The face don't care

TCM had a night of body horror movies some months back. One of the movies that I hadn't seen was The Hand, which I recorded in part because of its star, Michael Caine. I finally got around to watching it and, as always, that means that now you get the review.

Michael Caine plays Jonathan Landsale, a cartoonist living in Vermont with his wife Anne and daughter Lizzie. However, it's become a bit of a strained marriage. Anne has an offer for a job at some new age institute down in New York City, and she thinks having their daughter studying in New York instead of middle-of-nowhere Vermont might be better. Jonathan doesn't want that, and besides, there's more space to do cartooning in Vermont and it's cheaper, too.

So the husband and wife drive down to New York to see the apartment, but get in an argument along the way while also having to deal with lousy drivers. Anne tries to pass a truck when a car comes in the opposite direction, and in the ensuing accident Jonathan's right hand is severed at the wrist. Obviously nobody wants to lose a hand, but it's even worse when you're a cartoonist and you make a living using that hand to draw things. Anne and the police stay behind to look for the hand in the hopes it can be re-attahed, but since they're in a field with thick grass, they can't find it.

Jonathan does get a prosthetic and and learns how to use it, as well as dealing with the residual nervous system sensations that amputees apparently film. Jonathan's agent suggest somebody else take over the strip, but Jonathan hates the direction the other guy wants to take it. Worse, Anne seems to be having a romantic relationship with a yoga instructor at the institute.

Oh, but that's not the worst thing at all. Jonathan starts having something that might be nightmares, or might be some sort of dark hallucinatory premonition, in which he has visions of the severed hand doing really nasty things like strangling people to death. To deal with that, Jonathan decides a change is in order, and takes a job as an adjunct professor at an unorthodox college in rural northern California, where he's going to teach cartoon drawing to people who are about as talented as Billy Crystal's students in Throw Momma From the Train.

Unfortunately, Jonathan continues to have those horrible visions. He makes a friend in the form of fellow instructor Brian Ferguson (Bruce McGill), and then suddenly, one of his students shows up at his house in the woods. That student, Stella, doesn't know what she wants to do in life, but is more than comfortable having sex with Jonathan which ought to be a big no-no not just because Jonathan is married but because sex between teacher and student is way wrong. Then again, it also turns out that Stella had been thinking of going down to Los Angeles with Brian for the Christmas holidays, which leads to the movie's climactic finale.

The Hand received poor reviews at the time of its release, and having watched it it's not hard to see why. The movie has a glacial pace, and a lot of the time it feels like there's not a lot going on. And for what is supposed to be a horror movie, it's not as if there's that much horror, not even of the sort in a Val Lewton movie where the horror is not explicit but desiged to be in the viewer's mind. Michael Caine tries, but even he can't save this one.

However, The Hand has apparently become a bit of a cult film in the intervening years, so watch and judge for yourself.

A bridge too long

I mentioned several weeks ago how war historian Cornelius Ryan wrote the book on the D-Day invasion, The Longest Day, which was turned into an epic movie. Another of his books was similarly turned into an epic film 15 years later. That movie, A Bridge Too Far, aired as part of Dirk Bogarde's turn as TCM's Star of the Month since he was in the all-star cast. I got around to watching it not long before it went off my cloud DVR since YouTube TV only keeps recordings for nine months, but since I had a backlog of Bogarde films I wrote this post rather early and left it as a draft until a suitable time after the other Bogarde movies.

A narrator at the beginning of the movie, over newsreel-type footage of the late stages of World War II, informs us of the situation on the ground as it was at the end of the summer of 1944. The Allies had invaded Normandy in June, of course, and advanced reasonably far. But the Rhine was a major barrier because, if need be, the Nazis could just blow up all the bridges and set defensive positions on the other side. Anyone trying to cross the river would be a sitting duck. British general Montgomery came up with a daring plan that Eisenhower eventually agreed to, which was given the code name Operation Market Garden. The plan is to drop troops behind enemy lines in the Netherland, close to a bunch of important bridges. The troops are then supposed to capture six major bridges and hold them until traditional infantry coming from Belgium.

Dirk Bogarde was getting to the age where he would play the sort of military officer ranked high enough to be able to stay behind the front and come up with the overriding plan; he plays British Lt. General Browning who is more or less in command of the whole British part of the operation, even more difficult than the American part because the British are being dropped farther behind the enemy lines. Leading the men actually going in is Major General Urquhart (Sean Connery); they get the most distant bridge, at Arnhem.

As is always the case in war, large operations may seem brilliant on paper, but they're going to meet real life the minute the soldiers are expected to execute them, not that this is any fault of the soldiers. Especially when an operation is this big and is expected to run like clockwork, it should be obvious that there's a much bigger potential for things to go wrong. Indeed, the commander of the Polish forces, Maj. Gen. Sosabowski (Gene Hackman) raises objections to Lt. Gen. Browning when Browning briefs everybody on the operation. However, Browning say British intelligence believes the the Germans are badly enough off that the portion of the military defending the Netherlands is either too old or too young to put up a truly effective defense.

The date for the drop eventually comes, and as you might guess from the title even if you didn't know anything about the war, you'll guess correctly that problems do happen. Urquhart's radios don't work, and they have difficulty getting from the drop zone to where they're supposed to go. Since they can't radio, future supplies that are supposed to be dropped to them wind up with the Germans, leaving them in an untenable situation. Other portions of the operation have lesser problems, a lot of which were due to adverse weather, something you'd think the bigwigs could have predicted and planned for. Although the Allies weren't able to get to get that last bridge, there were enough successes that military historians have debated how much of a failure Market Garden was.

A Bridge Too Far has a bit of advantage over The Longest Day, in that there are so many points of action that a longer movie isn't quite to the detriment the way it is in The Longest Day. Having said that, however, I have a feeling the material would have worked better as a TV miniseries, with commercial breaks at suitable points to switch between the various parts of the operation. The movie is competently made, although with the number of major stars in the past, it's also easy to see why some contemporary critics thought the movie collapsed under its own weight. It definitely feels like a slog at times.

I've only read the Reader's Digest condensed version of A Bridge Too Far (seriously), and that decades ago, so I can't honestly say just how right Cornelius Ryan got things. But I think the movie is a worthy attempt at trying to document a massive military action, even if it's by no means perfect.

There's no Michael Shayne here

I've got a couple of movies that have been on my DVR for a bit coming up in quick succesion, so the first of them is getting a blog posting a bit further out from when it's airing than I would normally do for movies. That movie is the 1980 Brian De Palma film Dressed to Kill, which will be on TCM at 1:45 AM on Nov. 19, which is still Saturday evening out in the Pacific time zone.

Angie Dickinson, pushing 50, plays Kate Miller, a Manhattan wife on her second marriage to what must be a fairly successful man, considering the apartment they live in. Kate lost her first husband in Vietnam and left her a widow with a young son, Peter (Keith Gordon), who is now high school age and a science whiz. But both of them have figured out over the years that Stepdad isn't the World's Greatest Dad. Not that he's a bad person; in fact, we don't see all that much of him beyond him and Mom having sex that is very unsatisfying for her.

In fact, Kate feels so unsatisfied that, like a lot of bored upper-middle-class housewives, she's decided to get herself an analyst, Dr. Robert Elliott (Michael Caine). She pours out her problems to him, and he tries to remain a neutral observer since that's the ethical thing to do, even if it is difficult when she asks him if he's attracted to her.

After leaving her appointment with Dr. Elliott, she heads off to the art museum, where she has experiences that could be straight out of multiple Alfred Hitchcock movies like Vertigo and Topaz. Eventually, she drops one of her gloves, and a strange man picks it up. She finds the man in a taxi outside the museum, and they proceed to have sex in the taxi on the way to his apartment. Unfortunately, Kate discovers that the man has recently been diagnosed with a venereal disease, so she drops him like a hot potato, although she forgets her engagment ring.

This last bit is important because she has to go back to the apartment to retrieve it. On the elevator the second time is a woman in a really bad wig and sunglasses trying to look like the Karen Black character from Family Plot or something. This mysterious woman proceeds to take out a straight razor and stab Kate to death reminiscent of the shower scene in Psycho. Unfortunately, when the elevator doors open, there's a professional escort standing outside the door with the man she's escorting.

That escort is Liz Blake (Nancy Allen), and she's in danger. She stupidly picks up the razor, leaving her fingerprints on it and making her a prime suspect for police detective Marino (Dennis Franz years before NYPD Blue). It's also got Dr. Elliott's prints on it; apparently it's one of his patients who stole the razor from his home office. And Dr. Elliott has a patient who would be a prime suspect, a "Bobbi" who is a man with gender dysphoria and would like gender reassignment surgery except that Dr. Elliott won't sign off on it.

Liz is in trouble as Bobbi knows she's a witness. Thankfully, Peter wants to know who killed his mother and, being that science whiz, is more than ready to start using 1980-vintage surveillance technology to try to find the killer. And Det. Marino would love to get his hands on Dr. Elliott's appointment book to find out more about Bobbi.

Dressed to Kill was apparently a controversial movie even back on its release in 1980, because of the way it portrayed trans people. The portrayal probably wasn't politically correct then, and certainly isn't correct now that they've hijacked the LGB coalition and are only allowed to be portrayed as more perfect than anybody else. Sorry, but the gays I know hate how the Ts are in their view arrogating accpetance of gays and lesbians to force everybody to celebrate the trans above everybody else. That, and how the self-styled "leaders" of the LGBT... coalition kowtow to this and try to force the coalition into an extremely narrow political box. Woe betide all those gays who just want to be left alone.

Never mind the political rant; Dressed to Kill also has the problem that director Brian De Palma seems as interested in his homage to Hitchcock and the stylistic decisions this forces him to make as he does in having a good plot. The movie is either much too slow at times (the whole museum scene) or giving us unneccessary stuff such as an entire coda at the end. I think I get what De Palma was trying to go for; he just doesn't really succeed at what he was trying to do.

Still, you should probably watch Dressed to Kill once just because of the homage and how controversial it was.

The Cider House Rules

Another of the movies that I got the chance to record courtesy of one of the free preview weekends is The Cider House Rules. It's going to be on again tomorrow (Jan. 12) at 4:40 PM on Movie Max (one of the Cinemax channels), along with some other upcoming airings, so recently I sat down to watch it to do a review here.

The movie starts off in 1943 in St. Cloud, ME, one of those places where the railroad goes through but nobody gets off unless they have a darn good reason to do so. About the only thing in town is the orphanage, understaffed by a couple of nurses (Jane Alexander and Kathy Baker) and Dr. Larch (Michael Caine). Larch has been there long enough that he doesn't seem to have much will left to live, sending himself into an ether-induced stupor every night In addition to accepting unwanted children and, with any luck, adopting them out, Dr. Larch also performs illicit abortions, something which would obviously have been controversial in 1943.

Larch knows his time is coming, and indeed, the board of the orphanage has been writing letters about bringing in "new blood". With that in mind, and considering one of the orphans, Homer (Tobey Maguire) has already been adopted out only to be returned, Larch has sort of raised Homer like he would his own son if he had one. That includes giving Homer enough medical training that he could probably pass the nursing certifications, but being out in the middle of nowhere doesn't have the official education, and certainly not to be a doctor. Homer is also uncomfortable with the idea of abortions.

One day, coming to the orphanage is the couple of Wally Worthington (Paul Rudd) and Candy Kendall (Charlize Theron). Perhaps one of the orphans will get lucky today and get adopted out. No, that's not why these two are here. Wally is a soldier in World War II, a fate Homer has been lucky to avoid thanks to a heart condition. Wally, on leave, has also gotten his fiancée Cathy pregnant, so the two have come here for the abortion. Homer decides that since he's an adult, this might be an opportunity for him to leave the orphanage, grow up, and see something of the world. Wally and Cathy offer him a ride back to the Worthington place for the night.

Wally's widowed mother owns an apple orchard, and Homer decides that this will do as work for now, and at least it will let him get a few bucks in his pocket during apple-picking season while he decides what he wants to do. The rest of the pickers are migrant workers who go from place to place as each of the various crops ripens and needs picking. For the Worthingtons, that's Mr. Rose (Delroy Lindo) and his daughter Rose Rose (Erykah Badu); along with two other men, Peaches (Heavy D) and Muddy (Todd Freeman). Amazingly, race is by and large not an issue here, other than the class issues of the migrant workers all being illiterate.

Life isn't exactly a bed of roses, or a bed of apple blossoms, at the orchard. Candy shows Homer around their small part of Maine, which includes her family's lobster cages and the ocean, something Homer has never seen before. But Homer and Candy begin to fall in love, which is going to be a problem considering that Wally is bound to return home sometime. The fact that he returns home injured only makes things more difficult.

I briefly mentioned the orphanage board wanting new blood. Larch expects that Homer is going to grow tired of the world and want to come back to the orphanage. Not only that, but Larch is making up phony credentials so that "Doctor" Homer can be the official doctor at the orphanage. (Surely that would eventually lead to one of the children's death through a medical error.) And among the migrant workers, Rose Rose gets pregnant, which leads to its own tragedies.

The Cider House Rules was based on a novel by John Irving, who adapted his own book for the screenplay. I haven't read the book, so I don't know how much was taken out for the movie, but what was left in the movie is pretty good, thanks mostly to the good acting performances. This view of the World War II homefront seems a bit too neat and tidy, however, especially considering the personal problems all of them are going through. There's also no mention made of why they two young black migrant workers weren't drafted to serve in the war.

Overall, however, despite some of the difficult subject material, The Cider House Rules is a well made drama for the time when you actually want to do some thinking as you watch a movie, unlike something such as my previous selection, Point Break.

Hannah's sisters and her

A couple of months back, TCM had a tribute to the late actor Max von Sydow. One of his films they ran is one in which he's got a supporting role is Hannah and Her Sisters. It's going to be on again, early tomorrow morning at 4:00 AM (or, I suppose, overnight tonight depending on what time zone you're in).

Mia Farrow plays Hannah, one of three daughters in an acting family which is getting together for another Thanksgiving dinner. Patriarch Evan (Lloyd Nolan in his final film) and Mom Norma (Maureen O'Sullivan) do love each other even though they have their squabbles. Hannah is married to Elliot (Michael Caine), not an actor by any means, with a couple of kids. Hannah used to be married to Mickey (Woody Allen), a writer for a sketch comedy TV show.

Hannah's life seems the most in order, as each of her sisters seems to have bigger problems. Lee (Barbara Hershey) is unemployed and living in a sparse studio with her much older artist boyfriend Frederick (that's von Sydow, not that you couldn't figure out which role he was playing since he had a very distinctive look). The other sister, Holly (Dianne Wiest), is trying to get gigs on Broadway or in commercials or anything acting-related, but to shis point she's been rather less than successful, and is reduced to working as a caterer with her friend April (Carrie Fisher).

One Day, Elliot is in a different part of Manhattan for a business meeting but arrives early and has time to kill, so he decides to look for an independent bookstore to browse in. Who should he run into, however, but Lee, who claims to be on her way to her AA meeting? She knows where there's a good bookstore, and after spending some time browsing together, Elliot buys Lee a book of e.e. cummings poetry. The two wind up having an affair, meeting in out of the way hotel rooms.

Holly sees a couple of guys, too, but the relationships don't go so well. Hannah, after her divorce from Mickey, decides to help Mickey and Holly both out by setting the two of them up on a date, but that first date goes disastrously. Then there's an architect whom Holly and April meet at one of their catering gigs. He takes them out to show them the architecture of Manhattan, and Holly even thinks of going out with him, but he can't really decide between the two women.

This being a Woody Allen movie, we also have to talk about his character in more detail. This is another of Allen's nebbish, neurotic types, thinking both that he's got a deadly tumor in his ear and realizing that, as a non-observant Jew, he's got a crisis of faith in wondering what will be after he dies. So he considers joining other religions.

There's quite a lot going on in Hannah and Her Sisters, some of which is quite good, and some of it not as good. Nolan and O'Sullivan shine as the elderly parents in their Thanksgiving scenes together. The Hannah-Elliot-Lee triangle also works well, with all three actors doing a good job and Caine picking up a Supporting Actor Oscar for his part. And as with any Woody Allen movie, people who like New York City will like the photography of New York as it was circa 1985.

Ironically, however, for me, it's the presence of Allen that's one of the weak spots for me. I have to admit I'm not a huge fan of his neurotic shtick from about Annie Hall on, so I tend to be a bit biased against him as an actor. But the contrast in Hannah and Her Sisters was for me even starker than in some of his other movies. We get it, Woody, and it's not as funny as you might think it is.

Allen and Farrow were a couple at the time the movie was made, and some of their children get small roles as Hannah's children. (IMDb also says that Mia Farrow's own apartment was used as one of the sets.) Considering what eventually happened in the Allen/Farrow relationship, some people might find it a bit off-putting. But I didn't find myself thinking about that at all.

When I checked, Hannah and Her Sisters seemed to be out of print on DVD, although it is on Amazon Prime streaming. That's a shame, since the movie is really worth a watch for the performances of pretty much everybody but Woody Allen.

California Sour

Another of my recent movie watches off the DVR was the ensemble comedy California Suite, which TCM showed during 31 Days of Oscar because of Maggie Smith's Oscar win.

The movie is basically an anthology of sorts, based on a Neil Simon play which is actually a series of four one-act plays set in a hotel in Beverly Hills, those four stories being:

Visitor from New York, starring Jane Fonda as Hannah, a divorcée visiting her ex-husband Bill (Alan Alda) in order to get custody of their teenaged daughter for the summer;

Visitor from London, about a British actress Diana (Maggie Smith) up for an Oscar who comes to the ceremony with her gay husband Sidney (Michael Caine). The two bicker along the way.

Visitor from Philadelphia, about a man Marvin (Walter Matthau) coming to LA to see his son's bar mitzvah. He's come a day early, before his wife (Elaine May); Marvin's brother Harry (Herb Edelman) decides to use that extra day to procure a prostitute for Marvin.

Finally there's Visitor from Chicago, about two doctors who are best friends; Dr. Gump (Richard Pryor) and Dr. Panama (Bill Cosby). They've brought their wives with them for a joint vacation, but arrive to find there's only one room reserved for them instead of two.

There are obviously differences between the movie and the play (which I haven't seen; I'm going off the Wikipedia synopsis). One is that the movie can open things up more since it's not just on a stage. This works best in the Fonda/Alda scenes, as they visit a beach among other places while learning to be civil to each other. The Chicagoans' troubles also begin before reaching the hotel, as they have problems with their rental station wagon.

But there's another change which doesn't work at all. Everything I read about the play implies that it's separate acts, like the play and film versions of Plaza Suite, or the way most anthology movies work. The movie version of California Suite, however, makes it look like it's going to be more of an ensemble movie with a bunch of different storylines, like Dinner at Eight or The VIPs. This is where the big problem comes in: in California Suite, the storylines never intersect. So you just go from one couple back to another, for no particularly good reason.

It doesn't help that two of the stories (the Philadelphia and Chicago stories) are fairly week, with Cosby and Pryor in particular having cringe-inducing material. They try their best, and I don't think the film's failings are the fault of any of the cast. Indeed, Fonda, Smith, and Caine all put in very good performances. It's just that it's all in service of decidedly subpar material.

Still, I know other people have different opinions, and this one did win an Oscar for Smith, after all. So you'll probably want to watch and judge for yourself.

Peeper

A movie that recently showed up in the FXM rotation is one I hadn't heard of before, Peeper. It's going to be on again tomorrow, twice, at 3:00 AM and at 1:30 PM.

Michael Caine plays the titular "peeper", which is just 40s slang for a private detective, named Leslie Tucker. He's working in Los Angeles circa 1947, when in walks a man named Anglich (Michael Constantine). Anglich says that he fathered a daughter 30 years ago, but that the mother gave the daughter up for adoption, while he moved off to Florida to try to make a living. It turns out that Anglich was quite successful, which is why he's come back to Los Angeles. He wants to find that daughter he gave up, so that he can write her into his will or give her some of the fortune outright. All Anglich has to go on is a picture outside a house.

It looks like a pretty big house, and Tucker quickly figures out that the house is in Beverly Hills, owned by the Prendergast family. The family has two daughters who seem to be about the right age, Ellen (Natalie Wood) and Mianne (Kitty Winn), along with their uncle Frank (Thayer David). Tucker visits to figure out whether either daughter actually is the one in question, and along the way he falls in love with Ellen.

But not so fast. Tucker returns to his office one evening, and finds that Anglich has been killed. And then he gets a package as well as a visit from Ellen. They are then visited by a pair of thugs, Sid (Timothy Carey) and Rosie (Don Calfa), who are obviously trying to kill Tucker for whatever is in that package. Tucker and Ellen escape, and then some time later they both make their separate ways to an ocean liner for the movie's ultimate climax.

Peeper was designed as a comic homage to the noirs of the 1940s, and in some ways it doesn't do too badly. Caine and Wood are both unsurprisingly good at this sort of comedy, and the movie is visually quite stylish. There's also on odd openin credits, which are spoken by a Humphrey Bogart impersonator rather than the more traditional opening credits. However, I found the plot to be incredibly convoluted to the point that it was tough to figure out exactly what was going on. Perhaps I needed to be paying better attention instead of watching it at night.

I would, however, give Peeper a recommendation in spite of its flaws. The movie doesn't seem to be on DVD, so you're going to have to catch the FXM showings, which also include a couple showings next Monday.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

DirecTV had a free preview of the Epix package of channels over the summer, which gave me the chance to DVR several more recent films. Among them is Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which is going to be on Epix2 on Sunday morning at 9:50 AM, and is also available on DVD if you don't have the Epix package.

Michael Caine, looking almost unrecognizable with his hair slicked back, plays Lawrence Jamieson, a British man living in a ritzy town on the French Riviera where he plies his trade of fleecing rich women out of their money. He's got the help of the local police chief, Inspector Andre (Anton Rodgers), at least in the form of looking the other way and not doing anything about it. His latest scam has him pretending to be a prince trying to get money out of Fanny (Barbara Harris).

On a train back from depositing money in his Swiss bank account, Lawrence meets Freddy Benson (Steve Martin). Freddy is also a con artist, but much less suave than Lawrence. Lawrence has heard of a criminal called "the Jackal", but doesn't know anything about the Jackal's identity, only that apparently the Jackal is about to set up shop in the same town where Lawrence has been working. The town isn't big enough for two con artists, and Lawrence doesn't really like Freddy anyway, so Lawrence gets Freddy on a plane out of town.

The only problem is that Freddy meets Fanny on the plane. So now Freddy has something to blackmail Lawrence with, which he's bound to do. Freddy persuades Lawrence to try to teach him how to be more elegant, and the two pull off another con. But Lawrence still doesn't care for Freddy, so the two make a wager. They'll find a new mark, and the one of them to con her out of $50,000 will get to stay in town while the other is forced to leave.

They soon meet a suitable mark in Janet Colgate (Glenne Headley), an American soap heiress. Freddy tries to pass himself off as an American navy officer paralyzed from the waist down with some sort of mental condition, needing $50,000 to see a specialist to get better. Lawrence passes himself off as Dr. Emil Schaffhusen, a Liechtensteinian doctor who could treat Freddy for that $50,000. So the game is on.

Or, at least, it is until the two find out that Janet is not in fact a soap heiress. She's the "soap queen" because she won a contest in the States, and is only on an all-expenses paid trip presumably promoting an American detergent. In fact, the only way she could get the $50,000 is to sell off a bunch of her assets. On top of this, it doesn't help that Freddy is beginning to find himself falling in love with her, while Lawrence has a strict thing against bilking people who can't afford to be the victim.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is a fun little movie with a lot of twists and turns, aided enormously by the two leading men. Both of them fit their parts extremely well, Caine as an elegant con and Martin with his more stereotypically American brashness. Headley is also a treat as the woman between them. It's a shame that she died much too young. The movie is also helped by the gorgeous location shooting and a really nice score.

I can most definitely recommend Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

Blame It on Rio

My last set of DVD purchases from Amazon included this four-film set which as of this writing is out of stock. I didn't realize it until very recently, after watching Blame It on Rio off the set. Thankfully, Amazon lists the movie as being available on its streaming (free through June 30 for those with Prime), while the TCM shop lists it as being available as a stand-alone DVD or Blu-ray neither of which seem to be on Amazon.

Michael Caine plays Matthew Hollis, a businessman working for a firm in São Paulo, Brazil, along with his long-time friend Victor Lyons (Joseph Bologna). Victor seems more concerned with the divorce he's going through with his wife back in America, but Victor's daughter Jennifer (Michelle Johnson) is coming down for a visit. So Matthew arranged for a a visit to the more pleasure-oriented Rio de Janeiro for the two Lyonses, as well as Matthew, his wife Karen (Valerie Harper) and their daughter Nicole (Demi Moore).

The only thing is, the vacation isn't going to get off to a good start. As Matthew is packing his luggage for Rio, Karen informs him that she booked a separate vacation for herself at a resort in the northeastern state of Bahia. Matthew gets the obvious sense that there's something wrong in his marriage, but he doesn't have any idea what that something is. Still, there's not much he can do about it, so she heads her way and the other four go to Rio.

The two young women want to experience the pleasures of Rio, while Victor is OK thinking about fully adult women since he's about to get divorced. Matthew isn't so sure. Things are about to change for him, though. Jennifer convinces him to go along with her to a traditional non-Catholic wedding reception which apparently contains elements of the old African religions, as well as a lot of fun on the beach. After dark, Jennifer seduces Matthew and the two wind up making love! Matthew feels guilty, but Jennifer seems much more up-front about her feelings for Matthew.

Victor, understandably, would be might pissed if he knew what was going on. and soon enough, Jennifer tells Victor that she's had sex with a guy old enough to be her father, although she doesn't tell Victor anything about who that man is. Victor is extremely unhappy, but comes to the brilliant solution that since Jennifer seems to trust "uncle" Matthew, perhaps he should try to disarm Jennifer and get her to reveal who the man in her new relationship is. Matthew isn't about to let on, since he's pretty certain Victor isn't going to like it when he finds out that it's he, Matthew, who had sex with Jennifer.

I have to admit that I found Blame It on Rio to be not quite as funny as I expected going in. That's less because of the material and more because of Michelle Johnson's portrayal of Jennifer as a young woman who knows what she wants and is going to get it regardless of how it might hurt either her father, her "uncle" Matthew, or the two men's friendship. The movie does ultimately resolve everything with an interesting twist that does save the movie. But it takes a long time in getting to that resolution.

For the price I paid for the four-movie set, I'd certainly recommend Blame It on Rio. If you've got an Amazon Prime membership and can watch it for free through the end of the month, that's also worthwhile. For the price of the standalone DVD, I'm not so certain.

X, Y, Zee & Co.

A movie I'd wanted to see for a while was Zee & Co., which was released in the States as X, Y, and Zee. TCM ran it a month ago when Elizabeth Taylor was Star of the Month, and the movie is available on DVD courtesy of the Sony/Columbia MOD scheme.

The movie starts off with opening credits superimposed over a scene of Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Caine playing a game of table tennis, sporting the sort of exaggerated facial expressions of joy that you'd see in TV commercials. Right away, this was a sign to me that we've got a movie in the "Disaster Waiting to Happen" genre. Sure enough, it's coming.

Taylor plays Zee Blakeley, the wife of Robert (Caine), an architect in London. We learn fairly quickly that it's not a particularly happy marriage. Zee spends too much, and Robert drinks and has a wandering eye for the ladies. When their friend Gladys (Margaret Leighton) throws a swanky party, Robert makes the acquaintance of dress designer Stella (Susannah York).


Margaret Leighton (l.) and Elizabeth Taylor in X, Y, and Zee

Stella is a widow with youngish twin sons, and she could use a man in her life. Robert is a man who needs a woman who's not as nuts or nasty as Zee. So of course the two are drawn to each other. And they're not exactly keeping it a secret. Zee knows fully well what's going on, and she decides that she's going to make life as difficult for Robert and Stella as possible.



The antics range from Zee making business difficult for Stella by insisting on taking somebody else's dress, all the way up to trying to slit her wrists. And on her hospital bed after the suicide attempt, she learns something she can use against Stella, setting up the spectacularly nutsy finale.

X, Y, and Zee is one of those movies that's terrible because of how screwed up the story is, to the point that there are a lot of times you'll want to laugh at how ludicrous it all is. The characters deliver a bunch of tawdry one-liners, all while bathed in a production design that takes the style of the era and says let's turn it up to 11. Taylor's hair would be spectacularly bad if it weren't that she's easily outdone by Leighton in her two scenes. Taylor has to settle for that horrid eye make-up, as well as the opportunity to chew every bit of scenery in London.

X, Y, and Zee isn't very good, but it's a movie everybody should watch once for how hilariously off the rails it goes.

TCM's schedule page isn't always right

I see that TCM is running Beyond the Poseidon Adventure again overnight tonight at 2:00 AM as part of a day of Slim Pickens movies in Summer Under the Stars. (Dr. Strangelove is thankfully not part of the lineup.) I noticed that there was a "Buy the DVD" link that led to the TCM Shop, and a Warner Archive DVD that was first released back in April 2014.

I first mentioned Beyond the Poseidon Adventure back in 2015, pointing out at the time that I didn't know if it was in print because the TCM schedule didn't have a link to buy the DVD. Obviously, it should have been available in 2015 if it was released in 2014 and is still available form the MOD scheme.

As for the movie itself, it's fun if flawed. Failing tugboat operator Michael Caine happens on the overturned hull of the Poseidon at some point after the sinking and the victims were rescued in the original movie. I don't think the movie mentions exactly how long after, but you'd think there would be more rescue crews and a salvage operation or something there. Anyhow, Caine gets the idea of robbing the safe in the purser's office. But at the same time, another boat captained by the mysterious Svevo (Telly Savalas) shows up with its own agenda trying to get something else off the Poseidon. And they find more survivors (Slim Pickens among them).

Beyond the Poseidon Adventure isn't particularly good, but it is entertaining.

Escape to Victory

I think in large part because of the subject matter and the high number of athletes in the cast, the movie Victory (also known as Escape to Victory in the UK) gets a reputation as a hilariously awful movie. I bought the DVD some months back, and the movie is nowhere near as bad as it's often given credit for.

Max von Sydow plays Nazi Major von Steiner, who at the start of the movie is accompanying a delegation of Swiss Red Cross workers visiting a POW camp full of Allied prisoners. Steiner recognizes one of them, Capt. Colby (Michael Caine). Apparently, before the war, Colby played soccer for West Ham, one of the big English clubs, and even for the English national team. Colby has set up a makeshift soccer league in the camp.

Eventually, all of this leads to the Nazis having the idea of setting up a propaganda soccer friendly between a German team and a team of international POWs. This presents all sorts of problems because the British wouldn't want its soldiers becoming propaganda pawns of the Germans. Plus, there's really no way the soccer players can train properly. But Colby is told there are any number of internationals who are now POWs, including a Trinidadian (the Caribbean islands weren't independent countries yet) who looks and sounds surprisingly Brazilian, which is understandable when you consider the player is played by Pelé.

At the same time all this is going on, you've got an American who doesn't know much about soccer, and who wants to escape. Capt. Hatch (Sylvester Stallone), when he does play, tries to make American football-style tackles, which are highly illegal in soccer. But he spends more time on his escape plan, except that the soccer match is screwing that up. And then he does escape and make it to Paris, where the Resistance tells him it's possible that the big soccer friendly in Paris could be used as an opportunity for the team to escape! So we get to the big game. Will it be a fair fight? Will the Allies be able to escape at halftime? And what is Hatch doing playing in goal?

Victory is in some ways a familiar movie, what with the World War II theme and the idea of breaking out of a POW camp, topics that were covered in lots of movies. It's more the daft idea of putting a bunch of POWs in a soccer match in Paris that makes people want to bring the movie in for criticism. I find it's not so much that hook that's the problem. It's that the whole movie doesn't just require a suspension of disbelief; it requires disbelief to be levitated and flown off. The Resistance wants Hatch to go back into the camp to inform the soccer team of the escape attempt, but as we saw in The Great Escape, the Nazis just would have shot him in front of the others POWs without him having the opportunity to inform them of anything. Pelé gets subbed out of the soccer match, and then gets subbed back in, which is thoroughly against the rules of the game. And even though the refs aren't so neutral, there aren't even any yellow cards handed out to the Allies. If I watched the movie a second time, I could probably remember more obvious plot holes.

All that aside, though, Victory does entertain, and is nowhere near as bad as it's been made out to be. And the DVD is relatively inexpensive.

The Wrong Box

I thought I had done a full-length post on The Wrong Box before, but it turns out I've only mentioned it briefly when it aired a couple of years back as part of a salute to its director, Bryan Forbes, when TCM ran a programming tribute in response to his death. It's on this evening at 6:00 PM as part of Ralph Richardson's day in TCM's Summer Under the Stars. Thankfully, it seems to be available on DVD, so even if you miss today's airing, you can still catch it on DVD.

Ralph Richardson plays Joseph Finsbury, the elderly brother of Masterman (John Mills), in 1880s England. Back when they were kids, the two of them were entered into a tontine with about 20 other young boys. A tontine is an old form of insurance in which each person puts a sum of money into an account, that money is invested, and when only one of the people is surviving, that person gets the money plus whatever profits it's made due to prudent investments. Now, you'd think this would lead at least one greedy member of the tontine to want to off the others to get the money. And to an extent, that does happen, but only after most of the members die in various Victorian-era accidents, all humorously shown in a montage that takes up the opening reel or so of the movie.

Joseph and Masterman are the only two surviving members, and Masterman doesn't seem to be doing very well. Not only does he seem to be ill, his finances are in a rather parlous state. He's living with his grandson Michael (Michael Caine) and his perpetually drunk and befuddled butler Peacock (Wilfrid Lawson). Masterman would like the money from the tontine so that he can bequeath it to Michael and Peacock. To then end, he has Michael inform Joseph of his health, so that Joseph can come and visit one last time. That "one last time" is of course supposed to result in Joseph's dying before Masterman.

Joseph, for his part, doesn't seem to care about the money from the tontine. Instead, he's developed into an idle rich old man, as well as a sort of 19th century version of Cliff Clavin 100 years before the TV show Cheers, endlessly boring people with his knowledge of minutiae that nobody else cares about. However, he's living with a niece Julia (Nanette Newman) and two nephews Morris and John (the comedy pair of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore respectively). Nanette is at home in London a few doors down from Masterman and Michael; the rest are on a rest holiday in Bournemouth on the coast. When they hear the news of Masterman's health, they take the first train back to London, Morris and John desperately wanting to get the money. But Joseph escapes and the train derails, leaving them to believe Joseph has died. Of course, they can't let that information become public.

And so things develop. Joseph gets to London before his nephews, so Masterman knows he's still alive. The nephews try to get a post-dated death certificate, so they can "prove" that Joseph died after Masterman. Michael goes to Joseph's house, finds only Julia there, and those two fall in love. And a wrong box with what Morris and John thought was Joseph's dead body winds up at Masterman's house. It all leads to a bunch of zany comedy....

There's a lot to like about The Wrong Box. And yet, I found myself not liking it quite as much as a lot of other people seem to. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that as I've stated on a bunch of occasions, I'm not a huge fan of the genre of a comedy of lies where somebody (in this case Morris and John) tells a lie and then has to keep expanding on it lest the truth comes out. There's also the presentation that uses intertitles in a way I didn't think was necessary, sometimes slightly slowing things down. The biggest problem I had, however, was with the character of Dr. Pratt (Peter Sellers), the disreputable doctor from whom Morris and John try to get that post-dated death certificate. His character is irritating and unfunny, and his two scenes bring the movie to a screeching halt that made me want to fast forward through them.

Having said that, Michael Caine shows he can do light comedy even when up against people like Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Nanette Newman is lovely to look at and holds up her end of the bargain OK. But perhaps the highlights are the two old guys, John Mills and Ralph Richardson, both of whom look as though they're having an absolute blast. Mills has the more obvious comedy, but Richardson gets top honors, I think, for playing the ultimately nice guy who is at the same time intensely irritating with that small talk. And of course his character is utterly oblivious to how he's irritating everybody around him.

Overall, I think most people will like The Wrong Box. And if you like Peter Sellers, you'll probably like it even more than I do.

Deathtrap

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to watch Deathtrap off of my DVR. It turns out that you can get it on Blu-Ray from the TCM Shop, so I'm not opposed to doing a fuller-length post on it. Doing an actual full-length post, however, may be a bit of a problem, as you shall soon see.

Michael Caine plays Sidney Bruhl, a playwright living out on Long Island with his wife Myra (Dyan Cannon), who has a heart condition. As the film opens, Sidney is on Brodaway at the premiere of his new play, while Myra is at home taking her pills waiting for the reviews. Those reviews are unfortunately negative. Where Sidney used to be the big hit of Broadway writers, he's become a dud with his past several plays, this one apparently being the worst of them all.

Having a string of failures is obviously a problem, but there's another indignity coming. At the premiere of his play, he was sent by courier a copy of a play-in-progress called Deathtrap, by Clifford Anderson (Christopher Reeve), who had been a student of Sidney's at a seminar Sidney did the previous year. Clifford would like an honest review of it, if that wouldn't be too much trouble. Sidney brings Deathtrap home with him, reads it, and discovers... this is the perfect two-act play. It'll be a surefire hit on Broadway and make big money for its playwright.

So at this point Sidney has an outlandish idea. Nobody else but him, Clifford, and Myra know that Clifford is writing this play; Clifford doesn't have any family and not much in the way of friends around since he's cloistered himself away writing Deathtrap, and so on. So it would be just too perfect if Sidney invited Clifford over for the review, then killed Clifford and took credit for the play himself. Since this is a movie and the plan is such utter nonsense, you know that Sidney is going to put it into action.

Now, all of this happenns in the first few reels, and by the time Sidney reveals the truth of what he's going to do to Clifford, the movie is maybe a half-hour into its two-hour running time. And that's why it's tough to do a real full-length post on the movie. You know that there's a lot more that's going to happen, but for a reviewer to suggest what any of that something is would be to give away a lot of the plot. And Deathtrap the movie is not one of those where you want to know too much about what happens going into it.

That having been said, the movie is pretty good. Michael Caine goes a bit over the top, I think, but then this is based on a stage play and you get the impression that Caine is almost playing to the back rows here. It's material that probably works better on a stage than on the screen. Christopher Reeve is excellent; he's not just Superman when it comes to being an actor. Dyan Cannon isn't bad, although she here is the latest in a long line of Hollywood actresses who look a bit miscast as seriously ill women. The one cast member I found irritating is Irene Worth, who plays a psychic, who shows up in a couple of scenes to be just too convenient. I also had a problem with the ultimate ending wrapping up all the loose ends, which seemed even less plausible than the rest of the movie.

Any quibbles aside, Deathtrap is well worth watching.

The Swarm

TCM is giving us a night of insect-based horror/disaster movies this evening. A movie that's highly entertaining, if not particularly good, is The Swarm, airing overnight at 2:45 AM (or still late this evening out on the west coast).

The movie begins with Brad Crane (Michael Caine) driving up to an isolated military base somewhere in Texas. Not only is it isolated, it seems as if there's very little activity going on, and much of what does go on takes place underground. Brad investigates, and indeed, there's next to no sign of life. Eventually, it turns out that there's still a sign of life in the escape areas. Meanwhile, General Slater (Richard Widmark) has also arrived at the facility, wondering what this Brad guy is doing there. Everything is explained pretty quickly. Brad is an entomologist, and what happened at this military installation has the hallmarks of an attack by killer bees. Except that the killer bees are supposed to be a tropical phenomenon, and shouldn't be appearing this far nother. They are, of course, and that presents a huge problem not just for Brad, but for everybody in America!

Brad and the general are obviously going to be battling each other throughout the movie; that much is foreshadowed fairly early in the film. But Brad wins, at least in the sense that Washington authorizes him to investigate the phenomenon and set up a research station at the military base and assemble anybody he wants. Among the assembled are wheelchair-bound Dr. Krim (Henry Fonda), and reluctant researcher Dr. Hubbard (Richard Chamberlain).

I said earlier that those bees could become a problem for all of America, and we wouldn't have much of a film if they didn't start attacking good old average Americans. Marysville is a town not far from the military base, and they're about to have a civic pride festival. Little do they know the whole apple cart is about to be upset. A family goes out for a picnic at a state park not too far out of town, which just happens to be not too far from where the bees are massing to go swarm. So they swarm this family, killing Mom and Dad and making the kid drive away in fear of his life, not that he can drive very well either. He winds up in Marysville, which is how the town is made aware of the impending doom. To make matters worse, these bees aren't just swarming; they're even more venomous than previous killer bee strains. People can get killed by being stung only once.

There's a lot of formula in The Swarm is the civilian scientists fight the military over how to solve the problem. It's a theme that gets visited in a lot of horror movies, but here it's set against the backdrop of an all-star disaster movie. Katharine Ross plays Helena, the woman who ends up assisting Brad; there's a love triangle in Marysville involving schoolteacher Maureen (Olivia de Havilland) being pursued by two lovers (Fred MacMurray and Ben Johnson). That, and there are all sorts of over-the-top set pieces involving Marysville, a train, a nuclear power plant, and Houston. The result is a movie that should be terrible on so many levels. You have to feel bad for this cast of stars (I believe seven of them won an Oscar at some point in their careers) having to utter such horrendous dialog. The scenes of people dying during the bee swarms are some of the more hilariously bad death scenes you'll ever see. And some of those set pieces will make you laugh, even though that wasn't the intention.

That's all down to Irwin Allen, who produced and directed this movie. He had been successful at the beginning of the 1970s with The Poseiden Adventure, and seemingly tried to replicate such an all-star disaster film on an ever grander scale. The Swarm is near the end of that cycle, and it's clear that Allen had run out of steam. But while the movie is nearly bereft of ideas, it redeems itself by so unrelentingly missing the mark at every turn. Allen never intended movies like The Swarm to be comedies, but you'll probably be laughing a lot at the ludicrousness of all this. Ultimately, it's one of those movies that bombed but wound up being fun by so doing.

The Swarm is one of those movies that did get a DVD release at some point in the past, but is out of print. The TCM Shop doesn't list it as available for purchase, while Amazon has the sort of entries that strongly imply an out of print DVD.

The Man Who Would Be King

A few months ago I had the chance to catch the TCM airing of the rousing adventure movie The Man Who Would Be King. It's airing again tonight at 8:00 PM as this week's TCM Essential, and is well worth a watch.

The movie starts off in British India sometime in the 1890s. Rudyard Kipling (Christopher Plummer) is a civil servant working in some God-forsaken part of the country, when into his office walks one Peachy Carnahan (Michael Caine), who looks vaguely familiar despite the fact that he's also looking very haggard. It turns out that the two men met several years ago, introduced by an old friend of Peachy's. Flash back five years to how Kipling and Peachy met.... Kipling was taking the train to get to his posting, where he was accosted by on Daniel Dravot (Sean Connery), a cashiered British Army officer. Daniel picked Kipling's pocket watch and then returned it, claiming Kipling had lost it. But that was all a ruse for Daniel's scheme that he was planning to carry out with Peachy.

Beyond the borders of British India lies what is today Afghanistan; recall that India and Pakistan were carved out of British India and partitioned off at independence in 1947. Back in the day, what was beyond the Khyber Pass, the border pass leading northwest out of what is now Pakistan, was little known, at least not until you got someplace as far north as Samarkand in what is now Uzbekistan. There were, however, rumors of various tribes, some with fabulous wealth, living in the mountainous terrain. In particular, there's one tribe that is supposedly descended from Alexander the Great and the wealth that he plundered from his conquests along the way to the Hindu Kush. Daniel and Peachy have decided that, since they've got access to modern weapons, they can turn one of the tribes against another and get at some of that wealth themselves. Daniel and Peachy need maps from Kipling's office.

It's a daft idea, and already a quarter century earlier Hollywood westerns had running arms to the American Indian tribes being presented as a terribly bad thing. So you'd think Daniel and Peachy should be really bad people. But The Man Who Would Be King isn't that sort of movie. It's far less social commentary and far more straightforward adventure; after all, this was based on a story by Kipling himself, written back in the days when people like him would have felt the "white man's burden" to try to civilize places like India, or even more those tribes up in the northwest. So Daniel and Peachy are lovable rogues

And they actually do fairly well in getting away with their scheme. At least, they do at first. They're able to get past the Khyber Pass and meet up with another army man they knew, Billy Fish (Saeed Jaffrey). He helps them, being mixed-race and not quite feeling British. Eventually, they all get to Kafiristan, which it seems is the legendary land of the descendants of Alexander the Great. Their mythology posits that someday, Alexander's son is going to return to rule them -- and it just so happens that they mistake Daniel for that son! This gives Daniel the idea not to plunder the wealth, but to become a king and rule over these people. This is really a gilded cage, but it's probably also a hell of a lot less dangerous than trying to remove the wealth from the Kafiristanis. And who wouldn't let power go to his head?

Peachy, for his part, just wants to get that wealth. And we know that he makes it out of Kafiristan, since he shows up back in India in the opening scene of the movie. To be fair, though, it's not like the good people of Kafiristan were mistaking him for the son of Alexander the Great. He's just a dumb schlub accompanying Alexander's son. Who wants to be in an unequal relationship like that? So Daniel and Peachy start to develop a rift between themselves, one that could possibly put their entire scheme in danger. But there's a much bigger problem, which is that the Kafiristanis believe that the son of Alexander isn't just a king, but a god. Daniel, obviously, is not a god. What's going to happen when the natives figure that out?

I said in the opening paragraph, and stand by my comment, that The Man Who Would Be King is a rousing adventure story. Don't look too hard for deeper meaning. There might be some in places, but this is much more an entertaining movie, not a message picture. Sean Connery had finished up being James Bond a few years earlier, and was in a phase of his career where he was doing quite a few action movies (Zardoz and The Wind and the Lion spring to mind). The Man Who Would Be King is squarely in that mold, and Connery is well-cast as Daniel Dravot. Michael Caine is an interesting choice. He had already proven himself to be quite good at playing roguish heroes; Alfie is a cad and Gambit is rather closer to The Man Who Would Be King, only set in a different era. I wouldn't necessarily have thought of Caine as being the right person to do colonial India, but he's just fine here. Christopher Plummer doesn't have much to do, but is more than up to the task. One other notable cast member is Roxanne, the Kafiristani with whom Daniel falls in love. Roxanne was played by Shakira Caine, Michael Caine's real-life wife. They're still married after 42 years.

The Man Who Would Be King is a hell of a lot of fun. If you haven't seen it before, do yourself a favor and watch it tonight. It's also available on DVD if you can't catch it tonight, however.

Il compito

TCM is putting the spotlight on composer Quincy Jones tonight. Jones might be best remembered as a producer of pop music, but he did write several movie scores over the course of his career. Among the movies Jones scored is the caper film The Italian Job, overnight tonihgt or early tomorrow morning at 4:15 AM.

Michael Caine plays Charlie Croker, a small-time thief who has just finished a two-year stint in prison. After getting out, he's picked up by his girlfriend, who takes him to see a mysterious foreign woman. This woman, Mrs. Beckerman, is the wife of a man who was friends with one Bridger (Noël Coward). Bridger is a prisoner in the same prison where Charlie spent his two years, and is in fact the top dog in the prison, being a master criminal. Beckerman's late husband had apparently come up with an idea to pull off a daring heist in Italy, and she's offering that plan to Charlie.

The plan is audacious: steal a shipment of gold valued at £4 million being transported from Communist China to Italy when it's coming off the plane at the Turin airport. As cover, but also making things more complicated, is that the shipment is taking place at the same time as a big soccer match between England and Italy taking place in Turin. The city is going to be filled with English fans, and who's going to notice a few more who turn out to be criminals? Complicating matters is that more people is going to mean more traffic on top of the notorious Italian traffic.

Charlie can't do this by himself, and in fact it's obvious he's going to need Bridger's connections. Bridger, for all his other criminal faults, is a man who loves Britain, sp the thought of stealing gold from Italy appeals to his chauvinism, and he helps Charlie at least as much as a man in prison can, which seems to be quite a lot. Chief among the members of Charlie's gang assembled for the job is Prof. Peach (Benny Hill), an electronics expert whose job it's going to be to deal with all the security cameras and similar electronics. Peach, however, is also a mental patient, which again serves to make the job more difficult.

And so on to the heist itself. Well, not quite. Word has made it through the grapevine that some Englihsmen are plotting this heist. Of course the police don't like it, but there's another problem for Charlie & Co.: the Mafia. They don't like the idea of anybody muscling in on their turf, and they're going to make certain the heisters don't even get to Turin. Of course, the heist is going to go off, but are our English heores going to get away with it?

The Italian Job is probably remembered for one thing, which is the getaway scene after the heist in Turin involving a bunch of Mini Cooper cars going pretty much everywhere in Turin as they try to escape everybody chasing them. And I mean literally everywhere, including stairs and rooftops, among other places. There's a reason why this sequence is generally known as the highlight of the movie, and it's very well done.

In fact, much of The Italian Job is well done. Michael Caine had already played on conman in Gambit, and he seems a natural for the role here. The set-piece sequences -- not just the Mini Coopers, but the ones before the gang gets to Turin, the heist itself, and the finale -- all work well. About the only thing that doesn't work is Noël Coward,who comes across as though he's playing a parody of himself. The Italian Job isn't supposed to be particularly realistic; it's a fairly comedic heist movie. (As if you didn't figure that out from the Mini Coopers.) But the Coward sequences, especially one after he learns about the hesit, come across as particularly ill-fitting. That doesn't detract much from the movie as a whole, however, which remains thoroughly entertaining.

The Italian Job was remade about a decade ago, so if you're looking for it on DVD, make certain you get this 1969 version and not the remake.

Gambit

I think I've mentioned quite a few times that the heist films of the 1960s are entertaining, if not quite as good as some of the 1950s movies like The Asphalt Jungle. I think that's because a lot of the 1960s films were going for some light comic relief in addition to the thriller bits. An excellent example of this is Gambit, which is airing tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM on TCM.

Michael Caine plays Harry Dean, a British man visiting Hong Kong for a purpose we're quickly going to discover. He stops off at a particular nightclub, where he meets an associate of his, Émile Fournier (John Abbott). Harry is really looking to get in touch with Nicole (Shirley MacLaine), one of the dancers in the club's floor show, however. Harry eventually sits down with Nicole, and tells him what the purpose of his visit is, and why he's talking to her about it.

Shahbandar (Herbert Lom) is one of the world's wealthiest men, but living as a recluse in a penthouse at the top of one of the hotels in his city-state of Dammuz. He's a businessman and art collector, being in possession of some of the most priceless ancient sculptures out there, which he keeps in his penthouse apartment. He's also a widower, having lost hsi young wife after only a year or so of marriage. And that's where Nicole comes in. Nicole, half Chinese and half French-Canadian (yeah, there's an odd ethnic makeup), looks amazingly like Shahbandar's late wife. The minute that Harry and Nicole land in Dammuz, Shahbandar's men are going to see her, and invite the couple to Shahbandar's penthouse for dinner, where Harry is going to get the lay of the land, so to speak. And Shahbandar is going to be so taken by Nicole that he's going to want to take her out for a night on the town, leaving Harry free to get back into the penthouse, steal a particular sculpture and replace it with a copy, and get away. And they'll be able to make their escape, all with spending less than 24 hours in Dammuz. It's a brilliant, foolproof plan!

Yeah right. The movie presents this plan almost as though it's the actual action of the movie, suddenly ending about 35 minutes in. Nicole, for the very good reason that she needs the money, decides to take up Harry on his offer. The two, fake passports in hand, fly to Dammuz -- and find that there's nobody there to meet them, forcing them to face the traffic all by themselves. Shahbandar's men have spotted Nicole though, and eventually he invites Harry and Nicole to lunch -- on their yacht, not in the penthouse. And Shahbandar is peppering the couple with questions, which makes it sound suspicously as though he knows there's something not quite right.

Harry and Nicole eventually do get an invite to the penthouse, where he discovers that stealing the sculpture is going to be no easy feat, as it's guarded by a bunch of electric eyes which summon men with guns. And Nicole isn't excatly thrilled with her part in this whole hare-brained scheme, since it's been going on rather longer than Harry had originally planned for. But Harry, dammit, is going to go through with the plan anyway. Nicole ultimately has a change of heart, and shows up at the penthouse while Harry is trying to get the sculpture out of its cage, so to speak, and decides to help him do it! The two eventually steal the sculpture and escape the penthouse, getting away with it all. Or do they? There's still a whole series of complications to befall all of the main characters.

There really isn't all that much of a plot here: boy meets girl, boy uses girl to try to steal something from another boy. It's all in the presentation. Caine is suitably charming, which is about the only real characterization the script asks any of the cast members to do. Gambit is a movie more about the heist than about the characters carrying it out. In that sense, the movie succeeds quite well, at least when it comes to entertaining the viewer. Yes, the plan is hare-brained, and thoroughly utterly daft. Who in his right mind could thing a plan like this could possibly work? And yet, watching the movie, you really don't care that these people have to be nuts to even try to carry it out. There's nothing deep going on in Gambit; just a couple of pretty people violating every bit of common sense. But boy is it entertaining.