Intruder in the Dust

One of the movies I finally got around to watching yesterday is Intruder in the Dust. It's available on DVD, so I can still recommend it after the fact.

Based on a novel by William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust is set in a small Mississippi town (presumably in Faulkner's mythical Yoknapatawpha County; the film was actually film in Faulkner's hometown of Oxford) as it was in the 1940s. There's been a murder, and the police are bringing in farmer Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez) as the obvious murderer. It's evident from first sight that Beauchamp is black and, since the dead man was white, this case is going to have racial overtones. In fact, the deceased was a brother in one of those small-town clans (of the sort that I talked about when I recommended The Firemen's Ball back in November 2009). So there are a lot of family members baying for blood, and this being the South of the 1940s, there's the palpable fear that theere's going to be a lynching. Well, some of the people (the blacks) fear it, while others (the whites) have gone to the county lockup to crowd around and see what's going to happen.

A member of that latter group is young Chick (Claude Jarman, Jr.), who is spotted by Lucas because of an incident that happened some time earlier when Chick fell into an icy creek on Lucas' property. Town legend now has it that Chick is friends with Lucas, and Lucas asks Chick to get his uncle John (David Brian), who is a lawyer: Lucas needs somebody to defend him. All the (white) adults, unsurprisingly, think Lucas is guilty as sin, and Lucas is reluctant to defend himself because he knows that none of the adults will believe him. Chick, on the other hand....

Chick's willingness to believe Lucas leads to an illegal night-time exhumation with a surprise, and the realization that perhaps Lucas is innocent after all -- except that he won't have much of an alibi until after any autopsy. Meanwhile, the patriarch of the murder victim's family has his own desires for wanting to see justice done, and the crowd in front of the county jail is growing. Time is short to uncover the identity of the killer.

Intruder in the Dust works fairly well as a straight-up mystery/suspense movie. As commentary on race relations, however, I'm not so sure. There's something about Juano Hernandez, who was born in Puerto Rico, that screams, "Not a southern black!" Not that he could pass as white; but in all of his films that I've seen, he just seems different from the other blacks. True, he's supposed to be somewhat different here, but in other movies like Trial he also comes across as being slightly miscast. I say all this despite his being a good actor. Secondly, characters such as the sheriff (Will Geer), and especially the victim's father (Porter Hall), seem to turn on a dime. One little shred of evidence that Lucas might not be guilty, and they suddenly become crusaders for justice. I can't help but think that in real life, they'd be more like Linda Darnell's character in No Way Out: she could certainly be persuaded to do the right thing, but she's clearly more concered about what's in it for herself. Finally, there seem to be a few convenient coincidences in the plot. As we saw in Fury, a lynch mob doesn't seem to concerend about whether any "innocent" people trying to protect the target of their ire get killed in the crossfire. And what's the old lady doing seeking legal advice on a Sunday night?

Back to Crime School

I mentioned the movie Crime School back in December 2009 when its star, Humphrey Bogart, was TCM's Star of the Month. It's airing again tomorrow morning (January 17) at 8:00 AM (and is available on DVD if you miss the Tuesday showing), but there are a few more things I don't think I said about the film back in 2009. First is that in addition to Bogart, it's got the Dead End Kids early in their careers, before they morphed into the Bowery Boys and a series of low-budget films over at Monogram. More interestingly, while I mentioned in 2009 that Crime School was a remake of The Mayor of Hell, I hadn't spotted that the story was done a third time in 1939 as Hell's Kitchen. Astonishingly, Hell's Kitchen also stars the Dead End Kids.

On a somewhat unrelated note, in doing searches, I've been tending to mix up Crime School with another 1938 picture, Girls' School. Not only that, but I was thinking Girls' School was the title of a completely different picture (albeit one slightly closer to Crime School in plot), Girls on Probation, which stars Ronald Reagan and has the screen debut of Susan Hayward.

Revisiting Crime School also made me think of the Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School, which came out all the way back in the summer of 1986. There's another one for the "Boy does that make me feel old" file.

Martin Luther King Day

This being the Martin Luther King Day holiday, TCM is once again showing a bunch of movies either with prominent black cast members, or casts that are almost entirely black. Robert Osborne sat down with director Charles Burnett several years back on MLK Day for a night of Burnett's films. That's when I first came across My Brother's Wedding, airing at 8:00 PM. If memory serves, it was one of the later films that evening so I didn't stay up to watch the whole thing; I suppose then that it's good this film is back on the TCM lineup, as the little I saw looked at least interesting, and more accessible than his better-known Killer of Sheep (not on today's lineup).

The other surprise is The Defiant Ones, airing at 6:15 PM. No, it's not a surprise that it's on the lineup. What surprised me is that TCM lists it in its schedule as not available for purchase on DVD. Apparently it had a DVD release many years back, but is now out of print. You can get it at Amazon, but it's not cheap.

There are a couple of other good movies airing in the morning lineup, but they're also available on DVD so I don't have to mention them right now.

Making me feel old again

I was watching the football on TV today, and there was an advertisment for a film coming out in March or April called 21 Jump Street. The ad certainly brought back memories: I remember the original TV show 21 Jump Street, which was one of the first "hits" for the then-fledgling Fox network, or as close to a hit as they had back in those days.

It's also a bit odd to see 80s shows being made into movies, as the 80s seem to be a bit of an overlooked decade in my opinion. I've posted a lot about how the older Baby Boomers (roughly the ones born in the first half of the boom) still sit in a lot of executive positions and seem to have a lot of cultural power, and that one of the results of this is how we get so many references to stuff from the 1960s. To be sure, we've seen Hollywood make movies out of The Dukes of Hazzard and The A-Team, and now 21 Jump Street, but they've also decided to keep remaking Mission Impossible movies. And when somebody does make a movie about a conservative icon from the 80s, such as The Iron Lady, the shrieking from those who fought on the 80s left is amazing. For all her faults, she was far less bad than murderous 60s revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, but making movies about him is radical chic.

But I'm getting too much into politics. When I saw the 21 Jump Street ad, I began to wonder what was the first TV show to be turned into a movie. There was a Dragnet movie in the 1950s, and it had already been a TV show, but it was also a radio show which got its genesis with the movie He Walked By Night. Episodes of TV shows such as The Man From UNCLE were cobbled together into movies in the late 1960s, but I don't know how much nostalgia there was until the Baby Boomers started getting nostalgic.

On the other hand, turning movies into TV shows seems to have been going on for a long time, and may or may not have much to do with nostalgia. Gidget and Peyton Place (which of course was originally a book) were turned into TV shows in the mid-1960s, and The Naked City came even a few years before that. I think it's not uncommon for Hollywood to try to cash in on a successful property by selling it through multiple media; after all, look at how many comic strips have been turned into movies going back to the early 1940s if not earlier (the entire Blondie and Dick Tracy series).

HBO's schedule

So I was looking through the online TV listings services, and noticed that HBO Signature is airing Doctor Dolittle next Sunday morning (January 22). The listings say it's the Rex Harrison film from 1967, but I remembered that the movie was remade some years back, specifically in 1998 with Eddie Murphy playing the good doctor. Curious to see whether the listings sites were right, I decided to look for HBO's own online schedule.

I probably shouldn't have. HBO's website is a Flash-based abomination. It took a long time for anything to show up on screen at all other than a black background. And then when I clicked on the schedule link, there was another long wait... followed by the browser window going completely black. No schedule whatsoever. As much as I've complained about TCM's schedule, at least you can actually access their schedule. Is this just a problem with using Opera? I'm loathe to download the latest version of other browsers just to keep up with sites that may be excluding the one I use on a regular basis, especially if the problem pages don't work well in other browsers.

And why do websites insist on making everything Flash-based in the first place? It's really obnoxious. I know there are a lot of times when I'm visiting a site and I'd like to open one link in a background tab while suring the main page. TV listings sites are a natural for this; I can right-click the link to one program and open it in a background tab to see what other times the movie is showing, while looking through the main listings for other movies I might be interested in. But Flash, as usually implemented, brings up the Flash dialog with a right-click, not the standard browser dialog.

Riding the High Country

Yesterday when I was looking for a good still of Fortunio Bonanova in Five Graves to Cairo, one of the hits led me to a blog on FilmJournal.net. It turned out that the blog was no longer being updated. More or less -- in fact, the blogger had decided to stop using the filmjournal.net platform and switch to WordPress, where you can find his blog Riding the High Country.

To be honest, I don't read other film blogs all that often, mostly out of laziness and having other things I'd like to do with my time. (I'm an avid Go player, for example, and if I want to play a game at something other than breakneck speed, it's best to budget an hour at minimum.) It's also part of the reason why a lot of other people have a better-written blog than mine. I try to put up one post a day, and when there isn't anything I can think about, the post usually winds up being just a sort of placeholder mentioning something coming up on TCM that I blogged about some years in the past. That, and when I blog, I almost always just sit down and write in a sort of stream-of-consciousness style in that what I put down are the first things I think of. I don't normally write up posts some time in advance. Last Thursday, I mentioned Jack Cardiff and a movie he directed called The Liquidator which will be coming up later in the month on TCM on a night of movies that he directed. I probably should be starting that post now, but the reality is that I most likely won't get around to it until the day it airs.

Anyhow, I enjoyed Riding the High Country enough that I decided to include it in my minimal blogroll -- again a blogroll that's small mostly out of laziness. Then I looked at his blogroll, and noticed that I'm already on there. I hate to think how many people have decided to blogroll me, and I'm blithely unaware of it, looking selfish for not mentioning any of their blogs. So to any new readers, welcome! I hope you find something new about film that you don't already know.

Fortunio Bonanova, 1895-1969

Today marks the birth anniversary of Fortunio Bonanova, another of those names you might have seen in the credits but whose face you may not remember. In fact, as is often the case with character actors, internet image searches don't necessarily find too many pictures, which is why I haven't included a picture with this post.

Fortunio Bonanova sounds like either a Spanish or Italian name, and in fact he was born in Spain's Balearic Islands. As is the case with somebody like Gilbert Roland, his Spanish accent made him a natural for playing various Latin character roles (or roles from other Romance language-speaking countries, notably Italy). For example, IMDb lists him as "Hotel Manager" in Down Argentine Way, one of those Fox musicals from the early 1940s which, as you can guess, is set in Argentina. That Night in Rio? There's another obvious choice for casting Bonanova.

That having been said, I find it difficult to remember Bonanova in most of these films. IMDb also lists him in Citizen Kane. Really? He's also one of the men at the Spanish colony in The Black Swan. Then there was his small part in Double Indemnity. It's a bit of a shame that somebody good enough to keep working consistently in dozens of movies is also so difficult to remember.

In fact, the one role in which I best remember him is as the Italian general in Five Graves to Cairo.

Jack Cardiff

TCM is spending Thursday nights in January honoring cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Cardiff's career started in the 1930s, but it really took off in the 1940s thanks to director Michael Powell, who spotted Cardiff's work on The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (airing tonight at 8:00 PM) and then asked Cardiff to be the chief cinematographer on Powell's next color film, A Matter of Life and Death (airing overnight at 12:30 AM). Infact, this evening's entire lineup is dedicated to the movies Cardiff made when he was working for Powell.

There is one exception, and that's a documentary on the life and work of Cardiff, airing at 11:00. It aired twice last week, and I hadn't seen it then. It's actually quite a good documentary if you have any interest in the people who worked behind the scenes. Cardiff's work was quite broad. Not only did he work with Michael Powell; he was the cinematographer for such classics as The African Queen and Alfred Hitchcock's Under Capricorn, the latter of which is finally coming to TCM next Thursday.

In the 1960s Cardiff became a director, first with Sons and Lovers (interestingly enough for one of the great color cinematographers, Sons and Lovers is in black and white) and then with several lesser films. TCM actually showed the Cardiff-directed The Liquidator yesterday afternoon, but I'll mention that one in more detail when it comes up on the last Thursday of January. (It's not on DVD so I can't really mention it now.) Cardiff's directorial career is mentioned in the documentary, but not given as much attention as his work at a cinematographer, largely because it wasn't as successful.

So they had a Guest Programmer last night

I'll admit that I haven't been watching quite as much TCM over the past few weeks. TCM probably ran their Guest Programmer promo more than enough times, but I didn't see it until the last one, which always seems to air just before 8:00 PM on the night that their Guest Programmer shows up. If I had been paying attention, I would have known that James L. Brooks was going to be on last night, and I would have been able to do the research to find out about the short This Is Your Story, which was actually originally a sketch on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows. This was one of the sketches repacked in 1973 for the film 10 From Your Show of Shows.

To be fair, one should normally be able to spot these things from TCM's online schedule. If you look at tonight's schedule, for example, just before the 8:00 PM movie, there's a header reading, "TCM PRIMETIME - WHAT'S ON TONIGHT: STAR OF THE MONTH: ANGELA LANSBURY" Yesterday's schedule only read "TCM PRIMETIME - WHAT'S ON TONIGHT:". That, I think, would go a good ways toward explaining why I had less of an idea about the schedule.

I apologize. I also didn't think the This Is Your Story sketch was quite as funny as I've read some people make it out to be. In fact, I thought it got exceedingly tedious after the first "guest" was introduced. So I apologize a well if I led you astray.

I wish I had seen it before

TCM just showed Just You and Me, Kid. George Burns stars as a retired vaudevillean who takes his vintage car to the grocery store one morning, and when he comes out of the store to put his groceries in the trunk, finds a naked Brooke Shields in his trunk! It turns out she was a drug mule who shafted the dealers out of $20,000, so naturally they're looking for her.

It's not a bad movie; to be fair, though, it's the sort that would have worked well as a B movie 40 years earlier, something I've mentioned with a few other films I've recommended such as For Pete's Sake and 9 to 5. That B-movie nature also means it hasn't been released to DVD. I don't like to recommend movies that haven't gotten a DVD release unless they're going to be showing up on TV in the near future, and that's obviously not the case with Just You and Me, Kid.

As for what to recommend, if you read this quickly enough, you can see the short Teenagers on Trial at about 6:00 PM tonight. I could swear I've mentioned this one before; it's a pretty funny (in an unintentional way) short looking at the problems of juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, and how it's really society's fault.

I'm also looking forward to the short This is Your Story at 8:00 PM, but it's one that I haven't seen before, so I can't say whether it's any good. In fact, there doesn't seem to be any information on it at all.