The Yellow Canary

With the return of Noir Alley at the beginning of September, Eddie Muller presented a movie that wasn't quite noir, but was new to TCM largely because it was a restoration. That movie was The Yellow Canary. I forgot to record anything over the Labor Day weekend, so I had to watch it off of the Watch TCM app, where it's still available until October 5, so you've got a little while longer to watch it.

Pat Boone is the star here, and he made this movie in part because he wanted to broaden his acting chops and play something not as wholesome as before. Here he plays popular jazz-styled musician Andy Paxton, about to promote his new songs at a concert in Los Angeles. He's married to Lissa (Barbara Eden) and they have an infant son, but it's not quite a happy marriage. Andy is expecting his assistant Bake (Steve Harris), who himself has a troubled past, to smuggle a certain woman into the dressing room who is not his wife. As for Lissa, she's about to file for divorce because of Andy's constantly not being home nights and not from bein out on the road touring.

But they still have to be civil, so, before going out to a restaurant after the show, they stop off at home to check up on the kid. Lissa is shocked by what she finds, which is that the nurse has been murdered and the child kidnapped! The kidnapper has left a note referring to Andy as "Canary" and warning him not to call the police about the kidnapping.

Unsurprisingly, Bake, along with Andy's bodyguard Hub (Steve Forrest), who is himself a former police officer, prevail on Andy to call the police, who send in detective Lt. Bonner (Jack Klugman). Bonner is no dummy, and he knows that paying the ransom is a bad idea because it will only encourage other would-be kidnappers to do the deed for the ransom money. But Andy has a hysterical wife, and eventually sets out to liquidate some of his assets so he can get the cash necessary for the ransom. Perhaps the cops will be able to arrest the kidnappers at the pick-up.

And then, things happen that suggest to Andy and Lissa that the kidnapping might be an inside job. Well, not Andy or Lissa since they both had the iron-clad alibi of having been at the show all evening when the kidnapping would have occurred. But apparently Bake stepped out for a bit, long enough in fact to do the deed. (The movie doesn't address how someone would have gotten from the theater, to Beverly Hills, and back before the show ended.) Things get worse for Bake when his past catches up to him and he gets arrested on a forgery charge. Hub, for his part, uses his police past to do some investigating of his own with Andy. But who did the kidnapping, and why? And will the Paxtons get their kid back and reconcile their marriage?

The screenplay to The Yellow Canary was written by Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone fame, and in his outro Eddie Muller suggested that this wasn't Serling's finest 93 minutes. I'd say that's true, since the movie feels formulaic at times. But it's not exactly bad. There's a lot entertaining about it, from the familiar faces to watching Pat Boone try to play less-than-nice. It's more pedestrian than anything else, but The Yellow Canary is still definitely worth a watch.

Several months before Black Sunday

Today's (August 28) star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Brock Peters. This gives me the chance to do a post on a movie that's been sitting on my DVR and I hadn't seen before. That movie, Two-Minute Warning, comes up in the wee hours of the overnight at 2:15 AM, which is technically August 29 on the east coast although technically very late on August 28 if you're in the Pacific time zone and only have the east coast feed.

The movie starts off by sort of giving away something that's going to be the main plot point later in the movie. A man with a rifle and telescopic sight looks out a high window and sees a couple of bicyclists in what looks like a typical Southern California suburb. The man with the rifle then proceeds to shoot one of the cyclists dead. We don't see the shooter, which is a good thing as it adds suspense to the movie.

Cut to the Los Angeles Coliseum. "Championship X", the big football game is going to be held there the coming weekend. We do get Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford, although nothing closer than that to the NFL because they didn't permit the use of any of their properties for Two-Minute Warning the way they would for Black Sunday which was released a few months later. (I don't know the full production schedule for both movies. It's possible the NFL had agreed with pre-production on Black Sunday and didn't want to be involved in two movies with similar themes.) Brock Peters works at the Coliseum in maintenance and security, looking after the Dobermans who are partly responsible for security.

But, before the game, we have to be introduced to the requisite character types, much like any other disaster movie. Among them are a family man, Mike Ramsay (Beau Bridges) and his wife and kid; a husband and wife (David Janssen and Gena Rowlands); a pickpocket (a very elderly Walter Pidgeon a few years after Harry in Your Pocket); and Stu (Jack Klugman), a gambler who's heavily in debt but thinks he can make it back by betting on the big game. Oh, Stu also winds sitting next to a Catholic priest (Mitchell Ryan) at the game because the priest knows one of the quarterbacks.

The big football game has always had security although back in the 1970s it wasn't quite as tight as it is today. Sam McKeever (Martin Balsam) manages the Coliseum, and has the local police precinct run by Capt. Holly (Charlton Heston). Meawhile, since the sniper already killed that cyclist, we've got the SWAT team out looking for the sniper. They're headed up by Sgt. Button (John Cassavetes), and for obvious reasons wind up at the Coliseum too.

That's because the sniper, seen only in long shots until the very end of the movie, has holed up behind the scoreboard at the top of the Coliseum tower where the Olympic flame would have been in 1932 and 1984. Eventually Mike Ramsay looks through his binoculars and spots the sniper, who has also already been spotted by people in the control booth since they've got shots from the Goodyear blimp above. At this point, it's not known if the sniper has a particular target, which isn't entirely unlikely since there was talk of some elected officials showing up; or whether the sniper just wants to kill random people the way he did with the cyclist. And when is the guy going to start shooting?

Two-Minute Warning is a movie which has some decided problems, in large part down to the lack of character development. Nobody gets to be much more than a stock character, and we have no real reason to care about any of the fans. On the other hand, the main idea of the story is a good one, and fairly well executed. The plot device of not giving the sniper any discernable motive, and not showing him until the very end, is an inspired move that I thought heightened the suspense.

Two-Minute Warning is an overlooked and underrated movie in the disaster film genre of the 1970s, but one that works well despite the one-dimensional characters.

Woman in Hiding

I mentioned at the beginning of the month how Ida Lupino was one of the people spotlighted in this year's Summer Under the Stars for whom I had a movie on my DVR that wasn't airing as part of her day. I've finally gotten to the point in my library where that movie is at the top of the list for movies I've watched but haven't blogged about yet: Woman in Hiding.

The movie starts off in a really interesting manner. Lupino's character is driving a car down a windy mountain road as the opening credits play, complete with dramatic music that implies she's racing away from... something. As the credits reach their end, she fails to navigate a curve, and the car crashes through a guardrail into the river down below.

Next up is the police having pulled the car up from the river, with it hanging from a bridge, without a body to show for it. We then hear the voice of Ida Lupino, informing us that it's her body that the police are dredging the river for, the voice of one Deborah Chandler. The camera then shows a man on the bridge with the police, at which point Deborah informs us she's Deborah Chandler Clark; the man on the bridge is Selden Clark IV (Stephen McNally).

As you might guess, the movie then goes into a flashback. Deborah Chandler is the daughter of John Chandler (John Litel), who owns the factory that's the big employer in the North Carolina town where they live. John has hired on Selden Clark IV as the factory's general manager, largely because the Clarks were the big family in town; in fact, the town, Clarksville, is named after one of Selden's ancestors. Selden and Deborah have fallen in love, but Dad really disapproves of the romance, largely because he considers the last couple generations of Clarks to be really terrible people.

And then Dad dies suddenly in an accident at the mill, freeing the way for Selden to marry Deborah, while Deborah becomes the owner of the mill. It would seem a match made in heaven, but Selden is extremely anxious for the match to go through, and Voiceover Deborah says she should have seen things for what they were much earlier considering how Selden made the wedding proposal on the day of her father's funeral. Still, she goes through with the wedding.

It's then that things really get nasty. Selden takes Deborah up to a cabin in the mountains for their honeymoon, and when they get there, waiting for them is one Patricia Monahan (Peggy Dow) of Raleigh. Patricia is equally nasty, only to Selden, but then she has good reason to be nasty. She was -- and may still be -- Selden's other woman, and she has no qualms about letting the married couple know about it. Indeed, she points out that Selden had told her that he was finished with Deborah a year ago, so we know he's lying about that half of the relationship.

Selden responds by kicking Patricia out, and then trying to keep Deborah cooped up in the cabin. Obviously, now that she knows the full truth of the matter -- well she really learns the full truth when she concludes that her father's death was no accident -- she decides she's going to make a break for it. But we're only about a half hour into a 90-minute movie, which means that the flashback doesn't take up the full movie.

As you might guess, Deborah is giving the voiceover because she did not in fact die in the car crash, which would also explain why they can't find the body. Selden is also convinced that Deborah didn't die, and is obsessive about finding her. Deborah heads off to Raleigh to try to find Patricia. At one of the bus stations, a demobbed soldier, Keith Ramsey (Howard Duff), is manning the newsstand. He's quite taken with Deborah, not realizing who she is, but eventually decides to help her. He doesn't understand just how much danger she's in, of course.

When Eddie Muller presented Woman in Hiding in Noir Alley, he commented that it was a movie that Ida Lupino didn't really want to make, implying that she was taking a paycheck to be able to do the stuff she really wanted to do. That's a bit harsh, since Woman in Hiding is an effective enough little movie. In writing this post, I suddenly found myself thinking of Sleeping With the Enemy, which has a fairly similar plot of a wife running away and the obsessive husband going to the ends of the earth to find her, although in that one the husband is even more over the top in the way he treats his wife.

The cast does well enough here, and the movie is certainly reasonably entertaining, even if it isn't the best movie any of the people involved made. It's definitely worth a watch the next time it shows up.

Daddy's Gone A-Hunting

Another one of those movies that I recorded more because the plot synopsis sounded interesting, not having heard about it before I saw it show up on TCM, was the late 1960s thriller Daddy's Gone A-Hunting. Recently, I finally got around to watching it off the DVR.

Tragic British actress Carol White, brought over to Hollywood presumably to be the next big British thing in Hollywood, plays Cathy, a young woman who has just left the UK for a new job in San Francisco. On her first day in town, not long after arriving, she makes the acquaintance of a rather oddball guy, Ken Daly (Scott Hylands). He's a photographer who sees Cathy and is immediately taken with her, and thinks that the best way to make a good first impression on her is by throwing a snowball at her. This makes no sense, but it's a movie, so just go with it. Needless to say, the two hit it off.

They don't just start dating, but they pretty quickly move in together as well as start having sex, because who doesn't want to have hot steamy sex? Cathy, however, learns in fairly short order that Kenneth is more than just an oddball, in fact a rather demanding man who doesn't seem to happy about her doing better than him. That, and his controlling behavior. Unfortunately, Cathy didn't learn quickly enough, because by the time she figures out she doesn't want anything to do with him any more, she's gotten pregnant.

Not only does Cathy not tell Ken about her being pregnant, she does something controversial for the late 1960s -- she gets an abortion. And she lives happily ever after, dumping Ken and eventually finding true love in the form of Jack (Paul Burke), a scion of a family where such scions are groomed for bigger things, like elections to Congress. And after the wedding, the two of them set about raising a family.

But Cathy's having married someone relatively prominent means that it's going to be easier for Ken to find her. That's bad enough. Worse is that Ken really, really hates abortion in general, and especially so considering the fact that his baby was aborted. So he starts stalking Cathy, who knows she's being stalked but has never been able to tell Jack about the relationship with Kenneth and the fact that it resulted in an abortion. It would have been too much of a stigma in the late 1960s, and it would be easy to see how Cathy could believe letting the abortion become public knowledge might scuttle Jack's nascent political career.

This allows Ken to up the ante. Cathy killed his child, so he's going to make her expiate her sin... by forcing her to kill her own child! He's not going to do it since that would be wrong, but he's got some insane scheme to kidnap the baby and then force Cathy to kill it, even if unkowingly....

Daddy's Gone A-Hunting most certainly does have an interesting premise. Unfortunately, I have to say that I think it could have been executed better. As I was watching the movie I found myself thinking of another late 1960s film that goes way too far over the top, Once You Kiss a Stranger, the more lurid remake of Alfred Hitchcock's classic Strangers on a Train. The thing is that in the Hitchcock movie, the meeting between the two main players is a chance one with Farley Granger never expecting to see Robert Walker again. Here, you can't help but think Cathy should have run away the minute Ken hit her with that snowball. Of course, then we wouldn't have a movie.

So watch Daddy's Gone A-Hunting to see in interesting but flawed movie.

There's no Michael Shayne here

I've got a couple of movies that have been on my DVR for a bit coming up in quick succesion, so the first of them is getting a blog posting a bit further out from when it's airing than I would normally do for movies. That movie is the 1980 Brian De Palma film Dressed to Kill, which will be on TCM at 1:45 AM on Nov. 19, which is still Saturday evening out in the Pacific time zone.

Angie Dickinson, pushing 50, plays Kate Miller, a Manhattan wife on her second marriage to what must be a fairly successful man, considering the apartment they live in. Kate lost her first husband in Vietnam and left her a widow with a young son, Peter (Keith Gordon), who is now high school age and a science whiz. But both of them have figured out over the years that Stepdad isn't the World's Greatest Dad. Not that he's a bad person; in fact, we don't see all that much of him beyond him and Mom having sex that is very unsatisfying for her.

In fact, Kate feels so unsatisfied that, like a lot of bored upper-middle-class housewives, she's decided to get herself an analyst, Dr. Robert Elliott (Michael Caine). She pours out her problems to him, and he tries to remain a neutral observer since that's the ethical thing to do, even if it is difficult when she asks him if he's attracted to her.

After leaving her appointment with Dr. Elliott, she heads off to the art museum, where she has experiences that could be straight out of multiple Alfred Hitchcock movies like Vertigo and Topaz. Eventually, she drops one of her gloves, and a strange man picks it up. She finds the man in a taxi outside the museum, and they proceed to have sex in the taxi on the way to his apartment. Unfortunately, Kate discovers that the man has recently been diagnosed with a venereal disease, so she drops him like a hot potato, although she forgets her engagment ring.

This last bit is important because she has to go back to the apartment to retrieve it. On the elevator the second time is a woman in a really bad wig and sunglasses trying to look like the Karen Black character from Family Plot or something. This mysterious woman proceeds to take out a straight razor and stab Kate to death reminiscent of the shower scene in Psycho. Unfortunately, when the elevator doors open, there's a professional escort standing outside the door with the man she's escorting.

That escort is Liz Blake (Nancy Allen), and she's in danger. She stupidly picks up the razor, leaving her fingerprints on it and making her a prime suspect for police detective Marino (Dennis Franz years before NYPD Blue). It's also got Dr. Elliott's prints on it; apparently it's one of his patients who stole the razor from his home office. And Dr. Elliott has a patient who would be a prime suspect, a "Bobbi" who is a man with gender dysphoria and would like gender reassignment surgery except that Dr. Elliott won't sign off on it.

Liz is in trouble as Bobbi knows she's a witness. Thankfully, Peter wants to know who killed his mother and, being that science whiz, is more than ready to start using 1980-vintage surveillance technology to try to find the killer. And Det. Marino would love to get his hands on Dr. Elliott's appointment book to find out more about Bobbi.

Dressed to Kill was apparently a controversial movie even back on its release in 1980, because of the way it portrayed trans people. The portrayal probably wasn't politically correct then, and certainly isn't correct now that they've hijacked the LGB coalition and are only allowed to be portrayed as more perfect than anybody else. Sorry, but the gays I know hate how the Ts are in their view arrogating accpetance of gays and lesbians to force everybody to celebrate the trans above everybody else. That, and how the self-styled "leaders" of the LGBT... coalition kowtow to this and try to force the coalition into an extremely narrow political box. Woe betide all those gays who just want to be left alone.

Never mind the political rant; Dressed to Kill also has the problem that director Brian De Palma seems as interested in his homage to Hitchcock and the stylistic decisions this forces him to make as he does in having a good plot. The movie is either much too slow at times (the whole museum scene) or giving us unneccessary stuff such as an entire coda at the end. I think I get what De Palma was trying to go for; he just doesn't really succeed at what he was trying to do.

Still, you should probably watch Dressed to Kill once just because of the homage and how controversial it was.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane

Another movie that's been sitting on my DVR for a little while and that I'd always wanted to see is The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. I think it was run in October as part of the whole Halloween thing, and while the movie opens up on Halloween, it isn't really a horror movie at all, but more of a quiet thriller.

Jodie Foster, who was 13 at the time she made this movie, plays Rynn Jacobs, a 13-year-old girl living in a rented house in a small seaside town in Maine with her father, who coincidentally seems to be absent all the time. It doesn't take much to figure out that Dad is actually dead, and that Rynn is remarkably independent and mature for her age, and a shockingly good liar, even though pretty much everybody around her seems to suspect that something isn't right. After all, she doesn't go to school, and as mentioned, her father is never around.

Among the people who know something is up and want to talk to Dad is Cora Hallett (Alexis Smith), who owns the house and has rented it out to the Jacobses. Now, she rented it out to them before Dad died, as Dad was apparently able to pay three years' rent up front, as well as leaving Rynn a substantial sum of money that she has in the form of travelers' checks in a safe deposit box in the bank. But Cora unsurprisingly still wants to know what Rynn is up to all day.

Also showing up, and curious about Rynn, is Frank Hallet (Martin Sheen). He's Cora's son, and he has a back story that is hinted at and slowly revealed over the course of the movie, although it's pretty clear from the outset that Frank is a fairly malevolent figure. And just wait and see what he does over the course of the movie! But we're getting ahead of ourselves, and this is something I don't want to give away.

On one of Cora's visits to the house, she's looking for some drinking glasses, and decides to look in the basement, which is accessed via a trap door. On her way back up the stairs, Rynn lets the door hit Cora on the head, killing her! Rynn knows she's in danger of being found out, as in Our Mother's House about a decade earlier, and doesn't want to face the consequences of this until she's an adult at least. But now with Cora dead, Rynn has a whole new set of problems.

Fortunately, she meets an obliging young man who's willing to help. Not Frank, of course, but Mario (Scott Jacoby), who came down with polio as an infant before being able to get the then-new vaccine, and walks with a stick and severe limp as a result. Mario makes some money as a magician doing shows, but as a fellow outcast like Rynn, he feels simpatico with Rynn, which is why he's willing to help her. Of course, he's also willing to get her into bed with him even though she's only 13, in one of the film's more controversial scenes. (Jodie's adult sister was used as a body double.)

Frank misses his mother, which is why he comes back to the house. And he must have found his mother's house keys, since he's able to get in and discover enough evidence to know that there's a pretty horrible truth being hidden. It's a game of cat and mouse between Frank and Rynn.

For a film with a low budget, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane is quite a good one. Jodie Foster's character may be a bit grating at times to some people (me included) thanks to all the lies she has to tell, but that's certainly not her fault. And, in this case, the lies are really more necessary than in some films. This is also not a mystery but a suspense, so figuring out pretty quickly tht Rynn doesn't have any parents around and won't isn't an issue -- think of Alfred Hitchcock's dictum about suspense. The producers also did a very good job creating a small town atmosphere by finding a small town in Quebec to substitute for the village in Maine. (Well, except for some of the seaside shots.)

All in all, if you haven't seen The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, it's definitely one you should make it a point to see.

Play Misty for Me

Another of the box sets I've got is a seven-film set of Clint Eastwood movies that's apparently two sets in one: one of westerns, and the other of dramas. I've blogged about most of the films in this set, but hadn't done Play Misty for Me before, so I recently watched it to do a review here.

Clint Eastwood plays Dave Garver, a disk jockey at a small station in Carmel, CA, who has a nightly show taking requests from listeners and who apparently can afford a nice place on the Monterey peninsula thanks to this job. Well, actually, he does other work as a promoter, getting involved with the Monterey Jazz Festival and trying to get a gig financed by an older woman up in San Francisco.

Pretty much every night, Dave gets a call from some woman who wants him to play the old jazz standard "Misty", hence the title of the movie. One night after Dave's show, he goes to a bar where he knows the bartender well, and who shows up but that woman who keeps requesting "Misty", a woman named Evelyn Draper (Jessica Walter). The two decide to go back to Dave's place and have a night of hot, steamy sex.

Little does Dave know that Evelyn is on the crazy side of the hot/crazy matrix, as she eventually starts doing things that anybody who's seen a movie like Fatal Attraction would recognize as giant screaming warning sirens. Unfortunately for Dave, it was still a good 15 years before Fatal Attraction, and crazy female stalkers must not have been quite the trope, so Dave doesn't get what's going on. (And to be fair, he has no idea Evelyn "borrows" his house key to make a duplicate.) The behavior gets worse and worse until Evelyn decides to slash her wrists in response to Dave's attempt to dump her.

Evelyn gets sent off to a mental hospital, and while she's in the hospital, Dave runs into a former girlfriend, Tobie Williams (Donna Mills). The two pick up their relationship where they left off, which is fine until Evelyn gets out of the mental hospital. It's obvious there's going to be hell to pay when Evelyn finds out that Dave is now involved with another woman. Hell, Evelyn even thinks Dave's maid is a threat to her and stabs the poor maid.

Dave is understandably worried for Tobie, not knowing just how much danger she's in. Tobie, you see, inherited her parents' house, and this being the Monterey peninsual, she can't afford the sort of house that Dave somehow can. Tobie has to take in roommates to help cover the expenses, and little does she know that her new roommate "Annabel" is actually Evelyn. Will Dave figure things out in time?

Play Misty for Me was Clint Eastwood's first movie as a director, and he already shows that he's a capable director, having learned how to do things by paying attention from all the movies he was on earlier in his career. The story is good, and original for its time, although it might seem a bit slow and dated with the intervening 50 years having turned up the heat on the genre. Walter in particular is enjoyable as crazy Evelyn.

While I said the movie is a bit slow, it might not just be because the stalker movie was a relatively new thing. In fact, there are a couple of sequences which pad out the running time and don't quite fit in with the rest of the movie. One is the sex scene played out over the Robert Flack song "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face". I knew that the song had become a huge hit thanks to its use in the movie, but I didn't realize how it got used -- and misused, since the scene doesn't really fit in.

The other sequence is one that would have been great for its own movie. Eastwood was apparently able to get footage of the previous year's Monterey Jazz Festival, and inserts that into the movie with some cutting away to Dave as a music promoter. The jazz sequences would probably be great on their own as part of a documentary like Monterey Pop or Woodstock. Here, however, they don't fit in either.

On the whole, however, Play Misty for Me is a fairly good movie, and one that definitely shows Eastwood's promise. I'm glad it made its way to a box set.

Misery

Another of the more recent movies that I had the chance to record thanks to it showing up in HBO/Cinemax free preview at the end of last month is Misery. I suppose you could say it's not all that recent since it's over 30 years old, and I even saw it when I was in college back in the early 90s. But I recorded it since I saw that it was going to be on multiple times and hadn't blogged about it before. The next airing is tomorrow, Oct. 3, at 6:02 PM on Action Max, with more airings coming up during the week.

James Caan plays Paul Sheldon, author of a popular series of romance novels featuring a character named Misery. He's just finished his newest book, although it's something he wanted to write and not part of the Misery series. Sheldon is one of those superstitious writers who does everything in a particular way. For him, this means going from New York to a secluded mountain resort in Colorado to write; after finishing, he has one cigarette and a glass of Dom Perignon. Then he sets off down the mountain to get back to civilization.

Unfortunately, as he starts off on his journey this time, a blizzard comes in. Driving in the snow can be tough enough, but trying to do it on a twisty mountain road in a 25-year-old car that doesn't have the latest and greatest safety equipment is much more nerve-wracking. As you can probably guess, Sheldon's car goes off the road and into a deep ravine. This being a snowy mountain road, there's a good chance that he won't be found until the spring, if the animals don't get to him first.

However, there is somebody not far down the road, one Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), who is even a nurse and has a stash of medical equipment at her house since she lives in the middle of nowhere outside of town. On top of that, she recognizes Paul, since she claims to be his #1 fan, although I'm sure a bunch of people would make the same claim. But she makes certain the local general store owner saves the first copy of the newest Misery book for her.

So while Paul is convalescing, having broken both his legs, Annie reads the latest Misery book that has just come out. What she doesn't realize until she gets to the end is that it's going to be the last book in the series, since Paul has decided to kill Misery off, wanting to write the sort of books he wants instead of what his readers think he should write. Big mistake.

Annie is absolutely pissed that Paul killed off Misery. Worse, she's deranged, having been accused in any number of wrongful deaths at various hospitals -- death seems to follow her wherever she goes, and she's got a scrapbook of all the newspaper stories about it. So Annie decides that she's going to destroy Paul's latest manuscript, which she knows is the only copy -- there's that superstition again -- and force Paul to write a new Misery novel in which Misery absolutely lives. Further, she's going to hold Paul hostage until he does it, since nobody is going to find him until the spring what with the car under all that snow.

Or maybe not so much. The local sheriff covers the are in a helicopter, and the eventually do find Paul's 1965 Mustang, only without him in it for obvious reasons. The sheriff is also smart enough to figure out that the door has been pried open from the outside, which means somebody else must have shown up to get Paul rather than Paul dying out in the elements. The sheriff, understandably, doesn't yet know who might be responsible for all of this.

Paul, meanwhile, doesn't want to be subjected to torture, and wants to figure out a way to get out of his predicament. Part of this involves buying time by writing that Misery book that Annie wants him to write. But at some point he has to finish the book. And the sheriff is bount to put two and two together to figure out Annie's involvement in the case.

As I said at the beginning, I had seen Misery many years ago, but I don't think I'd seen it recently, certainly not in the time that I've been doing the blog. I was surprised at how well I remembered the movie compared to some other movies. But that's because of how good a movie Misery is. There's some definite foreshadowing that's a bit more obvious the second time you watch the movie, but the suspense works, while Bates is excellent as Annie Wilkes. This time around, however, I found myself wondering about the realism of the writing process, as though a writer can just write a novel straight through, without a whole bunch of outlining first and editing along the way.

But that's just a minor quibble. If you want an entertaining suspense movie, Misery is certainly worth the watch.