War Hunt

When Robert Redford died last year, TCM responded with one of their 24-hour programming tributes. This gave them a chance to show a couple of movies that I hadn't seen before. One of those was Redford's first big role (he gets an "introducing" credit), in a modest Korean War movie called War Hunt. It's getting an airing tomorrow, August 18, at 6:00 AM as part of Redford's day in Summer Under the Stars, so now is the time to schedule it.

As the movie opens, it's May 1953 in Korea, which means that the Korean War is about to end, or at least the fighting, not that the men on the ground doing that actual fighting know that it's about to end. The negotiations have been going on for ages and they grouse about it. Pvt. Roy Loomis (Robert Redford) is a man fresh out of boot camp who's been shipped over to Korea, and from there to a platoon that's pretty close to the front line, under Captain Pratt (Charles Aidman). Among Loomis' fellow soldiers are a couple of people who would go on to have well-known careers: Sgt. Van Horn (Sydney Pollack), Pvt. Crotty (Gavin MacLeod), and Sgt. Showalter (Tom Skerritt).

But the one guy everybody gives a wide berth to is Pvt. Ray Endore (John Saxon). The only person who doesn't give Endore that wide berth is young Charlie, a Korean orphan who was rescued by Pvt. Endore and now serves as Endore's private aide. Well, Pvt. Loomis doesn't really avoid Endore either, largely because he's new here and doesn't know yet just what Endore is like. The other guys in the outfit certainly try to warn Loomis.

And then one morning Endore returns to camp and wakes up Loomis with his whistling. He's also got a face covered in military-black of the sort used on a night operation when you don't want to be seen in the moonlight. Endore goes out on night patrols by himself, technically AWOL, because Capt. Pratt knows that Endore is able to get good intelligence information. The negatives, especially the big one that Endore likes to knife North Koreans to death, are things that Pratt overlooks because it's war, and war is hell and all that.

Loomis, again being new to all this, doesn't get any of it, and is concerned about the influence all of this is going to have on poor little Charlie. It's bad enough that Charlie has had the horrors of war visited upon him at such a young age; worse is that he's learning all the wrong lessons from a soldier who's showing himself to be increasingly mentally unstable. When Loomis brings up the point about what's going to happen to Charlie after the war, Endore thinks he's going to be able to stay in Korea after the hostilities end and continue to fight his own war.

And then the armistice does get signed, which means that the following night, everybody who's right at the front line with that little bit of demilitarized zone between them, is going to have to be on their best behavior. That's not something that Endore is going to like, and you can guess what he does when the sun goes down and the panic that this engenders in the other guys in his outfit.

War Hunt is a very modest, low-budget affair that somewhat surprisingly got extremely positive reviews back when it was released. It's not that I didn't like it or anything; it's more that the low-budget nature of the movie definitely reveals some of its flaws. Redford and Saxon both do good jobs with their roles, but everyone else is more or less a stock character. Perhaps it's the fact that in 1962, when the movie was released, this side of war was very little seen on screen. The heroic side is what most of the war movies delivered.

Downhill Racer

One of the movies that I recorded during the TCM programming salue to Robert Redford because I hadn't seen it before was Downhill Racer. It's getting its next TCM airing tonight at 8:00 PM, so I watched it to be able to do the obligatory review on it.

As you might be able to surmise from the title, the movie is set in the world of ski racing, notably downhill as opposed to the tight turns of slalom. So we get a lot of scenes of resort towns in the European Alps, as well as footage of people racing. In the opening racing scene, a member of the US ski team breaks a leg and has to be operated on, watched by team coach Eugene Claire (Gene Hackman). The US team has a spot open, and invited to compete is David Chappellet (Robert Redford).

Chappellet being new to the team, he doesn't quite get the politics that go along with making one's way up the ladder. He doesn't have any sort of performance history, so he gets a start time that implies he'll have to deal with a rutted course which will make him go slower. So, rather stupidly, he says no, I'm not going to race this time until you give me a better number. The next time, he moves up from1 starting about 88 to starting about 77, but puts forth an oustanding effort to take fourth place overall. And he still complains about his starting position, this time not just to coach Claire.

After the season is over, Chappellet returns stateside partly for summer training, and partly for a chance to visit his father in Colorado. The two of them have a frosty relationship, with Dad not understanding why his son likes to compete, especially in a world of strictly amateur sports where there's a question of how the heck one is going to make a living. It's not an unreasonable concern.

In any case, Chappellet and the rest of the team go back to Europe, where Chappellet proves himself to be a real contender, albeit one who takes a lot of risks. Perhaps too many for the coaches, who are consistently in conflict with him. At the same time, one of the leading European ski equipment manufacturers, Machet, is willing to underwrite Chappellet with equipment. Machet has a young, pretty secretary named Carole (Camilla Sparv), and she and Chappellet start an on-again, off-again relationship as everybody goes around Europe in the run-up to the Olympics. Will Chappellet finally be able to best the Austrian and French powerhouses?

To be honest, Downhill Racer is as much a character study of the Chappellet character as it is a narrative about the competition. The competition part is nicer for the scenery than it is for the story part, which is unoriginal. The après-ski parts are I suppose not particularly more original than in any other sports movie, but they're well-enough acted and pretty to look at. Ultimately, Downhill Racer is as much time capsule as it is sports movie, but it's an interesting one that's worth a watch.

A bridge too long

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out of Africa

Once again, TCM has a pair of movies coming up on the same day tomorrow (June 22), although this time the second one comes on late in the evening so putting up a post early in the morning should give everyone enough time to see the post before the movie. Anyhow, the first of the two is Oscar's Best Picture for 1985, Out of Africa, which TCM is showing at 5:00 PM on June 22.

Out of Africa was a big enough movie that most people probably know the basic bits of the story. Isak Dinesen was the pen name of the Danish writer Karen Blixen, who published a book in the mid-1930s about her experiences in Africa called Out of Africa (no wonder the movie has such an original title). As the movie opens, Blixen (Meryl Streep) is back in her native Denmark, giving narration that is also the opening of the book. Flash back a little over two decades....

Young Karen is a young woman with a reasonable amount of money to her name who is in want of a husband, because being a spinster in the early 1910s just wasn't the thing. She's been connected to a Swedish baron, but when that falls through his younger brother Bror Blixen (Klaus Maria Brandauer) decides to ask for her hand in marriage. The only thing is, he's about to set off for Africa. But the two decide to get married. Karen is going to follow Bror to Africa after he gets set up, and with her money start a dairy farm since land in British East Africa circa 1913 is inexpensive.

Karen gets to Africa, and since the farm isn't near the coast, she has to take the train from Mombasa to Nairobi, where she'll meet up with Bror and then go on to the farm together after getting married. The train makes a whistle stop along the way, where a British big-game hunter, Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford), deposits some ivory although he does not board the train. Denys knows about the way of life in Africa, and it's clear that Karen doesn't.

Eventually she reaches Nairobi and finds Bror. The two get married, only for him to reveal that he's decided they should grow coffee instead of dairy cattle. This even though it's questionable whether coffee will grow well in their part of Kenya -- it grows well in other parts, so why not here? This is only the first of several conflicts between Karen and Bror. Karen also has more concern for the local Kikuyu people than most Europeans do. Worst is that Bror must be sleeping with other women, because Karen is diagnosed with syphilis.

In the meantime, Karen likes to oversee all the land she owns and the nearby country. This leads her to another meeting with Denys when a lion approaches as Karen is standing under a tree. Now, if Karen just stands there, she should be OK, but she's scared and wants to run, and wants Denys to shoot the lion. But after the meeting, you know the two are going to fall in love, even though they'll never be able to have a real relationship. World War I and a bunch of other things intervene and, as we know, Karen eventually returns to Denmark since the movie opens with the much older Karen in Denmark.

I mentioned at the beginning that Out of Africa won Best Picture at the Oscars. I have to think it's because 1985 was a fairly weak year for films. Heck, Witness got a Best Picture nomination. I happen to like Witness, but it's most definitely not Best Picture material. Out of Africa is, of course, the sort of epic (161 minute) movie that Oscar loves, and the technical aspects of it are certainly quite worthy of all those nominations.

Streep and Brandauer also both give good performances, and were nominated. Robert Redford, on the other hand, sticks out like a sore thumb. Director Sydney Pollack wanted him on the grounds that there weren't any British actors with suitable charm and young enough to take on the role. (I don't think Hugh Grant or Colin Firth were well enough known yet.) In any case, Redford is all wrong for the part. There are also issues with the script, which moves at an absolutely glacial pace, accounting for that 161-minute running time. But the location cinematography is beautiful.

All in all, Out of Africa is a bit of a mixed bag, but one that ultimately has more pluses than minuses.

All the President's Men

Today being January 20, which is inauguration day here in the US in years that follow a presidential election, I figured today would be the right time to put up a post on a movie that I had on my DVR for several months: All the President's Men.

The movie starts off with a shot of a typewriter typing the date of June 17, 1972. For those who know their history, this is the date on which a security guard at the Watergate complex in Washington DC found a door with the bolt taped so that the door wouldn't lock. Five men are arrested in the break-in, which happened to be the Washington headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. The men are found to be carrying surveillance equipment, which would lead some people to question whether or not the burglars were trying to bug the Democrats.

Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards), an editor at the Washington Post newspaper, sends reporter Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) to cover the arraignment, which seems an odd affair since there's a lawyer there who claims not to be representing them and these nobodies have a "country club" lawyer. Some time after the hearing, Woodward gets a call from an FBI agent who tells him that the found some papers on the suspects that linked an "HH" at the White House. Obviously that's a reference to Howard Hunt, who was working for White House Counsel Charles Colson. Woodward later learns that Hunt had previously worked at the CIA.

Then, Bradley tells Woodward that he's puting a second reporter on the case with him, one Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman). They work well together, but as the investigate it seems to be an increasingly sprawling case with so much to try to figure out. It seems to point at president Richard Nixon, busy running for re-election, in some way, and Nixon's campaign committee, but they can't come up with anything firm in part because nobody really wants to speak on the record. And the movie version of Ben Bradlee is one of a man who only wants to print confirmable facts, a massive difference from the news organizations of today.

Indeed, one interesting thing is how, when Woodward and Bernstein are trying to get some background on Hunt, they go to the White House library and the Library of Congress trying to get library records. After the events of September 11, 2001, when the Patriot Act was first up for passage, there were howls of protest that the law might allow the FBI and CIA to spy on what books Americans were taking out of the library. Here, however, going after people's library records is portrayed as virtuous because they're going after those icky Nixon administration types.

As such, as I was watching All the President's Men, I couldn't help but think of another movie, the 1944 biopic Wilson about one of America's nastiest presidents who is whitewashed in a rather hagiographic portrayal. Both movies are extremely well made, while at the same time being utterly self-congratulatory. It's also ironic how Woodward's most famous source, "Deep Throat" (played by Hal Holbrook) turned out to be a former deputy director of the FBI who want to Woodward in large part because he was passed over for a promotion after J. Edgar Hoover's death and wanted to get back at the new boss.

So how much you like All the President's Men may depend on how much you can stomach the journalistic love fest. Considering how much it's become obvious journalism, and even more so the FBI, only investigates based on political affiliation, that love fest may be a bit much for some people to handle.

The Milagro Beanfield War

Another of the movies that was on my DVR that I noticed is getting another airing is The Milagro Beanfield War. Its next airing is on TCM overnight tonight at 2:00 AM (so that's Oct. 15 Eastern Time, but still late on the 14th in Pacific Time).

The movie opens up with a montage of night descending on the town of Milagro, NM, a series of images that informs the viewer that this is a Quirky Town, full of Quirky People. Among those people is Joe Mondragon (Chick Vennera), a farmer who isn't very successful, largely because he's lost his water rights along with everyone else in town who had been farming. He gets in his truck and nearly runs into a construction crew. They're working for Ladd Devine (Richard Bradford), who has bought up a lot of the land to build a development of second homes for the ultra-wealthy. And having political interference with the governor (M. Emmet Walsh), he was able to get the water rights from the locals, which is part of why Milagro is a dying town.

In frustration, Joe kicks the valve on one of the irrigation pipes, breaking it open. The water runs down onto one of his fields, and Joe realizes that he can grow beans on this little plot of land, at least in part as a protest against Devine and his property development company. The locals, most of whom are many generations descended from the Spanish who colonized the area in the 1500s, begin to take Joe's side.

Meanwhile, several Anglos also come in to take sides. A lot this has to do with the Devine company; in addition to Ladd he's got an adult daughter Flossie (Melanie Griffith) who gets involved. The Devine side also realize that they have to do something to get Joe to stop growing those beans, which is why they bring in Kyril Montana (Christoper Walken), a sort of hired gun who knows how to use plausible threats of violence to get his way.

On the side of the locals, there's white lawyer/publisher Charlie Bloom (John Heard), who moved to Milagro some time back and has been an activist ever since, presumably fancying himself a white savior. And suddenly showing up one day is Herbie Platt (Daniel Stern), a young idealist working on his Ph.D. in sociology who decided to do a study on Milagro, embedding himself in the town for six months to do it.

The Milagro Beanfield War has a lot to like about it, mostly thanks to the ensemble cast of mostly supporting players who come together. There's also the cinematography; it would be hard to make this part of the country not look good. Also worth noting is the score, which won Dave Grusin an Oscar. On the other hand, the movie is also a bit of a mess, largely down to the script. It makes the characters too damn quirky for their own good, along with requiring a bit too much suspension of disbelief. The characters at times seem more like archetypes than fully fleshed-out characters.

However, The Milagro Beanfield War is not without its charms, which is why it's definitely worth at least one watch, at least to decide for yourself what to make of it.

Not quite as obnoxious as Athena

Many years back, one of the local TV aired a movie that I only got to see the beginning of; for whatever reason, I never got around to watching the whole thing and TCM hasn't run it often enough for me to be able to catch it there (and indeed, hasn't run it since I upgrated to a service with a DVR). That movie is Barefoot in the Park, and having found it on one of the streaming services (I think PlutoTV), I decided to watch it even with the commercial interruptions.

The movie starts off with the honeymoon of Paul (Robert Redford) and Connie (Jane Fonda) Bratter, a young couple who are so madly in love that they can't be bothered to leave their hotel room. But of course the honeymoon is going to have to end, and in this case it's because Paul has to start his new job as the young lawyer at one of those Manhattan law firms. Connie is apparently still from the era when a wife stops working when she gets married even if she doesn't yet have any children to look after. But it's her job to go find an apartment for the couple to live in, something you think they would have done before getting married and moving to the city. Or maybe she did before they got married and the movie doesn't explicitly mention that.

In any case, Connie probably didn't do enough due diligence in picking a place to live, or else the couple just couldn't afford anything better. One of the reasons she's been able to get something so cheap is because it's on the fifth floor of a walk-up apartment building. No wonder it's so cheap; who the heck would want to keep walking up and down that many flights of stairs. There's also the issue of a hole in the skylight and the fact that the apartment seems ridiculously small, with the bedroom being little more than a closet. Connie is so in love that she can live with it until the couple can get settled in. And she's always been a free spirit, so she likes the sense of adventure.

Paul, on the other hand, is more strait-laced. Having said that, neither of them is a bad person; they're just the sort of people with some personality differences but of the sort that in the real world they'd figure out a way to solve the problems maturely. And Paul would probably move up in the firm quickly enough that it wouldn't be too awfully long before he could afford a better place for the couple. But then we wouldn't have a movie

Somewhat on Paul's side is his mother-in-law, Ethel (Mildred Natwick). Now that Connie's gotten married, Ethel is on her own, and Connie does worry about that, sincerely wanting what's best for her, even if Connie has the same conflict with Mom that she does with her husband. But Connie is about to get an ally in the form of Victor (Charles Boyer). He's a professional adventurer, and keeps the garret apartment above the Bratters' place because it's cheap and he's away a lot. Indeed, he needs to go through the Bratter place to get to his apartment, or so he claims. Seems highly illegal to me. Like Connie, however, he's a decided free spirit, and it's obvious that he's going to be interested in Ethel.

Barefoot in the Park is based on a stage play by Neil Simon, and it's one that's filled with contrived situations written solely for laughs. Fans of Neil Simon will enjoy this stuff, although I have to say that for me it's not quite as good as some of his later work, notably The Odd Couple and Plaza Suite. You know you're going to get a happy ending out of all of it, although the climax leading up to that ending is utterly unnatural and didn't work for me. Even with its flaws, however, Barefoot in the Park is definitely worth a watch.

The Candidate (1972)

Election Day is tomorrow here in the US, so since I had The Candidate sitting on my DVR since 31 Days of Oscar, I decided now would be a great time to watch it and do a post on it.

The movie starts off with a brief establishing scene that shows us professional political consultant Marvin Lucas (Peter Boyle) finishing up a campaign. It doesn't really matter where, or for what office. But with one election over, it's time for Marvin to find another candidate to back, and that's where the difficulty comes in. In California, Crocker Jarmon (Don Porter) is a popular Republican running for re-election. So popular, in fact, that none of the big-name Democrats want to run against him since there's not much chance of them winning.

With that in mind, Marvin approaches young Bill McKay (Robert Redford). Bill is decidedly on the side of the little guy, working for a legal aid society and having strong positions in favor of things that were big issues in the early 1970s, like integrative school busing, legalizing abortion, or a nascent environmental movement that in those days was reacting to things like Cleveland's Cuyahoga River catching fire. So he's the perfect sacrificial lamb for the Democrats. Moreover, he's got built-in name recognition, because his father John (Melvyn Douglas) was a very popular governor back in the day.

Bill accepts the challenge, but with the proviso that he gets to campaign on his issues as he sees fit, not as any handlers might want him to look to the public. And it's the sort of idea that works with young first-time voters, especially those politically active enough to make up a disproportionate amount of the electorate in a party primary. That, combined with the McKay name, is more than enough to help him win the primary and become the Democratic nominee.

But then the problems come. Early polling suggests not just that McKay is going to lose, but that he's going to lose by a big enough margin that it will humiliate him and harm the legal aid work that he'd go back to doing after a losing campaign. So Marvin and the rest of the handlers suggest that he start moderating, as well as making himself look more telegenic (as if young Robert Redford wasn't telegenic enough).

It works, as the polls begin to get tighter as election day approaches. But Bill still has a fairly stand-offish view of electoral politics, and especially the grind of having to run a statewide campaign. It doesn't help that he wanted his father to stay in the background, and that his wife Nancy (Karen Carlson) is having an affair. Nor does it help that Sen. Jarmon isn't exactly a bad guy, just one who disagrees on the issues. In fact, compared to 50 years on there's a surprisingly low amount of negative campaigning.

But it's an atmosphere that's actually to the movie's benefit. It's an intimate look at the behind-the-scenes world of politics, once you get away from the world of actually governing. Reford and Boyle both give fine performances, with Porter and Douglas also doing good jobs in their smaller roles as elders at different points in their political careers. It helps that the screenwriter and several other behind-the-camera people had worked on this sort of political campaign earlier in their careers; apparently several of the scenes in the movie are based on things that really happened in campaigns.

And, although the movie is definitely making some political statements, not just on what would now be called TEAM RED versus TEAM BLUE, but also on the whole idea of how to market political ideas, it does so in a fairly gentle way that I don't think is going to alienate anybody who has a differing political viewpoint.

Robert Redford will definitely be more remembered for movies other than The Candidate, but it's definitely a movie that shouldn't be missed.

The Condor's Days

Another of the movies that I had to record during one of the free previews was the 1970s spy thriller Three Days of The Condor. It's going to be on Epix tomorrow (Mar. 8) at 6:00 PM, so recently, I sat down to watch it and do a review on it.

Robert Redford plays Joe Turner, who lives in New York and bikes to his job at the American Literary Historical Society. We already know something is up, however, because we see somebody watching Joe ring for entry into the building and then ticking a name off a list. Sure enough, the Society is a front for an odd little CIA organization. Apparently, the workers here read a ton of books, looking for spy ideas that either the CIA hasn't thought of themselves, or perhaps ideas that some double agent within the organization might have thought up.

Joe draws the short straw of having to get lunch for everybody from the nearby diner (nobody brown-bags it?), and because of the rain, he goes out the back way, such that the people watching him in the opening scene never see him leave. They knock on the door, and when they're admitted, the promptly shoot the secretary and everybody else in the place. Everybody else, of course, means that they don't shoot Joe, and don't realize until it's too late that they've missed one of the workers. Joe returns from picking up lunch and obviously finds everyone else dead.

He doesn't much know what to do, so he calls up his station chief at the CIA's World Trade Center office, who tells him they'll send someone to bring him in. But Joe, code named Condor, doesn't recognize the person they're going to send and senses that something might be up. Indeed, we viewers know something is up, thanks in part to Wabash (John Houseman), much higher up in the agency, trying to get Joe liquidated.

The bigwigs in the agency think it shouldn't be that difficult to deal with Condor, since he's never done any field work. But what they're forgetting is that Joe has read voraciously, and read a whole lot of nutty spy plans and other things that give him ideas about how to proceed to remain unfound by the agency. Unsurprisingly, the contact that the station chief claimed would bring him to safety was a trap, leading Joe to duck into a store where he kidnaps a woman, Kathy (Faye Dunaway). She's a stranger who has know idea what's going on, which also means that the rest of the agency will have no idea who she is or where she and Joe are. At least, not until Joe takes her car for a ride as part of an attempt to figure out exactly what's going on. Kathy, unsurprisingly, doesn't believe a word of what Joe is saying.

Joe finds Joubert (Max von Sydow), a freelance killer, is trying to kill him. Joubert may be in the employ of Higgins (Cliff Robertson), one of Joe's bosses, or perhaps somebody else may be behind all of this. Joe has to try to stay one step ahead of everybody, which is going to be difficult considering how many resources the CIA has at its disposal.

Three Days of the Condor was made in 1975, a year after Richard Nixon resigned, and the same year that the US Senate's Church Committee was investigating the CIA; both of those things put a sense of paranoia high on a lot of people's minds. One may find it hard to believe that the CIA would have been able to do as much as is portrayed in movies like this, but in more recent years we've had people like Edward Snowden come forward to show just how much the Federal government is spying on its own people. And the really ironic thing is that the sort of people who would have lauded movies like this have become the establishment, cheering on the politicization of intelligence agencies to go after wrong-thinking candidates. The movie's last line is particularly prescient albeit not in a way the filmmakers had in mind; just consider how the putative idea of "fake news" is being used to silence any information that goes against the administrative state's narrative on any number of issues, from Hunter Biden's laptop to coronavirus, or even people who have a disagreement with their school boards.

As for Three Days of the Condor as entertaiment? Well, it's a well-acted movie, and entertaining enough with a nice vintage look at New York City as it was in the mid-1970s. I just felt that I had to remind myself not to take things too seriously and just enjoy the movie for what it is.

The Chase

Today's star in TCM's Star of the Month is Robert Redford, which means somewhat more recent movies than most stars' days, since Reford only started in the 1960s. His day concludes overnight tonight or early tomorrow at 3:30 AM with The Chase. I had recorded it some time before when it ran on TCM, so seeing it come up on the scheudule, I watched it to do a post on it.

Redford plays Bubber Reeves, who lived in a small town in Texas before being sent to prison. But he and another inmate break out of prison. To further their escape, they flag down a car presumably to carjack it and drive to points unknown, but the other prisoner kills the driver with a rock and drives off, leaving Bubber holding the bag and knowing everybody will suspect him without an alibi.

Word reaches his home town that Bubber has escaped from prison, and Sheriff Calder (Marlon Brando), one of the few people in town who's truly sympathetic to him, expects along with everyboy else in town that Bubber is going to try to come back as his wife Anna (Jane Fonda) still lives here.

Unfortunately, Bubber comes from a town that's a lot like the one in Violent Saturday, at least in the sense that almost everybody seems to have some sort of secret that threatens to turn the movie into a potboiler. Val Rogers (E.G. Marshall) owns the local bank and a lot of townsfolk think he's installed Sheriff Calder in order to have a toady to deal with any possible legal problems. Val's son Jason (James Fox) has having an affair with Anna while Bubber was in prison. Bubber's mom (Miriam Hopkins) thinks she's responsible for Bubber turning out the way he did. And on, and on, and on.

Sure enough, Bubber is trying to get home, likely to see Anna. Lester, an otherwise innocent black man, tries to go up the back way to Anna's apartment to give her a message about Bubber's whereabouts, and this benig a small southern town, there are a lot of people who would be happy enough to play the race card to try to get him to reveal where Bubber is. Heck, they'll be just as happy to beat the crap out of the sheriff to get the information. Can Calder keep the peace?

The Chase is based on a play by Horton Foote, who wrote the plays that served as the basis for some other movies that I really liked, such as The Trip to Bountiful, as well as screenplays like Tender Mercies. The Chase, however, has some serious problems. The whole thing seemed terribly unrealistic, as though Foote was trying to cram in as many thought-provoking plot points as he could. This also causes the movie to run about 135 minutes, when it really needed some trimming to get down to under two hours.

The acting, however, is pretty good, and I am for the most part not a particularly big fan of Marlon Brando. A couple of people I haven't mentioned yet are Robert Duvall as one of Rogers' employees, and Angie Dickinson as the sheriff's wife. The script, while having problems, doesn't really plum the overheated depths of Southern Gothic that films based on Tennessee Williams works do, such as The Fugitive Kind.

So watch and judge for yourself. While I and any number of other reviewers have problems with The Chase, there are also a lot of reviewers who really like it.

It's not as if Willie is over there

Another of the movies that I had the chance to DVR during one of the free preview weekends was Tell Them Willie Boy is Here. StarzEncore Westerns runs the movies they have the rights to a lot, so it's got a couple of airings coming up tomorrow, one overnight at 2:57 AM and a second at 4:32 PM.

Robert Blake plays Willie, a Paiute Indian who is returning to the reservation where he grew up in San Bernadino County, California in 1909. California hadn't grown anywhere near to the extent that it is now, but change was definitely coming to the place, and one of the plot points deals with President Taft's upcoming visit to the area and the notion that any man with a gun who was determined enough could assassinate him -- McKinley's assassination was still fresh in people's minds.

Not that Willie is thinking about the president, however. He's come back to the reservation, managed from the Bureau of Indian Affairs by Dr. Elizabeth Arnold (Susan Clark), because there's a young woman he loves, Lola (Katharine Ross). There's a problem, however, which is that Lola's father most definitely does not like Willie and doesn't want Willie to see Lola, much less think about asking for her hand in marriage.

So what does Willie do? Kill Lola's father in self-defense and start running across the desert of that part of California with Lola in tow. Obviously, the Sheriff, Frank Wilson (Charles McGraw), has to find Willie, since with the president coming there's the possibility for mayhem, even if that's not in Willie's mind. The police have no way of knowing until the capture Willie that the killing was in self-defense.

Sheriff's deputy Christopher Cooper (Robert Redford) leads the posse that goes after Willie, and even though he may have some respect for Willie, he still has to do his duty knowing that it's not going to be easy. Indeed, Willie is even able to shoot several of the posse members' horses before eventually reaching the top of a mountain where he's going to make his last stand.

Tell Them Willie Boy is Here is relatively slow going until after the shooting and the the chase begins, at which point it turns into one of the western formulas that we all know. Not that the movie is bad by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it's more than solid entertainment, with both Redford and Blake doing well and a couple of surprising twists along the way. It's also based on a true story.

Tell Them Willie Boy is Here wouldn't be my first choice of a western to try to get people interested in the genre, but for people who like westerns, there's definitely a lot to like here.

The Way We Were

TCM ran a bunch of romances back on Valentine's Day. This gave me the chance to record a movie I hadn't done a post on before, The Way We Were. Recently, I watched it to do a post on here.

Barbra Streisand plays Katie Morosky, who at the start of the movie is working as an assistant on a radio show in 1944, during World War II. Katie openly uses her position to edit the scripts to make characters and people who don't hold her political views look like jerks. To be fair, there was a lot of propaganda during the war, but Katie turns it up to 11.

Katie and her boss go to a club for dinner that evening, and at the bar, she sees one Hubbell Gardiner (Robert Redford), looking resplendent in his naval officer's uniform. This being a young Robert Redford, it's unsurprising that Katie should get the hots for him, although in reality, she already had the hots for the guy since Katie and Hubbell had a past together, back in college in 1937, and Katie starts thinking about that....

Katie was just as politically active and naïve in college, supporting the Soviets' backing of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War as if this were somehow nobler than the Francoists getting backing from Germany and Italy. (The movie conveniently omits the time between the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Pact and Germany's invasion of the USSR during which America's communists did a complete 180.) Katie and Hubbell were in the same graduating class at college, and in a creative writing course together. The professor singles out Hubbell's work, whch pisses Katie off. But Hubbell admires Katie's gumption if not her political views, while Katie feels something more physical toward Hubbell.

Back in the present day of 1944, Hubbell gets drunk and needs a place to flop for the night, so Katie puts him up, leading to more meetings and a torrid love affair. After the war, this is going to take both of them to Los Angeles, since they're both writers. They continue their affair, to the point that they get married and Hubbell gets Katie pregnant.

But then comes the House Un-American Activities Committee. Lots of Hollywood folks started receiving subpoenas, while ten of them refuse to testify before the committee. Those ten of course would become the first Hollywood blackistees, and Katie as a committed Communist herself goes to Washington to support them, something which could be very dangerous both to her career and her husband's. Hubbell is more sanguine, figuring that everything will blow over in a few years, and what purpose will all of this have served. It would be enough to break up their relationship, but as it turns out Hubbell has been having an affair anyway.

If you want a poignant romance, you could do a lot worse than to watch The Way We Were. It's filled with fine performances, a memorable theme song, and a story that works reasonably well. However, I have to admit that at times I had difficulty finding any sympathy for Katie. After all, she was deliberately using her job to screw over other people politically, and in other ways she consistently comes across as selfish.

I also had some dislike of the triumphalism of Hollywood's communists somehow being the victims. I've argued on several occasions before that the government shouldn't have been involved in things like this, but most people seem to be fine with the government shafting other people as long as it's not shafting them. Budd Schulberg, when he named names, said something to the effect that the Communists were in favor of free speech as long as it was speech they approved of, and that attitude is even stronger in today's society with cancel culture.

Still, I understand that most people are going to overlook such flaws and enjoy this manipulative romance.

Sneakers

Many years ago, when I was in college, I saw Sneakers when somebody was watching it in a dorm lounge. I hadn't seen it since, and when it showed up during one of the free preview weekends, I made it a point to DVR it. It's on TV tomorrow, at 4:51 PM on 5Star Max if you've got the Cinemax package, but it's also available on DVD.

A prologue introduces us to Martin and Cosmo when they were college students in the late 1960s. They're lefty computer science students in the days when computers meant mainframes and time sharing, but they're able to get into the computer lab late at night to use the computer to transer money from Republicans to liberal causes. The police come and arrest Cosmo, but Martin was out getting a pizza, so he's a fugitive now.

Decades pass, and Martin Bishop (Robert Redford) is working a white hat security consultant. That is, he and his firm are hired by businesses specifically to find out the security holes that would enable a computer hacker or other criminal to bilk them out of big bucks. Among his colleagues are Crease (Sidney Poitier), formerly of the CIA; Whistler (David Strathairn), a blind expert in electronics and the sounds various electronics make; "Mother" (Dan Aykroyd), an electronics technician; and Carl (River Phoenix), who does a fair amount of the grunt work.

One day, Martin is approached by a couple of guys who know his past. Dick Gordon (Timothy Busfield) and Buddy Wallace (Eddie Jones). They know about a Czech mathematician named Janek (Donal Logue) who is giving a lecture on large prime numbers, which are a big deal in the field of cryptography because it takes a substantial amount of computing power to figure out the prime factors of very large numbers (assuming, of course, these numbers aren't simply multiples of 2 or 3 or much smaller primes) and these numbers can be used to transpose the digitl 1s and 0s into patterns it's very hard to break. (OK, this is a simplification, but going into all the details would make for a very dry movie.)

Martin goes to the lecture, and from that and using human intelligence -- basic surveillance and confidence games with people around Janek, conning people being a big part of security breaches even today -- he and his colleagues deduce that Janek had figured out a way around the factorization problem and developed a computer chip that could basically hack into any current computer, no matter how good the encryption, meaning that all sorts of computer systems are at risk. Gordon and Wallace are from the NSA, and want Martin's company to get that chip for the Americans, since this is just after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and who knows who Janek is really working for?

So Martin and company are able to get it, but when the handover is to be made, Crease reads a newspaper article about the killing of Janek which makes him realize that Gordon and Wallace may not actually be NSA. Martin goes to the former Soviet, now Commonwealth of Independent States (remember that?) attache to figure out what might be going on, but Gordon and Wallace catch up with them, killing the attaché, framing Martin for it and abducting him, and getting the chip themselves.

It turns out that Gordon and Wallace were working for... Cosmo! Cosmo (Ben Kingsley) claims to be working for some shady organized crime group, except that they really weren't that organized before Cosmo showed up. The chip, at least if you believe Cosmo, would help the Mob stay one step ahead of the government. It doesn't quite add up, though, since why would Cosmo go work for the Mob when he and Martin both had ideals?

So Martin and his friends are going to have to figure out where Cosmo's men took him, and then come up with a way to get that chip back. This leads to the finale, in a Silicon Valley company with high-tech by 1992 standards security, and them tring to figure out how to break that security.

Sneakers is an entertaining enough movie as long as you don't think too hard, something that holds for a lot of the movies at the intersection of spying and heisting. My impression is that they get a fair amount of the technicals right: prime numbers and advanced math really are important for encryption, and conning people to get around security is often more likely to work (think phishing, for example). The presentation of computers is obviously made more visual-friendly if less realistic, and I think there are certain aspects of security the writers overlooked. A lot of the more sensitive computer systems would, I think, have been using air gaps even in the early 1990s, while Cosmo's company likely would have had fingerprint access in addition to badge and voice access. (I'm not certain how far advanced facial recognition was in 1992; it's not mentioned here.)

For a Hollywood look at computers and security back in the day, you could do worse than to watch a movie like Sneakers.

A River Runs Through It

Yet another of the movies that I had a chance to record during a free preview weekend is A River Runs Through It. It's got an airing coming up, tomorrow at 8:56 AM on Starz Cinema, so I decided to watch it over the Thanksgiving weekend to do a review on here.

Norman Maclean (played as an adult by Craig Sheffer) was a writer in real life born in Montana in 1902. His father (Tom Skerritt) was a Methodist minister and Mom (Brenda Blethyn) was your typical mother/housewife of the early 20th century. Norman also had a younger brother in Paul (played as an adult by Brad Pitt). Dad, being a Methodist minister, could be a bit strict (see One Foot in Heaven for another good example of a cinematic Methodist minister), but had as one of his great loves fly fishing, going out on the Blackfoot river and bringing his two sons with him. Both sons grow up to enjoy fly fishing, although Paul takes even greater pleasure in it.

Eventually 1917 and the American entry into World War I comes. With many of the adult males going off to fight, there's a need for labor that forces the two Maclean sons to grow up quickly. Dad, however, is insistent that his sons get an education and since the war is over by the time they graduate high school anyway, Norman goes east to Dartmouth in New Hampshire to get his degree in English, while Paul stays to study at the state school which gives him more time to keep fly fishing.

Fast forward to the spring of 1926. Norman has finally graduated college and returns home to Montana to decide what he wants to do with the rest of his life. Paul has also graduated and gone on to work for a newspaper in Helena, where he's the stereotype of the alcoholic reporter, the alcoholism coming even though there's Prohibition on. Everyone is happy to have Norman back, although he's not certain whether he's going to stay or whether he's going to go east to do graduate work.

At an Independence Day celebration, Norman meets Jessie Burns (Emily Lloyd), a nice young lady who at first isn't necessarily interested in Norman. They do, eventually, start courting in the old-fashioned style of small-town 1920s. However, when they all go to a speakeasy, Norman realizes that Paul is really a mess. He's cavorting with a Native American woman, but worse, not only drinks too much but likes to gamble. And he's really gotten himself into debt.

Norman wants to go fly fishing more with Paul in the hopes that will bring some happiness into Paul's life and quiet those internal demons in Paul's head. But then Jessie's brother Neal returns home from Hollywood where he's trying to make it as a screenwriter. Neal wants to go fly-fishing with the Maclean brothers, but he shows up late and brings his girlfriend. Then the two get drunk and sleep out in the sun, getting a nasty sunburn. There's no way this is going to help Paul, or Neal, or Norman's relationship with Jessie.

Further complications arise when Norman gets a letter from the University of Chicago informing him that he's being given a position to do his graduate work, which also comes with a job as an assistant professor. He's set to go back east, which means leaving Paul behind to face his demons alone. And who knows whether Jessie is going to want to go east with Norman?

The real-life Norman Maclean's story is a fairly good one that has potential to translate well to the screen, even though in many ways it feels as though it's not breaking any new ground. The themes of coming-of-age and tradition (family in Montana) versus modernity (the job in Chicago) are timeless and universal, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with them. Director Robert Redford does a fine job putting it all on the screen, helped immensely by the gorgeous scenery from location shooting in Montana (and some in Wyoming, according to IMDb). Unsurprisingly, that cinematography won an Oscar.

The acting is competent, although I think it's more likely that the actual story will be remembered more than the various stars' acting. In any case, the movie is absolutely worth a viewing. It is also available on DVD the last time I checked in case you don't have any of the premium channels.

Brubaker

Many months back, I had the opportunity to DVR Brubaker when TCM ran it during 31 Days of Oscar. Whoever owns the Cinemax channels seems to have the rights to it now, as it's going to be on 5Star Max tomorrow at 6:07 AM and again on Nov. 12 and Nov. 19.

Robert Redford plays Henry Brubaker, who at the beginning of the movie is boarding a bus to take him to his incarceration at Arkansas' Wakefield Prison circa 1969. Apparently there aren't enough cells in this prison, as he's put in a barracks-style cage with a whole bunch of other prisoners. This seems like a recipe for disaster, and unsurprisingly, we see things like sexual assault and one prisoner being tied to the bars of the cage, tortured, and left there all night.

But it turns out that Brubaker didn't commit much of a crime to be put in the barracks. In fact, he didn't commit a crime at all. Brubaker is the new warden, and he got himself put in the general population so that he could see the conditions in the prison as they really are, and not as any handlers would want him to see by turning the prison into some sort of Potemkin village. (How he did this without other officials knowing, I don't know.) I'd suppose you could say he was shocked, except that he had to know things like this were going on as he wouldn't have gone undercover otherwise.

Brubaker, unsurprisingly, wants to reform the prison, although other people who have been making out like bandits under the previous prision management have a fairly obvious vested stake in keeping the old regime running. The one person who might be willing to help Brubaker is Lillian Gray (Jane Alexander), a liaison with the Governor's office. However, she cares more about making herself and the governor look good while providing the appearance of reform, whether or not things get done is secondary.

It's only natural that Brubaker should be opposed by the officials and locals in business who have been profiting under the old scheme, but the scale of the graft shocks Brubaker. He tracks food purchases, only to find that they're being diverted and sold below market value out in the real world with officials pocketing the money. The barracks' roof wasn't properly installed and caves in during a rain storm, and wouldn't you know that's the one thing that's not insured. And when injured prisoners go in to the infirmary, the prison doctor charges them for extra services!

But it's not just officials that dislike Brubaker. Under the old scheme, the prison had "trustees", prisoners who were given better jobs within the prison as a reward for their good behavior. Or at least, that's the way the system was supposed to work; in reality the jobs went to people doing the system's bidding in exchange for the old warden looking the other way at the trustees' torturing prisoners who get out of line. One particularly nasty trustee is Bullen (David Keith), but even a trustee who has some sympathy for Brubaker like Dickie Coombes (Yaphet Kotto) isn't all that supportive and warns Brubaker his plans are never going to work.

Indeed, the trustees on the inside, along with the prison commission on the outside, which is about as corrupt as any government commission out there, both try to stymy Brubaker at every step of the way, either by hiding information from him or actively trying to stop him from doing things. They'll even resort to force if necessary. And when Brubaker finds out that elderly Abraham has been kept in the prison three years beyond the end of his sentence, that's when things really get bad.

Brubaker is based on a true story, although the name of the real-life warden involved, Thomas Murton, who wrote a book on the experience, was changed for whatever reason. The conditions shown are fairly brutal, although I doubt it's anything like what Murton really saw. The story is never interesting, and while it unsurprisingly takes sides, this is sometimes to the movie's detriment Brubaker seems sometimes too perfectly good and people like Bullen too perfectly bad.

Overall, however, Brubaker is more than worth a watch, and one that for whatever reason seems to have fallen through the cracks over the last 40 years. It looks to be out of print on DVD, although it is on Amazon streaming. That's a shame, because it's a pretty darn good movie.

The latest "in the FXM rotation" selection

It seems about once a week lately, I've been getting around to watching a movie that started showing up in the FXM rotation within the past couple of months. This week, that movie is The Hot Rock. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 3:00 AM and 11:25 AM.

Robert Redford plays John Dortmunder, who at the beginning of the movie is being released from prison. Surprisingly, he doesn't seem to have anywhere to go are anybody to greet him upon being released, as he's just walking along the sidewalk. That is, until a car tries to run him down. That car is driven by Kelp (George Segal), who is Dortmunder's brother-in-law. Kelp is also looking to become one of Dortmunder's partners in crime, Dortmunder being a jewel thief and Kelp owning a store selling locks in New York City, this being the era when crime in the city was really becoming a huge problem.

Indeed, Kelp has a proposal for a heist for his brother-in-law. The Star of Sahara is a big diamond that is of interest to several African countries, currently being exhibited at one of New York's museums. Dr. Amusa (Moses Gunn) is the UN Ambassador from one of those countries, one which thinks that the diamond is rightfully theirs but has seen it be taken from them by various of their members. Amusa would like it back for his country, and is willing to offer up to $100,000 to Dortmunder and his partners, albeit with some conditions.

Dortmunder accepts the proposal, bringing along Kelp; Murch (Ron Leibman) as the getaway driver; and Greenberg (Paul Sand) as the explosives expert. After some staking out of the museum, Dortmunder decides that the best way to get the diamond is going to involve some sort of diversion tactic to get the guards away. Chaos ensues, and they get away with the diamond.

Well, not quite. Three of them get away, but not Greenberg, who has the diamond. He decides to hide it by swallowing it, obviously planning to recover it when he defecates it out of his system. (Obviously, this places a limit on the size of the diamond.) However, there's another problem. Greenberg is in detention long enough that he elminiates it before he's released, and has to hide it in the police precinct.

So the thieves are going to have to come up with a plan to infiltratate the police station, and get that diamond from where it's been hidden. It's a complicated plan involving helicoptering onto the roof, even though none of them can actually pilot a helicopter. But it works, and they get into the precinct. Except that the diamond is no longer there. Greenberg's father (Zero Mostel) is a shyster lawyer, and on one of his visits to Greenberg in detention he was able to get the diamond, which is now in his safety deposit box, where only he can get at it because the folks at the bank know his face and his signature.

The Hot Rock is another of those movies that has a really fun premise, but winds up not quite meeting those expectations. I think part of the reason is the Zero Mostel character, whom I found intensely irritating. Another part of it is because the movie felt even more unrealistic than other heist films. A lot of the noir era heist movies, while they do have their own plot holes, work better, but all of Dortmunder's partners seem too bumbling.

Still, Robert Redford is amiable enough that the movie is certainly not a complete failure or something that should be missed. It works well enough as light entertainment if you don't think too hard about what the characters are doing. The Hot Rock did get a DVD release, but it seems to be out of print.

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.

I keep noticing I'm not a big fan of 70s westerns

I've stated quite a few times in the past that westerns were never my favorite genre, although as I've watched more in the decade that I've been doing this blog I've found quite a few that I really like. I've also come to realize that the "revisionist" (I think I'd prefer to use the term "non-traditional") westerns of the 1970s really aren't my cup of tea. Another movie that helped clarify that for me is Jeremiah Johnson.

Robert Redford plays Johnson, a man who shows up in a small town at the edge of civilization in Colorado of the 1840s, looking for a way to get out of civilization entirely and live a subsistence life in the Rockies, hopefully making extra money from trapping. It's not an easy life, as he's going to learn first when a Flathead Indian comes up on him, and then when he meets veteran trapper Bear Claw (Will Geer). Johnson lives with Bear Claw for a while and realizes just how much there is to learn about this harsh existence.

There's another meeting with a woman who lost her husband to an attack from the Crow Indians, resulting in him taking custody of the kid, and then a meetin with Del Gue (Stefan Gierasch). Del Gue's friendship leads to Jeremiah being saddled with an Indian wife Swan (Delle Bolton), although perhaps the kid Caleb could use a mother. In any case, the three unlikely blended family members try to make a life for themselves.

Then the cavalry comes through. They're looking for a way to get at a group of settlers who need saving. The trip is going to go through sacred Crow burial grounds, which Johnson knows is something you absolutely detour around, but the idiot cavalry insist on saving time by going through. Sure enough, the Crow respond by killing Swan and Caleb. This leads Jeremiah to go on a revenge spree against the Crow.

I said at the beginning that I don't like the term "revisionist western", mostly because I can like a movie that has a different view of history or politics than I do if the story is good enough. The problem that I've found myself having with these 70s westerns that go off in a new direction from your traditional western is that the technical production is done in a way I generally find unappealing. Jeremiah Johnson is very slow. While I don't have a problem with episodic movies, Jeremiah Johnson comes a bit too close to plotless for me. And there's also the 1970s cinematography. Somewhere along the way better zoom lenses came along, and moviemakers in the 1960s and 1970s started zooming not because it served an artistic purpose but because they could. Or at least, it seems like that to me. These zooms always seem jarring to me, and pointless in terms of storytelling.

Still, a lot of people love Jeremiah Johnson, and it is generally technically well made, so this and other movies in the genre are definitely ones you should check out for yourself.

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.