A fool is thanked

It wasn't uncommon for producers in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s to want to bring over an American star to make it easier to get one of the American studios to distribute the movie in the US. The latest such film I watched is I Thank a Fool.

The American star in question was Susan Hayward. She's playing Christine Allison, a Canadian who moved to the UK in part to become a doctor, and in part to follow her boyfriend. Said boyfriend is, as the movie opens, terminally ill in hospital, and Dr. Allison hastens his entrance into the next world by giving him an overdose of something when the duty nurse could easily have given him the proper dose and let him die "naturally". Even though it's a mercy killing, it's still technically medical malpractice, which means that a trial is necessary. Stephen Dane (Peter Finch) prosecutes the trial, with Allison being found guilty of manslaughter, sentenced to prison, and stricken from the doctors' register.

Fast forward 18 months. Christine is released from prison, but in need of a job, since she can't legally go back to being a doctor. But wouldn't you know it, there's somebody who could use a person with a physician's skills, and that person just happens to be... Stephen Dane! He's got a wife who might be suffering from a mental illness, and he needs somebody with medical skills to be a companion for the wife. Why am I thinking of The Chalk Garden here?

In any case, Christine takes the job and meets Stephen's wife Liane (Diane Cilento), who certainly seems to have some problems. One of those problems involves anything that spins like a circle, which is played up at several points during the movie. Liane's mental problems started back in her native Ireland, when she and her father, Capt. Ferris, were in a car accident in which her father died. Dane rescued her, at least metaphorically, and brought her over to the north of England to live. But she has those apparent mental problems, and Stephen doesn't want to have her committed to an asylum, which is also where Christine is convenient. A regular doctor would have the power to have Liane committed -- but of course Christine is no longer legally a doctor.

Christine quickly gets the impression that things are not quite what they seem, in no small part because Stephen seems to be terribly controlling and doesn't want Liane to go out on her own. All sorts of little things happen, and there's also the impression that one of the workers in the stables, Roscoe (Kieron Moore), might be trying to get involved with Liane. But things really take a turn when a man shows up claiming to be... Capt. Ferris (Cyril Cusack)! Now Christine really believes that Stephen has sinister motives, to the point that she's willing to help Liane run away to Ireland to see her father. This isn't quite the reunion you might thing, and Stephen is close behind, leading to shocking complications.

I Thank a Fool is a melodrama that starts off with the interesting premise of euthanasia, which would have been an even more controversial topic back in the early 1960s than it is today. But it devolves into something that at times is ridiculous and implausible. I'm guessing Susan Hayward took the role in part for the chance to take a working vacation in Ireland (the Ireland-set scenes were filmed at least in part in Ireland). She does the best she can with the material, and she's not bad. Peter Finch is reasonbaly good as the morally ambiguous man, and Cusack is professional too. But the script. Oh boy are the plot twists a mess.

So watch I Thank a Fool for some acting performances, or for the location shooting. But don't expect the best of plots.

Far from the Madding Crowd

Another movie that I watched recently largely because it was about to expire from my DVR was the 1960s adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel Far from the Madding Crowd.

Now, the first thing that I need to point out is that I haven't read the original novel, so I don't know how much the movie differs from the book. That, and any of you who have read the book will, I presume, already know the basic story. In mid-1860s England, one of those parts in the southwest where there are cliffs overlooking the ocean, lives sheep rancher Gabriel Oak (Alan Bates). Well, he's not really a rancher since he's poor and doesn't own any land; he just raises sheep. He lives near Bathsheba Everdene (Julie Christie) and loves her and would like to marry her, except that he's terribly poor and she would like at least a bit better of a living than Gabriel could currently provide her.

And then disaster strikes. One of Gabriel's two border collies is evil, breaking down the fence to the pen where the sheep are held, not only allowing the sheep to escape and stampede, but literally driving them to their mass death on the beach at the bottom of the cliff! Now Gabriel has no land, no sheep, and no money to buy new sheep, leading him to look for a job with one of those gentry farmers who employs a bunch of people. On his way to the village where farmers look for new labor, we meet Sgt. Frank Troy (Terence Stamp). He's got a girlfriend Fanny (Prunella Ransome getting an "introducing" credit but winding up with only a modest career) in these parts, who stops him while his platoon is traveling by horse and ask him about the promise he made to marry her. Frank says he'll marry her when the time is appropriate.

Gabriel gets to town, and looks to get hired as a shepherd. On his way to a possible new job, the cart comes across a fire in the servants' houses, and Gabriel takes charge in how everybody tries to put the fire out, leading to some notice for him. The next day he shows up with the rest of the workers at a farm owned by... Bathsheba!? It seems Bathsheba's uncle died, bequeathing her his farm, and she's decided to take it on even though she doesn't really have anybody to run the place. She and Gabriel recognize one another, but now that there is a class difference between them any thought of marriage is out of the question.

Living on the farm across the way is William Boldwood (Peter Finch), to whom marriage would seem to make sense, at least in the class system of Victorian England. Indeed, William would like to marry Bathsheba after she on a lark finds a valentine left in her uncle's papers and sends it to William on a lark. But she's not serious about marrying him. Bathsheba meets Sgt. Troy because, as it turns out, Fanny is one of the workers on Bathsheba's farm. Fanny's presence there brings frank to Bathsheba's presence. When William finds that Frank is there, he gets jealous and tries to get Frank to leave, only to find out that Frank has already married Bathsheba, not Frank.

Frank, however, doesn't really love Bathsheba so much. And he's decided he's not going to marry Fanny because, in the meantime, he did set a wedding date. The only thing is, she went to the wrong church, the one at the garrison instead of the one in the village. That led the hot-headed Frank to decide no, I'm not going to marry you if you're so damn stupid. Plus, Bathsheba also has at least some money that Frank can burn through. All of this leads to quite a bit of sadness for the various characters, although I can't go into much more detail without giving away some serious spoilers.

This version of Far From the Madding Crowd is one of those 1960s films made on location in Britain with some lovely cinematography and production design. The performances are pretty good, too. However, the film runs close to 2:45 plus an overture and intermission music (the print TCM ran didn't have exit music). And, I have to admit, the movie does feel like it has a leisurely pace. So if you have a rainy day without much else to do, Far from the Madding Crowd is definitely a reasonable way to spend some time with.

And yet it's airing on a Saturday

I mentioned yesterday that I've got another pair of movies showing up on TCM on the same day that are on my DVR and I haven't reviewed yet. The second of those movies is Sunday Bloody Sunday, which comes on tonight at 10:00 PM.

Peter Finch plays Daniel Hirsh, a Jewish doctor in what looks like one of the nicer parts of London. He sees a female patient who is in an unhappy marriage, and the incongruity of a man giving a wife marriage advice is evident. It becomes even more evident when the patient reminds the good doctor that he is in fact single.

Meanwhile, in another fashionable part of London, we meet Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson). She works at an executive employment agency, and is in some ways as lonely as Daniel, despite the fact that she's in a relationship with young artist Bob Elkin (Murray Head). The relationship starts in Alex's apartment, before the two decamp to look after the Hodsons, children of one of Alex's friends.

By this point, you wonder how the two main figures are connected? Dr. Hirsh looks out his window as a sculpture in his back garden, an intriguing sculpture of glass tubes filled with water in various colors that light up and bubble when the electric is turned on. The sculpture was conceived by... Bob, and Daniel calls him up for some maintence on the sculpture. He contacts Bob while Bob is with Alex, which only bothers her more for the fact that she'll be alone for a while, not because Daniel knows about the relationship.

Indeed, after working on the sculpture, Bob goes up to the second floor of Daniel's house and... sleeps with Daniel! Yeah, Daniel is gay and Bob is bi, sleeping with both Alex and Daniel. And as it later transpires, all three parties know about both relationships, and all three seem to be able to deal with it about as well as could be expected. We also discover that Daniels is friends with the Hodsons too and that they're fully aware of the relationships, being broadminded bohemians. (So broadminded, in fact, that two of the kids smoke a joint despite their very young age.)

Of course, the relationships are not going to be smooth sailing by a long shot. Daniel heads out one evening and is accosted by a former lover who is a heroin addict. And when Daniel doesn't want to deal with this guy, he responds by banging on the window of Daniel's car, a sort of blackmail that still existed despite the laws being changed after Dirk Bogarde's Victim. Daniel's and Alex's respective families also both question them about their personal lives, not so much because they know about the threesome, but because they see people not in a permanent relationship who in their view should be. And of course in Daniel's case, this being the early 1970s the presumption is that none of Daniel's family know he's gay.

The bigger snag comes when Bob has an opportunity to go over to the United States and install some of his sculptures for paying customers in America. It's a great opportunity, and as much as he says he'd only be away for a little while, the much more likely outcome is that it would mean the end of his relationships with both Daniel and Alex, even if on amicable terms.

Sunday Bloody Sunday is a well-made movie, with very good performances by both Finch and Jackson. For me, however, the movie had a problem with the script. The characters all left me cold, and at times it felt like the script was hard to follow. It took me a while to get what everybody's relationship with the Hodsons was, and some of the subplots didn't quite make sense to me either.

Sunday Bloody Sunday picked up several Oscar nominations, and watching it it's not hard to see why. But at the same time I can see why other stuff won. Sunday Bloody Sunday feels like a bit of a slog to watch at times, largely because of the emotional distance of the characters.

Rita's eyes in black and white

Quite a few years back, I sat down to watch the British movie Girl With Green Eyes when TCM showed it. For some reason, I didn't get to see the whole thing. So when TCM ran it again a few months back, I made the point to record it so that I could finally watch it in full and do a post on it here.

Rita Tushingham plays Kate, a girl who grew up in a rural part of Ireland in the late 1950s when the country was much poorer that it became after the Celtic Tiger years, and there wasn't a whole lot of opportunity staying in those rural backwaters. So after graduating from a Catholic school together with her best friend Baba (Lynn Redgrave), the two head off to Dublin in search of a better life, getting rooms in the same house. As the movie opens, the two have been in Dublin for some time.

They don't really have as exciting a life as they might have hoped for, although it's certainly more interesting than being stuck on the farmstead where the two grew up. They work as shop girls, and go out with guys on weekends, mostly at Baba's insistence as she's the outgoing one who seems to meet all the guys who bring a second one along for Kate to make it a double date. One supposes they'll never meet Mr. Right so much as Mr. Good Enough.

One day, Baba and Kate are out shopping when they see one of Baba's boyfriends with his delivery van stopped in traffic. He's got a job out in the country delivering a dog to be trained, and why don't the two girls come along and enjoy a day out of town? So they get in, eventually going to the house of one Eugene Gaillard (Peter Finch), an author who's written a book about African natives. He and the two girls exchange pleasantries, and that's about it.

Except, of course, with an actor of the caliber of Peter Finch, you know that's not going to be the end of it. A few days later, Eugene and Kate run into each other at a bookstore where Baba is waiting outside. Baba talks him into going out for tea with the two of him, but it's clearly Kate who is more interested in this man who is both more sophisticated than the girls, and never obnoxiously outgoing the way someone like Baba can be if you're an introvert like Kate.

So Kate writes a letter to Eugene to thank him for the tea and invite him to tea again, this time without Baba around. And wouldn't you know it, but he shows up for the appointment! The two start to develop a relationship, although because there's such a big age difference between them, you know that it's not going to be the easiest of relationships. Of course, that age difference is only the first issue. Somehow, Kate's father finds out about the relationship, so he goes to Dublin and finds the shop where Kate works to chew her out in public, and bring her back "home".

Kate naturally tries to run away, and goes off to live with Eugene, since she figures Dad would find her if she went back to rooming with Baba. But when she's with Eugene, she finds out that he's got an estranged wife, and that the two haven't gotten a divorce yet (although to be fair, doing that in Catholic Ireland of the early 1960s would have been difficult if not impossible). Kate also doesn't really have any friends who can fit into Eugene's social circle, not that she does. So can the two forge a happy relationship?

Girl With Green Eyes is an interesting movie, in no small part because it shines a light on a place and time that wasn't commonly seen in the movies. A lot of movies were made in the UK, with various parts of the country being the backdrop for first the "kitchen sink" movies and then swinging London of the second half of the 1960s. But Catholic Ireland? Not so much. The movie is also helped by very good performances from all three of the leads. The black-and-white cinematography also deglamorizes Ireland, something that never would have happened had Hollywood tried to make a movie out of this story.

So definitely make it a point to seek out Girl With Green Eyes if you haven't seen it before.

Angie Sinned

Today's star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Woody Strode, a supporting actor in a bunch of interesting movies in the late 1950s and 1960s. I had one of those roles on my DVR, so when I saw that it would show up in Summer Under the Stars, I decided I'd watch it so I could do a post on it today. That movie is The Sins of Rachel Cade, which concludes Strode's day at 3:30 AM (so, the early hours of August 30).

Once again, Strode is not the star, and he's certainly not playing the role of Rachel Cade. That honor goes to Angie Dickinson. As the movie opens, Rachel is on a train in the Belgian Congo in 1939. Now, if you remember your history, you'll recall two things. One is that up in Europe, the Nazis are about to invade Poland, kicking off the European theater of World War II, with the conquest of Belgium not far behind. The other is that Belgium had a reputation for being even worse to the locals than other colonial powers were in Africa, but surprisingly that bit is almost entirely overlooked.

Rachel gets off in the backwater town of Dibale. She's a missionary nurse, and a Protestant American one at that, which is equally surprising since Belgium was a largely Catholic country and I've have thought the Belgians would only allow Catholic missionaries. Running the local district, or at least the town, is Col. Derode (Peter Finch), who isn't very religious and certainly doesn't think having a woman at the mission is a good idea. He knows what the locals think of the missionaries.

Rachel is about to find that out as she makes her way to the mission to meet her nominal boss, Dr. Bikel (Douglas Spencer). Bikel desperately wants the supply of drugs that was sent along with her, in part because it includes his heart medicine. But that's not going to be necessary much longer, since Dr. Bikel drops dead mere moments after he first meets Rachel. I guess Angie Dickinson's beauty was too much for the old man's heart to take. Rachel and any westerner understands that Bikel died of a heart attack.

The locals, however, would beg to differ. The locals in this part of the interior believe in a religion that has a god up at the top of a sacred mountain which Dr. Bikel tried to climb, a big no-no. As such, the local chieftain, Kalanumu (Juano Hernandez), put a curse on Bikel that seems to have come true with his death. Rachel, meanwhile, tries to go on practicing western medicine, which brings the ire of both Kalanumu and medicine man Muwango (Woody Strode in a horrendous wig at least part of the time).

What Rachel really needs is another doctor to help run the mission clinic. But with a war on, fat chance of that happening. At least, not until a miracle literally falls from out of the sky. An RAF plane crashes, and on that plane was badly injured survivor Paul Wilton (Roger Moore). Paul happens to be a doctor, and, quite surprisingly, an American (pay no attention to Moore's intermittent attempts at an American accent) who's hoping to become an orthopedic surgeon in Boston after the war. He can do basic doctor stuff while he's recovering! As he recovers, he begins to recognize his biological needs, and Rachel is the only white woman around for hundreds of miles.

You can probably guess how soapy it's going to get from here. Rachel wants to stay in the Congo even though she winds up pregnant and Paul is going to be called back to fight with the RAF, or maybe the Americans if the movie ever gets to December 1941. Derode serves as a sort of intermediary, trying to solve everybody else's problems even though he's got his own problems with that Nazi threat always on the horizon.

One of the reviews I read of The Sins of Rachel Cade suggested that the main storyline could have been set pretty much anywhere, and it would be easy to see it as a sort of early precursor to the TV show Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. The movie is a slow, plodding mess, and one where it would also be easy to see modern-day movie historians commenting very negatively on the portrayal of Africans, who seem to fit every stereotype westerners had in those days about the continent.

It further doesn't help that Roger Moore is badly miscast here, and doesn't even show up until halfway through the movie. Dickinson and Finch do the best they can to try to save the movie, but there's not much they can do.

Four years before the heat of the night

Jane Fonda was one of the stars in this year's Summer Under the Stars on TCM. That gave me the chance to record the movie In the Cool of the Day, not having done a post on it before. Recently, I watched it to do a post on it here.

Fonda, wearing a God-awful black wig, plays Christine Bonner, a young woman with some sort of chronic health issue with her lungs married to New York-based editor Sam (Arthur Hill). Sam is from a fairly well-to-do background, considering the fashionable Westchester County house his father (Alexander Knox in a brief role) lives in. Coming over to visit for some sort of business is Sam's London-based colleague Murray Logan (Peter Finch). Somehow it gets suggested that Sam and Christine come over to visit and perhaps do some traveling together.

Unfortunately, nobody here has a happy marriage. Christine, as I mentioned, is ill although it doesn't really show until the end of the movie. She feels she needs a meek husband which Sam provides, even if it's not a marriage with much love in it. Murray has marriage difficulties, too, although of a different kind. He and his wife Sybil (Angela Lansbury) had a child together, but the family got in a car accident one evening. The kid died and Sybil was left with scars that she notices even if the rest of us don't. And she blames Murray for it.

So you can probably guess what happens the next time Murray and Christine meet, which is that they begin to develop feelings for each other. Complicating things is the fact that Sam had to stay behind in New York thanks to his father having a health issue. Still, the Logans decide to go forward with their plans for a trip to Greece, with Christine tagging along sans husband. It seems rather awkward to me, but what do I know?

This being a Studio Era movie, it turns out I knew a fair bit. Of course Murray and Christine's feelings for each other are going to deepen, especially when you see that Sybil is increasingly shrews and seems like she doesn't even want to be on this trip at all. Apparently there's somebody out there who doesn't want to see Greece at all.

Eventually Sybil meets another Englishman, Leonard (Nigel Davenport), who is nice to her and she decides to go running off with him to the Riviera, leaving Murray and Christine to see the beautiful sights of Greece alone together. But Sybil also decides she's going to write to everybody and tell her her opinion of what she's seen between Murray and Christine. This ticks off Christine's mother (Constance Cummings) enough that she flies over to Greece to see Christine, who clearly doesn't want to see her mother.

One day Murray and Sybil are preveted from seeing the sights by a rainstorm. This is considered somehow extremely dangerous for Christine's health, for no good reason other than we need her to fall ill for the purpose of the plot. Sure enough the couple drives around in the rain (and not even in a convertible), and disaster ensues.

Jane Fonda and Angela Lansbury haven't had anything good to say about In the Cool of the Day, and I can't say that I blame theme. It's a pallid mess of a movie that has a whole lot of nothing going on, feeling like it's overlong even though it runs less than 90 minutes. You especially have to feel for Jane being forced to wear that awful wig for no good reason. There was location shooting on Greece, but the cinematography doesn't look as good as it might have.

In the Cool of the Day is one of those movies to watch only if you're a completist of one of the cast members, or if you want to see how a movie can go badly wrong.

The Phoenix's Flight

In another installment of the "movies that have shown up in the FXM rotation recently and are on again", there's the 1965 version of The Flight of the Phoenix. Its next showing is at 12:35 PM tomorrow, followed by another one at 3:30 AM Thursday.

Frank Towns (James Stewart) is a pilot flying an old airplane in parlous shape togethr with his co-pilot Lew Moran (Richard Attenborough) for Aramco, the oil company operating in various parts of the Middle East. In this case, they're flying from a rig somewhere in the Sahara up to Benghazi, this being a few years before Qaddafi led the coup that changed Libya's history. Considering what they say about the plane itself, the fact that the radio is out, and this is in a sequence before the opening credits, you know something bad is about to happen.

Sure enough, something does when a sandstorm hits. The sand clogs up the carburetor, making the propellers stop and forcing the plane into a crash landing. Worse, cargo falls from where it's been secured, killing two passengers instantly and fatally injuring a third.

The plane has landed off course, in the middle of the Sahara, with no radio, and with nobody knowing for several hours that something's happened to the plane. The only good thing is that among the cargo, there was a supply of pressed dates, so at least the passengers and crew don't have to worry about running out of food. They do, however, have to worry about running out of water, which is much more serious.

Towns is technically boss as his first duty is to the plane and keeping his passengers safe. However, one of the passengers is a former British army officer, Captain Harris (Peter Finch). He just knows he's going to be able to find the oasis that's "only" 30 miles or so away, through a featureless landscape with everybody having no idea where they are. The alternative, of course, is staying where they are and hoping somebody finds them before the water runs out, which doesn't seem appealing either.

Over Towns' objection, Harris eventually sets out with Carlos, leaving behind his underling Sgt. Watson (Ronald Fraser) who picked up a slight injury making him unable to take a trek through the desert. The rest of the men settle in for a long wait that's probably going to result in their deaths unless they're extremely lucky....

Or if somebody can come up with an absolutely ridiculous idea. Another of the passengers is Heinrich Dorfmann (Hardy Krüger). He's a German aircraft designer, and he's done the calculations to conclude that there is a way out of this mess: they can take the parts of the plane that survived the crash, move a wing here, a propeller there, and soon enough, they'll have a plane that at least can fly to that oasis where they can be rescued. It is, of course, nuts, and since World War II is fresh in people's memories, there's some question of whether or not they should trust Dorfmann. But the alternative is to have no hope, so perhaps doing something is the least bad thing.

As you can guess, there's a lot of difficulty along the way, as the other passengers aren't necessarily as fit for labor as Dorfmann's calculations would have them being. There are further complications involving whether or not Towns can let Dorfmann have authority, or whether a group of Bedouins that pass a couple of dunes over might actually be bandits who would just as soon kill all the non-Arabs.

Flight of the Phoenix isn't a bad little movie if you can get past the idea that the plot is so ludicrous that nothing like this could happen in real life. They'd all be long dead. Although there's nominally the action of trying to build the plane, much like the bridge in Bridge on the River Kwai, the story is just as much about the psychology of the interaction among the various stranded people in a time of disaster. There are also shades of Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat what with a German who may not be fully trustworthy amid that disaster.

I thought that FXM's airing might be panned and scanned since it fills up the 16:9 screen, but IMDb claims that the movie was originally filmed in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio and not Cinemascope, so at most there's a little bit off the sides. The movie itself got a DVD release, although that seems to be out of print. There was also a remake in 2004, and that one also got a DVD release that seems to be out of print too. Both versions seem to be available on Amazon Prime streaming video.

The Abdication

When Peter Finch was honored in Summer Under the Stars back in August, one of the movies that I recorded was one totally new to me, The Abdication. It's available on DVD thanks to the Warner Archive.

The abdication in question is that of Christina, Queen of Sweden. Viewers who probably know about her more from watching the Greta Garbo movie Queen Christina will find that this movie picks up more or less where the earlier movie ends; the Garbo movie having dealt mostly with her time as queen. Christina (played here by Liv Ullmann), was very interested in Catholic theology, despite the fact that Sweden was one of the countries that had become Lutheran due to the Reformation. That, and there was also the religion-tinged Thirty Years' War going on for a good portion of Christina's time on the throne. Sweden needed an heir to the throne, and Christina was an only child who refused to marry, so she eventually abdicated in favor of her cousin Charles and left the country, ultimately converting to Catholicism and making her way to Rome to be accepted inot the Church by the Pope.

However, when she arrived in Rome in 1655 she met a Catholic Church in a difficult political situation. The Popes of that era were always Italian, but France and Spain had a lot of influence on the cardinals who would elect each new pope, and France and Spain each had significant influence on a substantial percentage of the College of Cardinals, since Italy was still a series of principalities. Accepting a prominent ex-Lutheran like Christina into the fold was a problem, and the power structure in the Vatican assigned Cardinal Azzolino (Peter Finch) to Christina to see if she was truly sincere in her new Catholic beliefs. (I'd have thought she could have converted along the way to Rome, and while Wikipedia says she technically did, there were political reasons on her part why she couldn't go public with this.) Further complicating matters is that the pope who sponsored Christina into coming to the Vatican is in a parlous state of health. This is another factual issue where I don't know how much the movie got right and wrong: Christina abdicated in 1654, and the then-Pope, Urban VIII, died early in 1655 with a contentious conclave to elect a successor. But Christina didn't arrive in Rome until a couple of months after the new Pope, Alexander VII (no Pope is ever seen in the movie) had been installed.

At any rate, Christina is forced into a waiting game, while all the office politics trying to figure out whether Christina is for real goes on around her. Christina insists on seeing Cardinal Azzolino over and over, and she doesn't care what anybody says about their meetings that have the appearance of impropriety, especially on his part considering that Catholic clergy are supposed to celibate and not even imply they could have a romantic interest in anybody. But those meetings continue and perhaps go too far. In between, Christina has flashbacks about her past and what led her to abdicate.

The Abdication is an interesting idea, although it's one of those movies that's not going to be to everybody's taste. It was based on a stage play, and even though it's been opened up a lot from a stage play by having settings in a bunch of parts of the Vatican as well as those flashbacks, it still looks like it came from a play even if you didn't know it did. There's nothing wrong with that, but it might be worthwhile to know ahead of time that the movie is going to have a lot of scenes of two characters just talking. I think it also assumes that the viewer will have a fairly good grasp of world history, and those who don't might find parts of the movie a bit baffling.

I'm glad I watched The Abdication, but at the same time I can certainly understand why others might not like it.

A Town Like Alice

A new-to-me movie that aired during Summer Under the Stars was A Town Like Alice, which aired as part of Peter Finch's day. The movie is available on DVD, so I can do a full-length post on it.

Peter Finch isn't really the star; that honor goes to Virginia McKenna. She plays Jean Paget, a British woman who at the start of the movie wants to go to British Malaya (now Malaysia) to help install a community well for a village. While there, she remembers her past that eventually led her back here....

Flash back to about 1941. That's during World War II, and as you may recall from history or movies like Bridge on the River Kwai or Sea Wife, the Japanese overran quite a bit of Southeast Asia. As the flashback begins, that takeover hasn't happened, but it's about to. Jean works as a secretary in the typing pool, and the pool's boss informs the secretaries that they're about to need to use the emergency preparedness skills they've been told about which were to be used in case they need to flee from the Japanese onslaught right now.

Unfortunately, Jean, her friend, and the friend's family get held up by a few minutes, but those few minutes are enough to make them miss the boat, so they have to drive the 50 or so miles to Singapore in a car that's not going to hold up. They get rescued by the British, but unfortunately the British have to stop when they hear Japanese ahead. Sure enough, the Japanese sho up at the compound where the British hole up, and take everybody prisoner, separating the men and the women.

The women are put under the command of a Japanese sergeant (Kenji Takaki, credited as "Takagi"), who tells the women to march, presumably to Singapore where they'll be interred with all the other women until the end of the war. But things happen, and the women can't get to Singapore. Meanwhile, at one village after another, the Japanese commanders tell them there's not enough supplies to inter women in that particular village, so they'll have to march somewhere else. This goes on for months and months.

Along the way, Jean meets Joe Harman (Peter Finch), an Australian soldier who is a POW but doing some work as a mechanic because it's presumably a valuable service that's keeping him safe. Joe ran a station (a giant cattle ranch) in Australia's Northern Territory, and Joe tells Jean about the nice town of Alice Springs (hence the movie's title) in the middle of the territory.

The women march on, with members of their group dying of exhaustion and tropical illnesses one by one along the way, but cross paths with Joe and the other Aussies on multiple occasions. Will the two be able to survive the war? Joe steals a Japanese commander's chicken to try to feed the women, but that could mean the death of him....

I very much enjoyed A Town Like Alice, as it's the sort of unassuming little movie that generally fits my tastes. McKenna is excellent in an unglamorous role while Finch is good enough in a smaller role. I did find myself questioning why the Japanese wouldn't transport all the women to a prison camp right away, as in Three Came Home, but was able to suspend that disbelief and get involved with the story which is quite good.

Those who think of war movies as action movies may not like A Town Like Alice, but I think everybody else will, and I can highly recommend it.