One of many movies with "Witness" in the title

In addition to the three free months of the Showtime channels DirecTV gave me, there was a free preview weekend of HBO and Cinemax at the end of September. I recorded Witness, not having seen it in ages, so that I could re-watch it and do a blog post on it. It's got an airing tomorrow at 9:04 AM on Movie Max, and then not another airing for another week and a half.

In the Amish country of Lancaster County, PA, Rachel Lapp (Kelly McGillis) has just become a widow. She's got a young boy named Samuel (Lukas Haas) and lives with her father-in-law. But before getting on with the rest of their lives, the two are going to spend some time to mourn with relatives in Baltimore.

This requires taking a train, and they'll have to switch trains in Philadelphia. Not that the relatively circuitous rote matters to them since they're Amish and time seems to stand still for them. But they're going to have to spend several hours in Philadelphia's train station. Samuel gets the chance to explore a small portion of the big wide world out there, eventually having to go to the bathroom. In the restrooms there's one other guy. But when Samuel steps into the stall to use the toilet, two other men come into the restroom and kill the first guy.

Poor traumatized Samuel, having seen a murder, is now a witness. Mom is deeply unhappy with this fact, but the police do need to talk to him and find out what he knows and if he can make a positive ID. The Philadelphia Police Departments sends in two men, John Book (Harrison Ford) and his partner Carter. The only thing Samuel is able to tell Book is that one of the killers is black like Carter.

When Samuel is taken to the precinct station for further questioning the next day, he does a little more exploring, which sets up a big problem. In one of the trophy cases he sees a press clipping of a narcotics bust led by McFee (Danny Glover). And Samuel recognizes McFee as the black man he saw in the restroom: this murder was an inside job. Further, McFee has figured out that there's a witness, so both Book and the Lapps are in danger. Indeed, McFee is even able to shoot Book, not knowing where the witness is.

So what's the best thing to do to try to keep safe? Take Samuel and Rachel back home for one. But at that point Book passes out from the effects of his gunshot wound, and is forced to convalesce at the Lapps' farmhouse until he can get better and figure out what to do next.

At this point there are some obvious Hollywood tropes such as the culture clash as Book tries to cope with the Amish way of life. There's also the fact that Book and Rachel begin to develop feelings for each other, even though there's no possible way Book could ever live the rest of his life the way the Amish do. And even though there's another Amish guy putting out feelers about being willing to take on fatherly and husbandly duties for Rachel, one Daniel Hochleitner (Alexander Godunov). But underneath all that, you know that McFee and the other crooked cops are going to find Book....

I'm really kind of surprised that Witness got all the Oscar nominations it did, because in rewatching it it didn't seem to me like the sort of movie that the Academy would recognize in the big categories (technical things like Art Direction, sure). That and considering all the tropes in the second half of the movie. But then Witness overcomes all of that, and is with one or two exceptions, an exceptionally well-made movie.

I'd guess that most people who were around in the 1980s would already have seen Witness. But if you haven't seen it yet, do yourself a favor and watch it.

Thursday Movie Picks #378: School Horror

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. We're into October, which means that it's that time of the year again when everything switches to a horror theme. (And yes, pumpkin spice foods are a horror, thank you very much.) So every edition of the blogathon this month is horror-related. For this first Monday in October, we have horror related to school. It took a bit, but I came up with three movies:

Black Christmas (1974). Students at a sorority house about to head home for Christmas are getting obscene phone calls. That's bad enough, but then one of the girls go missing. We know there's an intruder who killed her, but the sorority sisters don't. And there are other people in their lives who could be plausible suspects, especially once more of the sisters disappear.

The Fury (1978). Kirk Douglas plays a former CIA agent whose son gets kidnapped. It turns out the son has psychic abilities, and has been taken to a school the CIA has set up just for adolescents with various pyschic powers, run by John Cassavetes. Kirk wants his son back, and another student at the school who wants out (Amy Irving) eventually tries to help him, even though both of their lives will be in danger.

Flatliners (1990). Kiefer Sutherland plays a medical student who wonders if there's an afterlife, and devises a highly unethical experiment to test that hypothesis. This will require help from fellow medical students William Baldwin, Julia Roberts, and Oliver Platt, along with suspended classmate Kevin Bacon. Sutherland's experiment seems a success, and the other members of the group want to try it too, but by the time they do Sutherland realizes he's being harassed by somebody who died and who he saw in his near-death experience.

TCM Star of the Month October 2021: Lucille Ball

Lucile Ball in Du Barry Was a Lady (Oct. 21, 8:00 PM)

Now that we're into the first full week of a new month, it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time out it's Lucille Ball, who was already a Star of the Month at least once considering the piece on her narrated by Carol Burnett that TCM loves to run whenever there's a Lucille Ball movie coming up. But then she made a lot of movies at RKO before decamping to television, and those movies would be in the library that Ted Turner bought which became the backbone of the programming on TCM, which probably still makes it cheaper for TCM to get the rights to those films. At any rate, TCM will be showing Ball's movies every Thursday in prime time, continuing into Friday morning

This first Thursday in October has a bunch of Ball's movies from the 1930s, starting at 8:00 PM with Stage Door, which is definitely worth a watch. Then next week, we get all three of her films with her husband of 20 years, Desi Arnaz, including The Long, Long Trailer (pictured left) at 10:00 PM. The 28th includes some of her later movies, including Yours, Mine, and Ours, which I really enjoy.

Apparently, the "Scary Lucy" statue that had been installed in her home town of Jamestown, NY, was replaced a few years back:

with something more appropriate:

The Beguiled (1971)

Some time back, I picked up a box set of Clint Eastwood movies. (Actually, it's a repackaging of two box sets, one of westerns and one of dramas.) One of the movies I hadn't blogged about before is The Beguiled. Even though it's not really a western, it's going to be on StarzEncore Westerns tomorrow at 5:38 AM and 12:14 PM.

Eastwood is the star, although he's not the first person we meet. Instead, that's little Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin). She's wandering through the forest picking mushrooms, when she comes upon a man who's in terrible shape. That man is Eastwood, playing John McBurney. McBurney is a soldier in the Union Army in the Civil War, and Amy is a student as Miss Farnsworth's Seminary for Young Girls, located somewhere in Louisiana. (Location shooting for The Beguiled was, in fact, done in Louisiana.) This of course is a problem since Louisiana was part of the Confederacy.

Amy, not being certain what to do, takes the wounded solder back to the school, where Miss Farnsworth (Geraldine Page) is none too pleased. Don't you know that it's dangerous to go outside school grounds with a war on and marauding Union soldiers getting closer and closer to the school? With any luck, the Confederate patrollers are going to come along soon and they can all turn McBurney over to the patrollers, who will take McBurney to a POW camp where he'll surely die, if he doesn't die before he gets there.

But then, these are women, and they have moral qualms about being that cruel to a wounded man, even if he's fighting for the other side in a war. Perhaps they can at least deal with his injuries before turning him over to the Confederates. With that in mind, Miss Farnsworth, along with the one other teacher Edwina (Elisabeth Hartman), together with the student body of six and the one slave still staying on, set McBurney up in the music room to convalesce.

Of course, you can probably guess what happens next. Some of the girls are too young to have ever been this close to a man, while the few grownups haven't been around a man in a long time, what with the war on. The closest Miss Farnsworth got was having an older brother. We only see him in flashback, and there's some insinuation that there was an incestuous relationship going on, along with the brother having sex with the slave. No wonder Miss Farnsworth seems to have warped views of sex.

McBurney, for his part, plans to use the women's squabbling over him to his advantage, as he wants to get out of here with his health intact. Or at least as intact as possible considering how badly off he was when little Amy found him. Unfortunately, there's enough conflict between the women that some decide something has to be done about him.

The Beguiled, is an interesting picture from Clint Eastwood, and one that as I said I wouldn't quite call a western. Just because it's the Civil War in a fairly rural place doesn't make it a western. It's more of a straight drama, with some possible tinges of horror, albeit not of the supernatural kind. The entire cast is quite good, and the ending, which I won't reveal, was quite surprising. If you haven't seen The Beguiled before, it's well worth watching.

The Beguiled was remade a few years back, but the listings say it's the Clint Eastwood version. That's something else to note if you're looking for it on DVD or streaming.

13 West Street

A couple of months back, TCM had a spotlight of "Juvenile Delinquent" pictures. This gave me the chance to catch another one that I hadn't seen before, 13 West Street. It's just gotten a new DVD release as part of an Alan Ladd box set from Mill Creek, so I recently watched it to do a reivew here.

As you can probably guess, Alan Ladd is the star here, although it's one of his final movies and he died suddenly, so he's beginning to look a bit haggard here. That's not necessarily a bad thing, however, considering the character he's playing and what happens to him. Ladd is Walt Sherrill, a rocket scientist living in Southern California with wife Tracey (Dolores Dorn). He's got a fair amount of stress in his life, since this isn't very long after the Soviets sent Yuri Gagarin into space, and NASA really wants that next rocket, so there's a lot of work for Walt to do.

One night he's driving home through what looks like an industrial district. Not having paid attention to his car, he runs out of gas, which means getting out to walk to the nearest gas station and buy a gallon or two. As he's walking down an otherwise deserted street, another car shows up, this one with five teenaged boys who have taken the car for a joyride. For whatever reason, they decide to get out of the car and beat the crap of out Walt!

Walt is unsurprisingly pissed, at least once he begins to recover from the concussion. He somewhat vaguely remembers that one of the boys might have been named Chuck (Michael Callan), and that they may have said something about getting thrown out of a bar. Police detective Sgt. Koleski (Rod Steiger) takes all of this information down, and surprisingly gets to work on the case. Nowadays they'd probably just treat it as a cold case right from the start and get to easier things that allow them to engage in asset forfeiture.

Somehow, Chuck and his friends find out that Walt has been talking to the police. So they decide that they're going to threaten Walt some more, first telephoning him since they got his name and address from the ID his wallet, and then even coming over to the house to harass him more personally. That seems rather stupid, but who ever said petty criminals are smart?

So even though Koleski has continued on with the investigation, Walt decides he's going to do some investigating of his own. His brother-in-law is even the prinicpal of one of the big high schools, and might be able to help with yearbook photos of the various Chucks for Walt to see if he can positively ID any of them.

Of course, Walt gets so obsessive in trying to find his assailants that he starts harassing anybody who looks like they could be a possible match, such as when he tails a car that looked like the one the kids were riding in when they assaulted Walt. Big mistake, since it's the wrong car. The kids read the daily paper, too, and find out about the incident, which only makes life more difficult for Walt.

A lot of reviewers bring up Death Wish when mentioning this movie, and it's understandable why. Of course, this is a full decade before Death Wish, when societal norms hadn't yet broken down so much and there was still a Production Code that had to be followed. Still, 13 West Street isn't a bad little movie.

I do think, however, that you're going to have to going to have to suspend some disbelief. The detective spending days on this one case seemed unrealistic to me, as did the extra harassment or the blurb in the newspaper that the teens just happened to read. I know these are cinematic tropes, but still.

This being a Mill Creek box set, I don't know how good the prints are going to be, but the one or two other Mill Creek sets of Columbia movies I've picked up really aren't that bad for the price point.

Moonfleet

I've said in conjunction with a number of movies that MGM had a lot of gloss that could be used to bring really high production values to a movie. After World War II and outside of the Freed Unit musicals, though, that competence left a lot of movies with something a little off. Another good example of this is Moonfleet.

Jon Whiteley plays John Mohune, an orphan in England in 1757. Apparently his family had come from wealth down in the village Moonfleet in Dorsetshire some generations back, so his mom left him with a letter to look up one man in Moonfleet, one Jeremy Fox (Stewart Granger). Moonfleet must have changed, however, since one of the things little John finds upon his arrival to the area is a man who's been hanged for smuggling.

John finds Jeremy at a tavern, and Jeremy is none too pleased to see the arrival of a Mohune. Apparently the people of Moonfleet disliked the Mohunes, who were powerful back in the day but rather cruel. The Mohunes also had something to do with Jeremy's being forced to leave Moonfleet and cross the Atlantic to live in the colonies for some time. Worse for little John is that Jeremy is the head of one of the gangs of smugglers!

Jeremy tries to senf John away, but John escapes from the coach that's taking him away and returns at just the wrong time, while Jeremy is entertaining some important people. The only one who realy takes pity on John is Jeremy's lady friend Mrs. Minton (Viveca Lindfors). As for Jeremy, he'd like to get into a privateering deal with local bigwig Lord Ashwood (George Sanders), but having to schlep this kid around would be a problem.

Meanwhile, everybody in Moonfleet is complaining about ghosts in the graveyard. The reason for that is that the old Mohune crypt under the church, extending out into the graveyard, is where the smugglers meet in secret. Johnny goes into the old family crypt, and finds a silver locket in an ancestor's coffin. What he doesn't know is that the locket contains a piece of paper that holds the clue to finding a large and valuable diamond. Eventually that piece of paper is found and Jeremy is able to put two and two together. But by this time the authorities are on to him.

It goes like this, and since the Production Code was still pretty strong, it's tough to figure out a way that Jeremy is going to get out of all of this without facing justice. And what's going to happen regarding his relationship with John, since everybody else is telling Jeremy to ditch the boy?

I think part of the problem is Moonfleet is that the script seems to go all over the place without really doing enough. The other problem is that the movie is unable to break away from the look of obviously being done on the backlot. Everybody is professional, and there's the kernel of a pretty entertaining movie hiding at the center of it all. But the potential is never reached.

Some boys who are into adventure stories will definitely enjoy Moonfleet, but there's also a lot of adventure that's been done better out there.

Four years before the heat of the night

Jane Fonda was one of the stars in this year's Summer Under the Stars on TCM. That gave me the chance to record the movie In the Cool of the Day, not having done a post on it before. Recently, I watched it to do a post on it here.

Fonda, wearing a God-awful black wig, plays Christine Bonner, a young woman with some sort of chronic health issue with her lungs married to New York-based editor Sam (Arthur Hill). Sam is from a fairly well-to-do background, considering the fashionable Westchester County house his father (Alexander Knox in a brief role) lives in. Coming over to visit for some sort of business is Sam's London-based colleague Murray Logan (Peter Finch). Somehow it gets suggested that Sam and Christine come over to visit and perhaps do some traveling together.

Unfortunately, nobody here has a happy marriage. Christine, as I mentioned, is ill although it doesn't really show until the end of the movie. She feels she needs a meek husband which Sam provides, even if it's not a marriage with much love in it. Murray has marriage difficulties, too, although of a different kind. He and his wife Sybil (Angela Lansbury) had a child together, but the family got in a car accident one evening. The kid died and Sybil was left with scars that she notices even if the rest of us don't. And she blames Murray for it.

So you can probably guess what happens the next time Murray and Christine meet, which is that they begin to develop feelings for each other. Complicating things is the fact that Sam had to stay behind in New York thanks to his father having a health issue. Still, the Logans decide to go forward with their plans for a trip to Greece, with Christine tagging along sans husband. It seems rather awkward to me, but what do I know?

This being a Studio Era movie, it turns out I knew a fair bit. Of course Murray and Christine's feelings for each other are going to deepen, especially when you see that Sybil is increasingly shrews and seems like she doesn't even want to be on this trip at all. Apparently there's somebody out there who doesn't want to see Greece at all.

Eventually Sybil meets another Englishman, Leonard (Nigel Davenport), who is nice to her and she decides to go running off with him to the Riviera, leaving Murray and Christine to see the beautiful sights of Greece alone together. But Sybil also decides she's going to write to everybody and tell her her opinion of what she's seen between Murray and Christine. This ticks off Christine's mother (Constance Cummings) enough that she flies over to Greece to see Christine, who clearly doesn't want to see her mother.

One day Murray and Sybil are preveted from seeing the sights by a rainstorm. This is considered somehow extremely dangerous for Christine's health, for no good reason other than we need her to fall ill for the purpose of the plot. Sure enough the couple drives around in the rain (and not even in a convertible), and disaster ensues.

Jane Fonda and Angela Lansbury haven't had anything good to say about In the Cool of the Day, and I can't say that I blame theme. It's a pallid mess of a movie that has a whole lot of nothing going on, feeling like it's overlong even though it runs less than 90 minutes. You especially have to feel for Jane being forced to wear that awful wig for no good reason. There was location shooting on Greece, but the cinematography doesn't look as good as it might have.

In the Cool of the Day is one of those movies to watch only if you're a completist of one of the cast members, or if you want to see how a movie can go badly wrong.

Misery

Another of the more recent movies that I had the chance to record thanks to it showing up in HBO/Cinemax free preview at the end of last month is Misery. I suppose you could say it's not all that recent since it's over 30 years old, and I even saw it when I was in college back in the early 90s. But I recorded it since I saw that it was going to be on multiple times and hadn't blogged about it before. The next airing is tomorrow, Oct. 3, at 6:02 PM on Action Max, with more airings coming up during the week.

James Caan plays Paul Sheldon, author of a popular series of romance novels featuring a character named Misery. He's just finished his newest book, although it's something he wanted to write and not part of the Misery series. Sheldon is one of those superstitious writers who does everything in a particular way. For him, this means going from New York to a secluded mountain resort in Colorado to write; after finishing, he has one cigarette and a glass of Dom Perignon. Then he sets off down the mountain to get back to civilization.

Unfortunately, as he starts off on his journey this time, a blizzard comes in. Driving in the snow can be tough enough, but trying to do it on a twisty mountain road in a 25-year-old car that doesn't have the latest and greatest safety equipment is much more nerve-wracking. As you can probably guess, Sheldon's car goes off the road and into a deep ravine. This being a snowy mountain road, there's a good chance that he won't be found until the spring, if the animals don't get to him first.

However, there is somebody not far down the road, one Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), who is even a nurse and has a stash of medical equipment at her house since she lives in the middle of nowhere outside of town. On top of that, she recognizes Paul, since she claims to be his #1 fan, although I'm sure a bunch of people would make the same claim. But she makes certain the local general store owner saves the first copy of the newest Misery book for her.

So while Paul is convalescing, having broken both his legs, Annie reads the latest Misery book that has just come out. What she doesn't realize until she gets to the end is that it's going to be the last book in the series, since Paul has decided to kill Misery off, wanting to write the sort of books he wants instead of what his readers think he should write. Big mistake.

Annie is absolutely pissed that Paul killed off Misery. Worse, she's deranged, having been accused in any number of wrongful deaths at various hospitals -- death seems to follow her wherever she goes, and she's got a scrapbook of all the newspaper stories about it. So Annie decides that she's going to destroy Paul's latest manuscript, which she knows is the only copy -- there's that superstition again -- and force Paul to write a new Misery novel in which Misery absolutely lives. Further, she's going to hold Paul hostage until he does it, since nobody is going to find him until the spring what with the car under all that snow.

Or maybe not so much. The local sheriff covers the are in a helicopter, and the eventually do find Paul's 1965 Mustang, only without him in it for obvious reasons. The sheriff is also smart enough to figure out that the door has been pried open from the outside, which means somebody else must have shown up to get Paul rather than Paul dying out in the elements. The sheriff, understandably, doesn't yet know who might be responsible for all of this.

Paul, meanwhile, doesn't want to be subjected to torture, and wants to figure out a way to get out of his predicament. Part of this involves buying time by writing that Misery book that Annie wants him to write. But at some point he has to finish the book. And the sheriff is bount to put two and two together to figure out Annie's involvement in the case.

As I said at the beginning, I had seen Misery many years ago, but I don't think I'd seen it recently, certainly not in the time that I've been doing the blog. I was surprised at how well I remembered the movie compared to some other movies. But that's because of how good a movie Misery is. There's some definite foreshadowing that's a bit more obvious the second time you watch the movie, but the suspense works, while Bates is excellent as Annie Wilkes. This time around, however, I found myself wondering about the realism of the writing process, as though a writer can just write a novel straight through, without a whole bunch of outlining first and editing along the way.

But that's just a minor quibble. If you want an entertaining suspense movie, Misery is certainly worth the watch.

Heartbreak

I've noticed that I've got a rather higher ratio of more recent movies -- at least if you consider recent as being released after I was born -- on my DVR than older movies. Specifically, I haven't blogged much recently about movies from before 1950. With that in mind, I made a specific point of watching Break of Hearts from Katharine Hepburn's day in Summer Under the Stars to do a post on here.

Hepburn is the female lead, although we don't see her until the second reel or so. The other star is the male lead, orchestra conductor Franz Roberti, played by Charles Boyer. Franz is known to be extremely tough on his musicians, and also for socializing with the sort of high-society woman who atends his concerts. While in New York for a series of concerts, he goes to visit an old friend, Professor Thalma (Jean Hersholt), who teaches music in lives in a rather less glamorous apartment.

Living in the same apartment building is Constance Dane (Katharine Hepburn), who has a love of classical music and has even written a composition for piano that the movie tries to pass off as musical but sounded more contemporary to me. When she stops by to see Thalma, she meets Roberti for the first time.

Constance would love to see one of Roberti's concerts, but when she goes to the box office, she finds that the concerts are all sold out because that's just how popular Roberti is. So she does what any self-respecting lover of classical music would do, which is to sneak in to one of the rehearsals. Roberti is unsurprisingly pissed at first when he discovers Constance in the audience (well, actually, an audience of one). But Constance's explanation is one of those movie tropes that wouldn't work in real life but does in the movies, with Roberti starting a relationship with Constance.

It's a whirlwind romance that leads to the two getting married and going on an extended honeymoon in Europe. They return to New York where Franz will be giving another series of concerts, and the two live happily ever after.

Yeah, right. Constance and a violinist friend, Johnny Lawrence (John Beal) go to have dinner together because Franz is way too busy with rehearsals. Except that he really isn't, as he's seeing another woman, which he was wont to do in his pre-marriage days. Doing it once you've gotten married, however, is much worse, certainly by the standards of 1930s movies.

At this point, the movie really veers into melodrama. Constance obtains a divorce and to support herself, gets a job as an accompanist at one of those Tin Pan Alley publishing companies. Here, she learns that unfortunately she doesn't quite have the talent to be a professional musician. Roberti turns to drink and reaches the point that it's going to derail his conducting career. The only thing that can save him is the love of a good woman like Constance.

It's easy to see from the second half why anybody might have a scathing review of Break of Hearts. Oh my does it become sappy. Boyer and Hepburn both do the best they can with the material they're given, although considering some of the lines Hepburn has, you can be forgiven for thinking the suits at RKO looked at her Oscar-winning performance in Morning Glory and tried to recreate it.

Other people, however, may like this sort of melodrama, in which case they'll probably enjoy Break of Hearts. It's certainly not bad; it just very much fits a certain genre that to me also has the problem of appearing dated. It's definitely not going to be for everybody.

Briefs for the beginning of October, 2021

Ah, so we're into the beginning of a new month. Tht being October, it's the month where Halloween comes at the end. So, unsurprisingly, everybody trots out the horror stuff, and TCM is no exception. They've got a bunch of horror movies peppered throughout the month's schedule, although it climaxes on the weekend of Halloween, October 31 being a Sunday this year. TCM is having a horror marathon starting on the morning of the 29th. However, there are already a bunch of horror films from the 1930s this morning and afternoon.

I watched a couple of shorts recently, most of them unfortunately not being listed on the TCM schedule since the redesign last year. One was a Crime Does Not Pay short, They're Always Caught. If this one seems familiar to you, it's probably because the movie was extended into B-movie length a few years later as Kid Glove Killer, a little Van Heflin B movie that I absolutely love, about CSI as it was 80 years ago.

The other short was Olive Oyl for President, a Popeye short running in the 10:00 AM Saturday portion of the Saturday matinee block. Popeye makes a disparaging remark to Olive about politics, and she responds by concussing him with a frying pan. Popeye has a dream sequence about Olive being elected President. Some may find the dated policies sexist, although I was more reminded of the Simpsons where Homer becomes sanitation commissioner and institutes trash collection policies so extravagant he bankrupts the city. More importantly, however, is that the cartoon ended before the time scheduled for the start of the next B movie; I think they're going through the Perry Mason movies right now. But that started immediately after the cartoon, so if you were trying to record just the B-movie, you missed the start.

If you missed The Innocents which had a TCM airing today as part of their 24 hour salute to the centenary of actress Deborah Kerr, don't worry: it's going to be on FXM again today at 11:25 AM, and tomorrow at 3:00 AM.

As for recent passings, I probably should have mentioned director Melvin Van Peebles, who died a week ago at the age of 89. Mevlin directed such notable blaxploitation movies as Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, and was the father of Mario Van Peebles, who also became a director of such movies as New Jack City.

There's also Tommy Kirk, a Disney child star who's probably best remembered for his role in Old Yeller. Kirk was 79.