Moscow on the Hudson

Quite some time back I recorded Moscow on the Hudson. It seems to be out of print on DVD, but it is available at both Amazon streaming and Google Play if you can do either of those. And since I still need to free up space on my DVR, I decided to do a post on it even though I personally don't have the bandwidth to do streaming.

Robin Williams plays Vladimir Ivanoff, who at the start of the movie is sitting on a bus in New York. He's asked by a fellow passenger whether this is the right bus to get to a certain place, and this ultimately leads Vladimir to do some reflecting as to how he wound up where he is.

Flash back to Moscow. Vladimir is a saxophonist for the band that plays for a circus. He shows up late to practice one day because he spent a whole bunch of time standing in line to get shoes, even though they don't have any in his size. This being the Soviet Union of the end of the Brezhnev era, it's a very gray place, with Vladimir living in a cramped apartment with his parents and grandparents, with the KGB looking into his grandfather, who is probably going senile.

The one bright spot is that Vladimir and the rest of the circus have been invited to perform in the United States, a plum gig if you can get it. Of course, the KGB minder warns them of how terrible life in the States is, and people are so paranoid that perhaps their roommates might inform on them. Indeed, one of Vladimir's friends, trusting him, says that he's seriously thinking of defecting.

Ironically, that's not what happens. The circus performs, and on the last day of the tour before they're scheduled to fly back home, the performers are allowed half an hour to shop at Bloomingdale's. None of them ever having been in a Western-style department store, they don't know American shopping conventions and make life difficult for staff like the security guard Lionel (Cleavant Derricks). Just before their time at Bloomingdale's is up, it's Vladimir who decides he's going to defect.

This causes an international scene, and life is at first not easy for for Vladimir. Lionel takes pity on him and since Vladimir doesn't have a place to stay, lets him stay in his apartment, which like Vladimir's in Russia has an extended family. He can't get a job as a saxophonist, so he works a series of odd jobs. The woman at the perfume counter in Bloomingdale's whom he met just before defecting, is Lucia (Maria Conchita Alonso), herself an immigrant. The two start a tentative relationship.

I was always under the impression that Moscow on the Hudson was a comedy, but it's really more of a light drama. There's certainly a lot of comedic elements, but the main themes are definitely on the drama side of the line. Robin Williams really could do more than just be zany, and this is his opportunity to show it.

America being a country founded largely on the idea of immigration and being the land of opportunity, there's a lot here that will resonate with Americans, even though the idea of defecting from Russia is one that became dated overnight. Although America is that land of opportunity, the road there is one that's filled with bumps, and Vladimir encounters a lot of those bumps. Despite that, the movie is ultimately optimistic.

If there's a flaw, it was a likely unwitting mistake from director Paul Mazursky. He was a native New Yorker, and this movie, like his earlier Next Stop, Greenwich Village and even the opening portion of Harry and Tonto, show his love of the city, warts and all. Here, however, he almost seems to equate New York with all of America. In a diner, Vladimir gets in a debate with another Russian immigrant for whom the American dream hasn't quite panned out either. I kept thinking if they're getting beaten down by life in New York, there's a lot of America out there that won't beat them down in the same way. The scene ends up with them misquoting from the Declaration of Independence, crucially saying men are endowed with the right to life, liberty, and happiness -- just happiness, not the pursuit of happiness.

If you want an interesting film looking at a unique period in American history, Moscow on the Hudson is a good one to watch.

The King of Kings (1927)

Back on Easter, TCM ran a whole bunch of religious-themed movies. One that I made it a point to put on the DVR since I hadn't done a post on it before is the 1927 silent version of The King of Kings. It's available on a two-disc set from Criterion, so I finally got around to watching it to do a post on it.

The movie starts off with a two-strip Techniolor scene that isn't out of the Bible. Mary Magdalene (Jacqueline Logan) is in the sinning portion of her life, living it up with a bunch of Romans at a party that has a feast and a leopard among other things. She's irritated, however, that her boyfriend Judas Iscariot (Joseph Schildkraut) isn't there. She's informed that Judas has taken up with this carpenter from Nazareth, whom some people are treating as a messiah. So she sets of to find Judas and win her away from the carpenter.

Of course, the carpenter is Jesus (H.B. Warner, who was past 50 when he made this even though Jesus is generally considered to have been in his early to mid 30s when he was crucified). And if you know your Bible stories you'll know that Mary Magdalene winds up falling in with Jesus rather than winning Judas back for herself. As for Judas, you'll recall that his fate is to betray Jesus for 30 pieces of silver.

Anyhow, the Jesus in this movie performs various of the miracles that were depicted in the Bible, with director Cecil B. DeMille using intertitles containing verses from the Gospels, all meticulously cited. (The intertitles for establishing scenes use new material.) Among the miracles are the Lazarus story, healing the afflicted and making the blind see again. Other non-miracle portions of the Bible used are the famous stoning of the adulteress scene, as well as Jesus helping Peter (Ernest Torrence) pay his taxes by catching a fish with a coin in its mouth. DeMille strays from the Bible by having the Romans react by trying to catch fish themselves in the hopes that those fish will similarly have coins in their mouths!

Jesus ultimately makes it to Jerusalem, since that's where he's supposed to be crucified. He finds that the temple has been taken over by a corrupt group of rabbis led by Caiaphas (Joseph Schildkraut's real-life father Rudolph). The Romans, led by Pontious Pilate (Victor Varconi), want to find this meddlesome messiah, and finding him a threat to Roman authority, crucify him, only for Jesus to be resurrected on the third day.

The King of Kings is one of those movies that's a bit more difficult to judge, largely because it's based on material that would be very well-known anywhere in the western world. The movie is very well-made for the most part, although at times it gets close to going over the top. Jesus is presented using lighting that makes him almost glow -- we get the point already, although it's hard to avoid when you've got a character who as the son of God is supposed to be perfect.

The one flaw I found is that the movie really began to drag. There were actually two versions: a general release print that ran about 112 minutes, and a roadshow version that clocks in at about 156 minutes. TCM ran the latter, and I couldn't help but think the story could have been told in the shorter run time. (The Criterion release apparently contains both prints.)

For anybody who has in interest in Biblical movies, I can't see why they wouldn't find this an excellent addition to the genre.

The MacKintosh Man

I recorded several Paul Newman movies during his turn as TCM's Star of the Month, and I've been working my way through them. This time, we're up to The MacKintosh Man.

Newman plays Rearden, a secret agent of some sort. It's a bit tough to guess exactly what sort, since Newman himself was American, but the movie is set in the UK, and his UK spymaster has Rearden pass himself off as Australian at one point. But his boss MacKintosh (Harry Andrews) is most definitely British. MacKintosh tells Rearden about a new scheme by diamond smugglers that has them using the Royal Mail to send stolen diamonds to locations they only use once, picking up the diamonds somehow and absconding with them. Rearden gets the address of one of those locations, so obviously Rearden is out to break the ring.

No, not quite. Rearden lies in wait for the postman, and when he comes, punches the postman and takes the envelope full of diamonds! The British police are good at what they do, and fairly quickly put the finger on him, leading to arrest and a trial which gets him a long prison sentence.

It turns out that getting put in prison was the point, as Rearden has to go into prison to find out something, which will only become clear later. Among the people he meets in prison is Slade (Ian Bannen), a spy who had passed British secrets to the Communists and is serving a long sentence for that. There's a shady organization that plans prison breaks, and they see Slade as an important prisoner, but are also willing to free Rearden as a decoy.

Rearden is drugged before being taken to a safe house, and when he wakes up he has no idea where he is, trapped in a nice room in a house somewhere together with Slade. This is allegedly for the security of the escapees, but it would immediately raise my suspicions, and it does the same for Rearden. Meanwhile, the people who organized the escape have been doing their research on Rearden's false identity and realize he's not who he's been claiming to be which puts him in great danger.

Back in London, MP Sir George Wheeler (James Mason) is planning to raise holy hell, but his old friend MacKintosh warns him about doing so, which leads to a sudden change in plans for the folks holding Slade and Rearden. Rearden escapes and finds that the real point of the plot was to get Slade out of the country so that he could be shipped back to the Communists, a handoff that's supposed to happen in Malta.

The MacKintosh Man is a movie that's full of twists and turns, requiring a fairly close watch to see where the movie is going. That's not a bad thing by any means, but it nice to have a bit of advance warning. As with a lot of spy movies, you need a healthy suspension of disbelief, with certain plot points feeling as though they should fall apart.

But with that said, The MacKintosh Man isn't a bad little movie. There's nice location shooting in Ireland and Malta, and some parts of the plot that are handled surprisingly well. I particularly enjoyed the car chase along the rutted country tracks of western Ireland. While the movie never quite rises to great, it's more than entertaining and a solid addition to the genre.

The MacKintosh Man got a release to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Twelve of her men

Continuing to get movies off the DVR to make space for new movies I haven't blogged about for, one of my recent movie watches was Her Twelve Men.

Greer Garson plays Jan Stewart, who at the start of the movie is taking a plane to go to her new job, as a teacher at the all-boys Oaks boarding school. It turns out that one of the students is on the plane with her, and he's aghast at the thought of a woman teacher. (Really?)

Anyhow, Jan gets to the school, and finds that she'll be teaching a dozen boys. They live upstairs in a dormitory, and she gets an efficiency on the ground floor. So she's going to be spending a lot of time with them. At first, as seems to be a standard trope with a new teacher, they test her a lot.

One of the other teachers, Joe Hargrave (Robert Ryan), isn't so sure Jan is going to be up to the job, but he gives her some pointers along the way. The Oaks has strict rules, but part of being a good teacher is knowing when to bend those rules. These boys need a stable adult presence in their lives, since many of the wealthy parents are boarding them just to make their own lives easier.

Some of the boys need her more than others, such as the one whose parents are vacationing in Europe and can't even be bothered to send him letters. Jan writes fake letters, which should have been obvious fakes to the boy with the lack of foreign stamps and the photos cut out of magazines. Then there's the kid (Tim Considine, later of My Three Sons) who gets injured. When Jan takes him back home for convalescence, she begins to fall in love with the boy's father (Barry Sullivan).

But the other boys back at the Oaks need Jan too, and as we'll learn by the end of the movie, they'll even grow to love her. Her Twelve Men is a sentimental, episodic movie, reminiscent of The Trouble With Angels but not nearly as good. I think that's down in no small part to this being an MGM movie, with some of the same issues that brought to some other movies I've mentioned. MGM certainly had a professional gloss, but sometimes they needed to tone it down, and this is one of the movies.

It personally didn't help either that for some reason I thought this was a comedy, and was looking forward to seeing Robert Ryan do comedy. Although there are humorous scenes as befits an episodic movie, it's certainly not a straight-up comedy. But that's my fault for having a mistaken impression of the movie, not the filmmakers'.

Her Twelve Men is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Schedule notes for July 5-6, 2019

This being 2019, it's an odometer anniversary of 1939, which is often referred to as "Hollywood's Greatest Year". Back in 2009 for the 70th anniversary of the year, TCM ran a month-long spotlight, although I can't tell which month it was since the TCM article for that spotlight doesn't have a date.

At any rate, TCM is running another salute to 1939 for what is now the 80th, on Fridays in July. There will be 42 movies airing if I counted correctly; there's also a documentary that premiered back in 2009 that will be airing a couple of times this month, including at 10:00 tonight. The movies will be starting on Friday mornings and running through to the start of TCM Underground in the overnight.

One thing I find mildly interesting is that although both of the spotlights refer specifically to Hollywood, this year's spotlight includes a couple of British movies, starting with the very first selection in the spotlight, The Four Feathers at 6:00 AM today.

Last Saturday during the matinee block, specifically the 10:00 AM portion of that block, TCM ran the last of the Falcon movies they're running. That means that this week sees the start of a new series, and they're going back to... the Bowery Boys, with Live Wires just after the Popeye short, so around 10:07 AM. There's fifty-something movie in the series, so once you include Summer Under the Stars and 31 Days of Oscar, the Bowery Boys movies should theoretically be running until sometime in late 2020?

Thursday Movie Picks #260: Parenthood

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 Parenthood. There are lots of movies where the characters have children, although I assume for this week that the theme wants to pick movies where the main characters' having children, or becoming parents, is the main part of the plot. With that in mind, I was even able to come up with a theme-within-a-theme:

For Heaven's Sake (1950). Gigi Perreau plays an angel who has not yet been born. She's found the couple she just knows she wants to have as her parents: Broadway writer Bob Cummings and actress Joan Bennett. However, their marriage is at the point it could break up, and that would scupper any idea of Perreau becoming a child in this family. It's up to angels Clifton Webb and Edmund Gwenn to save the day.

Cheaper by the Dozen (1950). Clifton Webb plays Frank Gilbreth, an efficiency expert married to Lillian (Myrna Loy). He employs his theories of efficiency on his 12 children circa 1920 (the eldest being played by Jeanne Crain), which sometimes has unexpected results for the kids. The movie was popular enough to spawn a sequel, Belles on their Toes, although Webb's character dies at the end of the first movie so he's not around for this one.

The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker (1959). Clifton Webb, who was pushing 70 by this time, plays a man in circa-1900 Pennsylvania who is not only a bigamist, but who has 17 children by his two wives! The two families are in different cities, with Webb traveling on "business" to keep the secret going. Eventually, a son from one mother needs to find Dad in an emergency, and finds the other family. Charles Coburn, who was only 12 years older than Webb, plays Webb's father.

I hope you're not looking for Crosby and Hope

Among my recent purchases from Amazon was this four-film William Powell box set. Not having posted about any of the four movies in the set, I decided to start off by watching The Road to Singapore.

The movie starts off by informing us that Hugh Dawltry is some sort of a jerk, having had his house under a lien for non-payment of taxes, as well as getting expelled from his club in Khota, one of those British enclaves in Malaya of the sort where Somerset Maugham set The Letter. We learn all of this without actually seeing him in the opening scenes. He's actually in Ceylon, where he (played by Powell) meets Philippa (Doris Kenyon). She's getting ready to marry Dr. March (Louis Calhern), whom she had met when he was in medical school. Now he's living in Khota, so Philippa and Hugh are going to be taking the same boat to Khota.

Now, part of the reason Hugh is considered to be a jerk by the polite society of Khota is that he caused a scandal by wooing a married woman and leading her to get a divorce. Put two and two together, and you can guess where this movie is going. And it doesn't take all that long to get there either, since the movie is only 69 minutes. However, there's something to be said in Hugh's defense, which is that Philippa is going into things with her eyes open. It dawns on her fairly quickly that her husband has become more married to his job than to her; he's also a bit of a drip.

Complicating things is that Dr. March has a teenage sister Rene (Marian Marsh) living with him in Khota. She sees Dawltry, and she's immediately smitten with him. She's also willing to be quite forward about it, since this is a pre-Code Dr. March begins to figure out what's going on, and he is none too pleased; to be fair, this is the one thing you can't blame him for considering Hugh's reputation.

The Road to Singapore is a reasonably mid-level pre-code. There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but it also doesn't stand out like some of the other movies in the genre. Powell gives a professional performance, as does Calhern and the supporting cast.

If I were introducing people to pre-codes, I would pick some other movies. But for people who like them, I can certainly recommend The Road to Singapore.

Out of This World

One of this month's TCM spotlights is "Out of This World", a look at science-fiction movies. Every Tuesday in prime time, TCM is going to be showing a bunch of movies in the genre. I couldn't tell from the TCM blurbs on it whether there's any guest host.

This first Tuesday in the month unsurprisingly brings several early science fiction films, up through the 1930s. The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with one of the earliest feature films, the 1902 version of A Trip to the Moon. For some reason I thought I had embedded one of the Youtube copies before, but a search of the site claims I haven't:



Other movies tonight include Metropolis at 8:30 PM, followed by another Fritz Lang movie that's new to me, The Woman in the Moon.

Overnight there's Things to Come at 2:15 AM, followed by all the chapters of the 1940 Flash Gordon serial at 4:00 AM, if you want to sit through the whole thing in one go.

Impact

Another movie I recently watched to try to make some space on the DVR is Impact.

The movie starts off a bit less than promisingly, with some dopey narration defining the title of the movie for us: "Impact, the force with which two lives come together. Sometimes for good, sometimes for evil." We then meet Walter Williams (Brian Donlevy). He's a businessman in San Francisco who's been doing well for his company buying up factories. He's got a wife Irene (Helen Walker) with whom he's planning on going away for a bit. But we soon learn that things aren't quite as good as they seem. Irene is feigning illness, because she'd really rather be spending more time with the man with whom she's having an affair, Jim Torrence!

Anyhow, Walter drives off on one of his business trips that's supposed to end with him picking up Irene. But at the appointed spot, who meets him but Jim, who claims to be one of Irene's cousins that Walter has never met, and since Jim is heading the same way as Walter, perhaps he could drive Jim part of the way. This, as you can probably guess, is a ruse, especially when we see Jim releasing some of the air from one of the tires. Jim's plan, which Irene is in on, is to kill Walter when he stops the car to change the tire!

The two men get out to change the tire, and Jim hits Walter with a crowbar, pushing him down a hill, and then getting in the car and driving off. But Jim isn't careful enough, and crashes into an oil tanker, causing a fiery crash that kills him. Everybody naturally believes when the crash is found that Walter has died, because why would anybody suspect anything else?

Walter, however, hasn't died, but just got concussed. When he comes to, he hops on the back of a moving van, eventually ending up in the small town of Larkspur, ID. When he finds out about the car crash that everybody believes killed him, he feigns amnesia while trying to figure out what to do next. (Amazingly, nobody recognizes him despite his face having been in the newspaper.) He becomes a mechanic for service station owner Marsha (Ella Raines), and the two fall in love despite the fact that Walter can't follow through since he's still married.

Eventually, Marsha convinces Walter to deal with the secrets he's hiding, so he goes to San Francisco and reveals he's still alive. But Irene has a trick up her sleeve, suggesting that Walter had gotten in an argument with her, leading authorities to believe that perhaps Walter had planned to kill Irene and Jim. Amazingly, it's Walter who's going to have to stand trial.

Impact is a pretty good movie, despite the fact that I couldn't help but think there were a lot of plot holes. In addition to nobody recognizing Walter, parts of the trial seemed rather unrealistic. But suspend your disbelief and there's a farily entertaining movie. Donlevy in particular does well, as this is mostly his story. The two women are also good, Walker as the villainess and Raines as the good girl. The movie runs a bit longer than it probably should at 111 minutes; if the script could have been tighter we'd probably have an even better picture.

Impact is available on DVD should you want to watch.

TCM Star of the Month July 2019: Glenn Ford

Glenn Ford and George Macready in Gilda (July 8 at 9:30 PM)

We're in a new month, and already it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time it's Glenn Ford, and his movies will be airing every Monday in prime time, in some weeks ending in the Tuesday morning part of the schedule.

In looking through the photos I've posted to the blog, it turns out there aren't too many of Ford, and nothing from the movies airing tonight as far as I could tell. There's one from Gilda which is on next Monday, and a smaller one from 3:10 to Yuma, which you can catch at 11:45 PM on July 15. It doesn't help that Photobucket is complaining harder about bandwidth use. 25MB a month for their free service? What's the point of still offering a free service?

Anyhow, as for tonight's lineup, it starts off with one of Ford's more entertaining films, The Big Heat at 8:00 PM. Among the lesser-remembered movies are the original version of Ransom! at 3:45 AM, and the British-made Terror on a Train at 5:45 AM.