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.

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.

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 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.

The Yakuza

My latest movie viewing off the DVR was the intriguing The Yakuza. It's another of the movies that's available on DVD from the Warner Archive, so I feel comfortable doing a full-length post on it without it airing soon.

Robert Mitchum plays Harry Kilmer, who had served in the US Army during the post-war occupation of Japan, before returning to the US to a modest life as a private detective. One day, he hears from an old army buddy of his, George Tanner (Brian Keith), who had stayed behind in Japan after his stint in the military. Tanner has a daughter who has been kidnapped, and Tanner needs Kilmer's help in finding the girl.

So Harry flies off to Japan, and when he gets to Tokyo, one of the first things he does is to look for Eiko (Keiko Kishi). Harry had fallen in love with Eiko, a widow with a daughter, during the occupation, and even offered to marry her, but she turned him down. Harry helped get her on her feet by getting her a teahouse, and the daughter is now an adult. But there's also a business reason for meeting Eiko. Her brother Tanaka Ken (Ken Takakura; most western sources put Japanese given names first although this movie follows the Japanese tradition of using the family name first, both in dialogue and the credits) is in the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia, and he might be able to help find Tanner's girl.

The reason for this is something known in Japanese culture as "giri", a sort of duty that people feel they need to perform to somebody who has helped them, and in Ken's case that's the support Kilmer gave to Eiko. Ken, it turns out, has retired from the Yakuza, and started a martial arts kendo in Kyoto. But beacuse of that giri, Ken is going to set aside the kendo and help Kilmer in finding Tanner's daughter.

The thing is, Tanner isn't exactly an innocent. He stayed behind in Japan in order to run guns to the Yakuza, guns being highly illegal in Japan. And apparently he reneged on one of the deals, which is a big no-no, so the Yakuza took Tanner's daughter as revenge.

The Yakuza is a thoroughly American movie, which is one of the things I think makes it so intriguing. Directed by Sydney Pollack, you definitely get an outsider's view of Japan, albeit one that really feels like Pollack and everybody (well, all the Americans) in the cast were going out of their way to appreciate Japanese culture (unlike, say Walk Don't Run, which just happens to be set in Japan). And yet, there's a lot in the movie that feels thoroughly like one is just a fly on the wall and a movie written and directed by Japanese would be much deeper.

That's not to say The Yakuza is a bad movie. Mitchum is professional if getting on a bit in years, while Takakura is pretty good too. I did have a big problem with the climactic fight scene, which seemed terribly implausible considering it was two against I don't know how many. All in all, though, I found The Yakuza to be a nice look at something different, even if an Akira Kurosawa could have made something much better.

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.