Technically it should be called Asteroid

I've got a brother-in-law who's a James Bond fan, so for the past several years I've been getting him DVDs of various non-Bond Sean Connery (mostly) movies as Christmas gifts. Recently, I saw another new-to-me Connery film on one of the streaming services, I think Pluto TV: Meteor.

Connery plays Paul Bradley, who at the start of the movie is participating in a boat race. But the Coast Guard approaches his boat, basically forcing them to bow out of the regatta because Bradley is needed elsewhere. Indeed, the federal government already has a special plane laid out for him to take him to Houston, and from there to Washington DC.

Houston means the headquarters of NASA, which has learned something shocking and disastrous. They had a crew on the way to Mars for the first manned mission, but sent that crew out to the asteroid belt when space events intervened. Two celestial bodies collided, sending one of the asteroids out of its asteroid belt orbit and somehow resulting in the space crew's death. But scientists on earth have calculated the asteroid's new orbit and have found that it's going to collide with earth! And that collision is going to happen in six days!

Yeah right; never mind that comets don't make it that distance in six days or that even today are generally only able to calculate probabilistic chances for an asteroid to hit the earth. This asteroid is five miles in diameter, and something that big hitting the earth is going to cause cataclysmic damage. Consider that the Tunguska event is generally believed to have been caused by something maybe 200 feet in diameter, which is less than 1% of the diameter of this asteroid.

So what is Dr. Bradley supposed to do? NASA head Harry Sherwood (Karl Malden) knows that Dr. Bradley was one of the lead scientists working on a top-secret project called Hercules. Bradley's conception for Hercules was to send a space station-sized satellite armed with a dozen or so nuclear missiles, even though this would have violated the Outer Space Treaty (I think that's the appropriate treaty), which banned putting nuclear weapons in outer space. Bradley's idea was that the nuclear missiles could be used to intercept any incoming celestial bodies, pushing them off the orbit that would have them hit earth. After all, if you can hit an object far enough away, it doesn't take much to deflect it into missing the earth.

Unsurprisingly, however, military types like Gen. Adlon (Martin Landau) took over the project since they saw the military usefulness of being able to have nuclear weapons in space pointed at the Soviet Union. He got Hercules' mission changed to one targeting the Soviets, and he'd be pissed if the Soviets found out that the US had violated this treaty. Thankfully, the President (Henry Fonda) has the intelligence that the Soviets have a similar system, and that if the two countries combined their systems, they could deflect the asteroid enough to save Earth.

Of course, this means making Hercules public and getting the Soviets to admit to their system. The Soviets send to America their chief scientist, Dubov (Brian Keith), and his interpreter, Tatiana (Natalie Wood) to assist the Americans before the asteroid can hit Earth. But since this is a disaster movie, we know that at least pieces of the asteroid are going to hit and give the producers opportunites for special effects.

The problem with Meteor is that neither half of the movie -- either the Cold War story or the disaster climax -- is given enough focus to make it work well. As a result, we get something that's talky without the payoff at the end that in theory is what the audience wants to see. It also doesn't help that a lot of the cast seem to have taken on their roles simply for the paycheck. Some criticize the special effects, but I think this is unfair, since they're not notably bad for the era. Sure, filmmakers can do things better today, but that misses the point.

Still, Meteor is moderately entertaining, and the sort of movie that's probably worth one viewing since you can stream it.

Gypsy

A couple of months back, TCM ran the movie musical Gypsy. Realizing that I had never done a blog post on it, I made a point of recording it so that some day I could get around to watching it and doing a post on it. I finally did watch it, so here's the post.

The title Gypsy, of course, refers to Gypsy Rose Lee (1911-1970; played as an adult by Natalie Wood), famous for he striptease act. But we don't get any of that until almost the end of the movie. She was born Rose Louise Hovick (called Louise for most of the movie), with a sister June (who in real life became June Havoc). Her mother Rose (Rosalind Russell) had worked vaudeville and was now a single mother with a bunch of ex-husbands, so she's trying to push her two kids into vaudeville. Well, mostly Baby June since she's the one Mom thinks has talent.

An audition run by Herbie Sommers (Karl Malden) goes badly, with Herbie basically walking out on the producer and taking the show on the road, as it were, with the Hovicks. Mom comes up with an idea that has them and a bunch of boys be a child act, but of course they're all going to grow up and the depression is going to come, which is what ultimately kills vaudeville. Mom tries every trick in the book to get bookings for the act, and is also an incredibly pushy stage mother, who seems to care more about the kids' performing than the kids themselves do.

Eventually, they reach the end of the line. The boys are grown up and haven't been paid regularly. One of them has fallen in love with June and the two elope, planning to quit the act, leaving just Rose, Louise, and Herbie. Mom starts all over again, hiring a bunch of no-talent girls to be the new act, and putting Louise in the starring role, even though she doesn't seem to have anywhere near the talent that June had.

Louise's transition to Gypsy comes when Herbie gets the act a booking in Wichita. Only, it's not a vaudeville house but a burlesque house, with the Hovick act, now the Hollywood Blondes, being booked to be the "clean" entertainment between acts, much like Maureen O'Hara in Dance, Girl, Dance or the Britt Ekland character in The Night They Raided Minsky's (in fact, Minsky's Burlesque does get a brief mention in Gypsy). However, Mom is extremely unhappy with this. When circumstances conspire such that the owner needs somebody to do the "striptease" in a pinch, Louise volunteers and becomes Gypsy Rose Lee.

In a montage of her doing her number in a bunch of places, Gypsy becomes successful, enough so that Mom decides to look her up, although that might cause quite a bit of tension.

I think that fans of musicals will probably enjoy Gypsy, while other people will enjoy it somewhat less. Rosalind Russell plays Mama Rose as so obnoxiously pushy that for me she became grating. Wood does well, and Malden provides pretty good support in what I found to be a relatively thankless role. But for me it was the musical numbers, which are of course old-fashioned since the movie is set in the 1920s and 30s, that didn't work for me. I also felt the whole striptease montage was a copout. (I've never seen the stage musical, so I don't know how it's handled there.)

Still, Gypsy shows all the pizzazz that Hollywood studios would try to bring in the 1960s to what was becoming a dying genre, which also makes it a bit of an interesting artifact. It's just one that can be a bit of a slog at times.

Tab Wood and Natalie Wouldn't

Tomorrow morning and afternoon on TCM looks like a lineup of David Janssen movies, even though his birthday was actually in March. The day kicks off at 6:00 AM with The Girl He Left Behind.

Tab Hunter stars as Andy Shaeffer, place kicker on his college football team, and a pretty good student. He has to be the latter, as he's using college as a way to avoid the peacetime draft and intends to go on to law school just to keep being in school. Thankfully, he's got a mother (Jessie Royce Landis) who keeps indulging him, so money is never a problem.

Unfortunately, you know that with the way he comments on needing to keep up his grades so that he doesn't come to the attention of the draft board, something is going to happen. In this case, it's his girlfriend, Susan (Natalie Wood). She knows that Andy is a bit of a mama's boy (well, a lot of a mama's boy), something that's probably been a bone of contention between them for some time before the movie opens. She reaches her last straw, however, when he borrows her car and forgets to pick her up for one of her classes. They get in a quarrel, and that one little quarrel is enough for Andy to get a bunch of F's on exams and fluck out of college!

With Andy no longer being enrolled, the military can come for him, and sure enough he immediately gets drafted, and sent off to Fort Ord in northern California to do his basic training along with, among others, a young James Garner in a very early role. Among the sergeants leading basic training are Sgt. Clyde (Murray Hamilton) and Sgt. Hanna (Jim Backus, who seems much too old for the role); David Janssen plays their CO, Capt. Genaro.

Andy has been separated from his girlfriend and family, and is none too pleased about it. So he figures that since he comes from a well-to-do family, he can just use his class superiority to get what he wants, and not really follow orders. Unsurprisingly, everybody else in the army is pissed at Pvt. Shaeffer. The other privates going through basic training have to deal with the discipline he brings about, while the sergeants and Capt. Genaro actually want him to succeed, much like Jack Webb's character in The D.I.

Shaeffer is such a washout that he can't even follow basic orders, like watch for civilians who might accidentally wander onto a firing range that you'd think would be incredibly well marked and away from the boundaries of the fort so that nobody would stray onto it in the first place. (Fort Ord, where the army scenes were filmed, was closed in 1994 and 14000 acres of the place are now part of a national monument, so while I don't know how big the original fort was, it's bigger than that.) Shaeffer's actions nearly get two boys and their dog killed, and should have gotten Shaeffer court-martialled right then and there. But then we wouldn't have a movie. Shaeffer gets one more chance to redeem himself, and because of the type of movie this is, you know he's going to succeed.

There's a lot wrong with The Girl He Left Behind. I've mentioned what I think are a lot of plot holes; reading reviews of people who were in the military, the movie doesn't seem to portray basic training very accurately. Tab Hunter is given the job of playing a very unlikeable character, while Natalie Wood is underused; I'm assuming that Warner Bros. was doing everything they could to keep the two in the public eye together, hence the casting.

The movie doesn't seem to know whether it wants to be a comedy or a drama, and doesn't straddle the genres successfully. But I think the biggest thing for me personally was the sense that the part of Hollywood that made this movie really liked the idea of the peacetime draft and just stealing 18 months out of people's lives (something that happened to my father; he spent his time at White Sands keeping the missiles out of the hands of the Ernst Blofelds of the world). I can't imagine anybody getting drafted in peacetime and being OK with the prospect. Then again, even after 40 years we can't get rid of forcing 18-year-old men to register for the draft in the first place.

Maybe somebody out there is going to like The Girl He Left Behind, but I'm not certain who. As always, however, watch and judge for yourself. The movie is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Sex and the Single Girl

Tomorrow in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, we get a day of the movies of Natalie Wood. One of her movies that I haven't blogged about before is Sex and the Single Girl. It comes on tomorrow at 11:30 AM, and since I recorded it the last time it was on, I decided to watch it to do a post on it for the upcoming showing.

Tony Curtis gets nominal top billing as Bob Weston. Bob is the managing editor of Stop magazine, a magazine that at one point in the distant past had been a serious analysis magazine, but at some point in a desperate attempt to boost circulation, turned to writing much more salacious articles. One of those articles was about young psychologist/sexologist Helen Brown (Natalie Wood), who wrote a best-selling book called Sex and the Single Girl about how a single girl can in fact have it all.

Brown and her colleagues at the institute were of course aghast at that article, but Weston thinks it didn't go far enough. In fact, he believes that Brown has no real sexual experience at all, at least not of the sort she wrote about, and he's going to set about proving it for an article for Stop. Of course, there's an obvious problem in that there's no way Brown is ever going to consent to doing an interview with the good people at Stop, so Bob is going to have to come up with some way to get that interview.

As for Bob's personal life, he lives in an aparment next to Frank Broderick (Henry Fonda) and Frank's wife Sylvia (Lauren Bacall). Frank markets high-class women's hosiery, and although he's devoted to Sylvia, he's convinced that she believes Frank is interested in every woman he sees when in fact he's only got a professional interest in what sort of stocking are on these women's legs. It's the source for a lot of bickering.

And this gives Bob an idea. He'll go see Dr. Brown pretending to be Frank, and telling Brown Frank's problems with Sylvia. This, somehow, will trip Brown up and give Bob the material he needs for his story. In fact, Brown seems to be incredibly handsy with Bob, much more than I would imagine most psychologists being. She concludes, based on Bob-as-Frank's descriptions, that Sylvia is the problem. She'd like to meet Sylvia, something which Bob doesn't want because that will give the game away.

Eventually Brown does something I'd think is a severe violation of professional ethics and approaches Sylvia herself. Bob tries to get his girlfriend to pass herself off as Sylvia, and his secretary joins in, leading to three "Sylvias" which further perplexes Brown. And if that's a bad violation of ethics, Bob is falling in love with Helen, while Helen has feelings for Bob she doesn't want to explore for the obvious ethical reasons.

Sex and the Single Girl is a farce that takes its name from the book by Helen Gurley Brown, but as far as I'm aware Wood's character is nothing like the real-life Brown was and the movie is nothing like the book, Warner Bros. only using the title because they thought it would sell tickets.

There's a lot in Sex and the Single Girl that people will enjoy, but I have to admit that there's a fair amount that I had a problem with. I've mentioned the lack of professional ethics that Wood's Helen Brown has; this is all played for laughs and I can't imagine her colleagues at the institute being very accepting of what she's doing. Tony Curtis' Bob is another of his schmoozy schemers, a sort of character that I can find deeply unlikeable when it doesn't work; here, there are times that I didn't like it at all. The finale, which involved a madcap car chase, also didn't work for me.

But again, I think this is material that will appeal to some people, especially if you're interested in how the mid-1960s saw themselves. The movie, having been released by Warner Bros., is unsurpisingly available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Daisy Clover's Insides

Tomorrow, July 20, is the birth anniversary of actress Natalie Wood, so it's unsurprising that TCM is running some of her movies on Monday. One that I haven't blogged about before is Inside Daisy Clover, which comes on at 4:45 PM.

Natalie plays Daisy Clover, who at the start of the movie is turning 15 (in reality, Wood was 26/27 when she made the movie). She lives in a trailer near the boardwalk in Angel Beach, CA, with her mother (Ruth Gordon), who makes a meager living as a card dealer on the boardwalk. Dad took a powder ages ago, and Daisy's sister Gloria (Betty Harford) got married to a rich guy and left too.

Daisy supplements their meager income by running some sort of stall on the boardwalk that's Hollywood-related. She's got a love for Hollywood, and one day she goes and records her voice for 25¢ to send to the Swan Studio, run by producer Raymond Swan (Christopher Plummer). Somebody at the studio hears it, and decides that Daisy should be brought in for a screen test. Not that Mom wants any of it. She's either going senile or has some other mental illness and, while Daisy loves her mother, the mental problems can also be embarrassing.

Sure enough, Swan likes Daisy's performance and wants to make her a star. But this is where the problems begin for Daisy. The studio decides that her life story as is is not something audiences accept, so they're going to say that both of her parents died young, putting Mom in a sanatorium to hide her from the public. (What's going to happen if Dad comes back?) Daisy can't really resist, because she's a minor who can't legally sign a contract on her own, which is where Gloria comes in again.

The studio tries to build Daisy up, but she's lonely in Hollywood, especially without Mom. One night, when running out on a party at Swan's house, she runs into Wade Lewis (Robert Redford), who is also running out on the party, which is because he's got secrets of his own. But he's a charming man, and he probably really does like Daisy as a friend, even though she naïvely thinks he's much more than that.

The studio does make Daisy into a star, but she's still not satisfied, in part because the studio bars her from seeing her mother. Wade tries to get her out of her predicament by proposing marriage to her, but it's on the day of their marriage that Daisy learns the truth about Wade when he walks out. And then Daisy's mom dies and Swan pressures her into completing the movie she's working on, something that may destroy her.

I'm sorry to day that I didn't find Inside Daisy Clover appealing. It runs 128 minutes, and it's something that probably could have been cut down by a half hour. It's overlong and self-indulgent. I couldn't believe Wood as a teenager either, which is a problem since she's the main character of the movie The musical numbers don't really work either. All of the actors do the best with the material they're given, but it's not the best of material.

As always, however, I suggest that if I don't like a movie, you might still want to watch and judge for yourself. Inside Daisy Clover is avaialble on DVD and Blu-ray courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection.

Penelope

Another of the movies that I had the chance to watch recently is the oddball comedy Penelope.

Penelope Elcott (Natalie Wood) is a woman who walks into a bank one day, disguised as an old lady. She goes up to one of the tellers, and demands the money, walking away with quite a substantial sum! She then goes into the ladies' room and changes into her normal clothes, enabling her to get away since everybody's looking for an old lady. She then gets rid of more evidence at a thrift shop, before heading off to her psychiatrist, Dr. Mannix (Dick Shawn).

Boy does she have stories for Mannix. Apparently she's been a kleptomaniac for some time, mostly stealing because she doesn't get enough attention from her husband James (Ian Bannen), who is a wealthy banker. Indeed, Penelope robbed the bank she did precisely because it's a big new branch where James is the manager, and robbing it most certainly would get her attention! Not that James would believe it if Penelope told him she had robbed his bank, of course.

Meanwhile, the bank does the natural thing, which is to call the police, who sent Det. Lt. Bixbee (Peter Falk) to investigate. James tells her about the investigation, and invites her to the precinct where he's got to do some of the unpleasant business of identifying things and providing evidence. But this allows Penelope to see how the investigation is going and possibly influence it.

And she's certainly going to have to influence it. After doing some investigation, Bixbee decides that a woman named Honeysuckle Rose committed the crime, and has her arrested. Now, we all know this isn't true, and that Penelope actually did the deed. And because of the reasons she did it, she doesn't want to see an innocent person convicted of the crime she committed, so she finally tells James and Bixbee what really happened. Unsurprisingly, they don't believe her. How can Penelope get out of this jam?

There's a really fun idea behind Penelope, but once again, I found it to be a slightly maddening movie, mostly because of the character of Penelope. The way she's written, manipulating everyone around her, especially Dr. Mannix, you want somebody to take her and literally shake some sense into her. She's supposed to be off-kilter, but for me, she came across more as obnoxious. And I can't imagine the doctor allowing himself to get involved in the scheme the way Penelope does to him in the movie.

Still, Penelope is not a movie without it's charms; it's just more of a movie that's going to be a bit of an acquired taste. People who like kooky characters will probably enjoy it more than people who more reasonable characters.

Penelope has received a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection.

Grass Around the Splendor

Apparently, there's a new documentary on Natalie Wood coming out this week, so TCM is running a night of Wood's movies tonight, starting at 8:00 PM with Splendor in the Grass.

Wood plays Wilma Dean Loomis, nicknamed "Deanie". She's a high school senior in Kansas in the fall of 1928, the child of middle-class parents. The parents have been making money in the stock market, however, like a lot of people in the Roaring 20s, beacuse of the oil boom in the region. That oil boom is responsible for making the Stamper family wealthy too. Son Bud (Warren Beatty) is Deanie's boyfriend.

The two, being teenagers with raging hormones, have thoughts about how far to take the relationship, although they really don't take it all that far, in no small part because both of them have parents really pressuring them into staying on the straight and narrow: Deanie's Mom (Audrey Christie) and Bud's dad Ace (Pat Hingle). In Bud's case, there's also the example of his older sister Ginny (Barbara Loden), who went off to "art school" in Chicago and wound up with an annulled marriage because Dad thought the husband only wanted her money.

So there's all sorts of pressure on both Bud and Deanie, and it winds up affecting both of them badly. Bud's perfectly willing to marry Deanie, and would like to run what was the old family farm before oil made the Stampers rich, but Dad's having none of that, wanting Bud to go to Yale. Bud also seems to be the big man on campus, popular with the ladies and good at all the sports. Having to be the good one in the family comes back to haunt him after Ginny goes off at a party, getting Bud in a fight and then some time afterwards Bud collapses during a basketball game. I thought the two were related in the Bud was supposed to have a concussion or something similar, but here he's diagnosed as having a bad case of pneumonia.

As for Deanie, Bud eventually breaks up with her because he's afraid that if he does anything with her she'll end up like Ginny. Deanie, however, sees Ginny and comes up with the wacky idea that being a good girl isn't going to get her anywhere, so she responds by having a nervous breakdown and trying to commit suicide. Her parents sell off their oil stock which they had been saving in hopes of sending Deanie to college, instead sending her to a sanatorium.

It turns out to be a good thing, of course, since we all know the stock market is going to crash in October, right when Bud is a bored freshman at Yale who clearly has no desire to be there and who is thankfully going to get out, although in a bad way, when the crash bankrupts his father. But can Bud and Deanie live happily ever after?

Splendor in the Grass is another movie that, although it has a lot of good ideas, is one that I found some pretty big problems with. The movie meanders, going through a lot of nowhere before ending rather abruptly. Natalie Wood's breakdown scene is also one that I found myself laughing at as opposed to being the serious thing it's supposed to be. The New Year's party scene where Ginny gets drunk and Bud gets punched also goes on rather longer than it should have.

But there's also enough in Splendor in the Grass that makes it worth a watch, from the production design and cinematography as well as some of the supporting performances. It's one that I'm glad to have seen, although I don't think I'll be revisiting it any time soon.

Splendor in the Grass has received multiple DVD releases, although it looks like some of them may be out of print, which is always surprising when you consider one of them is from the Warner Archive.

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.

The Burning Hills

Another of my recent movie viewings was The Burning Hills, yet another of those movies that's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

The movie starts off with a bang, almost literally, as we see a man tending to his ranch. That man is approached by some other men and shot to death. It turns out that that young man was named Johnny Jordan, who had a kid brother Trace (Tab Hunter) who helped run the ranch. When Trace returns with their ranch hand, he finds his brother dead, and one of the horses with the Jordan brand stolen. Thankfully the ranch hand is smart, and is able to deduce some of the traits of the killers, one having a decided limp and another wearing fancy Mexican spurs.

So Trace heads off to Esperanza to report the murder, only to find out that Esperanza has been turned into a sort of company town run by the big man in the area, Joe Sutton (Ray Teal). There's not much in the way of law enforcement here, and Sutton's men harass anybody they think isn't going to be toeing the Sutton line. A good example of this is given by the way they treat Maria Colton (Natalie Wood), a half-Mexican who owns a sheep ranch outside of town on land that the Suttons want.

The Suttons, you see, have been using the land for their own ranching, even though under the Homestead Act it's going to be doled out to people farming it, and some of those people like the Jordans and Coltons, have already been using the land. The Suttons don't like this, so they've been violently trying to keep everybody else off of "their" land that of course really isn't theirs.

With that in mind, it shouldn't be a surprise that it was some of Sutton's men who killed Johnny Jordan. Trace finds the men and confronts Joe Sutton, who pulls out a gun and tries to kill Trace. Trace gets his gun out faster and shoots Joe, wounding him and bringing in Sutton's men while Trace beats a hasty escape. As Trace is escaping on his horse, Sutton's men shoot from a distance, wounding Trace.

Trace wakes up in an abandoned mine shaft where there's water that flows down the hill. Who should come up that hill but... Maria Colton! Maria finds Trace and tends to him, not knowing at first why he's there. When she finds out why, she's sympathetic, since Sutton's men killed her father. However, she lives with an uncle and kid brother, and they're not as willing to stand up to the Suttons as Maria is. Trace is hoping to get away and make it to the fort to get the Army to send in law enforcement, since this is still a territory and not a state.

Sutton's men come by the Colton place looking for Trace, headed by Sutton's son Jack (Skip Homeier) and ranch foreman Ben (Claude Akins). The two are a bit at odds, with Ben wanting to do things with more of an appearance of legality, and Jack wanting to get Trace come hell or high water, and who cares how it looks. They have a feeling Maria knows more than she's letting on, and when they discover that she does, she's forced to go on the run after Trace, and Jack and his men not far behind.

In many ways there's not all that much new going on in The Burning Hills, but it's still a nice western. Tab Hunter and Natalie Wood are both appealing in this undemanding material. Skip Homeier is suitably nasty, and the supporting actors all do OK. If you're looking to sit down with a bowl of popcorn and be entertained, you'll get that in spades. If you're looking for anything groundbreaking, you won't get that, but there's nothing wrong with wanting entertainment over something groundbreaking.

Kings Go Forth

One of my recent DVD purchases was a cheap Frank Sinatra box set, which included the movie Kings Go Forth.

Sinatra plays Lt. Sam Loggins, who is serving in the US Army late in World War II in one of the lesser-mentioned campaigns of that war, that being the one in southern France. The French Riviera has already been liberated, as the soldiers are able to go there when they get passes, but the front isn't too far away since the soldiers have to be able to drive back and forth between the front and the coast. As for the war itself, Loggins' forward unit is in need of a new radio man, and among the new soldier arrivals, Cpl. Britt Harris (Tony Curtis) announces that he knows how to operate a field radio.

Harris has a past back in the States, which is that he was a spoiled rich boy who didn't have to do real work, and wound up with no real character, which is why he decided to join the enlisted ranks instead of the officers' corps: he's trying to run away from that past and somehow make things right. But that past also causes some friction with Lt. Sam.

When Sam goes to the coast on one of his passes, he meets a nice young woman Monique (Natalie Wood) who seems to be teaching a boy English. He's surprised that she can speak English, so they strike up a conversation and have dinner together. Sam is obviously smitten with Monique, but Monique is kind of guarded about pursuing a relationship. So when Sam says she's welcome to meet him next week, He winds up being met by Monique's mother (Leora Dana). She takes him back to their palatial home, where he learns about their past, which is that Monique's mom was born in America. Eventually, though, Monique reveals a secret, which is that both of her parents were born in America and that her now-deceased father was black, which of course makes Monique mixed-race, although she looks even less mixed-race than Susan Kohner in Imitation of Life. This is supposedly why she and Sam can never have a real relationship.

Not that Britt cares. He runs into Sam and Monique one night at a jazz club, and he too is taken with Monique's beauty and, once Sam is out of the picture, he starts putting the moves on her. However, Britt having been spoiled rotten back in the States, decides that he can never marry her, although not because of her mixed-race heritage since he's broken off engagements to a whole bunch of monoracial white women back in the States. Sam, and especially Monique, react predictably very badly to Britt's selfishness.

There's still a war on, though, and the Germans haven't been dislodged, so a mission is going to have to go behind enemy lines to get a better fix on their position. As you can guess, it's Sam and Britt who get selected for the mission, even though the two of them are at each other's throats over Monique. Can they resolve their differences, and can Britt finally redeem himself?

Kings Go Forth is a movie that I found a bit of a mess, thanks mostly to a script that doesn't quite know what it wants to do. If Monique's mom could love a black man, there's no logical reason why Sam couldn't love a mixed-race woman; it's also not as if he's going back to the South after the war. And when the revelation is made about Monique's father, her mom consistently refers to him as her husband, and not by his first name, which really struck me. The ending is forced and, again, something that for me strained credulity. All three of the leads try hard, and Curtis probably comes out best, but they're all hamstrung by the script.

Still, you should always judge for yourself. Some of you may enjoy Kings Go Forth more than I did, and the box set isn't terribly expensive for the number of movies you're getting.

Brainstorm

TCM has been running the movies of Star of the Month Natalie Wood every Friday in prime time. This being the last Friday of the month, it's unsurprising that TCM is showing Natalie's last (and uncompleted from her point of view, much like Jean Harlow and Saratoga) movie, Brainstorm, at 12:15 AM.

Natalie plays Karen Brace, who works at one of those early-80s California tech companies along with her estranged husband Michael (Christopher Walken). The marriage has deteriorated to the point that it's going to lead to divorce, in no small part because Michael can't learn to see the world through his wife's eyes, and to a lesser extent vice versa. That's all about to change, although the Brace's marriage is in many ways a subplot.

Michael has been working closely on a device that nowadays we'd think of as a virtual reality device, although this one seems rather more real than anything that might be around now, or certainly 35 years ago. Apparently, Michael and fellow researchers like Lillian (Louise Fletcher) have figured out a way to distill the essence of human thought, and put it on those old magnetic tapes, to be played back into a machine for somebody else to use it. So you can see how Karen could use this device to record her thoughts, and Michael to learn to see the world from his wife's perspective, saving the marriage.

But that's not quite what the movie is about. As with The Sorcerers, the original researchers think this is a great idea with therapeutic purposes, but there are other people who want to use it for other things. Rather humorously, the financial types understand that this would be great as a sex toy. More ominously, the Defense Department wants to turn this into a weapon, a standard trope in Hollywood movies, I suppose. Trying to take the project away from Michael is more important to the movie's plot than his estranged marriage.

It's fate that takes the project away from Lillian. She's doing research at the lab when she suffers a fatal heart attack. However, she has a brilliant idea: she's going to record her death on one of those tapes so that people can learn what death is really like. But will watching such a tape kill the watcher? Michael has to find out what's on that tape, but since he's opposed selling the project to the government, everybody's trying to block his access. Perhaps Karen can help him.

There are some interesting ideas in Brainstorm, but unfortunately the movie was doomed by the untimely death of Natalie Wood. This supposedly necessitated changing parts of the movie to fit the fact that Natalie was no longer around to portray Karen, and using a body double to stand in for Natalie from the rear when Karen's presence was absolutely necessary. The result is that things are a bit muddled at times, while we also get a bit of a formulaic movie: brilliant but troubled scientist goes up against government establishment.

One thing that probably worked better on the big screen than TV is the portrayal of the device in action. To portray that the device is supposed to be an immersive technology, the scenes showing what's on the tapes use an extra-wide-screen format, while regular scenes use something more normal. I'd guess this works on a movie theatre screen, but on TV we get a fair amount of both letterboxing and pillarboxing, which don't work quite well together.

Still, Brainstorm is an interesting idea, even when it doesn't quite work. It's well worth a watch, and not just because of the trivia of it being Natalie Wood's final film. It does seem to be availalbe for purchase on DVD and Blu-Ray.

This Property Is Condemned

As part of Robert Redford's turn as TCM's Star of the Month this month, I got around to watching This Property Is Condemned back on Tuesday night. It's listed as being available at the TCM Shop and on Amazon, so I figure I can do a full-length post on the subject.

One might guess from the title of the movie that it's going to deal with a property that is condemned either moreally, legally in the sense that it's unfit for habitation, or both. One would be right. Of course, this is all given away by the fact that the movie is told in flashback. Willie Starr (played by Mary Badham, whom you'll best remember as Scout To Kill a Mockingbird), is shown at the beginning of the film walking along the rail of an abandoned railroad track wearing a tattered dress that's two sizes too big for her. Just when she's about to fall off the rail, she spies a boy about her age flying a kite. They're both truant from school, although this is the Depression, so they could both just as easily be dropouts. The boy asks Willie about her life, and Willie points to a dilapidated, condemned boarding house just off the tracks, saying that her wholf family used to live there, and what a happening place it used to be. Cue the flashback....

A couple of years earlier, but definitely in the grip of the Great Depression, Owen Legate (Robert Redford) is up front with the engineer on a train that's about to go through the town of Dodson, MS. This train doesn't stop there, so Owen has to jump out when the train slows down, which he does near the aforementioned boarding house. He shows up at that boarding house, where he meets Willie. Willie is looking for her mother Hazel (Kate Reid), since she's the responsible manager of the place, and because everybody else is looking for Ma too. It's Ma's birthday, and Johnson (John Harding), one of the boarders, has organized a birthday party for Ma. Owen takes a room for a week, but is very mysterious about who he is or why he's here.

Meanwhile, Wilie has an older sister Alva (Natalie Wood) who is the star of the movie and the star of the boarding house. She looks lovely, so all of the men, who are workers at the local rail yard, want her. Hazel, for her part, is trying to get Alva to be more sociable with the boarders more or less in the way that Barbara Stanwyck's character in Baby Face was being prostituted before the place burned down and Stanwyck and her friend hopped that train to New York and used men to get the things they want. The only real difference is there's not quite so much implied sex here; if anything Alva would be winding up as more of a mistress to Johnson. Not that Alva particularly likes this kind of life. She dreams of New Orleans, but if nything she only has unrealistic plans. Still, she meets Owen and senses something different in him from all the other men.

Oh, there certainly is something different. Owen is from the head office, and his job is to come into towns where the railroad is no longer really a viable concern, and figure out who among the railyard workers should be fired. That would explain why he's been so mysterious about what he's doing in Dodson. He kind of likes Alva, too, except that he's not fond of her fantasies. Things change, however, when everybody learns why Owen is really in town....

The movie was based loosely on a one-act play by Tennessee Williams, who supposedly disliked what the scriptwriters (including Francis Ford Coppola) did to his play when they wrote the screenplay. When Robert Osborne did the introduction and said that it was based on a Williams play, I was a bit apprehensive since I find that a little Williams goes a long, long way. In fact, the first two thirds or so of the movie aren't that bad in terms of plot, except for the fact that the movie is told in flashback (and since one of the first shots of Alva shows her wearing the dress that Willie is wearing in her opening scene, you can make an educated guess about what happens to Alva). The movie really veers into melodrama, though, once Alva hops on a train to New Orleans to follow Owen there. The bigger problem for me was the 1960s styling. Natalie Wood's character, especially her hairstyles, look like they're from the 1960s instead of the 1930s, almost to the point that at times you wonder if she's in a different movie. But for me an even bigger problem was the camera work. Hollywood must have changed cameras sometime in the early 1960s, because the new cameras could zoom and move more freely, and dammit, cinematographers were going to show us that the camera could do these things. In the case of This Property Is Condemned, it makes the camerawork look intrusive at times. There's one scene of Owen and Alva, either in the garden or on her abandoned train carriage, where the camera goes all the way around Owen and lights him obtrusively. And then there's one of Alva on the train to New Orleans where the camera pulls way, way out to a panoramic shot that I found pointles.

Overall, there's a fair bit to recommend to This Property Is Condemned. You may just find it a bit maddening at times.

A Cry in the Night

I could swear that I'd already blogged about A Cry in the Night before. A search of the blog, however, claims that I haven't. It's airing tomorrow morning at 7:30 AM on TCM, so now would be a good time to do a post on the movie.

The film starts off late one evening on a Lovers' Lane type place where all the teens and other people who want to make out in secret congregate -- nobody's going to let out the other people's secrets, lest their own secrets be relesaed, too. Among the neckers is young Liz Taggart (Nathalie Wood), daughter of police detective Dan (Edmond O'Brien). She's here with her fiancé Owen (Richard Anderson), but hasn't had the courage to tell Daddy about Owen yet; she knows he won't approve. But that's soon about to become the least of her problems. Hanging around all those couples is Harold Loftus (Raymond Burr), engaging in some voyeurism. His actions are heard but not seen, and Owen gets out of the car to figure out what's going on. At this point, Harold hits Owen over the head, knocking Owen out. Harold then takes Owen's car, with Liz in it! The other lovebirds flee, not wanting to be caught making out or accused over what happened to Owen.

Eventually, Owen is found by a cop, and brought to the station, where the night captain on duty (Brian Donlevy) thinks Owen is drunk. The doctor diagnoses a concussion and some short-term memory loss, and when all that clears up, Owen is able to tell them what happened, and how the police must have a kidnapping case on their hands. Worse than that, it's the kidnapping of a member of a cop family. Worst of all, it's the daughter of a cop who's going to go through the roof when he discovers that his precious little daughter was making out on a lovers' lane with this Owen guy; kidnapping only makes it that much worse.

Ah, but back to Harold the kidnapper. He's the much more fun character than Detective Taggart. He's taken Liz to his hideaway, an abandoned foreman's shack in a disused brickworks. He's not just a kidnapper; he's a psycopath, too. Apparently, he's never been with a woman before, as he has no idea of how to treat Liz. At times he's almost trying to romance her; when she undesrtandably refuses his romances, he goes ballistic. Harold is the way he is in part because of his mother Mabel (Carol Veazie). He lives with her and supports her, and when he doesn't come home that night, having kidnapped Liz (of course, Mom knows nothing about this), Mabel calls the police! The police aren't that stupid, and eventually are able to put two and two together and figure out that perhaps they and Mabel are interested in the same person.

If A Cry in the Night has one problem, it's that it was made during the era when the Production Code was still being enforced; that means that there's really only one possible outcome. The brickworks, however, provides a nice backdrop for the eventual climax, somewha reminiscent in terms of industrial imagery of the refinery in White Heat or the industrial-sized gas tanks in Odds Against Tomorrow. Burr had played psycho bad guys in several earlier movies, and is pretty good here. Nathalie Wood's purpose in the movie is little more than the damsel in distress, and she pulls off that role well enough. O'Brien is OK if a bit too strident as the angry cop, while Carol Veazie gets the fun stuff as the mother who's given her son issues. A Cry in the Night is another of the many movies that's nothing particularly groundbreaking, but is quite enjoyable.

As far as I know A Cry in the Night has not received a DVD release, so you're going to have to catch the TCM showing.