Tomorrow's the first of the month again

With tomorrow being July 1, it's time for another movie or two that FXM Retro hasn't run in a long time showing up. (I suppose I should add how pleasantly surprised I am that the block is still going on, even if FXM badly formats the movies.) Tomorrow morning that means a Shirley Temple movie that's new to me: Baby Take a Bow. James Dunn, who would appear with Shirley again in Bright Eyes shows up, as does Claire Trevor. A quick look at the plot makes the movie seem like typical Shirley Temple fare. I have to admit I never really gave much thought to watching her movies -- at least the Fox movies -- but when I do watch they turn out to be pretty entertaining.

I can't recall whether I've mentioned Star! before; that one will be on FXM Retro tomorrow at 12:05 PM and again Sunday at 10:50 AM. This is a long, long, long, long movie about Getrude Lawrence, a mostly stage actress of the first half of the last century (perhaps her best-known screen role might be in Rembrandt opposite Charles Laughton). Lawrence is played by Julie Andrews. This is one that I've never been able to get all the way through, because it's not my genre and it's ridiculously long. By the same token, I've only watched Funny Girl in installments. But then, I care for Barbra Streisand's singing even less than Julie Andrews'.

Thursday Movie Picks #155: Medical Dramas (TV Edition)

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of "Thursday Movie Picks", the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This being the last week of the month, it's time for another edition, and the theme this month is medical dramas. This one is a toughie for me since I don't watch that much episodic television, but I was able to come up with three shows:



Quincy M.E. (1976-1983). Jack Klugman, fresh off playing opposite Tony Randall in The Odd Couple, plays the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner, a fancy title for a coroner. Quincy (who only had one name) solved mysteries surrounding not only dead bodies, but overstepped his bounds to get into "public health" statism, a fact I never really paid attention to until the reruns showed up on one of the vintage subchannels that populate digital broadcast TV. It's humorous to watch the cops in the opening credits, however.



Trapper John, MD (1979-1986). The continuing adventures of MASH character Trapper John a quarter century after the Korean War, now played by Pernell Roberts and working in a big hospital in San Francisco with various other doctors and nurses. I didn't watch this one too often, mostly because it was on at 10:00 PM, past my bedtime, and didn't seem to show up in syndication anywhere near as much.



Emergency! (1972-1979). The adventures of the paramedics who shared quarters with the fire department in one station in Los Angeles. There's a fair amount of fire and car crashes, but a lot of medical emergencies. One thing I always noticed was that when a man had a heart attack, they'd take off his shirt to apply the defibrillator, but they never had women having heart attacks so the paramedics could take off the women's shirts and use the defibrillator. This one showed up a lot more in reruns.

Noises out there

So I was awakened this morning around 2:30 by what sounded a couple of coyotes howling. (I suppose it might have been just one, but it sure sounded like multiple.) It was even loud enough that it woke up the dog, who started barking.

At any rate, I started thinking about scary noises in the movies. Val Lewton, as I've pointed out on several occasions, did an excellent job in movies like Cat People of not showing us the horror, but allowing us to imagine it in our minds. There's a really effective sequence of the second woman in the gym pool, hearing something but not being able to figure out what it is.

Obviously, there are a lot of movies with scenes in the great outdoors where people have to camp out overnight and the possibility of hearing something come up on them is a plot point.

But just as frightening can be hearing humans out there. Earlier this month, I blogged about Midnight Lace, which has Doris Day hearing a strange voice first in the London fog, and then hearing the same voice on phone calls.

However, I think the most frightening of the voices is one where we know who it is, and that's why it's frightening: Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter, when the kids are hiding out in the barn and Mitchum rides by on his horse singing an old spiritual. Everybody knows just how close danger is.

What's your favorite scary "noise out there" scene?

Noah built himself an arky arky

Over the weekend, I watche Noah's Ark, as I noticed it's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive. (Note that the title is common enough that there are quite a few movies that will register hits, if you're looking to buy this at Amazon or whatnot.)

After a brief opening about the original Bible story, we fast forward to 1914. Travis (George O'Brien) and Al (Guinn "Big Boy" Williams, credited here as Gwynn and with no "Big Boy") are two idle Americans traveling around Europe. If you notice the date, that's when World War I began, so you can guess that the war is going to play a big part in the movie. As the two men are traveling on a train near the Franco-German border, the train derails, and the two rescue young Maria (Dolores Costello) from the train. The only thing is, she's German, and pretty much just as they're rescuing her war is declared. There's a Russian espionage agent Nickoloff (Noah Beery), and he wants to arrest her since he thinks she's spying for Germany.

Travis and Marie (rechristened Mary) fall in love and idle around Paris, while Al gets ticked and thinks he should fight in the war. Al enlists, and eventually Travis follows him. Mary is left to fend for herself, becoming a showgirl and getting spotted by Nickoloff. Travis, however, gets trapped in a cellar somewhere in Belgium, at which point a clergyman who just happened to be on train that crashed all the way back at the beginning of the movie. He compares World War I to the Biblical deluge, and proceeds to tell the trapped people the story of Noah and the ark.

We get a cinematic view of that story with all the actors from the first part of the movie taking roles in the Biblical story. Travis becomes Japheth, one of Noah's sons; Al becomes Ham; Mary becomes Miriam, Japheth's beloved; and Nickoloff becomes Sumerian king Nephilim. Miriam is taken by the King's men to be a virgin sacrifice, while Japheth is forced to work in the mill as a slave. Then the rain comes, and everybody tries to escape to the ark.

The rain, as it turns out, was real; director Michael Curtiz created a hellacious deluge that injured quite a few extras. The movie is also a partial talkie; several of the scenes in the modern half are talking while the Ark sequence is silent. However, since it's Vitaphone, there's a synchronized music score and sound effects.

Overall, Noah's Ark is an interesting movie in parts, and the flood scene is certainly spectacular until you realize the human cost. However, the plot has far too many coincidences that turn the film into over-the-top melodrama at times. If this were in a box set, I'd give much more consideration to buying it; at Warner Archive prices, however, I think it's a bit too expensive for me.

Jeanne Eagels, 1890-1929

Jeanne Eagels in The Letter (1929)

Today marks the birth anniversary of actress Jeanne Eagels, who was born on this day in 1890. She made some silents in the 1910s, but spent most of her time on stage, working with George Arliss and Leslie Howard among others. She stayed on Broadway throughout the 1920s, appearing in the original New York production of Rain, among others. She finally returned to Hollywood and made one more silent, followed by two talkies, The Letter and Jealousy, although only the former survives.

But Eagels is sadly more known for her personal life, one of failed marriages and drug and alcohol abuse. She was using heroin by the time she made The Letter, and that heroin addiction was soon to kill her. (I mentioned in a post several years ago that after her death, there were three autopsies performed, all of which came to a different conclusion, but it's pretty obvious the drug addiction had a big part to play in her death.) It's fascinating to watch The Letter because Eagels is skeletal and cadaverous, looking like a train wreck waiting to happen. And she gives a brilliant performance. The Bette Davis remake is better known, and Davis does well, but Eagels gets to do things Davis couldn't thanks to the code, and that makes the Eagels version a more interesting movie.

In the 1950s, a heavily sanitized biopic of Eagels' life was made, starring Kim Novak.

Såsom i en spegel

So I watched Through a Glass Darkly off my DVR. It's available on DVD as part of a pricey three-movie Ingmar Bergman set courtesy of the Criterion Collection. I'm glad I've knocked it off my list of to-see movies, but I don't know that I'd spend Criterion Collection money on it. I didn't realize when I watched it that Bergman Week begins tomorrow.

The movie starts off with a bunch of people getting out of the water after going for a swim. It turns out that those four people are the only characters in the movie. Karin (Harriet Andersson) is married to Martin (Max von Sydow), and is visiting her father David (Gunnar Björnstrand) and younger brother Minus (Lars Passgård) at the family's summer house on the island of Fårö, off the northern coast of Gotland, the largest island in the Baltic Sea.

Everything seems happy at first, but we quickly realize that there's a lot going on beneath the surface. Karin just got out of the hospital. In fact, it was a mental hospital, and there's the question of whether she's truly cured of her disease, which I don't think the movie openly names but is presumably schizophrenia. Minus is a teenager and going through what nowadays would be considered teen angst. And neither child has as good a relationship with their father as they'd like. Dad is an author who is commercially successful but who feels artistically blocked. Dad goes off to the rest of Europe for various work-related reasons, leaving the kids alone -- you wonder who's taking care of Minus all this time.

Karin starts to act just strangely enough that it's easy to wonder whether this is a relapse. Eventually, she finds her father's diary and reads it, finding out that her schizophrenia is most likely incurable, and that Dad is nuts enough that he wants to chronicle the course of the disease. Minus continues to feel unappreciated. And Karin's behavior continues to become even more erratic.

There's not much action in this movie, but a lot of talk. And talk. And more talk when they're done talking. Frankly, I found it all to be the sort of psychological mumbo-jumbo that people who like to pan foreign movies as being "pretentious" would probably find stereotypical. That having been said, this one isn't anywhere near as bad as Bergman's later Cries and Whispers which I reviewed here some months back. The black-and-white cinematography is also lovely, stark at times and making me want to visit Gotland to see it in living color. (Fårö was a military zone closed to foreigners during the Cold War but is apparently open now.) Ingmar Bergman liked the area so much that he eventually moved there, dying on the island in 2007.

If you're a fan of Bergman, you'll probably enjoy Through a Glass Darkly. If not, I'd suggest starting with something conventional like The Seventh Seal.

Briefs for June 24-25, 2017

I didn't realize that last night was the first night of Tina Fey presenting The Essentials alongside Alec Baldwin. At least, I think it was; I didn't watch the previous Saturday's movie. But there she was, talking about Rear Window and doing a good job of it.

Speaking of Hitchcock, somebody elsewhere posted this story about a Welsh village not named Bodega Bay. Where have we seen this one before? (NB: The source is from the British tabloid The Sun, so who knows just how true the story is? A Google News search, however, does yield the same story in several other sources.)

The local classical music station airs a syndicated program on Saturday mornings about film music. This week's program was dedicated to a documentary I hadn't heard of called Score: A Film Music Documentary. The presenter made it sound as if the film just came out, but in fact it was released last November. I don't think I'll be seeing it any time soon, then, only because it won't be in theaters around here and I don't know that it's available on DVD. I can only imagine the music clearance issues.

When I was looking up the Score documentary to see when it was released and if it was still in theaters, an IMDb search led me to this 2010 movie I had never heard of. Yikes.

The Culpepper Cattle Company

I noticed that The Culpepper Cattle Company is coming up on FXM Retro this morning at 9:25 AM and tomorrow morning at 8:05 AM, so I made it a point to watch it off my DVR last night so I could do a review on it here.

Gary Grimes plays Ben Mockridge, a young man in Texas who is ready to make his own way in life as a man. He's heard that Frank Culpepper (Billy Green Bush) is going to be driving a herd of cattle from Texas to Colorado, and Ben is determined to get a job as part of the cattle drive. Of course, he's never done such a thing before, and doesn't know what a cattle drive is really like.

It turns out that a cattle drive is brutal, and if you're not enough of a man, nobody is going to accept you. Things first go bad when somebody rustles a bunch of cattle and the Culpupper crew lose some men in a gunfight to get the cattle back. Ben is sent off to a town well away to recruite replacements, but along the way his horse and gun get stolen by a couple of trappers. He is fortunate, however, to get them back on the way back courtesy of the men he recruited, who seem rather violent.

Then again, everybody in The Culpepper Cattle Company, more or less, is violent, with the exception of Ben and a group of religiously-motivated settlers the cattle drive meets in the run-up to the film's climax. There's one shootout after another, becoming increasingly inexplicable. The last one even has Ben seemingly in the middle, with none of the bad guys thinking to shoot him; it's not as if they have any compunction about shooting everybody else.

I had some big problems with The Culpepper Cattle Company. Not because of the violence, but because the movie never really seemed to be going anywhere. I understand that it's part of the film's point that the cowboy lifestyle wasn't romantic and in fact would have been nasty, brutish, and short. But I found the movie to be incoherent at times, with an ending that makes little sense. Then again, I also have to admit that westerns have never been my favorite genre.

With that last caveat in mind, you may want to watch and judge for yourself. The movie seems to be out of print on DVD, however, although it does seem available from Amazon streaming if you can do that thing.

If I Were a Conventional Blogger

So yesterday's installment of the Thursday Morning Picks blogathon was on "the woods"; wanting to be different I decided to turn the theme on its head by going for people named Wood or Woods. (I suppose I could have used Woody Strode or Woody Allen instead.) Of course, the theme was supposed to be about the forest, and if I had done it that way, I would have had to do some thinking.

That's because the first movie I would have thought of A Midsummer Night's Dream, is one that I already used when the subject was Shakespeare. As you may recall, the characters in the movie are all going through the forest on the way to a wedding when the fairy Puck (Mickey Rooney) puts spells on all of them and makes them fall in love with the wrong people.

I think I would also have used Ring of Fire, a reasonably good drama about a cop (David Janssen) who gets carjacked by thieves on the run, who force him to take them through the forest to their escape. Except that the forest is ridiculously dry, which means there's a risk of forest fire, which unsurprisingly happens. Unfortunately, the print TCM shows is panned and scanned. Sydney Pollack is getting the heebie-jeebies in heaven right now.

And for a third movie? It's been ages since I've seen God's Country and the Woman, one of the earliest three-strip Technicolor movies and possibly the very first to make extensive use of external scenes. I believe this is the movie that Warner Bros. wanted to cast Bette Davis in and she, being sick of the idiotic (in her view) programmers they were giving her, decamped to the UK and sued.

Thursday Movie Picks #154: The Woods

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of "Thursday Movie Picks", the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is "The Woods". As a fan of older movies, I've picked three older (well, at least this time one of them was released after I was born) movies that fit the theme:

Brainstorm (1983). The final film of actress Natalie Wood; she drowned in an incident unrelated to the movie halfway through production. Wood plays Karen, the estranged wife of Michael (Christopher Walken), who is developing a sort of virtual reality device. The other inventor of the device (Beatrice Straight) dies suddenly, but not before hooking herself up to the device to record her thoughts as she's dying. Michael knows he just has to see that recording. Karen and Michael also record their own perspectives, which enables them to see the marriage from each other's point of view and save the marriage.

Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959). Ed Wood directed this hilariously awful movie about aliens trying to resurrect dead humans as zombies so that the zombies will take over Earth. Or something; the plot is such a mess as is the directing and the production values. But it's one of those movies that fails so spectacularly that it winds up being a blast to watch.

Fog Over Frisco (1934). Donald Woods plays Tony, a reporter pursuing socialite Val (Margaret Lindsay). Val's half-sister Arlene is a bad girl of sorts, hobnobbing with gangsters but engaged to a stockbroker. When Arlene gets her fiancé mixed up in a stock swindle, Arlene goes missing and Tony gets his chance to crack the case wide open. This is, unsurprisingly, Bette Davis' movie, even though she disappears for much of the movie. It's one of those really zippy Warner Bros. programmers; they always seemed to be better at that style of film-making than any of the other studios.

I hope I understood this week's theme correctly....