Sterling Hayden, Frenchman

Another person who was honored in Summer Under the Stars in 2025 was Sterling Hayden. Once again, TCM ran some new-to-me movies that I had the chance to record, such as The Golden Hawk.

Opening titles inform us that in the 17th century, England and Spain were allied together against France, at least against France. There were, however, some people who engaged in piracy for their own sake of adventure.... One such pirate is Kit Gerardo (Sterling Hayden), based on the French island of Basse-Terre (part of Guadeloupe) where he romances the ladies and talks about plundering loot with the men who would be sailing under him. One such boat is the Spanish boat the Garza, sailing out of the big Spanish Caribbean port of Cartagena captained by Luis del Toro (John Sutton).

In the middle of the fight against the Garza, a captive woman jumps overboard to escape del Toro and make her way over to Kit's boat. The woman (played by Rhonda Fleming) is a Dutch maid named Jane and therefore neutral, or at least that's her story at first, even though she doesn't have a Dutch accent. (Then again Sterling Hayden doesn't have a French accent.) In any case, the libidinous Kit immediate starts trying to put the moves on Jane, who understandably suspects Kit of trying to keep her captive. So she escapes from Kit just like she escaped del Toro.

As you might guess, Kit, Jane, and del Toro keep running into each other. Jane is also known as Captain Rouge, and wants to plunder other ships herself because she claims her family used to be wealthy but had their wealth stolen from them and she's only trying to take back what's rightfully theirs. She's also not really got any allegiances to anybody but herself, which will prove useful later in the film.

Kit keeps plundering and eventually takes a woman named Blanca de Valdiva (Helena Carter, no relation to Helena Bonham Carter) who claims to be betrothed to del Toro. And yet Kit immediately starts romancing her too despite her story about being betrothed. Action shifts all around the Caribbean as Kit also continues to search for Captain Rouge while also making war on the Spaniards.

Ultimately, Kit tries to invade one of the Spanish fortresses, which is going to put him in a lot more danger, leading up to the climax in which all the relationships are revealed and, as you might guess, the heroes come out all right in the end.

The synopsis of The Golden Hawk is, to be honest, a bit bare bones. That's largely because the movie is fairly formulaic. It's an entertaining enough movie, and the cinematography is actually quite gorgeous although nowhere near the Caribbean. There's nothing much new here, and that's part of the reason why the movie isn't so well remembered today. Still, you'll probably enjoy it for one watch.

William Castle in antiquity

Rhonda Fleming was honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August. TCM ran a couple of sword-and-sandal type movies with her as the female lead. I already did a post on Revolt of the Slaves; another one they aired was Serpent of the Nile.

The movie doesn't start out with Fleming. Instead, we get some opening narration about the assasination of Julius Caesar in Rome in 44 BC. This led to infighting among the various members of the cabal that got rid of Caesar, with Brutus and Cassius on one side, and Marc Anthony (Raymond Burr) and Octavian (Michael Fox) on the other. Now, we know that Octavian would later become Emperor Augustine. But first, he and Marc Anthony have to defeat Brutus and Cassius. General Lucilius (William Lundigan) has been serving Brutus, but he realizes the cause is hopeless, so he tries to come up with a way to get Octavian and Marc Anthony to accept his turning to their side.

While Octavian goes back to Rome, Lucilius gets captured by Antony's men. Antony already has a woman by his side, but it's not Cleopatra (that's Rhonda Fleming when we finally get to her) yet. He accepts Lucilius' pledge of loyalty to Rome, claiming that they're two of the same kind. And to make Rome truly peaceful, they're going to have to go to Egypt to pacify Cleopatra. She's been a canny politician, playing Brutus off of Octavian and Anthony in order to keep her dynasty going even if Egypt has to be a vassal of Rome.

Although, to be honest, Cleopatra has always been one to try to get more power for herself. That's why, before Julius Caesar got bumped off, she had been maneuvering to get herself married to Julius so that the two of them could be co-rulers of Roman dominions. Lucilius was with Julius back in those days, so he knows just how clever and beguiling Cleopatra can be. He tries to warn Antony that Cleopatra could be quite dangerous to him, as she was in many ways to Julius.

But as we know, Antony wasn't thinking with his big head, and he eventually falls for Cleopatra and her beauty and lavish displays of opulence. Lucilius sees it coming from a mile away and this makes him a danger to Cleopatra, who has him put under house arrest. But this Antony begins to realize that perhaps Cleopatra really is a danger like Lucilius had been warning him.

Serpent of the Nile was distributed by Columbia under the direction of William Castle and producer Sam Katzman, a couple of names I've mentioned, more briefly in the case of Katzman. Both of them were known for producing as much spectacle as they could get with a very low budget, and that colors this version of the Cleopatra story. Fleming's Cleopatra is really out for herself, not so much looking to be co-ruler of Rome and not as much in love with Antony as other versions. Cleopatra's attempted seduction of Antony includes women with whips and Julie Newmar painted in gold, and that's just the first time.

The casting also makes Serpent of the Nile a bit of a hoot, as Raymond Burr is almost as badly cast playing Marc Antony as many of the casting decisions in The Story of Mankind a few years later. It doesn't help that the dialogue doesn't serve any of them well.

It's easy to see why Serpent of the Nile isn't very highly rated. But it's one of those movies where you know how it's finally going to end being based on famous histoty. It's how it gets there that makes it fun to watch.

The slaves revolt

Rhonda Fleming got a day in Summer Under the Stars this past August, and that gave me the chance to record a couple of her movie that I had never seen before, including one that she made in Italy later in her career: Revolt of the Slaves.

We don't see Fleming for a bit; instead the action begins in Rome some time before Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, so a period when Christians were still persecuted. A bunch of slaves are brought into a plaza, and one of them tries to escape, unsuccessfully. The punishment for that is getting one's hands cut off. This prompts Vibio (Lang Jeffries), another of the slaves, to try to escape. This slave is stronger and smarter than the first, and also as we eventually learn a Christian. Vibio too is caught, but he's fortunate: a patrician named Fabio has come to the plaza, and offers to buy Vibio in lieu of Vibio getting his hands cut off.

Fabio's daughter Fabiola (Rhonda Fleming) sees Vibio's toned body, and she immediately gets the physical hots for him, despite their class differences. Fabiola would like to see Vibio use that body to fight the other wrestler-slaves. Fabiola has him whipped. But her cousin Agnese has Vibio saved. Agnese is secretly a Christian, too, and she's got a powerful boyfriend, the tribune Sebastian. Unsurprisingly, Sebastian is another of the secret Christians.

Spying on them is Corvino (French singer/actor Serge Gainsbourg), working for Emperor Massimiano and a rabid anti-Christian. He warns the emperor that Fabio is a very powerful enemy, but the emperor isn't so sure. In any case, the Christians are going to have to flee yet again and find someplace else to do their worshipping. Fabiola doesn't have much love for the Christians either, at least not until she learns from Vibio that her cousin is one of them, at which point she has a bit of a conflict but is at least willing to help her family; blood being thicker than water and all that.

But of course Massimiano and Corvino are still out there, waiting to hunt down the Christians and have them martyred in the sort of ceremony that is a suitable spectacle both to all the Romans sitting in the stands of the arena, and people of the 20th century watching a movie that wants to think of itself as an epic. Vibio, however, has no desire to be martyred....

Revolt of the Slaves is an interesting little movie in that it has very high production values for the sort of Italian movie that was also intended to be distributed in America. Certainly the production values are a lot higher than in other Italian sword and sandal movies such as the Hercules movies with Steve Reeves or similar movies. On the other hand, the movie isn't that much better in terms of plot than those other Italian movies. Still, it's definitely worth one watch.

Odongo

Rhonda Fleming got a day in TCM's Summer Under the Stars back in August, and it gave me the opportunity to watch a movie I had never heard of: Odongo. Needless to say, it's another of those movies where it's with good reason that I'd never heard of it.

Odongo is another of those movies set in Africa in that short era when Cinemascope was around but before decolonialization, so that you could have white people living in exotic locations that viewers would never see otherwise, at least in the establishing shots. The white guy living here is Steve Stratton (MacDonald Carey), who deals in exotic animals and has a sort of game reserve that presumably brings in money by showing wealthy westerners exotic animals on safaris. Stratton has a couple of Africans working for him, including the juvenile titular Odongo (a Zanzibar-born child actor named Juma). Odongo seems to have a way with animals, although not quite to the level that Audrey Hepburn does in Green Mansions.

Rhonda Fleming plays Pamela, who gets a job at Steve's reserve as the veterinarian, something that ticks Steve off to no end since he was expecing, well, a man. He doesn't think women are fit for work like this. It doesn't help that Pamela thinks Steve treats the animals badly and doesn't much care for Steve's treatment of both her or the African workers either. But she hasn't yet learned how to survive in this part of Africa well away from civilization.

Another of the locals working for Steve commits the sort of offense that really does merit getting sacked, but when Steve fires him, the guy isn't very happy about it, and decides to take it out on Odongo for no good reason. He also decides he's going to get revenge on Steve, doing it by opening up all the pens where the animals are being kept, and then taking Odongo hostage and threatening Odongo's life! Steve and Pamela are going to have to save poor innocent Odongo.

Odongo is one of those films that plays to all the tropes and stereotypes westerners had about Africans in those days, with the result that it's not very good. It's fairly predictable too, and to top it off, it includes a subplot about some of those wealthy whites who come and visit, something that really doesn't have much to do with the rest of the movie.

I'm not certain if Odongo is available anywhere, but even if it were, I sure wouldn't seek it out again.

The Big Circus

Some months back, the TCM spotlight was movies about the circus. This gave me the chance to record The Big Circus, which I hadn't seen in ages, and do a post on it now.

Victor Mature is the star, playing Hank Whirling, the proprietor of one of those traveling circuses that sets up a real big top and goes from town to town by train. However, he just lost his partner, Jules Borman, who was bigger and better financed, so the Whirling Circus is in a parlous state. Indiied, in order to go on the next tour, the bank is only going to provide a loan if they can send one of their employees, Randy Sherman (Red Buttons) on the tour to see that the money is being managed properly.

Actually, they send two people, as Randy brings along Helen Harrison (Rhonda Fleming). Her job is as a press agent, which miffs Whirling in part because nobody told him about this, and in part because she's a woman, and he doesn't know whether lady press agents can handle the difficult circus world if they're not the talent or born into it.

One who was born into it was Hank's kid sister Jeannie (Kathryn Grant). In fact, she has just enough talent that she could start practicing with the trapeze act, which includes Zach (Gilbert Roland), who also does the high wire, and Zach's spotter Tommy (David Nelson). But Hank doesn't want Jeannie doing the acts, especially not a dangerous one like the trapeze. Rounding out the major members of this circus are Skeeter the Clown (Peter Lorre in his fat period) and ringmaster Hans Hagenfeld (Vincent Price).

There's a fair amount of conflict since Randy and Helen are all business, and Hank thinks they don't understand the circus business. But there's going to be more conflict. One involves Jeannie's practicing with Zach, and another involves Skeeter getting too drunk to perform. Indeed, in one scene, Randy realizes the show must goes on and takes Skeeter's place in the performance of the clowns, even though he doesn't know the routine.

The biggest problem, however, comes when somebody decides to sabotage the circus, with half the train crashing and killing, among others, Zach's wife. This sends him into a deep funk. That's really a problem since the way for Whirling to save the circus is to get a performance in New York. For the publicity, Whirling's plan was to have Zach to a tightrope walk across Niagara Falls, which was actually performed for the first time a century before The Big Circus, by Charles Blondin. Needless to say, one needs to have all one's faculties and be in the right mental state to do something so dangerous....

There have been a lot of circus movies released, and as with submarine movies there aren't too many distinct plots one can do. So in that regard, The Big Circus isn't terribly original. It's competently made, and the circus performances are nice, but the movie as a whole isn't terribly memorable. It'll certainly entertain you for one watch, however.

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

Another recent movie viewing was the 1957 western Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

If you've seen enough westerns, you probably know most of the characters in the story and the basic events of the gunfight, at least as it gets portrayed in the movies. (The actual gunfight was only about 30 seconds and, for dramatic reasons, it's usually more drawn out.) The gunfight in this version comes almost at the end of the movie, which focuses mostly on the back story of Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster) and his eventual friend of sorts Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas).

Wyatt, at the time the movie opens, was marshal in Dodge City, KS, having to deal with the cowboys who would come into town at the end of the cattle drive and consistently create a ruckus, not having had any way to have real fun while they were on the cattle drive for weeks at a time. While pursuing a criminal away from Dodge, Wyatt asks for information about Johnny Ringo (John Ireland) first from a lawman nearing retirement age, and then from Doc.

By this time, Doc already has his tuberculosis, a girlfriend Kate (Jo Van Fleet), and a reputation as a gunfighter that forces him to go from one town to the next. Eventually, he's going to wind up back in Dodge City, which makes Wyatt, not yet having Doc as a friend, thoroughly displeased. Things are going to become quite complicated, with the return of Johnny Ringo, and the entrance of lady gambler Laura Denbow (Rhonda Fleming).

Wyatt doesn't want women gambling in the "polite" side of town, but Laura is just so darn beautiful that Wyatt eventually relents, as long as she does it off to the side where most of the public won't see her. But Wyatt is also falling in love with Laura, taking the opportunity to do patrols where he knows Laura is going to be so he can run into her. Laura, for her part, isn't so certain she wants a lawman as her partner, not because she'd be expected to give up gambling, but because of the violent fate that's likely to befall lawmen.

Now, we all know that Wyatt Earp ends up at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, AZ, so he's going to be leaving Dodge. In this movie, it's presented as getting a telegram from his brothers, including Vernon (John Hudson) who is the marshal in Tombstone. Apparently the Clantons led by Ike (Lyle Bettger) has a ranch outside of town, and has bought a county sheriff who looks the other way when the Clantons are rustling Mexican cattle and trying to pass them through Tombstone on the way to getting them to the railroad. Laura just doesn't understand that Wyatt has to help his brothers....

Wyatt goes to Tombstone, and Doc makes it there as well. The Clantons, it seems are itching for a fight, while the townsfolk support the Earps but aren't necessarily willing to put the lives where their mouths are. Wyatt has to deal with Ike's drunken kid brother Billy (Dennis Hopper), while Ike concludes that the only way to get the fight is to make it personal, so he has Wyatt's kid brother Jimmy (Martin Milner) killed. It's enough to make anybody get in a shootout for vengeance....

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral felt to me as if it wasn't breaking any new ground, other than being in color and wide-screen which earlier versions hadn't. Still, the story is solid, and the acting uniformly quite good. Kirk Douglas is probably the best, followed by Jo Van Fleet. Burt Lancaster's Wyatt Earp comes across as having been written as not quite complex enough, so while there's nothing wrong with his acting, the script lets him down a bit. Among the supporting actors, Hopper is quite good, as are Earl Holliman as Wyatt's deputy in Dodge City, and in one scene, Olive Carey as the Clantons' mother.

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is a movie I can highly recommend.

Rhonda Fleming turns 92

Rhonda Fleming in a screencap from Inferno (1953)

Today is the 92nd birthday of actress Rhonda Fleming. Fleming started her career in the mid-1940s, with one of her first credited roles being one of the patients at the sanatorium where Ingrid Bergman works in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound. There's a "Word of Mouth" piece that appears on TCM from time to time in which Fleming talks about getting the part, which is as a nymphomaniac, a word she and her mother didn't know. Learning what it mean was apparently an interesting experience for them.

Fleming had flaming red hair, but didn't get to show it off in all that many movies when she was younger since so many of them where in black and white. One that is in color is Inferno, which looks like it finally has received a home video release, at least over in Europe.

TCM had a night of Fleming's films last December, and I think I'll post that link here since it includes the links to several other of her films that I've blogged about and were shown that night.

Rhonda Fleming night on TCM

TCM is putting the spotlight on actress Rhonda Fleming tonight. Fleming, now 91, was a flaming red-headed beauty of the 1940s and 1950s, and I'm surprised to see that I never found a good publicity still to use to illustrate a post about any movie of hers. The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with Out of the Past, a movie which only has Fleming in a small part and which I'm a bit surprised I've never done a full-length blog post on before. Then again, that might be because I do have a few problems with the movie. To me, it really feels like there's a very distinct past part and then the noir present which are much more separate than a whole lot of other movies that have flashbacks. To me it really muddles the whole story and detracts a bit from what everybody else says is an outstanding film.

Second up, at 9:45 PM, is Home Before Dark, in which Fleming plays the step-sister of star Jean Simmons. It's a mess, but fun at times; I just wish it didn't clock in at an overlong 137 minutes.

It's slightly odd that TCM picked a pair of black-and-white movies to start off the night of Rhonda Fleming films, since Technicolor was exceedingly kind to her. The first of the color films tonight is A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, with Bing Crosby playing the Mark Twain character who winds up a millennium before his time. That's followed at 2:15 AM by a film I'd never heard of before, Instant Love, so I can't say much about it.

Last up is the hilariously awful The Crowded Sky, at 4:00 AM, which has Fleming playing the wife of military pilot Efrem Zimbalist Jr. This is an all-star movie about a pair of planes on a collision course, where all of the characters have problems and lay them bare for us, including a series of wildly overdone voiceovers and a whole bunch of stereotypes. Sure, it's terrible, but it's one of those movies that fun to watch precisely because it's terrible.