The Panic in Needle Park

When James Arness died over the weekend, I mentioned that TCM had already scheduled Them! for tonight at 8:00 PM. I've already blogged about it before, so the movie I'd recommend for tonight is The Panic in Needle Park, also at 8:00 PM over on the Fox Movie Channel.

Kitty Winn plays Helen, a girl from the Midwest who's new to the New York City of the early 1970s. She meets Bobby (Al Pacino), who's a bit of a crook, to put it mildly, stealing a TV off the back of a truck. It turns out he's got a much bigger problem than that: he's a heroin addict, and the reason he's stealing is so that he can support his habit. Helen falls in love with Bobby, who introduces her to his true love: as we'll see, each of them seems to care about getting that next hit more than anything else. Predictably enough for anybody who's seen The Lost Weekend or The Man With the Golden Arm, heroin does nothing good for Kitty, and her life begins to take the same turns as Bobby's.

In some ways, The Panic in Needle Park trawls through much of the same waters as earlier addiction movies like the two I mentioned above or The Days of Wine and Roses. And yet, there's something about The Panic in Needle Park that's even rawer than any of the others. Perhaps it's the location shooting of New York as it was back in 1971. Sure, The Lost Weekend did some location shooting, but New York by 1971 looked much less vital than it had a quarter century earlier: remember that this was just a few years away from President Ford's telling the city to "drop dead". There's something about the dingy apartment interiors and the diner scenes that feels so much more right than The Lost Weekend.

The acting is also quite good, as far as I can tell (I don't think I've ever known any heroin addicts, so I can't quite judge how realistic this is). In addition to Bobby and Kitty, there's his brother Hank (Richard Bright), who's a bit higher up in the thieving racket, planning and running the jobs. It gives him more money than Bobby and Helen could hope for, but more importantly, Hank doesn't spend his money on heroin, which leads him to needle Bobby over his much more screwed-up life.

The Panic in Needle Park is a movie that at times is quite uncomfortable to watch, but is still a very good movie.

Safe in Hell

TCM is honoring director William Wellman tomorrow morning and afternoon by showing several of his movies. One that I've never recommended before is the interesting Safe in Hell, at 8:30 AM.

Dorothy Mackaill stars as Gilda, a woman in New Orleans who's got a sailor boyfriend named Carl (Donald Cook), but needs money because he's away all the time. So she's turned to prostitution, which presents its own problems since she doens't have any legal protection. Matters come to a head when she gets in a strugle with one of her clients, and accidentally kills him and burns the place down. She was spotted leaving the building, too, so what's a woman to do? Carl has returned, and has a bright idea. Smuggle her aboard his boat, which is going to the one island in the Caribbean that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the US.

Needless to say, things don't quite go as planned. Carl marries Gilda but, being a sailor, has to leave to do his job, and Gilda quickly learns that she's been stranded on a sort of island of lost souls. All of the men are lechers and want her. This is particularly true of the local police chief, who's busy looking for a way to frame her on some dubious charge or another so that he can have her to himself in his island prison. And then who shows up again? No, not Carl, but the man Gilda thought she killed in New Orleans. It turned out that he was only knocked out, but regained consciousness in time to escape the fire, and committed insurance fraud by having his wife claim the life insurance money. So the only place for this man is the same island Gilda is on.

Safe in Hell is interesting and highly atmospheric. The island is one of the more creepy places you'll see on screen, at least in an understated way. The subject matter is stuff that would have no chance of reaching the screen a few short years later after the folks behind the Production Code started enforcing it more closely. The result is a bunch of lesser-known actors making a story that's still somewhat shocking 80 years after it was first released. Safe in Hell doesn't seem to have gotten a DVD release, not even to the Warner Archive collection. So you'll have to catch the rare TCM showing.

Star of the Month Jean Simmons

TCM finally gets to its new star of the month for June, Jean Simmons. Simmons was born in the UK and started her flim career there, and it is with some of those early British movies that TCM is starting its salute to Jeam Simmons tonight.

The first of those movies is David Lean's 1946 version of Great Expectations, in which Simmons plays the young Estella. Estella, of course, is the young girl our protagonist Pip (John Mills playing Pip as an adult) falls in love with, although she's being raised by the spinster Miss Havisham to do everything she can to break men's hearts. This is a very well-made production, although it seems as if the British were always good at adapting Dickens to the big screen.

It's followed at 10:15 PM by Black Narcissus, a movie about a bunch of Anglican nuns (led by Deborah Kerr) who are on a mission in British India and occupy an old place in the Himalayas that has more of an effect on them than they realize. Simmons actually plays one of the locals here, not a nun. This movie was made in goregous color, directed by the other great British director of the 1940s, Michael Powell.

The old(ster) college try

I've blogged about a couple of movies in which I point out that Loretta Young either chose or got put into some not very good stuff toward the end of her career. If you want another example of this, you could watch Mother Is a Freshman, which is airing tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM on the Fox Movie Channel.

Young plays Abigail Fortitude Abbott, a widow who's got a daughter Susan (Betty Lynn) in college. Unfortunately, Susan spends like a fish to mix metaphors, to the point that Abigail is out of money from the current installment of the trust fund that was set up for the two women and Susan might have to drop out of college. Abigail's attorney and the executor of the will, Mr. Heaslip (Rudy Vallee), is in love with Abigail and wants her to marry him because that will make everybody's financial situation so much easier. Abigail doesn't love Heaslip, and comes up with an idea. Several generations back, her family set up a scholarship that could go to anybody named Fortitude. Obviously Susan can't use it, but Abigail can! So she'll get into college and use the scholarship to support Susan for one semester until the next installment of the trust fund.

If you've seen one unrealistic college movie, you've seen plot themes that show up over and over in the genre. The boys seem more interested in the co-eds than in their studies, to the point that some of them are actually interested in Susan, who would have to have been in her late 30s according to the plot. Susan, on the other hand, is interested in her English professor, Prof. Michaels (played by Van Johnson). He's not that interested in her, of course. Things go from bad to worse when Abigail enrolls in Prof. Michaels' class, and he takes an interest in Abigail! You'd think this would violate all sorts of norms of propriety, but it's Hollywood. The Production Code frowned on a lot of things, but not this.

You can probably guess where things are going to go. At first it will look like Abigail will end up with the right man, and then romantic complications will ensue, but all of them ought to be sorted out by the end, and everybody will live happily ever after. Frankly, I think the professor and the lawyer ought to end up together; that would be a much more interesting plot twist. But the Production Code wouldn't allow that. Mother Is a Freshman is mildly diverting, but nothing special. But if you want to see it, you'll have to watch it on the Fox Movie Channel, as it's not on DVD.

A new season of Essentials Jr.

Now that we've gotten past Memorial Day, it's time for another season of TCM's summer series the Essentials Jr., which shows movies that are good for the whole family, and especially the younger viewers. The one thing I notice about this season's selections is that there are a lot of movies that were picked in previous years, starting with the very first selection, The Adventures of Robin Hood, tonight at 8:00 PM.

To be honest, the number of repeats doesn't particularly surprise or bother me when it comes to the Essentials Jr.. I think that in selecting movies for a series like this, you really have to program it more for people who aren't such big fans of film, which means you have to come up with films that the parents are likely to recognize. (In fact, I made the same point back in June 2008.) There are only so many classic films out there that are well-suited to kids as well as grownups, and which the casual fan is likely to recognize. So, after a while, you're going to have to start running through them all again. But there's also another reason why repeats in the Essentials Jr. selections is perfectly normal. The kids who are part of the target audience for this year's showing of The Adventures of Robin Hood would have been too young for the showing three or four summers ago.

Frankly, I'm more surprised at the lack of repeats in the films selected for the regular Saturday night Essentials series for us grownups. How many truly essential movies are there, anyway?

Witness to Murder

It doesn't get shown very often: the fun if flawed Witness to Murder is getting an airing tomorrow morning at 8:30 AM ET on TCM.

Barbara Stanwyck stars as the title character, an older unmarried woman who looks through the window of her apartment, and in the window of the apartment across the courtyard, she sees a murder! And she knows who did it, too: George Sanders, who came to the US after World War II as a refugee but has an interesting past. Shades of Orsown Welles in The Stranger. Sanders knows that he's in danger when the police come to question him, but he's got some things going for him. First, there's no body, and second, he's got the intellect of John Dall and Farley Granger in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope. So, Sanders convinces the police that Stanwyck must be seeing things, or had a dream, or any of the standard excuses. Like James Stewart in Rear Window, nobody will believe Stanwyck.

Or, you could compare Stanwyck to Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight. This is especially so because Sanders starts going after her in such a way as to get the police to think that she might be going insane. However, Stanwyck is fortunate in that she's got at least one person from the police on her side, a detective played not by Joseph Cotten, but by Gary Merrill. Eventually Sanders decides to get rid of Stanwyck in a way that will make it look like she jumped off a building because nobody believed her....

Witness to Murder is entertaining enough, but a huge problem it has is that it seems like so many other other movies you've seen before. I've named four movies above, but could probably name half a dozen others: Dangerous Crossing comes to mind, as does The Lady Vanishes or yet another Hitchcock film, Suspicion. Also, the movie looks more like a B movie beneath what all three of the stars were used to. It's worth a watch, though, as it's the sort of "popcorn" movie that's more about enjoying a good ride than a serious message picture. The movie isn't on DVD either, so you're going to have to catch the rare TCM showing.

James Arness, 1923-2011

James Arness died yesterday at the age of 88. He's best remembered for playing Marshal Matt Dillon on the long-running television series Gunsmoke, with one of the effects of that being that Arness had a rather brief movie career. Arness started out in the 1940s with his first movie role being one of the brothers in Loretta Young's The Farmer's Daughter, but once Arness took the Dillon role in 1955, he pretty much stopped making movies, although he did have a cameo in Alias Jesse James.

As for Arness' earlier movies, TCM already had Them! on the schedule for Thursday, June 9 at 8:00 PM as part of the "Drive-In Double Features" series running this month. Arness also played the Thing in The Thing From Another World.

Edward G. Robinson dons an apron!

The odd sight of one of Hollywood's great gangsters wearing an apron and washing dishes for his nagging wife comes in the noir Scarlet Street, which is airing tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM ET on TCM.

Robinson plays Christopher Cross (no relation to the guy who did the Arthur theme), a cashier for a small company, who has been working the same job for 25 years, and look where it's gotten him. He's got a cramped apartment and a wife who henpecks him. (She really does make him do the dishes and wear an apron while doing it!) After a banquet in his honor for the 25 years of service, he stops off at a local dive bar, where he meets Kitty (Joan Bennett), a pretty young thing. He likes to paint but is strictly an amateur, and when he tells her he likes to paint, she mistakes it for his being a famous artist whose paintings sell for thousands of dollars apiece. She's got ambitions of getting to Hollywood, so she immediately sees dollar signs in his eyes, and wants some of that money, which she things she can get with the help of her shifty boyfriend Johnny (Dan Duryea).

Christopher doesn't like Johnny as he sees what a jerk Johnny is, so Kitty passes Johnny off as her sister's (Margaret Lindsay) boyfriend. That's all the more convenient in that it will allow Kitty to lead Christopher on and think she loves him; something all the easier for getting the money out of him. Now, if Christopher were smart, he would have told the truth at the beginning; namely that he's just an amateur and doesn't have the money. But he saw a dame! And with the wife he's got he'd be more than willing to spend some time away from her. So he has to embezzle the money from work.

Of course, in a movie like this, you know things are going to go from bad to worse. Christopher never signs his lousy artworks, so Kitty does on a lark, and Johnny takes it to a street vendor, who sells the painting to a critic who puts it in a gallery. This causes all sorts of problems. First, the Missus thinks Christopher is just copying a great artist; second, there's no way he can ever get money for selling his paitings. The story ends up a bit more complicated, but let's just point out that one character ends up dead and surprisingly, unlike what you'd think the Production Code would dictate, the person responsible for the death doesn't wind up in prison. However, the way the movie ends obviously must have pleased the Code enforcers or else the movie wouldn't have gotten released. I think it will please you too.

Edward G. Robinson never received an Oscar nomination, implying that somebody in Hollywood didn't appreciate him enough. In fact, Robinson is a really good actor who had a surprisingly broad range, handling gangster films, comedies (although to be fair he did play gangsters in several comedies like A Slight Case of Murder), straight drama like Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, and both sides of noir: the perfectly clean guy in Double Indemnity, and the good guy with the dark side here.

China Girl

The Fox Movie Channel has brought the movie China Girl back to its lineup after a long time in the vaults. For some resaon I thought I had blogged about it before, but apparently not. It's airing at 7:30 AM ET tomorrow morning.

George Montgomery plays Johnny Williams (don't call him Johnny Jones), an American news service photographer working in Burma in late 1941 when it's taken over by the Japanese. He and two fellow ex-pats Bull and Fifi (Victor McLaglen and Lynn Bari respectively) escape from detention and just oh-so-conveniently happen to find a plane with which they can make a getaway to the northern part of the country where they'll find the Free Chinese. At this point the story begins to take two turns. First, it turns out that Johnny's friends aren't really friends, or even well-meaning amateurs; they're spies working for Japan. And Johnny manages to get some information off of them. Second, in Mandalay, Johnny meets the lovely Miss Young (Gene Tierney), whose father runs a school for orphans in Kunming, which is in that part of China that's in a war zone. Johnny falls in love with Young, and tries to help the poor Chinese orphans, while also trying to get back to the US with the vital information he has (I think it's about the upcoimng attack on Pearl Harbor, but it's really a Macguffin).

To be honest, China Girl is a bit weak as a movie, largely because looking back on it, I can't help but see a pale imitation to Foreign Correspondent. Alfred Hitchcock's movie was set just before the outbreak of World War II in Europe and came out shortly afterwards; China Girl follows the same pattern surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor. There's spies who aren't what they seem to be, a dashing American newsman, and a love interest for him. But Alfred Hitchcock was a master storyteller, and knew how to put the story first; only the scenes at the end are really propagandistic. In China Girl, it feels more as if the movie was rushed into production precisely to make propaganda and boost the morale of Americans on the home front.

I don't think China Girl has gotten a release to DVD, so you're going to have to catch this one on the Fox Movie Channel.

New month

We've finally gotten through May, and with a new month come new features to TCM. The Star of the Month is going to be Jean Simmons, although her movies show up on Tuesdays, which means we don't get them until June 7. TCM is also running a series they're calling "Drive-In Double Features"; you've probably seen the promos for this on if you've been watching enough TCM. I'm looking forward to the schlocky horror movies, kicking off with Japanese monsters this Thursday. This weekend also sees the final two chapters of the Buck Rogers serial, in which Buck presumably saves Earth for all that is right and good. (I don't think the Production Code people would let the bad guys win.) That's going to be replaced on the 12th by another serial. Right now the schedule says it's Ace Drummond from 1936, although that may be subject to change.

As for programming today, it's littered with repeats. TCM has gotten the rights to a couple of Fox movies about Nazi spies, and are airing them tonight as part of a line-up of movies about spying on the Nazis. First, at 8:00 PM is May 2010 recommendation The House on 92nd Street.
That's followed at 9:45 PM by Night Train to Munich, which I posted about in July 2009.
Third, at 11:30 is one that's not from Fox, but MGM: Above Suspicion, a selection back in July 2010.

You can find more Nazis today over on the Fox Movie Channel. At 10:30 AM, they're showing Man Hunt (hmmm, yet another movie I've recommended), followed at 12:30 PM by The Desert Fox.