The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean

Last night, I finally got around to watching The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, which I had DVRed back when it was on TCM as part of 31 Days of Oscar, that's how long ago it was. It's available on DVD from the Warner Archive, so I'm OK doing a full-length blog post on the movie. Unfortunately, I can't say the movie is worth watching.

Paul Newman is Roy Bean, who at the beginning of the movie rides up to a brothel in the middle of nowhere in west Texas, west of the Pecos River. He boasts of having robbed a bank, at which point the men and women in the brothel assault Roy and shake him down (literally) for his money, before putting a rope around his neck and having a horse drag him off to his death. Except that the rope snaps and Roy, tended to by Maria Elena (Victoria Principal), recovers. Obviously he wasn't happy with the way he was treated, so he goes back to the brothel and kills the people there.

He finds there was a law book in the brothel, so he turns the place into a saloon/court, calling himself the "Law west of the Pecos". People get brought into his court, and he sentences them to hang, with little or no rhyme or reason. Along the way, he acts like a complete self-righteous jerk, reminding me of the portrayal of Theodore Roosevelt in The Wind and the Lion. (The movie has one scene praising Roosevelt as the best president the country has had.)

Bean also has a thing for singer Lillie Langtry, even though he's never seen or heard her, there not being any movies or records for him to see or hear. But still, he just knows she's unbelievable beautiful and dammit, he wants to see her. This actually leads to Bean's downfall, as his rival Gass (Roddy McDowall) is elected mayor while Bean is away trying to see Langtry in San Antonio.

After Bean is forced out of town, there's a wholly fictitious sequence about the next 20 years ending in the 1920s; in fact, Bean died peacefully in 1903. But in the movie, Bean gets to return to take the town back from the evil Gass.

Sadly, I found the movie wholly unfunny. Paul Newman's Bean (to be fair, it's not Newman's fault, but that of the screenwriters) is, as I said above, a total jerk who shows no respect for the rule of law and is basically a self-centered totalitarian. And this is presented as a good thing; we're supposed to have sympathy for him and root for him. And the whole Lillie Langtry thing was overdone to the point that I didn't give a crap about Bean's creepy obsession. Apparently, the real-life Langtry did visit Bean's town (which had been renamed Langtry) after Bean's death; that's the closing scene in the movie and Bean is portrayed by Ava Gardner. In fact, a number of well-known actors get small parts in which they only appear in a couple of scenes. Anthony Perkins gets one scene when he's burying the original brothel people; Jacqueline Bissett shows up for the last third as Bean's daughter. But overall, I found this Roy Bean such an irritating character that I just wanted to smack him.

Perhaps you should judge for yourself, however; maybe you'll like the movie. There are enough reviewers on IMDb who do.

The Academy has a Youtube channel

I don't know if I've posted to any videos from the channel, but apparently, AMPAS, the folks behind the Oscars, have a Youtube channel dedicated to the Oscars.

I ran across it this morning. Recently, I watched The Bespoke Overcoat, having DVRed it last week when it was on TCM. I was curious to see if it was available on DVD (apparently not) or even on Youtube (unsurprisingly not). I think I've read the Gogol short story on which the short film is loosely based. I say loosely based because I didn't recognize the story. Then again, I may be mixing it up with Gogol's "Nevsky Prospekt"; I'm not the biggest fan of Gogol's work.

Anyhow, when I was looking on Youtube, what I found was the Academy Awards presentation for short subjects the year The Bespoke Overcoat won for two-reelers. I probably should have realized, but the winner for one-reelers was Crashing the Water Barrier.

The Academy's channel allows for embedding, so here's Mickey Rooney presenting the Oscars for short subjects:

A couple of lesser-seen movies coming up

Tonight's TCM lineup is female con artists. This includes Blonde Crazy at 9:45 PM, a movie I thought I'd blogged about before. Joan Blondell and James Cagney go around conning people and trying not to get conned themselves. If memory serves, this is the movie in which Cagney comes into Blondell's hotel room while she's taking a bath and asks her where the $5,000 is, and she replies that it's in her bra!

I blogged about The Young in Heart seven years ago; it's on overnight at 12:45 AM. This is definitely one to watch as pretty much everybody in the ensemble cast gives a good performance.

Finally, I'll mention The Girl From Missouri at 2:30 PM tomorrow. This one has supposedly been released to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, but it doesn't seem to be listed that way on TCM's schedule page. Then again, the schedule page claims West Side Story isn't on DVD either.

There's still stuff new to me

And I don't just mean stuff that's new to everybody, like films that are only hitting the theaters this weekend. TCM is spending much of tomorrow morning and afternoon with Rock Hudson on his birth anniversary, and I have to admit to not having even heard of the first two movies.

The one-sentence plot of Sea Devils (6:30 AM) made me think of To Have and Have Not, which had already been remade once. Rock Hudson is a fisherman from the Channel Islands given the task in the Napoleonic era of rescuing an English spy (Yvonne de Carlo) from France. The idea sounds reasonably interesting, but the reviews don't seem so good.

That's followed at 8:00 PM by A Fine Pair, in which Hudson plays a detective following jewel thief Claudia Cardinale. Sounds like one of the many, many heist movies from the era, which means it doesn't sound terrible, but doesn't sound particularly earth-shattering, either.

It's nice to see TCM bringing us movies that don't get shown all that often, so we can all learn new things. Now I just have to see if I can make enough space on my DVR to catch these two.

TCM Guest Programmer November 2016: Steve Israel

So you were hoping the election season was over. Unfortunately, politics goes on, and we get a politician for this month's TCM Guest Programmer: US Rep. Steve Israel, from Long Island. He's selected four movies, three of them obviously politically-themed, and will be presenting them with Ben Mankiewicz I'd assume:

The Candidate at 8:00 PM, in which Robert Redford runs for Senate. Natalie Wood has a cameo so this one is showing up again later in the month;
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington at 10:00 PM, with James Stewart getting named Senator and finding out how dirty a place Washington is; and
The Best Man at 12:30 AM, about a contested presidential convention. We'll win with Merwin, or maybe we won't.
As for non-political movies, you can't get more apolitical than Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, at 2:30 AM. It's funny because it's true, 70 years on. Just ask anybody who's built or renovated a house.

For some reason, I thought TCM had scheduled A Face in the Crowd to follow Israel's selections. The inimitable Jesse Walker has a good commentary on that and Meet John Doe here, although it was probably more timely last week at this time.

Mary Poppins bares her breasts!

I mentioned the other day after Robert Vaughn died that he was in S.O.B., which I have on my DVR. So I made a point of watching it over the weekend. It's available from the TCM Shop, so I'm comfortable doing a full-length post about it.

The movie starts off rather creepily, with Sally Miles (Julie Andrews) doing a rendition of "Polly Wolly Doodle" on a movie set; obviously, this is a scene in a movie-within-the-movie, as intertitles helpfully tells us after the opening credits. Producer/director Felix Farmer (Robert Mulligan) has just directed his wife Sally in "Night Wind", and the movie has been not just his first flop, but a spectacular flop. Meanwhile, Sally is preparing to divorce Felix. The result is that Felix goes nuts and decides to try to kill himself.

The suicide attempt fails when the gardener, trying to shut off the ignition in Felix' car, accidentally shifts it into gear, sending the car through the garage and ultimately into the ocean. This brings a whole lot of attention in the form of gossip columnist Polly Reed (Loretta Swit), as well as getting Felix' bosses at the studio to try to find him.

Studio head Blackman (the aforementioned Vaughn) wants to take control of the picture, while Felix' lawyer Culley (William Holden, in his final film role) just wants Felix to live. Things get complicated at Felix' beach house, until they wind up holding a party there with a whole bunch of people who got invited heaven only knows how. Felix is still trying to kill himself, but when an attempt to shoot himself goes awry, he gets a sudden insight: the way to rescue "Night Wind" is to turn it into a softcore porn movie!

Remember that scene at the beginning of the movie of Julie Andrews doing "Polly Wolly Doodle"? Apparently it was a dream sequence from "Night Wind", and now it's going to be an erotic dream sequence detailing the sexual horrors Sally's character had to face. Or something like that. The result is that Sally is going to have to bare her breasts as part of the scene. Except that she's a pure and virtuous as Julie Andrews' image supposedly was. (Not that she's impure; it's just that she was, after all, willing to do whatever it took to make a movie work.) Sally isn't sure she wants to do it, but she owns half the movie since she's in a community propery state, and dammit she's going to protect that property.

This is the basic plot of the movie, but it really just serves as a hook on which to put Blake Edwards' satire of all things Hollywood. The plot actually goes all over the place, with only about a third of the movie going from the time Felix gets his idea to the resolution in which Sally actually does go topless. (And yes, we see it. The way it's handled makes Sally look rather less erotic than any of the other characters in the dream sequence.) And after the resolution of that plot strand, there's still another third of the movie to go.

The result is something that reminded me of the Norman Lear/Bud Yorkin movies, Divorce American Style and The Night They Raided Minsky's. All three movies have some good ideas, and some of those ideas are very well executed. But I found S.O.B, like the earlier movies, to be less than the sum of its parts. Among the things that work are a running joke about a man who's suffered a fatal heart attack while jogging on the beach with his dog just outside the Farmer beach house, and nobody noticing the poor dead man. Loretta Swit does well in her part, as does Shelley Winters as Sally's agent. Andrews is perfectly acceptable, although you have to wonder how she/Sally wound up with all these nutcases. I'd say the same for William Holden, except that he'd already done Network and probably drank prodigiously with enough people in Hollywood for him to fit in to Blake Edwards' satire.

As for what doesn't work, there's Sally's servant who wants to be an agent, and the Chinese cook; the attempt to satirize the way Hollywood treated Asian servants just falls flat and is grating. There's also the doctor who comes to treat Felix after the original suicide attempt (Robert Preston); he's obnoxious. And much of what happens in the final third of the movie just makes no sense, as though Edwards ran out of a coherent plot, but still had punchlines for how to satirize Hollywood.

Overall, I think people who like movies in the "Hollywood on Hollywood" genre will like this one, while people looking for an introduction to any of the actors in the movie, or even the "Hollywood on Hollywood" genre, would be better served with other movies.

Briefs for November 13-14, 2016

Lupita Tovar has died at the age of 106. Tovar was one of the first stars of Mexican sound cinema, going back to the early 1930s. Actually, her career started a bit earlier, when she was discovered in Mexico and brought to Hollywood to make Spanish-language versions of early US talkies for the Spanish-language market. (Garbo did a German-language version of Anna Christie, while I've also mentioned a couple of Laurel and Hardy shorts done in Spanish.)

Tonight's prime time lineup looks at the Fleischer family. Dad Max was an animator, which means that we're going to get a couple of animated movies in the 8:00 hour. TCM is listing two two-reel Popeye movies, one starting at 8:00 PM, and the second at 8:30. That leaves a pretty substantial amount of time for something in between the movies, however. As for son Richard Fleischer, I'm always pleased to see The Narrow Margin (9:00 PM) and Solyent Green (10:30 PM) on the schedule.

Apparently I haven't done a full-length post on The Battleship Potemkin, this week' Silent Sunday Nights movie, before. It's on at 12:15 AM and is well worth seeing. Perhaps I should watch it again, because I don't think I've seen it in years. It kicks off a night of Communist bloc movies, with two movies about the 1940s following. I've recommended The Cranes Are Flying (1:30 AM) before; I've never actually seen the Czech Courage for Every Day (3:15 AM) before.

Robert Vaughn, 1932-2016

I suppose I should mention the death of actor Robert Vaughn, who died yesterday aged 83. A lot of the obituaries are mentioning the TV show The Man from U.N.C.L.E., but he also made a fair number of movies. Looking at the recent (well, 2009) picture of him at the top of his Wikipedia page, it's easy to see the resemblance to the character he played in Bullitt 40 years earlier.

Vaughn was also the last of the Magnificent Seven, I believe. That movie is going to be on the regular Starz channel several times on Wednesday.

Several of the UNCLE episodes were stitched together to turn into movies, and Vaughn also made a cameo as Napoleon Solo in The Glass Bottom Boat. I've also got S.O.B. on my DVR, and haven't gotten around to watching it yet.

The matte shot

One of my favorite non-movie bloggers, David Thompson, has a weekly, more or less, "Friday Ephemera" post in which he links to stuff that's not exactly newsworthy, but interesting or noteworthy. A lot of Youtube videos, but also things like blog posts with lots of photos of the way things were in the past.

This week, one of the links was to the matte shot, from a blog looking at the use of matte painting technology in the movies, and how it makes good background shots. There aren't many posts on the blog, but this one has a ton of interesting photos.

Comments on TCM's upcoming schedule, November 10-11, 2016

TCM is running a salute to British direct Jack Clayton tonight. Clayton didn't make very many movies, and TCM is running three of the features plus one short. The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with Our Mother's House, which has been released to DVD since the last time I blogged about it. Despite the title and the fact that the cast is full of kids, this is really a grown-up movie. I'm looking forward to the short The Bespoke Overcoat, airing at midnight; this one is based on the Gogol short story The Overcoat. I haven't seen this short before. Clayton also directed Room at the Top, but that one isn't on the TCM schedule tonight.

Tomorrow, TCM is running a bunch of Joel McCrea movies; his birthday was last Saturday. What I find interesting -- and frankly refreshing -- is that TCM is running all of these on Veterans' Day, instead of trotting out a bunch of war movies for the umpteenth time because heaven forfend we don't supplicate ourselves before people who committed violence in the name of the state. Foreign Correspondent at 12:45 PM is always worth watching.