The original Bugsy

A couple of months back, TCM ran the biopic Bugsy, about gangster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel and his ultimate desire to build a new kind of gambling mecca in the desert of Las Vegas. It's a movie that first came out when I was in college, so I was too busy doing other things to see much in the way of new movies, with the result that I'd never seen it in the 30-plus years since. So with that in mind, I recorded it in order that I'd finally be able to watch it.

Warren Beatty plays Bugsy Siegel, part of the New York Jewish Mafia who has the movie opens up is presented as someone apparently trying to overcome his class upbringing, at least as evidenced by his practicing his diction. (That, and his hatred of the "Bugsy" nickname.) He's sent out to Los Angeles to deal with a gangster who stands accused of skimming money from the syndicate. There, Bugsy is met by his old friend George Raft (Joe Mantegna), who of course had known the old New York mobsters before decamping to Hollywood to become an actor himself. Siegel gets the idea that Hollywood might be a bigger racket than everything he'd been doing in New York, and likes the idea of staying out west, buying a house from opera star with Hollywood pretensions Lawrence Tibbett.

George Raft is busy making the movie Manpower, and it's on the set of that movie that Siegel meets a would-be actress who also had ties to the Mob, Virginia Hill (Annette Bening). Siegel is taken with her beauty, and the two start a torrid affair. Meanwhile, business hits some snags for Siegel when Mickey Cohen (Harvey Keitel) robs the outfit. Siegel realizes, however, that Cohen is smart, and gets Cohen to go in with him.

One day, Siegel goes off on business, that takes him through the sleepy desert city of Las Vegas. Gambling was already legal in Nevada, but there was mostly small-time gambling in Vegas at the time. However, seeing the possibilities of legal gambling, and the possibility of doing something more respectable, Siegel gets the idea of building a resort out in the desert that, like Palm Springs, would be a place for people to get away from it all with an almost always sunny climate. Only, this place would have legal gambling in addition to resort stuff.

That resort would eventually become the Flamingo, and at the time Siegel conceived it, he planned on spending a million bucks building it, quite a sum of money just as World War II was ending. But thanks to various difficulties and Siegel's consistent desire to make the Flamingo the best resort around, the project suffers from severe cost overruns. The rest of the mafia bosses get together, believing that Siegel has embezzled a bunch of money from them in order to fund the construction of the Flamingo.

The story of Bugsy as presented is done fairly well, with strong performances from Beatty and Bening. However, since a good portion of the story has Siegel out in Hollywood and dealing with real Hollywood figures, all of us who are fans of old movies are going to spot a bunch of continuity errors. This is almost always the case in Hollywood biopics, since they need to compress the action to fit within a reasonable running time, but when the subject of the biography is tangent to something you know a bit more about (in this case classic film), the errors can be a bit more jarring.

Still, that doesn't take enough away from the movie to make it enjoyable. And for "regular" people who don't know so much about old Hollywood, some of the errors should be less notable (although since a good portion of the action is during World War II, that's another area where errors can be jarring). If you haven't seen it before, Bugsy is definitely worth a watch.

Southern Gothic all'Italiano, part 1

A bit by chance, I've happened to watch pairs of movies recently that have something in common with each other: two with Cleavon Little in the cast; two with Lauren Hutton; and a pair of sports movies come to mind. And then I happened to watch a pair of movies based on works by Tennessee Williams in which Italians play a key part, not realizing until I started watching the second that Tennessee Williams was responsible for both. The first one I watched was The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, although it's the later of the two movies. In the near future, depending on the order in which I decide to put up the blog posts on the various movies I've watched recently, you'll get the other movie, The Rose Tattoo.

Mrs. Karen Stone is played by Vivien Leigh. She's a stage actress who does Shakespearean stuff, but she's getting up there in years and still seems to insist on playing the roles written for younger women. The public and the critics are noticing it, so Karen decides a break would be in order. Besides, she's got a wealthy industrialist husband who has health issues, and some time off from his equally stressful job would be just the thing for the two of them. With that in mind, they decide to go to Rome for a break, since it's such a romantic city.

Unfortunately for the two of them, Mr. Stone suffers a heart attack mid-flight, and even if they had been over land and been able to divert, it wouldn't have been any health as the heart attack kills him almost instantly. Mrs. Stone is now a widow, but one who's inherited a substantial sum of money from her husband, meaning that she can take a break from going back to work instead of having to flog Pepsi like Joan Crawford. Mrs. Stone takes an apartment overlooking the Spanish Steps, which are apparently considered romantic by tourists and ex-pats. We can also see that there's some shady young man at the bottom of the steps who keeps looking up at Mrs. Stone's apartment.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of other younger men out there who are perfectly willing to debase themselves for an older lady's fortune much the way that sugar babies do with older men. Paolo di Leo (Warren Beatty) is one of those men, and he works for the Contessa (Lotte Lenya), who is basically a pimp although they don't use such language thanks to the presence of the Production Code. If anything, it's presented as being more like Gigi only with the sex of the two protagonists switched. The Contessa arranges for Paolo and Mrs. Stone to meet.

Mrs. Stone is happy to have companionship at first, although the relationship slowly turns into love, at least from her perspective. For Paolo it's just a job, and when he meets Barbara (Jill St. John), an American actress closer to his age, he starts pursuing her. The doesn't happen until about the final quarter of the movie, however, after a long, slow build-up between Stone and Paolo.

And when I say long and slow, it really is long and slow. That's one of the two big weaknesses of the film, the other being Warren Beatty, who isn't Italian at all. On the more surprising front, and for me a bit of a plus, is that the characters aren't anywhere near as obnoxiously shouty and over the top as they are in some of Tennessee Williams' other works that are set in the southern US.

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is definitely the sort of movie where I can see why it would appeal to other people more than it did to me, so it's another one where I would strongly suggest watching for yourself and making your own conclusions.

Shampoo

Several months ago, TCM had a spotlight on California in the movies. One of the movies I actually hadn't seen before was Shampoo, so I recorded it. I recently noticed that it's got a couple airings coming up on various of the Showtime channels, including tomorrow morning at 10:10 AM on Showtime Showcase.

Warren Beatty plays George Roundy, who at the opening of the movie is sleeping with Felicia Karpf (Lee Grant), on the night before the 1968 presidential election. But that romantic tryst is broken up with George gets a call from another woman, Jill Haynes (Goldie Hawn). Jill is technically George's girlfriend, although as we can see he's not above sleeping with other women because, well, it's just so pleasurable to sleep with a woman. Jill has some sort of nervous issue, and needs George to come over and see her because, well, reasons.

George knows both of these women, as well as a third, Jackie (Julie Christie), because of his job. He's a hairstylist at a high-end salon in Beverly Hills, and all the women rave about what a tremendous job George does on their hair. So much so, in fact, that he's often asked to go out to their houses to do the hairstyling. (How George ever finds time to work considering all the running around he's doing is a good question.) And because he seems to be the one they all want, George has decided that he'd like to go out on his own and start his own salon.

Of course, to do this, he's going to need some money. Even though he believes he's got a great business plan, and possibly he does although I wouldn't know how to judge a business plan for a hair salon, the banks aren't so sure, and probably for the same reasons as me. They want more financial and business information from George, which really ticks him off. However, while George is working at the salon, it's revealed that Felicia's husband Lester (Jack Warden) is rich, and invests in new businesses, or venture capital before they called it that. Perhaps Lester could fund seed money.

If George's life seems complicated from those few paragraphs, it's about to get a lot more complicated. Jill is an aspiring actress, and she's gotten a call from a producer about a part that would require her travelling to Egypt. Jill would like some commitment from George one way or another and this could lead to a break-up of their relationship. And then, George gets a call to do a hairstyling at Jackie's house. While he's doing it, in the bathroom, who should show up but... Lester? Jackie had been George's serious boyfriend before Jill came along, and George still things about trying to rekindle things. But Jackie has moved on and is now seeing Lester, despite being good friends with Felicia. Needless to say, neither of the Karpfs realize yet that the other is stepping out on them.

I mentioned at the beginning the the film opens on the night before election day, and George gets invited to an election party by Lester, who wants him to bring Jackie because nobody would have a problem with Jackie and George being an apparent item. (Lester, for what it's worth, things that George, being a male hairstylist and not a barber, must be gay.) Jill also shows up with another man. Eventually all the main characters leave that party for a house party that seems more like the swinging 60s, where some of the secrets are found out.

Shampoo is a complicated little movie, and that's probably going to make it hard for people to like. It also has some uncomfortable moments, such as the Karpfs' teenaged daughter (Carrie Fisher at the beginning of her career) propositioning George. It's also a movie that for a good two-thirds of it feels like it's not really going anywhere. Then there's the genre issue; most synopses claim it's a comedy, or maybe a satire or farce. For me, it was really more of a drama. On the bright side, however, the performances are uniformly quite good, and some people will probably enjoy seeing the Los Angeles area as it was back in the day.

Shampoo may not be for everybody, but it's certainly an interesting watch.

Mister Buddwing is now a stand-up comic

Last week's theme for the Thursday Movie Picks blogathon was Movies that Confused You. Unfortunately, I only watched Mickey One after doing that entry, or else I could have used it in the blogathon.

Warren Beatty plays Mickey, a stand-up comedian in Detroit who apparently likes to gamble and entertain the ladies when he's not up on stage. He's accrued some gambling debts, and somehow the Mob has gotten a hold of those debts and wants him to pay up now. But how much, and how the Mob got those debts is a mystery to the comic and, frankly, to the viewer as well.

So our comic decides that, since he can't pay those debts, he's going to go running off to Chicago to try to get away from the Mob. Fat lot of good that's going to do him. A lot of the better nightclubs have Mob ties, but which branch of the Mob is it? Getting in with the wrong branch could cause problems for Mickey.

With the help of a manager who looks like he should have died 20 years ago, Mickey gets gigs at some lesser clubs, and this eventually brings him to the attention of Castle (Hurd Hatfield), who manages a club called Xanadu, which has nothing to do with roller disco. The agent may be able to get Mickey a gig there, which may help Mickey at least figure out how much he owes and to whom. But Mickey worries that he's not seeing the right people.

Along the way, Mickey winds up with a girlfriend in Jenny (Alexandra Stewart). But he doesn't want to get too close to her because he doesn't want her to get hurt. And who knows, but she could be a lure to get him killed by the Mob. Or something like that.

I found Mickey One maddeningly hard to understand, and as I was watching, I couldn't help but think of another movie that's tough to decipher, Mister Buddwing. In that movie, James Garner plays a man who wakes up in a city park one day with a bad case of amnesia. I'm guessing that Warren Beatty's Mickey knows who he is, but the way everything is presented made me wonder whether a bunch of the scenes, such as Mickey in the auto junkyard, were supposed to be some sort of dream or allegory and not real. At least, that's the interpretation I gave it to try to make the movie less incomprehensible.

So I was frankly glad to get finished with Mickey One so that I could delete it from the DVR and make room for something else.

Grass Around the Splendor

Apparently, there's a new documentary on Natalie Wood coming out this week, so TCM is running a night of Wood's movies tonight, starting at 8:00 PM with Splendor in the Grass.

Wood plays Wilma Dean Loomis, nicknamed "Deanie". She's a high school senior in Kansas in the fall of 1928, the child of middle-class parents. The parents have been making money in the stock market, however, like a lot of people in the Roaring 20s, beacuse of the oil boom in the region. That oil boom is responsible for making the Stamper family wealthy too. Son Bud (Warren Beatty) is Deanie's boyfriend.

The two, being teenagers with raging hormones, have thoughts about how far to take the relationship, although they really don't take it all that far, in no small part because both of them have parents really pressuring them into staying on the straight and narrow: Deanie's Mom (Audrey Christie) and Bud's dad Ace (Pat Hingle). In Bud's case, there's also the example of his older sister Ginny (Barbara Loden), who went off to "art school" in Chicago and wound up with an annulled marriage because Dad thought the husband only wanted her money.

So there's all sorts of pressure on both Bud and Deanie, and it winds up affecting both of them badly. Bud's perfectly willing to marry Deanie, and would like to run what was the old family farm before oil made the Stampers rich, but Dad's having none of that, wanting Bud to go to Yale. Bud also seems to be the big man on campus, popular with the ladies and good at all the sports. Having to be the good one in the family comes back to haunt him after Ginny goes off at a party, getting Bud in a fight and then some time afterwards Bud collapses during a basketball game. I thought the two were related in the Bud was supposed to have a concussion or something similar, but here he's diagnosed as having a bad case of pneumonia.

As for Deanie, Bud eventually breaks up with her because he's afraid that if he does anything with her she'll end up like Ginny. Deanie, however, sees Ginny and comes up with the wacky idea that being a good girl isn't going to get her anywhere, so she responds by having a nervous breakdown and trying to commit suicide. Her parents sell off their oil stock which they had been saving in hopes of sending Deanie to college, instead sending her to a sanatorium.

It turns out to be a good thing, of course, since we all know the stock market is going to crash in October, right when Bud is a bored freshman at Yale who clearly has no desire to be there and who is thankfully going to get out, although in a bad way, when the crash bankrupts his father. But can Bud and Deanie live happily ever after?

Splendor in the Grass is another movie that, although it has a lot of good ideas, is one that I found some pretty big problems with. The movie meanders, going through a lot of nowhere before ending rather abruptly. Natalie Wood's breakdown scene is also one that I found myself laughing at as opposed to being the serious thing it's supposed to be. The New Year's party scene where Ginny gets drunk and Bud gets punched also goes on rather longer than it should have.

But there's also enough in Splendor in the Grass that makes it worth a watch, from the production design and cinematography as well as some of the supporting performances. It's one that I'm glad to have seen, although I don't think I'll be revisiting it any time soon.

Splendor in the Grass has received multiple DVD releases, although it looks like some of them may be out of print, which is always surprising when you consider one of them is from the Warner Archive.

Dick Tracy (1990)

Another of the movies that I recorded during one of the free preview weekends was the 1990 version of Dick Tracy. I finally got around to watching it recently, so today you get a blog post on it.

Based on the vintage comic strip by Chester Gould, the movie is set in a 1930s metropolis beset by gangland crime which is fought by upright police detective Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty). Tracy's nemesis Big Boy (Al Pacino) is trying to consolidate all the underworld crime under his leadership, and when some other gang bosses don't go for it, he has them rubbed out, witnessed Some Like it Hot-style by The Kid (Charles Korsmo). The Kid is a petty criminal, engaging in pickpocketing to surive and appease an abusive father figure. Dick catches the Kid who, not having real parents, is set to go to the orphanage. Dick and his long-suffering girlfriend, Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly), are going to serve as his foster parents until the Kid can be sent to the orphanage.

Dick is still trying to bring down Big Boy, who for his part is still trying to bring the other gang bosses under his wing, doing so from his headquarters at the Club Ritz where Breathless Mahoney (Madonna) serves as the nightclub's singer and main attraction. She's a witness to some of Big Boy's crimes, but would seemingly rather seduce Dick despite his having a girlfriend than spill the beans on Big Boy. Big Boy tries to bribe Dick and have him offed when Dick refuses the bribe, but the Kid saves Dick.

Dick responds by a feint raid on the Club Ritz which is really an excuse to plant a bug in the club to stop Big Boy's reign of crime. It works for a while, but Big Boy eventually finds the bug, and a mysterious criminal, The Blank, kidnaps both Tess and Dick in a further attempt to bring Dick to heel. It's all part of a much more audacious scheme....

Dick Tracy is probably best known for its production design, and that's for good reason. Warren Beatty, who also served as the movie's producer, decided that he wanted a movie that would recreate the look of Chester Gould's comic strip. The strip, being released on newsprint, had to rely on broad drawings and bold primary colors, with the latter being eye-popping in the movie that results. It's extremely distinctive, but works quite well.

But while it's the color scheme that most people will remember, the rest of the movie is pretty darn good too. The plot is fairly well done; the make-up is good for having to do the difficult job of going over the top for the villains with names like Pruneface and Flattop; and the acting is OK. Among the names I haven't mentioned yet are Dustin Hoffman as Mumbles, the mumbling stool pigeon; Dick Van Dyke as the D.A.; or Charles Durning as the chief of police. One big plus is the original songs by Stephen Sondheim which are an excellent throwback to the pre-war era, especially "Sooner or Later" which was sung by Madonna and won an Oscar. There is a fair amount of violence, but as befits a movie based on a comic strip, it's mostly handled in a cartoonish manner.

Dick Tracy is a movie I can definitely recommend, and it's available on DVD and Blu-ray should you wish to watch for yourself.

Fall Up

Another movie that I watched off of my DVR recently was All Fall Down, which is yet another movie available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Brandon De Wilde plays Clinton Willart, a young man who's gone from his family home in Cleveland down to Key West, FL to see his beloved brother Berry-Berry (Warren Beatty, and yes, that's the character's bizarre name) with $200 that Berry-Berry wants in order to get going in the shrimp fishing industry. However, when Clinton gets to the hotel where his brother is supposedly staying, he's told that Berry-Berry is in jail! Apparently, Berry-Berry tried to beat the crap out of a hooker. That $200 would do fine for "bail", however, and oh, please get the hell out of Key West.

Clinton wants his brother to go back to Cleveland with him, but the two meet women while hitchhiking, and one of the women offers Berry-Berry a "job" of some sort on her yacht, so Berry-Berry departs and Clinton heads back to Cleveland. When he gets back, we find that his parents (Karl Malden and Angela Lansbury) came straight out of a Tennessee Williams play, except that All Fall Down is based on a novel by some guy whose name I didn't recognize at first (James Leo Herlihy, who also wrote the book behind Midnight Cowboy) and the screenplay was adapted by William Inge of Picnic fame. Clinton is the closest to sane that the family has, although even he keeps copious notebooks of other people's conversations.

Into this wacky family comes the daughter of a family friend, Echo (Eva Marie Saint). She's a working girl who is also into being a bit of a car mechanic to work on her own car, and for the first time in his live Clinton finds a woman he thinks he can love, even though she's much older than he is. Echo really likes Clinton, although how much of it is friendship and how much love is an open question.

Berry-Berry gets off that yacht at some point, as he's working as a service station attendant at the sort of service station the guy from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg dreamt of opening, thankfully minus the singing since I don't think anybody wants to hear him sing. He hits on a woman going north, eventually becoming her driver although she's stopping in Lousiville. He gets in a fight with her in a bar on Christmas Eve and winds up back in jail.

Dad wires Berry-Berry the money to get out of jail, and eventually Berry-Berry shows up in Cleveland. He meets Echo, and immediately starts putting the moves on her, despite the fact that Clinton feels way too much love for Echo. Berry-Berry being a jerk, however, he causes a whole bunch of problems leading to the film's denouement.

For fairly obvious reasons, while watching All Fall Down I couldn't help but think of Brandon De Wilde a year later in Hud. De Wilde is quite good here, but he's the only one of the four Willarts who is any good. I don't know if the problem is with the script, or with the actors playing things to be way overheated (hence my mention of Tennessee Williams earlier). Malden, Lansbury, and Beatty are all irritating, so I think I'd have to lay the fault for that at the hands of the director, the normally talented John Frankenheimer.

One other thing I didn't like was that the first act of the movie set down in Florida was nicely evoactive with all the location shooting. But when they got back to Cleveland, the house was so obviously on the MGM backlot that it was jarring. Maybe they blew the budget on the location shooting, but whatever they did, the contrast is not to the movie's benefit.

I've read any number of reviews that praise the acting in All Fall Down, however, so this is another one where perhaps you may want to watch for yourself in order to judge it.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller

I finally got around to watching McCabe and Mrs. Miller in its entirety off my DVR. The movie is available on DVD and Blu-ray, having been put out by the Criterion Collection about a year ago.

The movie starts off with John McCabe (Warren Beatty) showing up in a dark mining town in Washington state. McCabe is a professional gambler and a bit of a blowhard. There are rumors that he's a gunslinger who killed a man, and he's not about to let them die. He's got plans to set up shop in this town, big plans. He wants to build a competing saloon, and even bring in prostitutes for a bordello. This even though he really doesn't know the first thing about it, picking up a couple of cheap hookers.

He's in luck, though, as Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie) shows up. She's run a bordello before, and she also knows all the practical things about women that a man just wouldn't know. She comes up with the idea that she'll run the place for McCabe, and the two will split the revenues. McCabe isn't necessarily happy about it, but he eventually accepts. It doesn't help that Mrs. Miller his hot, in his mind.

The business becomes successful, succesful enough to attract interest from outside. A big mining company sends in two men to offer a buyout to McCabe, one that would be fairly lucrative. But partly thanks to McCabe's hubris, and partly because he seems happy with his current position in life, he turns the big company down. They decide that if they can't buy McCabe out, they'll force him out.

Most of the reviews of McCabe and Mrs. Miller that I've read are much more positive than I would be. I found the movie to be extremely slow paced, without much seeming to happen for long stretches. There's also the 70s cinematography with its pointless zooms that I've never appreciated. And to be honest, I didn't particularly care for either of the main characters.

Still, you should probably judge for yourself. In that regard, it's a bit of a shame that the Criterion Collection discs are always pricier than run of the mill disks.

Kaleidoscope

I apologize for only giving a couple of hours warning about the upcoming airing of Kaleidoscope, which you can catch at noon on TCM. However, it does happen to be available from the Warner Archive Collection.

Warren Beatty plays Barney Lincoln, who at the start of the movie is heading toward an industrial site somehwere in Europe. He gets up on the roof, and breaks in! He goes to the safe, so presumably he's going for the case or some other valuables like jewels. But he just takes out a couple of printing plates, alters them, and leaves. To do something that crazy, somebody has to have a pretty good reason.

And Barney certainly does have a good reason. Those factory was at the company that makes the playing cards for all the great casinos of Europe, and Barney's alterations of the printing plates subtly marked the backs of the cards so that Barney could see what everybody else was holding. This obviously would enable him to defeat the people he was gambling against, and win large sums of money.

Such winnings, unsurprisingly, brought him to public attention, especially from the various authorities, who aren't so stupid that they can't figure out something hinky is going on. Eventually, Inspector McGinnis from Scotland Yard (Clive Revill) pieces everything together and brings Barney in. The bad guys always go down, don't they? Except, that's not what Kaleidoscope is about. McGinnis understands that if the arrest of Barney were made public, along with his scheme to defraud the casinos, it would cause a great loss of confidence that would result in bigger problems than not prosecuting Barney would.

With that in mind, McGinnis gives Barney a different sort of punishment. Serve the authorities by helping bring down Dominion (Eric Porter). Dominion is a smuggler who has made a bundle of money doing that, and has moved into more "legitimate" businesses as well to keep himselve ever so slightly above the law. So McGinnis figures that the way to go after Dominion is financial. Dominion is known for his love of gambling, so what better than to put him up against Barney in a high-stakes poker game? Barney can win Dominion's money since Barney knows the cards are marked, and that money can go to pay back the casinos he defrauded. Of course, there are a couple of problems. One is that along the way, Barney falls for McGinnis' daughter Angel (Susannah York). Another is that at a key point in the poker game, the cards are changed out -- and by this time, the factory figured out what was going on and the new cards are unmarked!

Kaleidoscope is one of those movies that fits in with all the other heist and caper movies of the 1960s. It's stylish to look at, even though there might be even less here than in most of the other films in the genre. But it does succeed in entertaining the viewer, and in that is more than worth a viewing.