Blame It on Rio

My last set of DVD purchases from Amazon included this four-film set which as of this writing is out of stock. I didn't realize it until very recently, after watching Blame It on Rio off the set. Thankfully, Amazon lists the movie as being available on its streaming (free through June 30 for those with Prime), while the TCM shop lists it as being available as a stand-alone DVD or Blu-ray neither of which seem to be on Amazon.

Michael Caine plays Matthew Hollis, a businessman working for a firm in São Paulo, Brazil, along with his long-time friend Victor Lyons (Joseph Bologna). Victor seems more concerned with the divorce he's going through with his wife back in America, but Victor's daughter Jennifer (Michelle Johnson) is coming down for a visit. So Matthew arranged for a a visit to the more pleasure-oriented Rio de Janeiro for the two Lyonses, as well as Matthew, his wife Karen (Valerie Harper) and their daughter Nicole (Demi Moore).

The only thing is, the vacation isn't going to get off to a good start. As Matthew is packing his luggage for Rio, Karen informs him that she booked a separate vacation for herself at a resort in the northeastern state of Bahia. Matthew gets the obvious sense that there's something wrong in his marriage, but he doesn't have any idea what that something is. Still, there's not much he can do about it, so she heads her way and the other four go to Rio.

The two young women want to experience the pleasures of Rio, while Victor is OK thinking about fully adult women since he's about to get divorced. Matthew isn't so sure. Things are about to change for him, though. Jennifer convinces him to go along with her to a traditional non-Catholic wedding reception which apparently contains elements of the old African religions, as well as a lot of fun on the beach. After dark, Jennifer seduces Matthew and the two wind up making love! Matthew feels guilty, but Jennifer seems much more up-front about her feelings for Matthew.

Victor, understandably, would be might pissed if he knew what was going on. and soon enough, Jennifer tells Victor that she's had sex with a guy old enough to be her father, although she doesn't tell Victor anything about who that man is. Victor is extremely unhappy, but comes to the brilliant solution that since Jennifer seems to trust "uncle" Matthew, perhaps he should try to disarm Jennifer and get her to reveal who the man in her new relationship is. Matthew isn't about to let on, since he's pretty certain Victor isn't going to like it when he finds out that it's he, Matthew, who had sex with Jennifer.

I have to admit that I found Blame It on Rio to be not quite as funny as I expected going in. That's less because of the material and more because of Michelle Johnson's portrayal of Jennifer as a young woman who knows what she wants and is going to get it regardless of how it might hurt either her father, her "uncle" Matthew, or the two men's friendship. The movie does ultimately resolve everything with an interesting twist that does save the movie. But it takes a long time in getting to that resolution.

For the price I paid for the four-movie set, I'd certainly recommend Blame It on Rio. If you've got an Amazon Prime membership and can watch it for free through the end of the month, that's also worthwhile. For the price of the standalone DVD, I'm not so certain.

The Red Badge of Courage

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I took a look at the TCM schedule to see if there were movies available on DVD that I hadn't done a post about before. I noticed that among them was The Red Badge of Courage, so I recorded that, and sat down to watch.

This is based on the 1890s novella by Stephen Crane, who having been born in 1871 had no first-hand knowledge of the US Civil War. Henry Fleming (Audie Murphy) is a young soldier from the North who joined a regiment in the Civil War which is moving south to take on the Confederates. Fleming is worried about what's going to happen when they have to go into battle, as he doesn't want to die.

Probably Henry's best friend in the regiment is Tom (Bill Mauldin), with Jim (John Dierkes) being the voice of experience. For everybody, the war is very much a case of hurry up and wait, as none of the enlisted men seem to understand at first why they're going north to go south in a flanking action. Eventually, they get to engage the Confederates in battle. Henry makes it into the trenches with the rest of the men, but when the time comes for the charge -- he flees.

Henry considers himself a coward, and could probably be court-martialed for desertion if it weren't for the fact that the battlefield can be a very chaotic place. While dealing with some of the other Union regiments, he accidentally gets hit in the back of the head. It changes his outlook, as now he has a wound, even if a slight one. It's his "badge of courage".

On his way back to the regiment, he meets other soldiers who have been injured, such as a cheery soldier (Andy Devine), as well as a regiment mate known as "the tattered man" (Royal Dano). All of it gives Henry a renewed sense of courage the next time he has to go into battle.

There's really not all that much going on in The Red Badge of Courage. Part of that is because the movie was cut down. Director John Huston had considered himself to be making a war epic, but the studio bosses said there were terrible previews that necessitated edits. Huston by this time was in Africa to make The African Queen, so he was in no place to protest. The result is a B movie running just 69 minutes.

The movie that we have is nothing terrible, but it's nothing great either. Murphy was not yet a star, but he already shows he was going to be a more capable actor than people tend to give him credit for. Everybody else is pretty much just there, but does nothing to make the movie bad. For me The Red Badge of Courage was just one of those movies that comes and goes.

It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection, so you can always judge for yourself.

Darkest Hour

The last time DirecTV ran a free preview weekend, various channels in the Cinemax package were running Darkest Hour quite often, so I DVRed it. It looks like it's still in the Cinemax rotation, as well as being available on DVD, so I decided to watch it and do a post on it here.

It's May, 1940, at a period in World War II when the Sitzkrieg was just being ended by the Germans and their invasion of the Benelux countries. The British plans to defend against the Nazi invasion of Norway had failed, leaving Prime Minster Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup) with an untenable situation in Parliament. Ultimately, he decides to resign as PM but stay on as head of the Conservative Party while a coalition government is formed.

There was some discussion as to who should lead the new coalition. Chamberlain originally wanted Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane), but in real life Halifax felt he was unsuitable as a member of the House of Lords and not the Commons. It was eventually suggested to have Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman), civilian head of the Navy, take on the role. This despite the fact that there were serious questions from Chamberlain and others in the Commons for Churchill's past failures; also King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn) was less than thrilled with the prospect.

But, there was nobody else who could be agreed on, so Churchill became head of a five-member War Cabinet. Chamberlain and especially Halifax were still opposed to him and working behind the scenes to bring down the coalition government. They felt that suing Hitler for peace was the right course of action, while Churchill, who had spent much of the 1930s railing against Hitler, believed that if they sued for peace, Hitler would eventually come after Britain eventually.

Churchill, meanwhile, is facing problems from without as well as within. Germany has by this time invaded France, and the UK has a large number of soldiers stationed in France who are being forced into retreat, eventually to be surrounded at Calais and Dunkirk, from which there is no further retreat thanks to the fact that they've got the sea at their backs. This explains in part why Chamberlain and Halifax want a truce: they're worried about losing an entire generation of soldiers, which would make defense of Britain even more untenable.

Churchill, of course, eventually comes up with the idea of requisitioning as many civilian boats as possible and having them assist the Royal Navy in evacuating soldiers from Dunkirk, an operation portrayed in the movie Dunkirk which came out the same year as Darkest Hour. All of this is history, and so I don't think I'm giving very much away by detailing Churchill's success and the political defeat of Chamberlain. (The movie does reference the fact that Chamberlain also had terminal cancer, although apparently he didn't realize this in May 1940.)

Darkest Hour is an interesting movie going into more detail about a period of history that I think people in America know vaguely about but not to this level. Thanks to Churchill's ultimate success in leading Britain through the war, it overshadows the fact that there was some serious political pressure on him in the early days of his term as Prime Minister. That makes the movie well worth watching.

It's also worth a watch for Oldman's bravura performance as Churchill, which won him an Academy Award. He understandably dominates the movie, although Mendelsohn does well in his scenes as George VI. He and pretty much everybody else in the movie, however, are in support of Oldman.

I did, however, have some big problems with the movie, mostly on the technical side. The direction was extremely intrusive, right from the opening scene which I felt misused overhead shots, something which continued throughout the film. Director Joe Wright has a tendency to move the camera in ways which very much distract from the action. The lighting seemed wrong, too, which Churchill and other characters often in shadows when they shouldn't be, and other scenes (particularly in Parliament) too washed out. There's also a score which wells up inappropriately on many occasions.

That's a big shame, since I think it's hugely interefers with the excellent story and acting, but it doesn't make me not recommend Darkest Hour.

Franco Zeffirelli, 1923-2019

Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli, who came to prominence by directing Elizabeth Teylor and Richard Burton in the 1967 adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, has died at the age of 96.

Most people of a certain age (myself included) will probably remember Zeffirelli better for introducing Olivia Hussey to a generation of horny pubescent boys when he cast her in another Shakespearean adaptation, Romeo and Juliet:



I know that when we did Romeo and Juliet in whichever English class it was (10th grade, I think), this is the movie version we watched to accompany the reading, and I know my school wasn't the only one.

I remember watching Endless Love a few years back not having realized at the time that it was another Zeffirelli film:



The movie even got an Oscar nomination, although that was for the song (Lionel Richie lost, but would later get one for "Say You, Say Me" from White Nights).

TCM programming heads-up for June 15-16, 2019

It's been a good two years since I blogged about La pointe courte. It's on again tonight at 8:00 PM as this week's Essential. That will be followed at 9:45 PM by Cleo from 5 to 7. They're both on the same pricey Criterion box set, so I'm going to have to record the latter to do a review on it.

Tomorrow is Father's Day, and it should be no surprise that TCM is running a bunch of movies suitable for the day. I was kind of surprised to see the number of movies where the sons have either difficult or less than the stereotypically happy stuff you see in Father's Day cards. Oh, some of the usual suspects show up in the lineup, such as Life With Father at 8:00 PM Sunday, or the first Andy Hardy movie at 11:45 AM. There's even The Courtship of Eddie's Father, which also seems to get shown every Father's Day, at 3:45 PM. But there are the others, like Edward, My Son at 8:00 AM, as well as East of Eden at 1:15 PM.

That Uncertain Feeling

In trying to get through the backlog of movies on my DVR, I watched That Uncertain Feeling.

Merle Oberon plays Jill Baker, a woman who has been happily married to her husband Larry (Melvyn Douglas) for six years, but has one problem: she has an intractable case of the hiccups that appear every time she gets nervous. So one of her friends suggests that she see the eminent psychoanalyst Dr. Vengard (Alan Mowbray). One wonders how much the doctor can do for her, but in the waiting room one day she meets a concert pianist, Alex Sebastian (played not by Claude Rains but by Burgess Meredith).

Alexander is a strange guy, as he seems to have backwards opinions about everything just for the sake of being contrarian. But Jill finds him interesting, so the meet each other from time to time at places such as art galleries. (This is actually a chance to show Alexander's character, as there's a Daliesque painting of a clock that's supposedly a portrait of Alexander.) Jill invites Alexander over for a dinner party her husband is holding for some Hungarian-American businessmen who might be buying his insurance.

It's there that Larry realizes he's got a problem on his hands. Jill seems to have an infatuation with Alexander, while she also realizes that Larry is as much married to his business as he is with her. So Larry sets about casually suggesting that perhaps he should grant Jill a divorce, as that will get her to focus her opinion and realize she really wants to stay with Larry.

It eventually does happen, as you can guess from this sort of light comedy, but not without some complications along the way, involving Larry's lawyer Mr. Jones (Harry Davenport) and Jones' secretary Sally (Eve Arden).

That Uncertain Feeling was directed by Ernst Lubitsch, but somehow the famed "Lubitsch touch" that shows up in many of his other movies isn't quite here. I think it's mostly down to the script. The movie is based on a French play from the late 1800s, when this sort of material was probably more daring. The movie was made four years after The Awful Truth, and after any number of glittering Lubitsch movies, so it feels old hat. It also doesn't help that I didn't have much sympathy for the Alexander character. He's not really a bad guy, but he's not somebody you'd want to get close to, either. I also really didn't care for the dinner party scene, which just seemed tedious.

Still, all the actors try their best, and the movie's problems are not any of there faults. This is particularly true for Meredith, with his difficult character. It's not a terrible movie by any means; it's just rather blah. It's also available on DVD, so you're always welcome to judge for yourself.

Thursday Movie Picks #257: Undercover

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is "undercover", so immediately the first thing I thought of was this:



Of course, that's not a movie, so I had to come up with some movies instead. After a bit of thinking, I was able to come up with three interesting movies:

The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938). Edward G. Robinson plays the title character, a psychologist investigating the causes of crime who comes up with a brilliant idea: he'll pass himself off as a gangster to allow him to get initiated into a gang so that he can do his research from the inside. The gang is headed by Claire Trevor and Humphrey Bogart, and things get complicated with Dr. Clitterhouse tries to get out of the gang.

Smashing the Money Ring (1939). Ronald Reagan returns to play Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft once again in the third of four movies in the series. This time, there's a counterfeiting ring being run in a prison, and Brass' job is to get himself sent to that prison and find out who's doing the counterfeiting. Reagan is by far the best thing about the Brass Bancroft movies, which got weaker as the series went on.



High School Confidential! (1958). Russ Tamblyn plays a narcotics officer sent to infiltrate a high school to find out who's the mastermind behind the heroin distribution going on there. As it turns out, that's Jackie Coogan. Jan Sterling plays one of the teachers, and Mamie Van Doren plays his "aunt" who gets to flaunt her assets in a bullet bra, as do some of the other female characters, as in this fabulous bit of beatnik poetry:

Jane Powell, Part 2

Tonight being the second Wednesday of the month, we get another installment of Star of the month Jane Powell on TCM. This time, we're into the early 1950s, starting off at 8:00 with Royal Wedding, in which she and Fred Astaire travel to London for the wedding of then Princess Elizabeth to Philip. (It's amazing that the two are still married and Elizabeth is still Queen.) This is the one with Astaire's famous dance on the ceiling:



That's followed at 10:00 PM by Two Weeks With Love, a movie that might be more famous for a young Debbie Reynolds singing this terrible song:



The rest of the night's lineup is:

Nancy Goes to Rio at midnight;
Small Town Girl at 2:00 AM; and
Rich, Young, and Pretty at 4:00 AM

The Rack

I mentioned earlier that I recorded quite a few of the movies that aired during TCM's tribute to May 2019 Star of the Month Paul Newman, so I'm getting through them slowly. The most recent watch was The Rack.

A bunch of people are waiting at an airport for a military plane bringing a group of POWs from the Korean War home. Among them is Capt. Edward Hall, Jr. (Paul Newman). He's the son of army colonel Edward Hall Sr. (Walter Pidgeon), and also had a brother who died in the war, leaving behind a widow in Aggie Hall (Anne Francis).

Before the POWs can go home, they have to spend some time at the military hospital to be debriefed by army psychologists and the like. While Ed Jr. is watching a movie, another soldier comes up to him, and puts a noose around his neck with a placard reading "TRAITOR". Oh dear, somebody has something against poor Ed. It's not just this one man, either. Ed is uncomfortable being back home, and feels like his father isn't making things any easier for him. Just wait until Dad finds out about what happened over in Korea.

Apparently during the debriefings, enough evidence was obtained to lead military authorities to believe that Ed Jr. collaborated with the Chinese who were holding them prisoner, and this is a really serious offense. Dad can't believe this, as he raised his two sons to be perfect little soldiers. Surely when they hold the trial, the truth is going to come out and Ed Jr. is going to be exonerated.

The trial begins, with Lt. Col. Wasnick (Edmnod O'Brien) defending Capt. Hall, and Maj. Moulton (Wendell Corey) prosecuting the case. It's a difficult defense, as Capt. Hall has admitted that he did the things he's accused of, although he says that he felt it was the only thing he could do to help the men in his command. Wasnick obviously doesn't believe any of this, and he's going to do everything he can to debunk Hall's defense when he takes the stand.

The Rack is another of those movies that's well-made, but which kept striking me as having something not quite right about them. One of the big things for me was the scene resolving the relationship between father and son, which came across as really artificial.. Something also felt off about the trial, although that's probably because it was a military trial, which does have different rules from civilian justice. But where did they get all the evidence that the Chinese would certainly have kept?

However, Newman gives a very good performance and his clearly on his way to becoming a star in the early picture. The supporting cast is also pretty good, even Pidgeon who is normally a bit too stolid for my tastes. There's a nice early supporting role from Lee Marvin, and James Best (Roscoe P. Coltrane from The Dukes of Hazard) and Cloris Leachman have bit parts.

The Rack is available on DVD from the Warner Archive, and isn't a bad little movie.

Pale Flower

I've got a fair number of foreign films that I haven't reviewed either on DVD or on my DVR. It's been over a year since I reviewed a Japanese-language film (or, if it was more recent, I forgot to include the "Foreign" tag). So I decided that since I recorded Pale Flower when it showed up recently and would like to free up some space on my DVR, I'd watch that one first.

Ryō Ikebe plays Mutaki, a member of the yakuza (the Japanese equivalent of the Mafia) who has just gotten out of jail for the murder of a member of a rival gang in Tokyo. He goes to a gambling hall, which is where he meets mysterious Saeko (Mariko Kaga). She's the only woman in the entire room, playing some sort of game with traditional Japanese playing cards that would probably be known to Japanese and as such is never explained to the viewer. Mutaki is immediately smitten with Saeko.

Mutaki has other women in his life, however, as well as other problems. While Mutaki was away in prison, the two main gangs in Tokyo found that their territory was getting muscled in on by a gang from Osaka, to the point that the two gang leaders called a truce. Mutaki doesn't know that at first, and there are people who want to settle scores with Mutaki, including a young man who attacks Mutaki in a bowling alley and, failing, cuts off one of his fingers in the yakuza tradition.

Saeko, for her part, likes the gambling, as well as other thrills. But the current gambling isn't enough for her, so she wants Mutaki to find her a gambling place that has higher stakes. He does, but this place will pose a problem for Mutaki and Saeko. That's Yoh, a man who sits by the far wall and watches, never saying anything. Nobody quite knows Yoh's full background, except that he's half-Chinese, from Hong Kong, and spends time doing dope, which is an even more serious cultural issue in Japan than in the US.

There's also the day-to-day business of being a gangster, as Mutaki is given the task of getting a nightclub owner providing entertainment to use the Tokyo gang for protection instead of the Osaka gang. And, with the Osaka gang continue to tread on the turf of the Tokyo gangs, Mutaki is going to be asked to go back to his old hitman ways and bump off a member of the Osaka gang.

There's a lot to like in Pale Flower, most notable the cinematography and composition, as well as the depiction of Tokyo as it was in the early 1960s, just before the Olympics came and really started to change the place. It fell down for me slightly in terms of the plot which seemed to me to be missing something that I can't quite put my finger on. It doesn't help that not being Japanese, I didn't get exactly what it was they were gambling on and how the game worked. I don't gamble, but if I were going to do so, I'd want to do something like poker or backgammon where I could feel like there's at least some element of skill. These games looked like pure luck. But those are minor flaws.

Pale Flower is available on DVD from the Criterion Collection, and is one I'd quite recommend.