out her brother, who promptly jumped bail. (Send your wife to jail.)

The other Brit is Ravenscourt (Laurence Harvey), a wannabe playboy and layabout who has been living off his wife's (Margaret Leighton) largesse until his father (Robert Morley) finally kicks it and the will comes into effect giving Ravenscourt his own money. He's also the charismatic leader of the four men who wind up meeting by chance at a pub, and gets them in on the plot.

Ravenscourt knows about how old currency notes are exchanged overnight at one of the big banks in London, and his plan is to rob the armored truck carrying those notes just as it gets to the bank. Somehow, everybody else winds up going along with it, something you could see teenagers doing, but these are all much older men who really ought to know better. The heist, of course, goes wrong, with Ravenscourt making things far worse by using his gun when he told everybody else there would be no shooting. Will any of the characters be able to avoid the enforced Production Code ending? Does that even matter since the movie was made in the UK?

Well, yes, it does matter, which is largely because the movie was made by one of those smaller British production companies that had the very good idea of bring over American stars to appear in the movies they were making, so that it would be a lot easier to get a distribution deal in the States, the language not being an issue. That would certainly explain Grahame's presence, as the big name who had already won an Oscar. Basehart was in Europe on his trip that would also result in his appearance in La Strada -- apparently, Fellini loved Basehart's work in Fourteen Hours, a movie I blogged about ages ago and is definitely worth watching. The main thing, however, is that since the production company was intending the movie to get shown in the US, they had to deal with the Production Code.

And that, unfortunately, results in a smallish flaw of the sort that a lot of movies like this have. You know that there can really only be one type of ending because the other kind would violate the code. However, the way that The Good Die Young gets there is pretty good, even if the Laurence Harvey character is thoroughly unlikeable. (That is, of course, a testament to Harvey's acting ability.) Richard Basehart gives another of the sort of good performaces that make you wonder why he didn't become a bigger star. The atmosphere of the movie is also quite good, from London at night to the world of boxing. If you haven't seen The Good Die Young before, you should definitely record this one.

A gaslighting movie I hadn't seen before this week's Thursday Movie Picks

Pretty much every Thursday I take part in the Thursday Movie Picks blogathon. This past week's theme was "Gaslighting", and I not only had three movies in mind, but one sitting on my DVR that I thought would probably fit the theme, only I hadn't gotten around to watching it. That movie is Night Watch, and I finally watched it last night.

Elizabeth Taylor plays Ellen Wheeler, a woman living in London and married to her second husband, John (Laurence Harvey), a financial advisor in the days before it was easy to buy index funds and when brokers like John were considered a high-paying job. They live in a nice house opposite one that's been boarded up for years, with a garden in between, where a now-poor former resident of the Wheeler house, Mr. Appleby (Robert Lang) spends his time gardening. The Wheelers also have a houseguest in the form of Sarah (Billie Whitelaw).

As I said, Ellen is married for a second time, and therein lies part of her problem. Her first husband Carl died in a horrific car crash, and Ellen had to identify the body. That's something that still gives her nightmares and really screws up with her sleep in general, to the point where the doctors have her on tranquilizers and whatnot. It also means that John and Sarah both worry quite a bit about how well Ellen is doing.

They're about to get quite a bit more worried, and for good reason. One night during a thunderstorm, Ellen is looking out the window at the abandoned house, when one of the shutters starts flapping open, allowing Ellen to look inside and see -- a dead body! Not just any dead body, mind you, but one that sure looks like it's been knifed to death and therefore murdered! Ellen gets John to call the police, who send over Inspector Walker (Bill Dean).

Walker and his men take questions, and more importantly, do a search of the old abandoned house, and find... nothing. Well, not quite nothing. Ellen saw Appleby doing some digging in the garden, enough in fact that you could forgive her for thinking it was something the size of a grave for burying a murdered human being. And when Appleby plants a couple of trees into that digging, well, the obvious guess is that perhaps there really was a murder and Appleby dumped the body there, planting the trees over the dead body. But you'd think there would be an awful lot of dirt left over, which the police don't find.

So, with nobody finding any evidence that anybody might have been murdered -- and seriously, you'd think that if somebody had been knifed to death, there would be blood in the old house -- talk turns to worrying about Ellen's mental state. Perhaps she's not just seeing her first husband in her nightmares, but now seeing him in her waking hours, too. Other things transpire that sure make it look like John might be trying to gaslight Ellen, especially considering how John tries to get his psychiatrist friend to try to treat Ellen.

There are, however, still a lot of twists and turns before we find out what really happened in the old dark house and just how crazy Ellen is, twists that make this movie more than just a reworking of Gaslight or other movies you can think of it sharing plot points with (Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window being another obvious example).

Elizabeth Taylor had some movies later in her career where she really goes over the top, thanks in part to the script. X, Y, and Zee, which Taylor made in the UK around the same time she was making Night Watch comes to mind. The script of Night Watch is one that really gives her the opportunity to play things up, and Taylor takes that opportunity and runs with it. This may cause a problem for some viewers, but the script has a method to the madness it makes her suffer.

As I was watching, I was also noticing some plot holes, but surprisingly, the script more or less does a good job of tying them up at the end, making Night Watch a satisfyingly interesting movie, but one that does require the viewer to suspend disbelief a good deal.