The Freshman

I've got several movies from Marlon Brando's time as TCM's Star of the Month to get through before they expire from YouTube TV's cloud DVR. Up next is one of Brando's later movies, The Freshman.

Brando may be top billed, but the real male lead is played by Matthew Broderick. He plays Clark Kellogg, a young man from Vermont who, having just finished high school, is set to go off to college at NYU's film school, in the big city. It's also partly to get away from his stepfather, who's a fairly extreme animal rights activist. Now, having such a stepfather, and a late biological father who was a professor at a tony private school, you'd think that Clark would have spent at least weekends in a big city like Boston. But no; Clark is presented as more hopelessly naïve than even characters in 1930s movies.

When Clark arrives at Grand Central Station, looking for the subway, he's approached by a guy who seems like an obvious scam artist, a man named Vic (Bruno Kirby) who claims to be a private livery driver. Yeah, right. But Clark is so stupid that he thinks he putting one over on Vic by negotiating a much lower price on the taxi ride. Unsurprisingly, when Clark steps out of the car to take his stuff out of the trunk, Vic speeds off, leaving Clark with no belongings and even no cash, not having carried the cash on his person, go figure.

The next day, Clark is talking to his film studies professor, Prof. Fleeber (Paul Benedict), about his inability to pay for the expensive books (mostly written by Fleeber himself) that Fleeber wants his students to buy in what is one of the big scams of college. As Clark is in that conversation, he looks out the window, and what does he see? Why, it's Vic, walking across the NYU campus! So Clark jumps out the window and starts chasing Vic, eventually catching up with Vic at the entrance to Vic's apartment building. Now, Vic doesn't have Clark's money any longer, or so he claims. Instead, he claims to know somebody who can help him get a good job, down at a "social club" on Hester Street.

Clark goes to that social club and is admitted on Vic's recommendation. There, he's introduced to Carmine Sabatini (Marlon Brando), who looks surprisingly like Vito Corleone from The Godfather which is of course no surprise since that was a Marlon Brando character as well. Carmine does indeed have a job for Clark, and once again it's another thing that should seem too good to be true because, well, it is. Carmine wants Clark to take his Cadillac, drive to one of the airports to pick up some cargo, and transport that cargo over to New Jersey. Depending on traffic, it's a couple of hours, but for doing all that Clark can pick up a cool $500, which was nice even in 1990.

Alarm bells should be going off, but Clark brings his roommate along. The cargo in question is a live Komodo dragon, not caged. It's an endangered species (although not quite as endangered as the movie posits), so bringing one into the country is highly regulated, and bringing one into the country like this certainly must be illegal. But Clark is well past the point of no return, so he takes it to the destination, what seems like a farm owned by Larry London (Maximilian Schell), a seeming collector of exotic animals and a lover of gourmet food.

Clark calls his mother back in Vermont to talk about what's going on, and his stepfather is eavesdropping on the conversation. Stepdad, being an animal rights activist, immediately responds by calling the feds since there's definitely crimes being committed, and they send two men to investigate and eventually try to arrest Clark, using him to go after the much bigger prey in Carmine.

Now, The Freshman is a lot of fun, although it's not realistic at all. Then again, it's a comedy, and a lot of it isn't meant to be realistic, instead giving cast members an opportunity to play overbroad stereotypical roles such as Brando doing his Godfather shtick or Paul Benedict as the college professor. And, I suppose, Matthew Broderick as the ultimate hick even if hicks aren't liable to go to film school. Surprisingly, all of it works. The Freshman is definitely worth seeing if you haven't seen it before.

Murder By Death

Quite a fair bit of Neil Simon's work has been turned into Hollywood movies, although it should be added that he wrote several screenplays directly for the screen. One of the latter, as far as I can tell, is the movie Murder by Death, which has been sitting on my DVR for several months now.

The movie starts off with an unseen hand signing the name Lionel Twain (when we eventually see Lionel, he's played by Truman Capote) to a bunch of invitations. These go out to, in order:

Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Maggie Smith respctively), and Pet Terrier in New York;
Inspector Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers), in Catalina;
Monsieur Milo Perrier (James Coco), Brussels;
Mr. Sam Diamond (peter Falk), San Francisco; and
Miss Jessica Marbles (Elsa Lanchester), Sussex, England.

Considering the names of these characters, and the title of the movie, it doesn't take much to figure out that this is going to be a spoof of the detective story/movie genre. Lionel then calls in his bulter Jamessir Bensonmum (Alec Guinness), who is blind, to stamp and deliver the letters. Although one of the jokes is that his stamps miss the letters, the characters all get their invitations, as the next scenes show the various characters trying to make their way to the house. Everybody comes more or less in pairs, as the Charlestons come togther; Wang comes with adopted #3 son Willie (Richard Narita); Milo has a chauffeur Marcel (James Cromwell); Diamond has his secretary Tess (Eileen Brennan); and Miss Marbles has an exceedingly elderly nurse, Miss Withers (Estelle Winwood).

They all get to the house in the thick fog, where they've ostensibly been invited for dinner cooked by a mute maid/cook (Nancy Walker). Of course, once again considering the title, we can guess that's not the real reason Twain invited everybody. Indeed, at dinner he tells them that he knows they're supposedly great detectives, but he's the greatest criminologist of them all. He's going to prove it by there being a murder committed at the house that they will be unable to solve because the mystery behind the murder is so diabolical that only a real mastermind can solve it And if any of them can, they'll win a million bucks. Yeah right.

But wouldn't you know it, the great detectives of the world eventually find a dead body, and one that certainly looks like it's been murdered. And they're in a stereotypically old dark house, so it may threaten them if they split up. Then again, it's not as if they're going to be able to solve it just sitting there together. And there's that big money for solving it.

To make things more complicated, when each of the pairs go to their bedrooms for the night, each of them finds they're also the target of a murder attempt in a way that's as stereotypical but also cinematic as the old dark house. Eventually each of them comes up with their own theory on whodunit and why, but who is right?

Murder by Death is another of those movies where it's very easy to see why everybody involved with it would want to make it. The idea of spoofing all of these literary/cinematic detectives is appealing. Add in the comic writing of Neil Simon, and there's a lot that most people are going to find hilarious.

To me, I have to admit there was a bit of an air of trying just a little too hard. Not that Murder by Death is a bad movie at all; it's more that at times the parody feels way too broad, and therefore not quite as funny as it ought to be. Still, most people are probably going to like this more than I did (and it's certainly not that I didn't like it), so it's absolutely worth watching.

Modesty Blaise

I've briefly mentioned the movie Modesty Blaise on a couple of occasions, I think most recently when Dirk Bogarde was TCM's Star of the Month and this was one of the movies that did not air during the tribute, it having been distributed by Fox. It happens to be back in the FXM rotation, and it airs again tomorrow, December 21, at 9:05 AM, so I watched it to do a review. (It will also be on early on Christmas Eve.)

The movie opens in Amsterdam with the sort of nonsense epsionage tropes common to movies of the era, such as ridiculous costumes and coded speech to deliver something through multiple middlemen. The eventually gets to a building in the city where presumably the final drop is supposed to happen, but instead the building is blown up, killing a British agent. Sir Gerald Tarrant (Harry Andrews), chief of the Her Majesty's Secret Service, is called in to discuss what to do next.

This bit of espionage involved diamond shipments to a Middle Eastern emirate in exchange for British firms getting the rights to drill the oil the emirate has. Sheik Abui Tahir (Clive Revill) it the former head of the country, and could be vital in getting back into power to secure those leases. He's also the foster father of a former supercriminal Modesty Blaise (Monica Vitti), who has allegedly gone into retirement. So a call is put out to her to see if she'll do the job and get those diamonds where they're supposed to go.

However, there's a catch. In order to come out of retirement, Modesty wants full immunity, and the ability to work with a former partner, Willie Garvin (Terence Stamp). One big issue, however, is that Willie is supposedly in South America, and will be difficult to find. Of course they do find him, and he joins the case.

However, there are powerful interests trying to stop the delivery of those diamonds. Since this is nominally a spy movie, there has to be a mastermind working from a secret lair. That's Gabriel (Dirk Bogard), together with psychotic killer Mrs. Fothergill (Rossella Falk) from his island lair somewhere in the Mediterranean. One running joke throughout the movie is that Gabriel wants to carry out his plans on a budget; after all, he didn't get wealthy by spending that much money.

But there's somebody else interested in stopping Modesty, which is Sir Gerald himself. Together with one of his agents Paul, who used to be a boyfriend of Modesty, they trail Modesty and Willie and try to mess up her plans. It's no skin off their teeth if Modesty and Willie meet their ends.

Modesty Blaise was based on a British comic strip that was first conceived in the wake of the earliest James Bond movie. As such, the production design has a very over-the-top look that certainly works in portraying the utter unrealisticness of the whole story. However, the movie as a whole got mixed reviews, and it's not hard to see why. The story itself is muddled and complicated, and a lot of the time it feels like the parts aren't working together as well as they did in the more coherent Sean Connery Bond movies. It's as though Modesty Blaise would predict the parody of itself that the Roger Moore Bonds tended towards. On the bright side, in addition to the production design it mostly looks as though the cast is having fun making this, especially Bogarde.

If you're looking for a spy spoof movie from the 1960s you haven't seen yet, Modesty Blaise isn't half bad. If you're looking for a tense Cold War spy movie, however, this isn't it.

Young Frankenstein

In the 14 years that I've been doing this blog, it seems that I've never done a post on Young Frankenstein. It's been in the FXM rotation recently, and will have two airings tomorrow (Mar. 14), at 4:00 AM and 1:10 PM. So, since I had recorded it during one of the previous FXM showings a few weeks earlier, I made a point of sitting down and watching it to do a post on now.

Gene Wilder plays Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, pronounced FRONK-en-steen, thank you very much, an instructor at a medical school in something close to the present day when the film opens. At least, everybody looks like they're from the 1970s, and references are made to it being the 20th century. During one of his lectures, a man who's clearly not a medical student comes into the lecture hall and wants to see the good doctor after the lecture. It turns out that Frederick is the grandson of Victor, the Dr. Frankenstein who worked on reanimating the dead and created the famous monster (never mind that it just being a grandson, this means the dates don't work out at all). Whoever has owned the Frankstein estates in Transylvania has just died, and Frederick being the closest living relative, he's bequeathed the properties. So he leaves his fiancée Elizabeth (Madeline Kahn) behind and sets out for Transylvania.

Transylvania, for no good reason, seems trapped in the 19th century. There don't seem to be any cars and almost no electricity other than what the Frankenstein castle is able to produce. Also, everybody speaks German, which might have been more likely during the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but certainly not by the Communist era. Frederick is met at the train station by Igor (pronounced EYE-gore, thank you very much), a hunchbacked assistant, who takes Frederick to the castle. Also in the wagon waiting for Frederick is Inga (Teri Garr), who is intended to serve as another of Frederick's assistants.

Running the household is Frau Blücher (Cloris Leachmann) who, it turns out, wants Frederick to continue the work of previous generations of Frankensteins, even though he's also considered himself a serious doctor. She lures Frederick into the laboratory, where he finds all the equipment now covered in cobwebs. But finding Victor's private journal, he's suddenly curious as to whether Victor's procedures actually work. He and Igor obtain a corpse but need a preserved brain. There's the brain of a prominent local scientist, but Igor has an accident and winds up bringing back an "abnormal" brain instead.

Dr. Frankenstein is able to reanimate the corpse, but the living corpse, once again dubbed Frankenstein's monster (Peter Boyle), has some serious problems. He can't speak, and has a pretty severe fear of fire. He also doesn't want to be chained up, leading to unintentional violence. The townsfolk, led by police inspector Kemp (Kenneth Mars), remember Victor's work, and they understandably don't want another monster running loose. To complicate matters for Frederick, he falls in love with Inga despite being engaged to Elizabeth, who sends a telegram to inform Frederick she's coming to Transylvania.

Young Frankenstein is a Mel Brooks movie, and how much you like it is going to depend upon how much you like Mel Brooks' style of humor. For me, I find that when it works, it works really well, but when it doesn't, it can be extremely irritating. As such, I found Young Frankenstein rather uneven. The bits that were more directly parodying Universal's horror movies of the 1930s worked well, such as the monster's scene with the little girl, and another scene with a blind hermit (Gene Hackman). Others, like a running gag about mention of Frau Blücher's name being accompanied by horses whinnying, fell flat. I prefer some of the other movies from Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder, but also understand that a lot of people are going to love Young Frankenstein.

I don't think Hitchcock ever had a ditzy blonde

Last summer during Summer Under the Stars, TCM had a day of the films of Goldie Hawn, of which I recorded several, which I've blogged about over the past year. I think the last of the films I recorded is Foul Play, which I recently watched.

The movie starts off with a killing, as a priest who's living pretty comfortably decides to sit down for an evening of relaxation, only to get stabbed to death. We then cut to a party someplace just outside San Francisco, where librarian Gloria Mundy (Goldie Hawn) is. She's going to be a bridesmaid to the woman giving the party, but she herself is divorced and not so certain about getting back into the dating scene. She's happier right now living alone in her apartment with kindly landlord Hennessey (Burgess Meredith) and his big snake Esme on the ground floor.

On the way home, Gloria passes by a man whose radiator has busted, and needs a ride back to San Francisco. It turns out that the man, Scott (Bruce Solomon), is being chased because he has some secret evidence that the people following him want. He slips the evidence into Gloria's purse, and asks her for a date at a revival movie house to get that evidence back, not that he told her about it. However, he shows up late to the movie, and when he's finally there, he gets stabbed to death! Gloria tries to tell the managment about it, but somebody was able to get the body out of the theater with nobody seeing it.

However, these people did see Gloria, and they, in the form of an albino and a man called the Turk, start chasing her. Gloria is again able to escape, this time with some help from kinky Stanley Tibbets (Dudley Moore). But that's not good enough, as she gets back to her apartment where she's assaulted again, stabbing her assailant with a knitting needle although she doesn't kill him the way she thinks she does. Instead the albino does and takes the body away.

This time, however, Gloria has called the police, who show up in the form of Lt. Carlson (Chevy Chase), whom she had already met back at that engagement party, and his partner Fergie (Brian Dennehy). You'd think they'd find some strange blood as well as the evidence that Scottie had passed to her, but apparently not. Finally, after getting kidnapped, Gloria is able to convince the police that something bad is really happening.

This all ties back to the murder that we saw at the beginning of the movie. The victim was the Archbishop of San Francisco, who just happens to have an identical twin brother, Thorncrest (Eugene Roche). He and his partner-in-crime, Gerda (Rachel Roberts), are radicals who believe that organized religion shouldn't have tax-exempt status. Their ultimate plan is to assassinate Pope Pius XIII as he's sitting at the opera as part of his state visit to America. But can Gloria and Lt. Carlson stop this fiendish plot in time?

If you've been reading carefully, and as you watch, you'll probably notice a whole bunch of things that look a lot like homages to various Alfred Hitchcock movies, although this was done after Hitch's retirement. The more obvious relationships are to both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much, as well as Grace Kelly using a pair of scissors to kill her assailant in Dial M For Murder. But there's a lot more going on in Foul Play.

Most of the first two-thirds of Foul Play are serious in the same vein as Hitchcock, with some comic relief in the form of the Dudley Moore character (and the dark humor of a game of Scrabble). But the final third turns into something that's over-the-top zany and comic, and not just Hitchcockian dark humor. That having been said, this sort of zany humor works in Foul Play, in no small part thanks to the comic talents of Hawn and Chase. Using the hills of San Francisco for a car chase has been done to death and is done again here, but works well, helped out by some Japanese tourists who, well, you have to see for yourself.

Foul Play, while taking its inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock, isn't quite as good as the master's work. But taken on its own, it's a hell of a lot of fun.

I'm Gonna Git You Sucka

Working through the backlog of movies on my DVR, last night I watched I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, because, well, doesn't every family look like the one in this movie on Thanksgiving?

It's late 1980s Los Angeles, and a young black man dies of OG -- "over gold", or wearing too much in the way of gold chain jewelry. In a photo of the young man, we see somebody way overloaded with jold chains to the point of parody, so even if you couldn't figure it out from the names in the cast, you can tell this is going to be a parody. Anyhow, the young man left behind a widow Cheryl (Dawnn Lewis) and a mother, Ma Bell (Ja'net DuBois). The bad news for them is not only have they lost their relative; they've got two guys visiting their house saying that they owe $5,000 because that's apparently what the dead man owed on all his gold jewelry! Thankfully Ma is one tough woman and is able to give the two debt collectors a thoroughly deserved beat down.

The deam man also had a brother Jack (Keenen Ivory Wayans) who served in the military and is just returning home from a stint, sadly too late to save his brother. But having heard what happened, he's going to make certain the same thing doesn't happen to anybody else. He finds John Slade (Bernie Casey), who was a hero in the community back in the 1970s, and tells Spade what happened, leading to the two of them to team up with some other 1970s fixtures to try to take down Mr. Big (John Vernon), who is apparently responsible for all the misery going on in the neighborhood. Mr. Big, for his part, wants to kidnap Cheryl to ransom in order to get that debt paid off, and one can guess to discourage others from trying to stand up to his reign of terror.

As you can guess, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka is a parody of 1970s blaxploitation movies. I have to admit that I haven't seen enough of them to get all the references in the movie, although I think there was enough going on in the movie that you can get a lot of enjoyment out of it without recognizing the specific things being parodied. For example, there's a running plot point that Ma has always been helping John out of a jam and for once he wants to be able to solve his problems himself. Also there was the scene introducing John, who had organized a very unique sporting event for the young men in the neighborhood. It's shockingly funny, although I thought that if any white director had tried this scene, people would have been screaming racism.

Then there are the cameos. Mr. Big makes a reference to it in his climactic scene, while an earlier scene has Eve Plumb (Jan Brady from The Brady Bunch), whom I didn't recognize but probably should have when the Brady Bunch theme was playing in the background. Not everything worked for me, and there are some lulls, but overall, the movie had a lot more hits than misses.

Those who are bigger fans of the 1970s blaxploitation genre will probably get more of the references, and would probably enjoy the movie even more as a result. Then again, those people have probably seen I'm Gonna Git You Sucka already. The movie is available on DVD for anyone who wants to watch.