Young Anthony Hopkins

It's only a couple of weeks ago that I blogged about Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day, by which time he was quite famous, it being after his first Oscar win. Back in October for Halloween, TCM aired a much earlier Hopkins movie that I hadn't seen before, which sounded interesting, so I recorded it: Magic. Recently, I finally watched it off my DVR.

Hopkins plays Corky, a struggling magician working the nightclub scene in New York; his British accent is explained away by the fact that his parents emigrated to work the Borscht Belt which is how Corky wound up in America. That Catskills upbringing however does come in as a plot point later in the movie. When we first see him, Corky is nervous and despite doing his mentor Merlin's tricks and doing them well, the show flops because of Corky's nerves and lack of delivery. Merlin tells Corky that he needs a gimmick, so he goes off and gets one.

Fast forward some unspecified amount of time, and Corky is back at that same club we first saw him in, only this time his agent Ben (Burgess Meredith), who knows about Corky's new gimmick, shows up with a network representative in tow. Corky starts doing his routine, which looks a lot like the same one he was doing as the movie opened. And that show seems to be bombing just as badly as the first one. So badly, in fact, that a man starts heckling him from the back of the room.

In fact, that's the gimmick. Corky isn't getting into a double act like Martin and Lewis in The Stooge; in fact, the heckler is a ventriloquist's dummy, named Fats, and the idea that Corky can throw his voice that far is impressive in itself. But Fats serves as the distraction a magician needs for his sleight of hand. Corky also gives Fats the persona of an off-color heckler, injecting humor into the routine. Fats turns the show into a success, enough that the guy from the network wants to offer Corky a pilot.

But there's a catch. One of the clauses in the standard contract is that the person getting the pilot needs to do a physical, and Corky is flatly against that, which he says is from principle, but the way it's all presented foreshadows that there's probably something darker going on. Indeed, we've seen Corky carrying on a conversation with Fats with no one else around. Corky runs away heading back for home, except that all his family are dead and gone.

Corky really has another reason for heading back to the Catskills. When he was in school, he had a crush on lovely Peggy Ann (Ann-Margret), and is looking to see her again, stopping at the motel her parents owned. But it's Peggy who's there, having been given control of the motel when her parents left for Florida. But since the Borscht Belt is dying by this time, the business isn't going well and she lives in a loveless marriage with her husband Duke (Ed Lauter).

At this point, the movie starts getting really dark. The voice of Fats inside Corky's head doesn't go away, and when Corky rekindles his relationship with Peggy, going farther than he did in high school, it's not only Duke who has a problem with it; Corky does as well. Fats senses the danger, and things start to spiral out of control from there....

The old horror anthology trope of a ventriloquist's dummy that seems to take on a life of its own has been done a lot of times, but I don't think it's so common that it's been extended out to a full-length film. Magic does it fairly well, helped by an intelligent way of introducing the premise. That, and fairly good performances, especially from Hopkins and Meredith. Magic, for some reason, has fallen through the cracks, and isn't so well remembered today, which is a bit of a surprise considering the star power of the cast. It's definitely one that deserves better, and deserves a watch.

Angel of Color

Another of the noirs that Eddie Muller selected for Noir Alley that I had never heard of before was the Universal film Black Angel. It sounded interesting, so I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

After some establishing shots of the Universal back lot substituting for Los Angeles, the camera pans to a window which is one in the apartment of Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling). After her maid goes out for the evening, she calls down to the doorman, and tells him that if a certain Martin Blair should come asking to go up and see her, the doorman is most emphatically not to let him up. Sure enough Marty (Dan Duryea) comes into the building, claiming to be married to Mavis. The doorman blocks him, but then soon enough for Marty to see it, anothr man, a Marko (Peter Lorre) shows up looking for Mavis, and the doorman lets him right up.

Marty is so ticked off that he goes off and gets stinking drunk, playing the piano at a local dive bar since he's also a musician. He was in fact married to Mavis, but the drinking is why she's left him. So one of Marty's friends takes him home. While Marty is passed out drunk, also going up to Mavis' apartment is Kirk Bennett. He'd been in a relationship with Mavis despite being married to Catherine (June Vincent), and Mavis was blackmailing him, which would explain why Kirk would go up to see Mavis.

The next thing we know, the cops stop by the Bennett place. Capt. Flood (Broderick Crawford) is looking for Kirk, since he was the last person to see Mavis, at least until the maid returned and found that Mavis was really quite dead, having been murdered. The maid also saw Kirk leaving the building, so it's unsurprising that the police would suspect him of the murder. He's put on trial for it, and found guilty. Catherine, however, still believes that he must be innocent. Or, at least, she's acting like she believes that.

Kirk is eventually found guilty, and Catherine decides she's going to spend the rest of her life, or at least until the day of the execution arrives, trying to clear her husband's name. She goes looking for Blair, since to her it seems obvious that he must have killed the wife who dumped him. At least, until she finds out that Marty was really quite drunk at the time Mavis is believed to have been killed, and that a couple of his friends can corrobrate that. He's willing to help Catherine find out who really did it.

But Marty has ulterior motives, which is that having seen Catherine, he's attracted to her. And this is where the story really gets weird. Catherine was a singer until she married Kirk, and since Marty is a piano player and songwriter, the two team up in order to get Catherine into places like Marko's nightclub, since Marko was in Mavis' apartment after Marty was sent away by the doorman. So in theory Marko could be a suspect too.

Eddie Muller, in his Noir Alley presentation, mentioned that this was based on a story by Cornel Woolrich, which means that you shouldn't always expect the story to be that logical. Having recently watched another Noir Alley movie also based on a Woolrich story that will be the subject of a post in the relatively near future, I can certainly understand Muller's comments about Woolrich. As for who killed Mavis, I won't say, other then to point out that a killer was revealed, since the Production Code probably required that.

Dan Duryea was already known as a smooth villain in noirs; Black Angel was made after The Woman in the Window and Scarlett Street. Duryea is unsurprisingly good here; ditto Lorre although this is a relatively small role for Lorre despite his being so high up in the cast. Black Angel works in spite of the story and is definitely one worth watching.

Allen Smithee

I remember reading many years ago that if a director for some reason didn't want his name on a movie, directing credits would be given to a fictitious director called "Allen Smithee", or some similar spelling, since this was a name no actual director had. It turns out there really aren't all that many movies credited to Allen Smithee, so I was a bit surprised when I watched what was one of the earliest: the western Death of a Gunfighter.

Richard Widmark plays Frank Patch, marshal of Cottonwood, one of those small west Texas towns right on the railway line, circa 1900. The circa 1900 date means that times are beginning to change, as the old west is going and the settled townsfolk are getting more modern. Patch is a man out of his time, as the film opens more or less with him sleeping in one of the jail cells and adolescent Dan comes into check on the marshal.

Later that night, a drunk gets erratic enough that Frank shoots the drunk in self-defense, and that's enough for the town fathers to step up their campaign against Frank. The problem is that Frank had been given a more or less lifetime contract when the town was founded, because he was good at putting down the violence that was stereotypically rampant in Old West towns back in the day. Since the town fathers want to modernize, having a marshal like Frank just won't do. The simplest thing would be to persuade him to retire gracefully, but the editor of the town's newspaper, Oxley (Kent Smith), who would also like to see Frank leave, knows that Frank is never going to give up the job voluntarily.

One other person who doesn't have it in for Frank is Claire Quintana (Lena Horne), the proprietress of the town brothel from back in the days when such towns had brothels. It seems odd for the marshal to have a good relationship with a woman of ill repute, but he does, and it's to the point that he may just ask her to marry him, which seems really shocking for west Texas circa 1900 since it's the wrong kind of interracial marriage. (The movie was released in 1969, but which time the Production Code had been done away with and white/black "miscegenation" was no longer forbidden.)

The town fathers then go searching for Frank to try to convince him to retire, finding him fishing with young Dan. Frank refuses, and when Oxley is more insistent on it, Frank punches Oxley to the ground in full view of Oxley's son. Oxley eventually responds to this by... killing himself. And that really sets the town fathers into trying to provoke Frank into doing something that will let them kill him legally.

I knew about Allen (or Alan on later movies) Smithee being a pseudonym, but I didn't know the full story. In the case of Death of a Gunfighter, there were actually two directors. The first was a TV director whom Widmark didn't particularly like, so Widmark got the director off the job and replaced by better-known film director Don Siegel. Siegel didn't think it was fair to take credit for another man's work, and the DGA eventually reached the compromise that neither director really had directorial control, coming up with a pseudonym directors could use in future under exceptional circumstances.

As for the movie itself, it's not the world's worst movie by any means, although it's also not the greatest. For those who like the sort of western about the changing society, they'll probably enjoy Death of a Gunfighter; for regular people, it might be a bit slow and feeling like not a whole lot is happening.

Luis Buñuel does the Twilight Zone

Some months back, one of the TCM Imports movies was Luis Buñuel's movie The Exterminating Angel. Since the plot synopsis sounded interesting and didn't mention Buñuel by name, I decided to record it and have a go.

The movie opens up with an establishing shot of a Calle de la Providencia, presumably in Mexico City although I don't think any specific location is given, and one of the mansions on the street. As the movie opens, one of the servants is leaving the house, basically quitting his job, for unstated reasons. A couple of the other servants also feel ill at ease, although they don't quite know why.

The servants are supposed to be preparing dinner for their bosses and a bunch of well-to-do guests, but it's a shockingly late dinner, past 11:00 PM. (Granted, I work the early shift so I eat on Old People's Time, but 11:00 seems way too late for anybody, except possibly people who work a weird shift that doesnt let them eat a big main meal beforehand.) The guests have the sort of conversation you'd expect at such a dinner party, and retire to the salon where one of the guets plays baroque music on the piano.

After that, it's time to leave... except that for some reason, nobody does leave. Not only do they not go home, they all decide to sleep in the salon, no guest rooms for anybody. And when they wake up, everybody feels as though they can't leave for some reason nobody's able to state. They can't even go to the kitchen to get food and water, much less get out of the house. Obviously, if things go on like this, they'll starve to death.

Meanwhile, outside, the authorities realize something strange is going on after nobody leaves the house for a couple of days. Not only that, but they're not able to have contact with anybody inside the house. You'd think they could just walk in but, sort of like in Village of the Damned, there's a sort of invisible cordon that nobody is able to get past that prevents them from entering the house.

Conditions start to deteriorate inside the house what with the lack of food. (Never mind that nobody mentions the bathroom, unless there was one just off the salon that they were able to use.) They also have ever more absurd thoughts and hallucinations. Will anybody be able to get out alive? And just what is going on, really?

As The Exterminating Angel went on, I found myself liking it less and less. Then I had the inspiration of comparing it to an episode of The Twilight Zone, hoping that would get me to like the movie. But no luck. First, none of the characters here are particularly interesting and they don't have any sort of back story to flesh things out. That, and episodes of The Twilight Zone resolved themselves in a half hour minus commercials. The Exterminating Angel goes on for over 90. It doesn't work, as much as some peopel may want it to simply because of the stellar reputation Luis Buñuel has.

I suppose if you like arthouse stuff that the goodthinkful critics praise, then you'll like The Exterminating Angel. But it wasn't my thing at all.

The original platinum blonde

Actress Jean Harlow is fairly well-known as a platinum blonde bombshell. I blogged about her movie Bombshell back in 2014, but she also made a movie called Platinum Blonde, early in her career before she went over to MGM. Indeed, Harlow is only billed third here. TCM ran it a few months back, and not having seen it before, I decided to record it.

The actress getting top billing here is Loretta Young, even though hers isn't the biggest character in the story. Young plays Gallagher, a columnist at the Post, where she works with star reporter Stew Smith (tragic Robert Williams). Smith gets called into the editor's office to tell him to get a big story. The Schuylers are one of those wealthy families out on Long Island who don't want any sort of scandal. But they've got a son who's made a big mistake by getting involved with a chorus girl and writing a bunch of love letters to her. She's threatening to sue, and rumor has it Mrs. Schuyler's (Louise Closser Hale) lawyer has paid a substantial sum to get those letters back. Stew should go to the Schuyler mansion to find out whether the rumors are in fact true.

This is where we meet Jean Harlow. She plays Ann Schuyler, the kid sister to Michael, the brother with the dalliances, although he's a rather minor character in this whole thing. Ann is completely innocent in this whole scandal, and it certainly wouldn't do to harm her by printing the story. A reporter from a rival paper shows up at the same time as Smith, and the lawyer bribes both of them not to print the story. Or attempts to; the rival reporter takes the bribe but not Smith. This is where Ann implores him not to hurt her by printing the story. However, he does so anyway.

The next day, at a speakeasy, we see Stew bragging to Gallagher about how he got the story, and about how he's going to go back to the Schuyler mansion to see Ann because he's fallen in love with her. He has an excuse to go back, having taken a book from the Schuyler library, but unsurprisingly Ann would rather not have anything to do with Stew. We also see here that Gallagher has the hots for Stew, but has never been able to tell him.

Stew has another reason for wanting to see the Schuylers. He was able to obtain the letters the chorus girls had, and is willing to sell them back to the Schuylers. That gets Ann to perk up her ears. When she fixes lunch for him, the two start to develop feelings for each other despite the previous rancor between them.

Logically, however, we know that Stew and Ann aren't really right for each other. Either that, or Ann isn't really right for her social class. But we've got a fairly long way to go before finding out which resolution we're going to get.

Platinum Blonde is an interesting if imperfect movie. A lot of people have suggested that Young and Harlow are miscast here and should have been given each other's roles. In many ways that makes some sense, but I don't know if the filmgoing public or the studios had realized yet just what they had in Harlow. Put her in a wisecracking journalist (think Torchy Blane) role here, and she'd be great. Young is made to be too muted and wasn't suited to the brassy nature that works best here. Likewise, Harlow isn't really the stodgy heiress, something Young could have done in her sleep.

As for Williams, he does very well as the star of the proceedings. Sadly, he suffered a ruptured appendix a few days after the movie's release and that killed him. Who knows what he would have been able to bring to the screen had he survived. Direction is by Frank Capra (including middle initial, apparently not famous enough to be the one and only Frank Capra), and the movie certainly has his touches evident.

Despite some flaws, Platinum Blonde is a lot of fun and one not to be missed.

Irma the Sweet

TCM ran a night of Shirley MacLaine's films not too long ago. One of the films they ran then but that I hadn't posted on before is coming up again: Irma La Douce, tomorrow (June 10) at noon.

A narrator (apparently an uncredited Louis Jourdan) tells us about a particular working-class section of Paris that's up all night as opposed to some of the more well-to-do parts; the reason it never sleeps is because, well, the women there sleep for money. (OK. Sorry for the terrible pun.) Intersperesed throughout the opening credits is one such prostitute, Irma (Shirley MacLaine), whom we see giving different clients different reasons on why she became a prostitute.

The prostitutes are able to ply their trade mostly because the cop that patrols the beat looks the other way. Well, at least he looks the other way for a price, being on the take. He goes to the café run by Moustache (Lou Jacobi), where a lot of the prostitutes and their pimps, including Irma's pimp Hippolyte, gather; it's there that the cop gets his bribes paid. At least, until the police commanders go through the regular schedule of assigning rookie cops to their beats.

Nestor (Jack Lemmon) has been assigned to this particular part of Paris, and he's a decidedly honest cop. But one who's also a bit of a naïf, as he seems to believe Irma's excuses when he asks her about what she does. When he figures out what the women do, he has a whole bunch of them arrested and taken down to the station. Things don't go quite the way Nestor expects, however, as somebody higher up apparently wants to use the prostitutes as a safety valve. Nestor gets framed for bribery and summarily fired.

And yet, Nestor decides he's going to return to the neighborhood where everything went wrong. Then, in a wacky twist, he becomes friens with Irma, and tries to "save" her from her pimp. He does, but at a price of becoming a kept man. He moves in with Irma, but she insists that it's unbecoming for a prostitute not to be able to support herself, or even the man she's with. She very much believes that Nestor shouldn't have a job.

So Nestor comes up with a bizarre scheme of his own. He'll take an overnight job at the butcher's market, while also coming up with an alter ego, the British "Lord X". As Lord X, he'll become the sole client of Irma, with the money he makes at the meat market going to pay for Lord X's dalliances with Irma. Of course, Hippolyte is still in the background, and Irma wonders why Nestor is always so tired. And Nestor has not yet thought of a way to end this scheme. The way he picks, however, doesn't quite work....

It's a wonder how director Billy Wilder was able to get Irma La Douce made, since the Production Code was still in effect, even though it was beginning to weaken. It's based on a French stage musical, and you can see why Wilder would have liked the material, although the songs were more or less excised from the movie. (My understanding is that composer André Previn's musical themes here are based on the songs from the musical, but there's no singing of note.)

However, Irma La Douce is a bit of a one-joke movie, and unlike Some Like It Hot where the joke is only stretched to two hours, and the joke doesn't really begin until a good 20-30 minutes in, Irma La Douce runs over 140 minutes and the joke gets staler much more quickly. It also doesn't help that both Lemmon and MacLaine seem a bit miscast here. They both try hard and are definitely professional, but I'm sorry to say that Irma La Douce is not one of Billy Wilder's greatest movies.

Touched by a Mink

Many years back, well before I started the blog, I saw the Cary Grant/Doris Day romantic comedy That Touch of Mink. I never got to blog about it, so when Cary Grant was TCM's Star of the Month and they got the rights to show it, I recorded it in order that I could finally watch it again to do a blog post on it.

Under the opening credits, we get to meet both Grant and Day's characters. Grant is Philip Shayne, an executive who rides through Manhattan in a chauffeured limousine. Day plays Cathy Timberlake, an unemployed computer operator in the days when computers meant punch-card programming and a device that took up a whole room. As she's on her way to the unemployment office, Philip's limousine accidentally drives through a puddle, splasing it all over Cathy and ruining her outfit. He wants to make it up to her, so sends his executive assistant Roger (Gig Young) out to try to find her.

Cathy, meanwhile, is facing trouble at the unemployment office, as the man in charge of her case, Beasley (John Astin) keeps putting the moves on her, which is thoroughly unprofessional and should have gotten him fired even in those days, let alone today. She lives with her best friend Connie (Audrey Meadows), who works at the Automat across the street from Shayne's office. So it's only natural that Shayne is going to see Cathy on the street and get Roger to talk to her.

Both of them would like to show Philip what-for, so Roger brings Cathy up to the office. However, Cathy is so totally taken by Philip that it's love at first sight for her. And it's similarly love at first sight for Philip. And since he's fabulously wealthy, he's able to take Cathy all over the place and do things that no mere mortal could do, like get Cathy into the dugout at a Yankees baseball game, which is an excuse for cameos for a couple of the Yankees' stars of the day.

But it's fairly quickly that Cathy realizes the relationship is getting serious, which means the possibility of sex -- and sex outside of marriage is a somewhat controversial thing for the early 1960s. Cathy is beginning to think she'd rather be married. At the same time, Cathy and Philip's friends are having misunderstandings of their own, with Connie still wondering whether Philip is taking advantage of her, while Roger seeing an analyst who completely gets the situation wrong.

Cathy finally comes to the conclusion that she's going to have to force the issue. She goes back to Beasley, and gets him to take her out in such a way that Philip will absolutely find out and do whatever it takes to win her back, leading to a climax that is madcap and more reminiscent of the old screwball comedies, with an ending that satisfies the Production Code.

That Touch of Mink is a physically pretty movie to watch, with lovely color showing off early 1960s design as it actually was (more or less), and not the idealized view people today have of the Kennedy era. As for the story, it feels really dated, and I hate to say that both Cary Grant and Doris Day are much too old for their roles. They do the best they can, and they're both still appealing as actors, but at times I can't help but want to reach through the screen and smack the writers.

But the appeal of Grant and Day makes That Touch of Mink a passable enough movie with flaws that some people are going to find easier to overlook than I did.

Woman Chases Man

Recently, while browsing through the Roku Channel (I really hate that name, since there's a bunch of channels in addition to all the streaming stuff) app, I was alerted to a new-to-me movie that sounded interesting, with a cast including several old stars whose movies I tend to enjoy, so I watched it. That movie was Woman Chases Man.

Kenneth Nolan (Joel McCrea) is a wealthy young man on a transatlantic liner coming home from Europe, about to surprise his fahter B.J. (Charles Winninger) when he gets home with the news that he's about to pop the question to Nina (Leona Maricle, and if you haven't heard that name before that might be a sign as to which character Kenneth will wind up with in the final reel) Tennyson. However, Dad surprises him first, with a collect radio call to the liner (in the days when this sort of thing would have been monstrously expensive) asking for money. However, Kenneth has heard it before.

Meanwhile, waiting outside B.J.'s office are a bunch of process servers. B.J. is no longer rich; his late wife had half of the couple's money, and when she died, she made certain the son got half of it so he'd have something to start on and so that B.J. wouldn't spend it all. B.J. isn't a bad guy; it's just that he has a habit of picking hare-brained inventions that won't work in real life and wind up costing him a bunch of money. The latest scheme, at least, doesn't sound so bad: a property development of planned houses for the lower social classes, to be called Nolan Heights. But he needs $100,000 to keep the creditors at bay.

Not knowing this is Virginia Travis (Miriam Hopkins). She goes to the building here B.J.'s office is along with a letter of introduction telling Nolan that she's an architect who would be good for the Nolan Heights project. Not that she has any clue that Nolan doesn't have the money to hire her, or anybody else, on. However, her moxie is able to drive the process servers away so the elder Nolan is going to see her. She faints, being in as bad a financial state as B.J. is and not having eaten in two days.

All this gives Dad an idea. Virginia should use her feminine wiles on Kenneth to get him to propose to her, or at least to sign a check for that $100,000 that Dad needs. That latter isn't going to be so easy, since as I said earlier Kenneth has seen all of the schemes up close and seen his father fritter away his money. Kenneth isn't about to let him blow the other half of the money that Mom had when she died. The former -- getting Kenneth to fall in love -- isn't going to be easy either, since as we know Kenneth is bring his girlfriend home with him.

Except that we eventually learn Nina isn't wealthy, and the "Uncle" Henri she's traveling with is really her boyfriend. She's just a gold-digger. And, since we know who the two leads are, we know where it's all going to go. As is so often the case with a movie like Woman Chases Man, the movie is more about how the characters get where we all know they're going.

Unfortunately, Woman Chases Man is one of the weaker screwball comedies I've seen. The situations are even phonier than in most screwball comedies, and the characters are almost all people it's hard to have sympathy with, the possible exception being Kenneth. But even he does a 180 just in time for the final reel. Of note, as a friend of Virginia's pressed into service as a butler, is a young Broderick Crawford.

Woman Chases Man isn't a particularly good movie. But at least it's mercifully short. And the print Roku showed had relatively few commercials -- I think 8½ minutes for a 70-minute movie. Traditional cable channels would probably have had 20 minutes.

Cornelius Ryan

Today is June 6, which is of course the anniversary of the D-Day invasion in Normandy, and this year it's an exact number of decades. So TCM is running a day full of films about the invasion. One that was sitting on my DVR was The Longest Day, airing at 11:00 PM. So with that in mind I watched it to do a post in conjunction with tonight's showing.

The Longest Day is based upon the book by military historian Cornelius Ryan, a man who wrote sprawling epics trying to cover World War II battles from a multitude of angles, his other famous book turned into a movie being A Bridge Too Far (that one is also on my DVR because it has former Star of the Month Dirk Bogarde in the cast). But Ryan's books tried to present things in as factual a way as possible; they're not historical or military fiction.

As a result, the film version of The Longest Day is also mostly a docudrama on an extremely grand scale. A very large cast (named only at the end) portrays the invasion from the point of view of the Americans, British, French, and the Germans. In fact, it starts off a few days or weeks before the invasion. The Nazis knew full well that the Allies were going to be invading on the western front, although the key question was where. The most obvious place to invade would be across the Pas-de-Calais/Strait of Dover as that's the closest point on the Continent to England. With that in mind, the Allies knew that this was also going to be the most heavily fortified area, which is why they thought about invading somewhere farther west despite the English Channel being wider there.

The preparations for the invasion were meticulous and complicated. Soldiers were getting antsy having to sit around in the UK and wait. But at the same time, there was the question of whether to invade in bad weather; rough seas seems like a major no-no for an amphibious invasion and the Nazis knew this. Indeed the Nazis as portrayed here all seemed surprised that the Allies hadn't invaded in May.

Additionally, the invasion is personalized somewhat by having some of the smaller parts of the invasion focused on, such as the need to take and hold a particular bridge or how paratroopers were dropped in on the night between June 5 and 6 before the beach landings at dawn. And then when the landing does come, the Americans under Brig. Gen. Cota (Robert Mitchum) get bogged down on Omaha; it's vital that they break through for the invasion as a whole to succeed.

As we know from history, the invasion did succeed. But does the movie succeed? For the most part, I'd say yes. The screenplay does a good job of explaining everything that's going on without being too dry or didactic. Not having opening credits apart from one title card showing the title of the picture is also a big plus; there are so many big-name actors here that looking for them all from the credits would be a bit distracting. Coming off best is probably John Wayne, who I think has the biggest role as a commander of paratroopers. The wordless look of horror on his face when he sees those paratroopers who died because they were off course and parachuted right into town says more than any dialogue (and John Wayne's delivery isn't the most helpful in that regard) does.

Others who have smaller roles are Henry Fonda and Edmond O'Brien as American generals; Richard Burton as an RAF man; Curd Jürgens as a German chief of staff; and many many more. A lot of the Americans only get one or two scenes, while there are fewer Germans so all those actors get more screen time.

Where The Longest Day doesn't always work, however, is in the pacing. The subject is sprawling, and there's not really enough done either with the subplots or anything to narrow it down. The result is that of a relentless slowness. I understand that the invasion itself took a long time, but cinematically it feels like a whole lot of the same thing happening and not ending, especially once we hit June 6.

Overall, however, The Longest Day is a very well-made movie and one that, if you haven't seen before, you really should.

King of Hockey

For those of you who are ice hockey fans, the Stanley Cup finals are coming up soon. With that in mind, I watched the movie King of Hockey.

The Violets are the champions of one of the minor leagues, since Warner Bros. couldn't use the NHL and the league didn't have much popularity outside of Canada anyway. So the Violets are barnstorming in the offseason to make money, taking their talents to one of the colleges that is rather a surprise to have a hockey team at all since Warner Bros. probably filmed a building in Los Angeles, if not something on the backlot, that looks like it has the sort of tree not suitable for a school with long winters.

Anyhow, the star of the college hockey team is Gabby Dugan (Dick Purcell), playing in what he thinks is his final game since he's planning to hang up his skates after college and make the real money selling bonds, something that very obviously dates this movie if you couldn't figure that out already. It being the mid-1930s and there still being a Depression on, lots of 20-something men thought they too could sell bonds, so Gabby isn't able to get him a good job. That makes him go crawling back to Trotter (Joseph Crehan), coach of Violets, looking for that job that Trotter had suggested was open.

Gabby rooms with Jumbo (Wayne Morris), and on their day off from the team, they decide to go to a commercial ice rink, because Jumbo knows that's where a hockey player meets the classy women. Jumbo meets young Peggy "Princess" O'Rourke, there taking skating lessons and escorted by her adult sister Kathleen (Anne Nagel). Gabby meets Kathleen and for him it's love at first sight, although for her it's just a nice day out and fun to meet a hockey player, but that's the end of it. At least until Peggy suggests the family go see a hockey game since none of them have ever done so before.

Meanwhile, professional gambler Nick Torga (George Stone) has been betting on hockey, and losing by betting against Gabby. He gets the brilliant idea to have Gabby, if not throw games, at least do the hockey equivalent of basketball point-shaving and take penalties that will keep him off the ice. Gabby sees Kathleen sitting behind the penalty box, so he decides he will in fact take an inordinate number of penalties so he can hit on her, not because of anything Nick wanted. But Nick sees the penalties and expects Gabby to keep doing Nick's business.

Jumbo is no dummy, and since he knows Gabby talked to Torga, he thinks Gabby is on the take too. Jumbo is ticked, and gets in a fight with Gabby that concusses Gabby and affects his eyesight. This combined with the dalliances with a professional gambler get Gabby kicked off the team, after which he goes blind. Except that it's one of those forms of movie blindness that can be totally cured, if only the victim gets "an operation".

King of Hockey is one of those ultra-B movies under an hour long. So there's not much of a story here, at least not much original. And not exactly a stellar cast, either. It's all fairly dumb stuff, but at the same time a fairly good example of the genre of movies even more B than the studio stuff that ran in the 60-70 minute range. And at least Wayne Morris got to go on to supporting roles in A movies.