Gotta love those retro looks at the future

I've mentioned in the past that one of the things that's always fun about old science fiction movies set in the future is how much the future in question is rooted to the time period in which the film was made. Another interesting entry into that genre is one from Hammer Films in late 1969: Moon Zero Two. It's got an airing on TCM tomorrow, July 9, at 3:00 PM, so I watched the previous showing from my DVR to be able to do the post on it.

The movie starts off with some trippy and animated opening credits, backed by another hilariously dated title song, although at least this time it's not as much of a misfit for the genre as with Anzio that I recently mentioned. After the credits, we're transported to Moon Zero Two, a colony on the moon, circa 2021, so well in the future from when the movie was made, but in the past now. (At least, all the synopses say 2021; I thought I heard mention of the 23rd century. On the other hand, a plaque of people who died colonizing the moon didn't have enough names on it to be 250 years in the future.) Kemp (James Olson) and Korminski are going through lunar customs, getting dinged for a communications satellite they've brought, since electronics imports are regulated. Except, as they point out, the satellite has malfunctioned, being one of the satellites that provides communications to the far side of the moon. So for the time being, there's no communication with the other side, which as you might guess is a key plot point later in the movie.

J.J. Hubbard (Warren Mitchell) is a businessman who is interested in the mining claims on the moon. He and his men have learned of a small asteroid that in their spectranalysis that the asteroid contains extremely high levels of corundum, which for those not in the know is the mineral that forms sapphires and rubies depending upon color and the other trace elements in the corundum. They'd like to get a hold of that asteroid for fairly obvious reasons, but corraling something the size of an earth-sized duplex house is difficult even in the microgravity of space. They have a plan to get someone to crash the asteroid into the moon, where they can claim it, so Hubbard offers Kemp a new ship in exchange for doing this job of questionable legality.

Meanwhile, back at the cantina bar on Zero Two, a woman named Clementine (Catherine Schell, no relation to Maximilian as far as I can tell) shows up. She and her entire family have long been interested in mining, with Dad having wandered around the earth looking for precious metals. The moon is a great place to do that, so Clementine's brother decamped to the new frontier to get a two-year claim on a plot of lunar land. That lease is almost up, but worse, Clementine hasn't heard from her brother in several days. She's worried about him, and would like somebody to ferry her to where her brother's claim is to see if he's OK.

Clementine is asking Kemp for help because he's got that spare ship he's not using, and because getting to the claim over land is prohibitively long. Now, we know that Kemp is kinda-sorta working for Hubbard, so there is a conflict there. But it's not the only way the two plot lines are going to come together, as we shall see when Kemp and Clementine finally get to her brother's claim.

Moon Zero Two was, as I said at the beginning, filmed in Britain in 1969, and the movies look at the moon is very seriously (or humorously, I supposed) stuck in 1969 despite ostensibly being set decades later. The fashions are mod gone wrong, with garishly colored hairstyles to boot. And then there's the floor show at the moonbase bar, which is really wild, with groups of ladies in tight costumes doing ridiculous dances. The production design for the moon bases has decidedly not advanced past 1970. The first primitive cell phones were still a few years away. But the look of the movie is something that's so badly dated that it's trippy and fun.

One just wishes one could say the same for the rest of Moon Zero Two. The plot doesn't seem much more fleshed out than what one could get on episodic television, while the acting is wooden at best. The special effects range from "trying hard, but don't have anything better than 1969 technology" on the good side to bad miniatures on the bad side. Moon Zero Two is a mixed bag that objectively has more misses than hits, but still should probably be seen once just to figure out how a movie could go wrong.

Yentl

TCM is running a double feature of Barbra Streisand films tonight. I've blogged about the second, The Way We Were at 10:30 PM, before. The first is Yentl at 8:00 PM. I was too young to see it in the theater when it came out, and never got around to watching it in the intervening years. But the last time TCM ran it I recorded it; with it showing up again in short order I decided to watch that showing in order to be able to do the blog post on it.

Yentl was famous in its day for, I think, its unique plot and the fact that Barbara Streisand had greater responsibility for a major motion picture than almost any woman had had up to that point. It's based on a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Jewish writer born in what would now be Poland but was then part of the Russian Empire, emigrating to the US to escape the Nazis and becoming a writer in Yiddish. Streisand had read the story and since the time of Funny Girl had wanted to make a movie version of it, but for various reasons that took a long time.

The title of the original Singer story, Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy, gives a good quick synopsis of the story. Streisand plays Yentl, a seeming spinster living with her father, Rabbi Mendel (Nehemiah Persoff), in a shtetl somewhere in Eastern Europe in 1904. Dad teaches local boys the Talmud, the commentaries on the Torah and the basis for Jewish religious law and dispute resolution. Yentl having overheard all her father's teachings, would like to study Talmud herself. But she's female, and since women are the only ones who can carry babies to term and provide the next generation of Jews, that and other domestic duties are a Jewish woman's lot in life, not Torah and Talmud study. Yentl chafes at this, studying with her father in secret and never getting married despite being in her mid-20s, which is seen as a bit scandalous for the early 20th century.

And then Dad dies, with Yentl reading the Kaddish at his funeral, something that is also seen as a bit scandalous because Orthodox Judaism even in its religous services kept men and women largely separate. The local women come to "help" clean Yentl's house of her father's things that she would no longer have any use for, but Yentl is aghast when they want to take the books. So she gets a brilliant idea. She cuts off her hear, starts wearing men's clothing, and runs away to the big city, where she'll try to pass herself off as "Anshel", using the name of her dead brother, so that she can study Talmud.

This being Barbara Streisand, you have to wonder how anybody would have taken the ruse that she's a man seriously; indeed, a major plot point in the movie is Yentl trying to navigate keeping her secret a secret. This becomes complicated when she meets Avigdor (Mandy Patinkin), a fellow yeshiva student. You get the impression that deep down inside, he already knows Yentl's secret, although the screenplay suggests he doesn't. He too is in mourning, for his late brother who died of, well, that's another plot point for later in the movie. Avigdor has been matched by the matchmaker with Hadass (Amy Irving), a woman who really does love Avigdor, and the feeling is mutual. In theory, Hadass and Avigdor should marry, Yentl should emigrate to America and become a Reform Jew, although even the Reform Jews weren't ordaining women until several decades later.

But that would end the movie fairly quickly. Instead, Hadass' family learns the truth about Avigdor's brother, which is that he killed himself, suggesting there might be mental illness in Avigdor's family and thus a valid reason to call off the marriage. Yentl as Anshel then marries Hadass in order to keep all three of them close together. Yentl obviously is not able to consummate the marriage, and this by itself should be a reason to invalidate the marriage. But it's still going to take a while to get to that point.

At the time of its release, Yentl both received critical praise and was the butt of quite a few jokes, picking up Razzie nominations as well as Oscar nominations. Part of the problem is that I didn't find Streisand believable as a man. Another part is that, in order to get the movie made, Streisand and her collaborators turned the movie into, if not a full musical like Funny Girl, something that was dominated by Streisand's singing. (The ending sequence also made me think of Streisand on the tugboat in Funny Girl. To me, this gave Yentl entirely the wrong tone.

On the other side, part of getting the movie made and I'd guess keeping costs down involved filming in Europe, with a lot of location shooting being done in Communist Czechoslovakia. The cinematography is lovely, and I think the best part of the movie. Streisand co-wrote the screenplay, and also directed. While neither is bad, I really did get the impression at a lot of points of a bit of self-indulgence in the direction.

So while I'd give a decidedly mixed review to Yentl, it's also the sort of movie you should definitely watch and judge for yourself.

Robert Mitchum in another invasion movie

Back on June 6 I mentioned The Longest Day about the D-Day invasion of Normandy, in which a ton of Hollywood and international stars, including Robert Mitchum, have roles of varying sizes. Several years later, for Italian producer Dino di Laurentiis, he made a movie about a different World War II invasion: Anzio.

After a horrendously awful song sung by Jack Jones over the opening credits that makes it sound like one of those 1960s potboilers instead of a war film, we see a bunch of Allied soldiers somewhere in southern Italy. The Allies had taken Sicily relatively early since it was an island, while getting across to the mainland was somewhat more difficult. They were able to take some of southern Italy before the Nazi commander in Italy, Field Marshal Kesselring (played in Anzio by Wolfgang Preiss), was able to set up a defensive line that more or less stalemated the Allies as winter was setting in.

Obviously, the Allies were going to try to break out somehow, and while the generals were preparing, the grunts are getting all rowdy in one of the palazzos, observed by war correspondent Dick Ennis (Robert Mitchum playing a composite character; most of not all of the Allies are either wholly fictional or composites based on real militry officers). But then some commanders come in, which can only mean one thing: the big invasion is about to being.

Thankfully, although this is winter, it's Italian winter, so it's not bitter cold like the Allies would get the following winter when they pushed eastward from Normandy, meaning that another invasion is doable if not necessarily easy. The big question is, how much resistance are they going to face from the Germans. In command is American general Lesley (Arthur Kennedy), who wants to make certain the Allies can secure the beachhead, that being necessary before further advances can be made.

So the Allies land at Anzio, and as Gen. Lesley sets about securing the location, everybody seems surprised at the lack of resistance that they're facing. Indeed, the lookout points for snipers seem to be completely empty. With that in mind, Ennis procures a driver and sets out for Rome, which isn't all that far away from the landing site. They even get all the way to the outskirts of Rome, basically facing no resistance whatsoever. The Allies, it appears, could just take Rome right away, which would be a major victory.

However, the difficulty lies in getting in touch with the commanding officers and getting them to believe that the Allies could in fact advance. Lesley has some reason to believe that the Germans are in fact setting a trap, trying to get the Allies to overextend themselves after which the Germans can really put a hurting on the Allies. This proves to be wrong, however, and this delay gives the Germans vital time to fortify their position, more or less trapping the Allies on the beach.

It's not hard to see why someone would want to make a movie about Anzio, and with the movie being made in the late 1960s, it's also not hard to see why moviemakers would want to make something that suggests the futility of war. However, there's something about Anzio that makes it come off as not quite right, already starting from that opening song. I think what goes wrong has a lot to do with the script, and a sense of di Laurentiis wanting to make an epic on a tight budget.

The cast is professional although a lot of them are underused. They do the best they can with the material, but ultimately, Anzio comes off as another of those movies that probably could have been so much more than the final product we get.

Clickety Clack

I've got quite a few foreign films on my DVR that I need to watch before they expire. One of those is the Akira Kurosawa film Dodes'ka-den.

The movie is, like Street Scene, a look at the various inhabitants of a poor neighborhood, although in this case, the residents are much, much poorer, basically on the edges of society in conditions much closer to a shantytown or the Brazilian favelas than a tenement. The movie's title comes from an onomatopoetic word for the sound that rail wheels make on a track. A young man lives with his single mother and they both seem to have substantial mental problems. She engages in very loud religious chanting, while the son goes off to "work" as a streetcar conductor, although none of it is real. The son prays for his mom to be granted intelligence by Buddha; left unmentioned is how the two of them survive.

We are then introduced to other inhabitants of the neighborhood, all of them poor, but some vastly poorer than the others:
One man makes hairbrushes by hand, supporting a wife and several kids, with the wife getting pregnant again. Eventually, the eldest son says he gets bullied by other kids at school saying that Mom is sleeping around and none of the kids are the dad's biological kids.
Two couples appear to be in an open relationship, in that the husbands, who both work menial jobs, come home and may or may not, depending on their moods, go home to the women who are their legal wives.
One kid begs for food, and then goes "home" to his father, who lives in the back of Citroën 2CV; not being able to cook the food properly, the kid eventually gets food poisoning.
Another woman is raising her adolescent niece, who is being pursued by an adolescent sake delivery boy. The woman's husband is an alcoholic. Eventually, the niece gets pregnant, leading to violence.
An old guy who worked as a silversmith is the sort of wise old man of the neighborhood, letting a thief take his cash when the thief inadvertently tries to steal his tools.

Eventually, the stories get resolved, more or less, although the movie runs at a slow pace and it takes a while for those stories to resolve.

Alicia Malone presented the movie as part of TCM's Imports, and mentioned in her outro that Dodes'ka-den is a movie that divides critics. It was a box-office failure in Kurosawa's native Japan, while some latter-day critics give it high praise. I tend towards the somewhat negative side. For me, that's largely because of the film's structure. If it had been written as a traditional anthology, with each story getting its own segment, I think it would work a lot better. But it's more like one of those ensemble cast movies, except that the stories don't work so well together.

But because of the decidedly mixed reaction, Dodes'ka-den is one you'll probably want to watch and judge for yourself.

Briefs for the weekend of July 5-7, 2024

With the new month having started on Monday, it's time for new programming features. I mentioned Star of the Month Eva Marie Saint getting her tribute on Thursdays, but on Fridays there's going to be a look at movies of the 1970s. It kicks off tonight at 8:00 PM with New York, New York, a movie that I had on my old DVR before we moved but never got around to watching. Unfortunately for me, the second one, Looking for Mr. Goodbar at 11:00 PM, is another of those that for whatever reason TCM seems to have rights issues involving streaming as opposed to traditional cable or satellite. (No, I don't get why those issues would be a thing, or why the most recent round of contract talks didn't solve those issues.) So for those of us with YouTube TV, Looking for Mr. Goodbar doesn't seem to be available. I had it on my old DVR ages ago but only got halfway through watching it for some reason.

Speaking of 1970s movies, Robert Towne, a screenwriter best known for some of his 1970s work like Chinatown and Shampoo, died earlier this week aged 89. As of right now, it doesn't look as though any of Towne's work is part of the salute to 1970s films. The Last Detail, I think, showed up as part of the Two for One mini-series that finished up at the end of June.

As for stuff on my DVR that's coming up on TCM, you are going to get a whole series of such posts over the next week, as there are four or five movies I haven't blogged about before that will be showing up. As for what I have previously blogged about, there's most of the FXM Retro lineup, while over on TCM, The Reluctant Debutante is on this afternoon at 4:00 PM, so there's not much time left to catch it.

I put the entire weekend in the title of the post, however, in large part because I wanted to mention that The Flag is showing up as part of Silent Sunday Nights at 12:45 AM on July 8 (that's in the Eastern time zone; further west it's still late in the evening of July 7). I mentioned it ages ago; it's a short movie that was produced by the Technicolor company as a way of trying to show off their two-strip Technicolor process. Francis X. Bushman plays George Washington, who gets Betsy Ross to make the first American flag. At the time I wrote a post on it, the movie had not yet fallen into the public domain. It should be now, but I wouldn't know who holds elements of the movie that might put it onto one of the video sites.

TCM Star of the Month July 2024: Eva Marie Saint

Eva Marie Saint and Karl Malden in On the Waterfront (July 4, 8:00 PM)

We're into a new month, which as always means that we get new programming subjects on TCM. For the Star of the Month, TCM is giving us the films of Eva Marie Saint, mostly because today, July 4, is her 100th birthday. Not that Saint made a whole lot of movies; TCM's tribute contains 15 or 16 of them, I think (there's a TBA slot and tonight includes her 2014 appearance at the TCM Film Festival). Those movies will air every Thursday in prime time.

Of course, Saint won the Oscar for On the Waterfront, so it's no surprise that this is the movie that kicks off the salute. Coming up on the 11th is Raintree County, which will be the subject of a full-length post. It aired early this year and again in June. I was thinking about doing a post on it in June, but when I noticed that Saint was Star of the Month in July and Raintree County would be airing, I decided to hold that post back since I had several other movies that were on my DVR and coming up on TCM to post about.

To be honest, I didn't have a whole lot of photos of Saint, and I've been remiss in not getting screenshots/publicity shots from movies to illustrate my posts with. The one other Saint photo I could find on my hard drive was of her, Don Murray, and Lloyd Nolan in A Hatful of Rain, which concludes tonight's Saint lineup in the early hours of the morning. It's another fine dramatic performance. I first blogged about it in 2011, but the photo was from a birthday salute to Lloyd Nolan (a very underrated supporting actor) in 2014.

The Gull

With me already having written one post for today, my next post is going to be a bit briefer of a review than normal, although that's also in part because it's a movie based on a classic work of literature: a 1968 international production of The Sea Gull.

The movie is of course based on the play by Anton Chekhov, which probably should have been originally translated as just The Gull since the movie isn't set anywhere near the sea. Instead, it's set at a country estate somewhere not far south of Moscow where bureaucrat Sorin lives. His sister Arkadina (Simone Signoret) visits; she's a successful actress whose son Konstantin (David Warner) would like to be a writer but is writing more daring stuff that the public doesn't care for.

More successful with the public is Trigorin (James Mason), but he doesn't much care for the sort of stuff that sells commercially; he's also carrying on an affair with Arkadina. And then, living over on the next estate, is young Nina (Vanessa Redgrave). Konstantin has been pursuing her, but she meets someone successful like Trigorian and she's immediately smitten with that achievement. The various characters see each other and philosophize a lot, to the point that the whole proceedings get boring.

Eventually, it comes time for everyone not living in the area to go home, except that Nina goes off with Trigorin to become his mistress. Two years pass, and most of the same characters return to Sorin's estate because he's getting to the age where everybody expects him to die soon. There's more philosophizing, and then an ending that's a bit shocking.

Apparently the first performance of the play back in the 1890s was a critical failure and it wasn't until a few years later when a new production was an artistic breakthrough. I'd never seen any version of the play, nor read it, before seeing this version of the movie. All I can say is that having seen this movie, I can understand why the original stage play was a failure. The one thing that the movie has going for it is the settings; the movie was filmed in Sweden with lake areas just outside Stockholm substituting for country Russia, and doing so rather beautifully.

However, I think Signoret is miscast as a Russian actress, while director Sidney Lumet didn't do anything particularly imaginative in the direction. The actors mostly declaim their lines, as if they're not on screen together, and since the movie is slow and talky, none of this really helps the production.

TCM's Roger Corman tribute

Director Roger Corman died in May at he age of 98. Due to his work with American International and directing movies on a budget, followed by his work as a producer, Corman was involved with a lot of movies. So TCM's salute to Corman is a bit different from normal. Rather than a night in prime time or even a 24-hour salute, TCM is giving Corman three nights in prime time.

Those nights will be three consecutive Wednesdays starting tonight and followed on July 10 and July 17. I don't see any particular overriding theme for either of the first two nights, although July 10 starts off with three or four of the Corman films based on works by Edgar Allen Poe. July 17 is a bit different, in that it's movies produced, not directed, by Corman, with several of the films directed by people who would go on to become prominent directors. You can probably guess who those directors are and what the films are.

Suprisingly, I think I've only seen one of the movies airing tonight, The Wasp Woman at 10:45 PM, so I'm looking forward to some of the others. And on July 10, Bloody Mama (technically 2:30 AM on July 11) is definitely worth watching with Shelley Winters playing a character inspired by 30s gangster Ma Barker.

More on the final night of the tribute when it comes up on July 17.

Der Tod in Venedig

One more of the movies that TCM showed when Dirk Bogarde was TCM's Star of the month was Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice, a 1971 adaptation of Thomas Mann's novella. As the book is only a novella, it's a relatively shorter synopsis here. Also, it's been a good 30 years since I read it (in translation although I'd like to think my German is good enough to handle it), so I can't really comment on the differences between the novella and the movie.

The story deals with a writer Gustave von Aschenbach (that's Dirk Bogarde), a widower who needs to get away from the stress of his life in Germany. He plans to go to the Mediterranean for the climate, winding up in Venice. At the hotel, where he dines alone, he sees a family at a table: a mother, several daughters, and an adolescent son (Björn Andrésen) in a sailor suit. Aschenbach considers the boy the apotheosis of the classical Greek standard of beauty.

With that in mind, Aschenbach does what any rational person would do: he starts stalking the family just so he can get glimpses of the boy. He figures out that the family is Polish, and that the boy is probably named Tadeusz, since it sounds like they're referring to him as Tadzio. Aschnebach keeps following the family until the day he dies, which you might have guessed he's going to do considering the title. (I seem to recall the death being mentioned at the beginning of the novella, but again, as I've said, I read it ages ago.)

Another theme in the movie is that, as Aschenbach is following Tadzio around, he sees signs going up in the less touristy parts of Venice in Italian warning the locals and giving Gustav the distinct feeling that there's some sort of epidemic about that the government doesn't want to tell the tourists about lest it destroy that season's tourist trade. He's right, of course, and we can presume it's that disease (likely cholera) that's going to kill Gustave.

I didn't care for the novella, because the main character following Tadzio around is frankly creepy, and not because of the homoeroticism. After all, if it were about an author stalking a girl -- think Lolita -- there would also be a serious creep-out factor involved. As a result, I was hesitant to watch the movie. And I have to admit that I have many of the same problems with the movie that I did with the novella. That's not necessarily the fault of anyone in the movie; it's that the story is one that has natural challenges in making it more palatable. Visconti tries this by turning it into a two-hour affair, with lots of languorous scenes of Venice as it might have looked circa 1910 before it got zillions of tourists of a more modest economic class, and before authorities decided to turn the place into a museum, stopping the rebuilding that was one of the things preventing the city from sinking into the lagoon.

Many of the visuals in Death in Venice are pretty. But for me it wasn't enough to overcome that ugly story.

The Mountain Men

I've got a few more Charlton Heston movies to get through from when he was TCM's Star of the Month last October. One that I hadn't heard of before it showed up last year was The Mountain Men.

If you pay attention to the opening credits, you'll see that the screenplay is by one Fraser Clarke Heston, who is in fact the son of Charlton Heston, and that collaboration may have something to do with why the movie got produced at all. Charlton Heston plays Bill Tyler, a trapper in the days when the Oregon trail was only beginning to become a thing with a miniscule number of people going that far west to farm. It was a time when the white man was still badly outnumbered by the various Indian tribes in the region, and for Bill and his friend Henry (Brian Keith), the Indians in question are Blackfoot and Crow.

One day, Cross Otter, a Crow, and a couple of his companions from the tribe go out looking for Henry and Bill, because the Crow claim the white guys stole their horses. The white guys, for their part, say they're only taking back what had been theirs before the Crow took the horses. This somewhat tense meeting is interrupted by some Blackfoot showing up to start an attack on both groups. In the resulting melee, Bill incapacitates a woman, Running Moon.

Running Moon is the wife of the Blackfoot chief Heavy Eagle, although she's none too happy with the marriage, having been sold into marriage. In fact, that's why she was at the melee: she was trying to run away from Heavy Eagle. She wants Bill to help protect her, but he's only willing to take her to the point where he's supposed to meet the people to whom he's selling his pelts. He's had a squaw accompany him before, and he found her too much work. Never mind that in this case, Heavy Eagle is going to be coming after her. But at the same time, she gives the two trappers information about the legend of a valley that's incredibly rich with beaver pelts. Needless to say, Bill and Henry want to find the place.

Heavy Eagle does in fact find the group, but it is not the climax of the movie, as there's a lot more to go. Running Moon gets taken back by Heavy Eagle (or kidnapped, depending on your point of view), and she vows to escape again. Henry, not being the star, gets badly injured in the attack and may or may not die. Bill is going to have to go through a lot more. Who will survive, and who will end up with whom?

I think it's not hard to see why Charlton Heston would be interested in making this movie, and it's not just because the screenplay was written by his son. The potential is easy to see here. However, at the same time I can see why The Mountain Men isn't a very well-known movie. It doesn't feel all that original, and also feels a bit like a boy's fantasy of the thrilling adventures of life in that era must have been like, instead of the incredibly dangerous grind it most likely was. One big plus is the cinematography, having been filmed in part in Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons in Wyoming and the surrounding national forests.

Fans of westerns will probably enjoy The Mountain Men; for people who aren't the biggest fans of westerns I'd introduce them to other parts of the genre first.