Agnes of God

Another movie that I watched over the weekend to free up space on my DVR is Agnes of God.

The movie starts off rather shockingly, with the screaming of a young woman giving birth, followed by the baby being killed. That's bad enough, but this is all happening at a convent not far outside of Montreal, Quebec, and the young woman in question is a nun. Even if you're not Catholic, you probably know that nuns aren't supposed to be having sex, and in a cloistered place like this, where are the men coming from? The nun who gave birth, Agnes (Meg Tilly), is going to have to stand trial, but first it needs to be determined how she got pregnant and if she's even fit to stand trial.

To determine the latter question, the authorities send in psychologist Martha Livingston (Jane Fonda), a woman who has her own psychological baggage regarding the Catholic Church. she goes to the convent where she is met by the Mother Superior, Mother Miriam (Anne Bancroft). Miriam unsurprisingly has her own problems with outsiders, thinking they're out to destroy the reputation of the Church, never mind what you think about whether the Church is causing its own problems. But she's also defending Agnes who, as Dr. Livingston talks to her, it becomes clear is a woman who has serious problems above and beyond however she got pregnant. She seems to know nothing of the outside world, and talks elliptically about what happened to her.

Dr. Livingston takes it upon herself to investigate not only the question of whether Sr. Agnes is sane, but also what actually happened to her. Mother Miriam continues to be wary of her, and we get the feeling that the latter knows a lot more than she's letting on. But what actually did happen to Agnes?

Agnes of God is an interesting movie, and one that is certainly thought-provoking. I can imagine that both anti-clerical people and religious Catholics might have some probems with the movie at first, however. (I was born Catholic, but outside of weddings and funerals haven't been to a Mass in probably 20 years.) Fonda's character is drawn so one-dimensionally that I found myself wondering whether the script was trying to make a negative point about the Church, or about people with hangups about the Church. But Bancroft's character certainly isn't a saint either, and probably any institution in a situation like this would probably do some unethical things to try to save its repuatation.

Bancroft and Tilly are excellent; Fonda adequate although again I think that's more down to the script. The cinematography is also glorious, with director Norman Jewison having used rural Canaidan locations as well as Montreal for shooting. Georges Delerue's evocative score is also a nice touch.

Amazon lists Agnes of God as being on DVD, but it doesn't seem to be available at the TCM Shop. Amazon does also have it on streaming, as far as I could tell.

The QB detective

Another of the movies that I watched over the weekend was Tony Rome, off a cheap box set of Frank Sinatra movies I picked up.

Frank Sinatra plays Tony Rome, a detective with a gambling problem who lives on a boat at a marina in lovely Miami. One day, he's called up by his former partner Turpin (Robert Wilke), who tells him that there's a young lady passed out in a hotel, and the management would appreciate if Tony could discreetly return the girl to her parents, since they're rich and neither the hotel nor the parents want any negative publicity.

The girl, Diana Pines (Sue Lyon) is the daughter of construction magnate Rudy Kosterman (Simon Oakland) and has recently married. Dad remarried after Diana's mother died, and his second wife is Rita (Gena Rowlands). Visiting is Ann Archer (Jill St. John), whom you expect to have a fatal attraction on somebody. Dad hires Tony to keep an eye on Diana and see why she's doing things that might bring about bad publicity.

But he's not the only one in the family to hire Tony. Diana discovers that while she was passed out at the hotel, a diamond brooch has gone missing, and she and Rita hire Tony to find out what happened to that pin.

It's fairly obvious that people are being less than honest with him, when you consider that some heavies show up at the boat and rather nonchalantly ask Tony whether they can pistol-whip him or chloroform him so they can ransack his boat in peace to find that diamond. (Tony chooses the chloroform, but he has no idea where the brooch is.) The police get on the case when Turpin is murdered, and Tony is unsurprisingly a person of interest in the killing.

Tony Rome is a serviceable enough movie, but I couldn't help but feel watching it that Sinatra was just going through the motions. It's not that he's bad; it's more that the movie feels like any of a bunch of detective movies from that era. I found Sinatra's performance in The Detective to be much better. Still, for the price of the cheap box set, you can't really go wrong. The movie was also in the proper aspect ratio, and had a bunch of trailers as extras.

One final special for TCM's silver anniversary

TCM has been rearranging its programming this month in order to include a bunch of special programming for its 25th anniversary. We're almost at the end of the month, but there's time for one more special night tonight. TCM is re-airing several of the old interviews, notably some of the Private Screenings shows Robert Osborne did.

Well, not that much, unfortunately. There's a "best of" show which will be on at 8:00 PM with a repeat at midnight for the benefit of those on the west coast. And in between there's going to be the Private Screenings in which Osborne himself was the interviewee, interviewed by Alec Baldwin (9:30 PM), followed at 11:00 PM by the 20th anniversary interview from the TCM Film Festival which was hosted by Alex Trebek in the style of This Is Your Life.

The second half of the night is a couple of the more recent interviews from the TCM Film Festival. To be honest, I would like to have seen more of the old Private Screenings interviews, although with all the clips embedded in the interviews I sometimes wonder whether there's a rights issue with re-running some of them.

The Concorde: Airport '79

I recently mentioned the death of Swedish actress Bibi Andersson, and that she had appeared in The Concorde: Airport '79, which I have on Blu-ray as part of the box set of all four Airport movies. So with that in mind, I sat down to watch it and do a full-length review here.

The basic plot involves one of the Concorde supersonic passenger airplanes, which has been bought by an American airline and is going to go on its first flight for that airline from Washington DC to Paris, and from there to Moscow as a goodwill gesture ahead of the upcoming Summer Olympics in Moscow. (This was obviously made before the US and many other western countries boycotted the games.) Among the passengers on that flight are going to be a team of Soviet gymnasts, coached by Mercedes McCambridge and Avery Schreiber, with American reporter Robert Palmer (John Davidson, not singing "Addicted to Love" here) following along because he's trying to bed one of the gymnasts, I assume in the name of detente and world peace or something.

Another passenger is Maggie Whalen (Susan Blakely), another television reporter having an affair with the head of the Harrison defense contracting company, run by Dr. Harrison (Robert Wagner). Somebody passes documents to her, documents that show that the Harrison company has been illegally arming various militias in a bunch of third-world countries that at the time would have been the sites of proxy wars that were going on because of the Cold War. She's apparently planning to release those documents once she gets to Moscow. We've already seen that people are willing to kill to get those documents back, so when we learn that the Harrison company is going to be doing some testing of drone planes for air-to-air combat, Harrison gets the brilliant idea of using that drone to try to take down the Concorde!

The French Concorde pilot Metrand (Alain Delon), a notorious womanizer who is carrying on with one of the stewardesses Isabelle (Sylvia Kristel), along with the co-pilot Patroni (George Kennedy, who apparently learned how to fly the damn Concorde after every other unrelated job he had in the previous three Airport movies), evade the missile over the Atlantic and, with some minor damage, get the plane to Paris. Amazingly, you'd think that after the suffering the passengers went through on the first leg of the journey, they'd make alternative arrangements to get to Moscow, but no, they stupidly get back on the plane! Harrison tries to take it down again.

Now, this being a disaster movie, we know there should be a bunch of stars each getting a cameo story line. Among them are Eddie Albert as Sands, the head of the airline; Cicely Tyson as Elaine, who is going to Paris to fetch an organ for transplantation into her son; Martha Raye as an incontinent woman who keeps needing to use the bathroom; Jimmie Walker as a pot-smoking jazz musician who plays his saxophone during the first leg of the flight and then, after it gets destroyed, pickes up a fresh sax for the second leg (!!); and Charo as a woman trying to smuggle her dog onto the flight -- she should have called it her service dog. As for Andersson, she plays a high-class "escort" that Metrand procures for Patroni during their layover in Paris.

The Concorde was the last of the Airport movies, and it's easy to see why. It's terrible in oh so many ways. But it's one of those movies that's delightfully awful; you'll be splitting your sides laughing at the thought of it all. There are too many to list, although I've already mentioned everybody getting back on for the second leg as well as Jimmie Walker's second sax. There's the terrible special effects looking like a very primitive Chroma-key, and Patroni firing flares out the cockpit window (!) to try to deflect the heat-seeking missiles from the drone. I think my favorite moment involved Avery Schreiber's character bringing his young daughter into the cockpit to talk to the pilot. Dad is translating in some sort of sign language for the daughter, while I was hoping Patroni would ask the girl if she likes gladiator movies.

I'm glad I picked up this box set, because all four of the movies are worth watching, even if only the original is really good. The other three reach varying levels of disaster in the figurative sense, and are all the more fun for it.

As the screw turns

For those of you who have FXM, they will be showing The Innocents tomorrow, at 3:00 AM and again at 10:15 AM.

Deborah Kerr plays Miss Giddens, who at the beginning of the movie is meeting with her new boss, the uncle (Michael Redgrave, whose character is only referred to as "The Uncle") of two siblings to whom she is going to be governess. Uncle is a bachelor who prefers an active life and doesn't want kids impinging on it. Their parents died, and they're living off the inheritance in an estate out in the country. Or, at least, Flora (Pamela Franklin) is; her older brother Miles (Martin Stephens) is currently off at boarding school.

Miss Giddens gets to the estate where she thinks she hears a voice that must be Flora, but Flora insists it isn't her. Giddens also meets the cook, Miss Grose (Megs Jenkins), who seems to know that this place had a bit of a dark history, although she doesn't want to let on what that dark history is. Eventually we learn that a former governess, Miss Jessel, and another servant, Quint, were in love with each other and died, and it might just be the case that their ghosts haunt the place, if you really believe in ghosts.

Flora, like all children, can be a bit mischievous and willful at times, and she too seems to have a bit of the dark history as she just knows Miles is going to be coming home soon even though he's off at boarding school. Sure enough, word arrives that Miles is being expelled from the school because he's a bad influence on the other boys. And boy does he seem to be bad when he gets back, in a Bad Seed male equivalent sort of way. Miles lies through his teeth but also acts at times like a perfectly innocent gentleman.

Giddens continues to investigate, and eventually reaches a disturbing conclusion: Quint and Jessel are still around in spirit form, showing up to possess the bodies of Miles and Flora respectively! This would certainly explain their naughty, overly grown-up behavior. But such behavior also seems to be a threat to the people around them, and Giddens decides that she's goin gto have to expel the trespassing souls from her young charges, in a manner of speaking. Of course, to do so may just drive the little brats insane, especially if they're not actually possessed by anything....

The Innocents is based on the novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I haven't read the original but do recall seeing one other TV adaptation of it back when I was in high school. (I think it was this 1974 version which is technically American although I always thought it was British thanks to the cast featuring Lynn Redgrave.) The story is a good one if you like that sort of story, which I have to admit isn't necessarily my first choice. Kerr does well in her role, and the photography is excellent, as should be expected considering the movie was directed by former cinematographer Jack Clayton. To me, the movie seems a bit ambiguous on whether the kids were really possessed or whether Giddens was just going insane, but that works for the movie.

The Innocents got a Criterion Collection DVD release some years back, but that seems to be out of print, so you're either going to have to pay through the nose or watch on FXM.

Don't forget they remade M

Tonight's entry in TCM's Noir Alley is the 1951 version of M, overnight at 12:45 AM and then tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM. This is more of a heads-up than a full-length review because I've got something else to post about today that's not on DVD (although last I checked this version of M wasn't on DVD either), and because you probably know the story.

David Wayne plays the main character, a man named Martin who has a complusion to kill little girls and take their shoes although, this being a movie under the Production Code, they can't really talk about it being a sexual fetish. Anyhow, the public is terrified, and the police crackdown causes problems for the traditional crime world, so they decide to take matters into their own hands.

I enjoyed this version of M, even if it isn't as good as the Fritz Lang/Peter Lorre version. It would probably have a better reputation if the movie had been an original, but in that case it also probably wouldn't have been made -- the folks in the Code office only passed this one on the grounds that it was a remake of a true classic.

One other thing that will interest many people is the location shooting of places in the Los Angeles area that are no longer there. I'm not a big-city person, but when movies like this use locations in Los Angeles or New York or wherever, I always enjoy the vintage look of the place as it was back then.

Local Hero

At the end of 2017, TCM ran a night of movies set in Scotland, including Local Hero. It got a DVD release as part of a TCM Burt Lancaster box set, although that seems to be out of print. You can do the Amazon (and other places) streaming thing, though, and since I need to free up space on my DVR, I'm going to break with my normal rule and review a movie not coming up on TV and not easily available on DVD.

Lancaster plays Happer, the CEO of Knox Industries, an oil company headquartered in Houston. As with most energy conglomerates, they do exploration all over the world, and have gotten involved enough in the North Sea/North Atlantic oil deposits that they need a new refinery in Scotland. After careful consideration, they've found the perfect location in an isolated cove.

Well, it's almost the perfect location. There's a small village where the company wants to put the refinery, and they're going to have to buy out every property in the village. You can probably guess that at least one person is going to be uncomfortable about selling, because in every situation like this you've either got one person who wants to hold out for more money, or because some people are so emotionally tied to where they currently live that they don't want to break those ties. To deal with the acquisition, Happer sends McIntyre (Peter Riegert), a middle-level executive whose biggest qualification seems to be having a Scottish surname.

McIntyre is picked up by Oldsen (Peter Capaldi), and when he meets Gordon Urquhart (Dennis Lawson) at the local hotel, McIntyre finds that a Scottish village is something radically different from Houston and the go-go world of big business that he's been used to before this. Happer, for his part, has a surprisingly laid back attitude. He inherited his position within the company, and seems perhaps more interested in amateur astronomy than actually running Knox, telling McIntyre to watch the skies and call Happer if he sees a comet.

The village is not without its charms, as the local minister, an import from Africa named MacPherson, tells McIntyre. And sure enough, as McIntyre gets held up in the village because negotiating takes longer than expected, he finds that he begins to like the place and isn't so sure if he'd want to sell if he were one of the locals. This feeling becomes stronger when it turns out that the beach is held separately, and he still has to negotiate with Ben (Fulton Mackay) to buy that last little bit of land.

Local Hero is a movie that follows a well-known formula, that of an outsider (usually a sophisticate) meeting a simpler culture, and having his or her life changed by it. Off the top of my head, as I was watching the movie I found myself thinking of Remember the Night, I Know Where I'm Going!, and even The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. It's a tried and true formula, and there are a lot of surprisingly good films following it.

Local Hero is most definitely one of those surprisingly good movies. Not to say that I thought it wasn't going to be good; it's more the sort of movie that grows on you as it goes along. Lancaster is good in his smallish role; the locals in the Scottish village are quite good, and the location shooting in the northeast of Scotland is wonderful. If you're looking for action, you're not going to find it here, but if you want an intelligent little movie, you could do far worse.

Thursday Movie Picks #250: Music/Musicals (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 Thursday of the month, it's time for another TV edition, with the theme being music or musicals. I've stated on a bunch of occasions that I watch very little episodic TV any more, so this wasn't the easiest one for me, until I hit on the idea of vintage game shows:



Face the Music (1980-1981). Musical cues were clues to famous faces; lather, rinse, repeat.



Name That Tune (multiple incarnations, with the most recent in the US being 1984-1985). Another song identification show with various themes. Probably the best-known is "Bid-a-Note", in which contestants were given a clue about a song, and contestants said, "I can name that tune in [diminishing number of] notes", until either one contestant challenged the other to name that tune, or could name it in no notes at all.



Puttin' on the Hits (1984-1988). Contestants lip-synched songs doing sometimes elaborate acts; celebrity musicians judged them. I don't get it either, or how it ran four seasons. I couldn't find a full episode on Youtube the way I could for the other two, so I used a commercial instead. A Youtube search reveals a plethora of clips.

The End

I hope nobody was thinking it was the end of this blog. When I was watching Dollar the other day, I noticed the card at the end of the movie was the following:



Now, I speak German, so I fairly quickly recognized the word as cognate to the German Schluß, meaning the end, never mind the fact that it came at the end of the movie. Obviously, for English-speakers, that Swedish end card is ripe for abuse. But it also got me to thinking of some other ending cards.



Fox cards from after 1953 would helpfully remind you that you had just watched a movie in Cinemascope. I seem to recall that a lot of the cards were not over footage of the film, but on a blue background, just like the opening cards that mentioned you were about to watch a Cinemascope movie. (I don't remember which movies did which, and thanks to some issues with my computer's DVD player having trouble recognizing multiple DVDs, I'm not about to look.) MGM's cards from around 1950 on had a lot of empty space like this, which would get filled up by the name of the movie, as if you don't remember what you just watched.



For some reason I was thinking the end of the Traveltalks shorts was more colorful. And that it said the end. My memory on this was obviously wrong. There are some other interesting ones out there such as William Castle's Strait-Jacket, which, being about an axe-murderer, has an appropriate one:



I remember the first time I watched Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur noticing that it had a card reading "Finis". And then there were the Universal cards of the early 1930s (the era with the airplane going around the globe), telling us "A good cast is worth repeating". Unfortunately I couldn't find those either.

Dollar

Recently, I picked up another Criterion Eclipse Series set, this time of six films Ingrid Bergman made in Sweden at the beginning of her career. I had seen Dollar quite a few years ago when Bergman was TCM's Star of the Month and they ran a night of her Swedish movies. A look at the IMDb user reviews suggests that was June 2005. So I decided to make that one the first of the films from the set to watch and post about here.

Ingrid plays Julia Balzar, wife of businessman Kurt (Georg Rydeberg), who seems more in love with his business Sveaverken than he is with his wife. That's OK, though, since Julia seems to be just as much in love with Louis Brenner (Kotti Chave), who is already married to another woman, Sussi (Tutta Rolf). Sussi, for her part, is in love with Ludvig, who is married to Katja.

Love isn't the only thing interfering in their lives; there's also money. Louis is an inveterate gambler, much to the annoyance of his wife. He's told her he's going to stop gambling, but sure enough, he keeps it up and loses 50,000 kronor playing poker at the club. He writes a post-dated check but he could theoretically go to jail if he can't make it good. So Julia decides that she's going to help Louis out by selling some of her shares in Sveaverken. She doesn't know, because her husband can't be bothered to tell her, that he's been trying to float a bond issue for Sveaverken, and these mysterious shares being sold is depressing the share price. Ludvig offers to buy Julia's remaining shares in a private sale.

As for Kurt, he's got another chance to get the money needed for his bond issuance. Apparently one of their number has an elderly cousin in Chicago, Miss Jonston, who has decided she's going to visit her family in the old country, and she's absolutely loaded. So the three couples head up to the ski resort at Åre, where Miss Jonston is going to be. Sussi decides she's had enough of Louis' dalliance with Julia, and she goes off cross-country skiing. She falls down the mountain, and her injury has an effect on all the couples as well as the brash Miss Jonston's relationship with the doctor -- when everbody meets her they're surprised to find out she's relatively young.

Dollar is an interesting movie that's a bit difficult to classify. The liner notes on the DVD refer to it as a screwball comedy, but I wouldn't quite call the comedy screwball. That, and there's a reasonable amount of drama. One thing that struck me is that although Miss Jonston is supposed to be American, she was about as American as the characters in the French Purple Noon -- another good movie, but with characters who aren't American at all. Then again, I imagine Hollywood's look at Europeans, especially back in the 1930s, isn't very accurate either. As for Miss Jonston, she's most like an Edna May Oliver character, except a bit younger. Ingrid Bergman does well; she's nominally the star on the back of some earlier successes but this is really an ensemble cast.

All in all, I think I'd compare Dollar to the Hollywood programmers with upper-class dalliances, after such comedies left the drawing room. It's good, but it's also the sort of thing that blends in with any of the hundred or more programmers in that category. That's not a bad thing, of course; it's thoroughly serviceable and there's nothing really wrong with it, but it in some ways only gets the mention it does because of Ingrid Bergman's presence.

I'm looking forward to the other five movies in the set.