Patton

I didn't intend to do a couple of World War II pictures so close to each other after putting up a post on Bitter Victory. But I noticed that Patton is in the FXM rotation. It's got an airing tomorrow at 12:10 PM, followed by another one at 3:00 AM Monday (Nov. 9), and a couple the following week.

George C. Scott plays General George S. Patton, who stands in front of a giant American flag and gives some new recruits a lecture about how war isn't about dying for your country, but making the other bastard die for his country. Cut to North Africa in 1943, where the US has just been routed by Rommel's forces in the battle at the Kasserine Pass.

Back at headquarters in Morocco, Patton is named the commander of the II Corps, which has the job of slogging through North Africa in preparation for the invasion of Sicily. Patton finds laxity at headquarters, and immediately becomes the sort of martinet Henry Fonda was in Fort Apache, commiserating with his friend and fellow general Omar Bradley (Karl Malden). Bradley points out that Patton has some enemies in high places, in no small part because of his personality.

Eventually the Allies do invade Sicily, and Patton doesn't like the plans mostly because he thinks is has the Allies going too slowly and won't let him get enough of the glory in the operation. (Can't he see this is part of why higher-ups like Eisenhower might be blocking the advancement of his career?) So what does Patton do? He sets things up so that he winds up in Messina, just across the strait from mainland Italy, before the Brits. Nobody could deny that Patton had one success after another where other commanders failed, but at the same time he was basically defying orders and a bit of a nasty egotist and frightful in his command.

Well, a lot of nasty and frightening. This we see in a scene where Patton is famously visiting a military field hospital and finds that a couple of the soldiers there are in for combat fatigue. Patton knows only the glory of physical struggle, and cannot comprehend that some men are just wired differently and aren't cut out to be on the front lines. He thinks basic training can just beat his values into them, and considers anybody with combat fatigue a coward. So he smacks one of the soldiers suffering from combat fatigue!

This is a big no-no, so Patton is relieved of command and sent to England in part to do public relations with the British who have to put up with the Americans stationed there, and in part to serve as a decoy to the Nazis. The Nazis are well aware of Patton's success and nervous with the idea of him being more in command than Bradley or British Field Marshal Montgomery (Michael Bates). So they're keeping track of him and his personality to figure out what he's going to do next.

Eventually, the Army needs more generals in the invasion of Europe, so Patton is put back into regular service commanding the Third Army, making rapid advances through France and saving the surrounded division at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge (you may remember them from Battleground). As we all know from history, the Allies won World War II and Patton would go on to die in a car accident at the end of 1945, although Patton's death is not shown in the movie.

Watching it, I couldn't help but think of Scott's portrayal of Patton as being a lot like Brian Keith's performance as Theodore Roosevelt in The Wind and the Lion, that latter movie coming to mind recently thanks to the passing of Sean Connery. Both Patton and Roosevelt are portrayed as driven men who know exactly what they want and how to get it, and that the only way to get it is by living the strenuous life. Both are also portrayed as contemptuous of anybody who won't live the strenuous life.

Patton, unsurprisingly, is almost entirely about Patton, with everybody else being a fairly minor character, the biggest among them being the aforementioned Omar Bradley. George C. Scott is suitably larger than life, giving a bravura performance as an extremely complicated man, in the wrong time but not in the wrong place. It's easy to see why all the other generals would hate him (and much of getting that high up in the military is political), but also tough to deny that he had a knack for accomplishing things in wartime.

Patton does seem to be in print on DVD. One thing I noticed is that the DVD release I checked lists a running time of 171 minutes, while IMDb says 172; those could just be rounding differences. FXM has it in a 170-minute time slot, and on the DVR recording I watched I didn't see the Fox fanfare, the movie cold opening with the speech in front of a flag which comes before the opening credits. The print ran 168 minutes; I'm not certain what if anything was cut out.

Brubaker

Many months back, I had the opportunity to DVR Brubaker when TCM ran it during 31 Days of Oscar. Whoever owns the Cinemax channels seems to have the rights to it now, as it's going to be on 5Star Max tomorrow at 6:07 AM and again on Nov. 12 and Nov. 19.

Robert Redford plays Henry Brubaker, who at the beginning of the movie is boarding a bus to take him to his incarceration at Arkansas' Wakefield Prison circa 1969. Apparently there aren't enough cells in this prison, as he's put in a barracks-style cage with a whole bunch of other prisoners. This seems like a recipe for disaster, and unsurprisingly, we see things like sexual assault and one prisoner being tied to the bars of the cage, tortured, and left there all night.

But it turns out that Brubaker didn't commit much of a crime to be put in the barracks. In fact, he didn't commit a crime at all. Brubaker is the new warden, and he got himself put in the general population so that he could see the conditions in the prison as they really are, and not as any handlers would want him to see by turning the prison into some sort of Potemkin village. (How he did this without other officials knowing, I don't know.) I'd suppose you could say he was shocked, except that he had to know things like this were going on as he wouldn't have gone undercover otherwise.

Brubaker, unsurprisingly, wants to reform the prison, although other people who have been making out like bandits under the previous prision management have a fairly obvious vested stake in keeping the old regime running. The one person who might be willing to help Brubaker is Lillian Gray (Jane Alexander), a liaison with the Governor's office. However, she cares more about making herself and the governor look good while providing the appearance of reform, whether or not things get done is secondary.

It's only natural that Brubaker should be opposed by the officials and locals in business who have been profiting under the old scheme, but the scale of the graft shocks Brubaker. He tracks food purchases, only to find that they're being diverted and sold below market value out in the real world with officials pocketing the money. The barracks' roof wasn't properly installed and caves in during a rain storm, and wouldn't you know that's the one thing that's not insured. And when injured prisoners go in to the infirmary, the prison doctor charges them for extra services!

But it's not just officials that dislike Brubaker. Under the old scheme, the prison had "trustees", prisoners who were given better jobs within the prison as a reward for their good behavior. Or at least, that's the way the system was supposed to work; in reality the jobs went to people doing the system's bidding in exchange for the old warden looking the other way at the trustees' torturing prisoners who get out of line. One particularly nasty trustee is Bullen (David Keith), but even a trustee who has some sympathy for Brubaker like Dickie Coombes (Yaphet Kotto) isn't all that supportive and warns Brubaker his plans are never going to work.

Indeed, the trustees on the inside, along with the prison commission on the outside, which is about as corrupt as any government commission out there, both try to stymy Brubaker at every step of the way, either by hiding information from him or actively trying to stop him from doing things. They'll even resort to force if necessary. And when Brubaker finds out that elderly Abraham has been kept in the prison three years beyond the end of his sentence, that's when things really get bad.

Brubaker is based on a true story, although the name of the real-life warden involved, Thomas Murton, who wrote a book on the experience, was changed for whatever reason. The conditions shown are fairly brutal, although I doubt it's anything like what Murton really saw. The story is never interesting, and while it unsurprisingly takes sides, this is sometimes to the movie's detriment Brubaker seems sometimes too perfectly good and people like Bullen too perfectly bad.

Overall, however, Brubaker is more than worth a watch, and one that for whatever reason seems to have fallen through the cracks over the last 40 years. It looks to be out of print on DVD, although it is on Amazon streaming. That's a shame, because it's a pretty darn good movie.

Thursday Movie Picks #330: Bookish Movies

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. We're out of October, so no more horror themes for a while. Instead, we get a theme called "Bookish Movies". Now, I didn't think this was a theme about book-to-movie adaptations, since I'm pretty certain we've done that before. After a bit of thought, I came up with three movies with different types of people who could be considered bookish:

Fast Company (1938). Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice plays Joel and Garda Sloane, a married couple who are sellers of rare books, with Joel making more money by finding stolen books and returning them for the insurance reward. One of those cases leads to a man being murdered, and Joel and Garda start playing Nick and Nora Charles.

Storm Center (1956). Bette Davis plays a spinster librarian who's an insititution in her medium-sized town. But she's also created controversy by keeping a book on her shelf that argues in favor of communism, saying she kept Mein Kampf on the shelves back in the 1930s so people could read and judge for themselves. One little boy idolizes her, and when his dad tells him she may be a Communist, the boy goes nuts, which is funniest part of the movie, which is nowhere near as brave as it might make itself out to be.

The Best of Everything (1959). Hope Lange plays the new member of the secretarial pool at a New York publishing house. The secretaries have various adventures, while Lange looks up to spinster editor Joan Crawford, who's about as nasty here as her character in Torch Song was. Lange's hoping to become a reader and then maybe an editor. Other editors are played by Stephen Boyd and Brian Aherne, while the secretaries include Diane Baker and Suzy Parker.

It Happened in Flatbush

Lloyd Nolan brightened up a lot of movies in supporting roles. The rare occasions he did get to be a lead were mostly in the B movie series as the detective Michael Shayne. One other movie with Nolan in the lead is It Happened in Flatbush. FXM is running it tomorrow at 8:45 AM, and again on Saturday at 4:35 AM.

Brooklyn's baseball team (not called the Dodgers although Ebbets Field was used for establishing shots) is lousy again, to the point that the current manager has up and quit in the middle of the season. The owner, Mac McAvoy (Sara Allgood) is looking for a new manager, and she has just the person in mind. However, she's going to have to go looking for that man....

Frank Maguire (Lloyd Nolan) is in the independent minor leagues, managing a no-name team of no-name players when McAvoy shocks the players by entering the locker room. She's looking for Maguire because she has fond memories of him, and wants to give him a chance to redeem himself. Maguire, for his part, isn't so certain he wants to go back to Brooklyn. Seven years earlier, in a pennant race, he committed an error that cost the team a title, earning him the nickname Butterfingers and the opprobrium of all the Brooklyn fans.

Still, Maguire does take the job. But when he gets to Brooklyn, he finds out that McAvoy has died, bequeathing the team to a consortium of family members, headed by McAvoy's niece Kathryn (Carole Landis). She's an heiress from one of McAvoy's siblings, living as a socialite in Manhattan and knowing next to nothing about either Brooklyn or baseball. She'd just as happily go with the rest of the family and sell the team, but press agent Sam Sloan (William Frawley) convinces them to hold put for at least the rest of the season.

Two things happen. One is that Maguire and Kathryn begin to fall in love. The other is that Maguire shakes things up in the locker room to the point that the team starts winning. But that winning comes at a bit of a price as Maguire's focus on the team causes him to miss a date with Kathryn, who promptly falls out of love with him and is perfectly willing to sell the team out from under him again.

Amazingly, the result is that things suddenly start to go south for Maguire and the team just as the critical final three-game series against the Cardinals is about to begin. Maguire is willing to leave the team for no good reason, and when he does come back to the team, he's somehow unable to manage the team properly unless Kathryn is in the stands. But with this being a feel-good movie released early in the USA's involvement in World War II, it's quite easy to figure out how the movie is going to end.

Nolan and Landis do the best they can with the material, but in the end it's fairly slight and lets them down. Baseball fans may be interested in some of the vintage footage of Ebbets Field, but they'll also be interested (or cringing) in spotting all the baseball-related plot holes, with the most egregious being the climax ignoring that Brooklyn would bat in the bottom of the ninth inning if St. Louis does score the tying run.

In the end, It Happened in Flatbush is utterly pedestrian material that you might want to watch once if you're a Lloyd Nolan or Carole Landis completist, but it's nothing particularly memorable. Judge for yourself, however. The movie has been released to DVD courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme.

Bitter Victory

Earlier this year, I bought this 5-film "war" movie box set. (Young Winston, which I blogged about not so long ago, is only partly a war movie, while I wouldn't call The Prisoner a war film at all.) I had recorded Bitter Victory before picking up this set, and finally got around to watching it.

The scene is North Africa during World War II, when the Germans still control a fair portion of North Africa, notably Benghazi. The British command in Cairo wants to get some important information from the Germans, necessitating a commando operation. Who to lead it? They have two choices. Capt. Leith (Richard Burton) knows the area and speaks Arabic, having studied the archaeology of North Africa. But he's only a captain. Maj. Brand (Curd Jürgens) has rank on Leith, but is a by the books officer who doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the men under him. So the general makes the Solomonic decision to have both men go with the rest of the commandos, with Brand nominally in command.

Brand and Leith then go to dinner, where Brand introduces Leith to Mrs. Brand (Ruth Roman). Of course, they need no introduction, as Mrs. Brand had a relationship with Leith before marrying Brand, one that Leith broke off. But for whatever reason, Maj. Brand is pissed about it, probably because his wife still holds a candle for Leith. So there's going to be a lot more tension between Leith and Brand.

The men parachute in behind the lines and reach their assigned target. Unsurprisingly, the place is well-guarded enough that the commandos aren't going to be able to get those documents unmolested. And wouldn't you know it, one of the German guards spots the interlopers and attacks. Brand finds himself unable to kill the enemy, being too much of a coward to kill at close range, leaving Leith to do the deed. No wonder nobody has any respect for Brand.

The commandos head out into the desert toward where they're supposed to rendezvous with the people who are going to provide them with the camels they need to get the rest of the way out of the desert. However, along the way they spot a German patrol and get into a firefight with them, killing several but also leaving a British solder and a German officer seriously wounded. Brand, being in command, comes up with the brilliant idea of leaving Leith behind with the two wounded men since they can't just leave a British soldier to die alone. It also has the added benefit in Brand's mind that it will probably kill Leith too, and Leith won't be able to report back to Cairo how much of a coward Brand was.

It doesn't quite work out that way, as Leith decides the least bad thing to do is to put both wounded men out of their misery. The two wounded do ultimately die out there in the desert, leaving Leith free to leave the scene and catch up with Brand. Boy can you bet there's going to be a lot of tension once Leith shows up again, and even more when they discover the people provisioning the camels have been found out and killed, leaving just one camel for the men.

You'll have to watch the rest of Bright Victory to see how the conflict between Leith and Brand is resolved. It's an interesting movie in that it's more of a thoughtful movie than a war movie of action. Casting a German in Jürgens as an Allied officer (he's passed off as South African, presumably an Afrikaner) seems odd, but works because he gives a good performance. I'm not the biggest fan of Richard Burton, but he doesn't do anything to make the movie worse. Roman only gets a couple of scenes, while the commandos include a very young Christopher Lee whom I didn't recognize at first.

Much of the filming was done on location in Libya; this was a dozen years before Qaddafi came to power. The rest was done in France. Although the print TCM ran has a Columbia logo at the beginning, the movie was made by a comapny called Transcontinental Films based in France with Columbia getting distribution rights in the English-speaking world. Apparently there were cuts made for the original release (there are a couple of scenes I can understand censors being unhappy with), but the print TCM ran and the one on the box set are both around 102 minutes which, as I understand it, was the original pre-cut running time.

People who want a war movie with less action will probably enjoy Bitter Victory, but be aware that it's also a bit of an acquired taste.

Drunken Angel

Some months back, TCM ran a day of films for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune. Among the movies, I recorded Drunken Angel. Recently, I finally got around to watching it to do a post on here.

Nominally, the star is not Mifune, but Takashi Shimura. Shimura plays Sanada, a doctor who lives in a slum region of Tokyo that was probably poor even before all the devastation caused by World War II. The neighborhood has a festering open sewer that Dr. Sanada warns the children about. Also, beaten down by the unrelenting poverty of his neighborhood. Why couldn't he have gone into a more lucrative private practice like his classmate Takahama, he wonders?

One evening, into his practice comes Matsunaga (that's Mifune). Matsunaga claims to have injured his hand on a piece of nail protruding from a door. But when Sanada goes to extract it, he finds that it's actually a bullet, which implies that Matsunaga is part of the yakuza, since Japan's strict gun laws mean there's no way law-abiding people are going to get access to guns. But worse than that, Sanada discovers that Matsunaga has a bad nagging cough that's likely tuberculosis. Sanada suggests going to Takahama to get x-rays.

Eventually, we find out that Matsunaga had already gone to Takahama and the x-rays reveal a case of TB that, left untreated, is going to kill him in the not too distant future. We also learn that he's only temporarily the top dog in the neighborhood. He took that role over while the previous top dog, Okada (Reizaburo Yamamoto) spent four years in prison, and is on the verge of getting out. Matsunaga doesn't want to give that spot back to Okada.

Okada's looming freedom is also going to cause problems for others. Dr. Sanada's nurse, Miyo (Chieko Nakakita) was Okada's old girlfriend, and has absolutely no desire to go back to Okada. She is naturally worried that Okada is going to come looking for her, find her, and expect her to come back to him. Her family has a farm out in the country so she could probably go back there, but for whatever reason hasn't done so already.

Sure enough, Okada eventually does get out of prison. He approaches Matsunaga and finds that Matsunaga isn't intending to go back to the way things used to be, so Okada goes to the big boss. When they realize that Matsunaga has TB, they plan to use him as a sacrificial lamb. That's going to come when Okada's underlings recognize Miyo....

In some ways, Drunken Angel is one of those little movies that doesn't have a whole lot going on, at least not on the surface. But it's actually a fairly deep movie. Sanada and Matsunaga seem unlikely partners, but they both wind up on the edges of society, Matsunaga as a not very high up member of the yakuza, and Sanada only being a slum doctor. Both actors give very good performances as the story reaches its fairly obvious conclusion.

Drunken Angel has received a standalone DVD release courtesy of the Criterion Collection. That means it's rather pricey; I wish it could have been included in the Eclipse set of Postwar Kurosawa.

But where's Davy Jones?

Another of the movies that I had the chance to record during one of the free preview weekends is 12 Monkeys. It's going to be on again, tomorrow at 3:30 AM on HBO, or three hours later if you only have the west coast feed. So I decided to watch it to do a review here.

Bruce Willis plays James Cole, a prisoner in some sort of dystopian future where a virus has killed over 90% of the earth's human population and everybody else lives underground. James has dreams about a young boy watching somebody get shot on an airport concourse, highly reminiscent of La jetée; the opening credits quite explicitly state that the movie was inspired by La jetée.

Cole is "volunteered" to go above ground to try to find some insects to see if they still carry the virus so the scientists can do more research. After returning, the scientists give him an offer: Go back to 1996, just before the virus was released, and see if he can find out about the virus and the mysterious group called the "Army of the 12 Monkeys" that may have released the virus.

However, Cole finds that he's arrived not in 1996, but in 1990, which is six years too early. His arrival gets him in trouble with the 1990 authorities, and after assaulting some police officers, he gets sent to an insane asylum in Baltimore. There he meets Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), the son of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist (Christopher Plummer). Treating Cole is psychiatrist Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe).

Cole escapes and, on being recaptured, asks to make one phone call, because the people from the future are monitoring that phone number. Needless to say, the woman who answers has no idea what Cole is talking about. Somehow, however, this is enough for the scientists from the future to find Cole and bring him back.

They try to send Cole to 1996 again, but he gets sent first to World War I before ultimately winding up in 1996. Dr. Railly has now written a book and is giving a lecture on it. Cole accosts her when she comes out from the lecture, forcing her to drive him to Philadelphia, since that's where the animal rights group that's believed to have engendered the Army of the 12 Monkeys was based. Also, it's where Jeffrey Goines' father lives.

Dr. Railly begins to believe Cole, especially after she extracts a bullet from him and it happens to be one that he took in World War I as determined by metallurgical analysis. Cole, for his part, decides that he wants to stay in 1996 and not go back to what would be the post-apocalyptic present for him.

To Cole, this means that he wants to stop the virus from being released in the first place, which was not why the scientists sent him, since they believed that would be futile and however the timeline changed, the virus would still get released. Jeff has been released from prison and is supposedly doing research under his father, although it's a front for that animal rights group. Jeff is charismatic, but still pretty clearly nuts.

Eventually, we get to the time the virus was scheduled to have been released. But will Cole be able to stop whoever is going to release it? After all, the scientists were able to get him out of 1990 and out of World War I, so they should be able to find him in this timeline too....

12 Monkeys is a movie that is complicated and requires the paying of close attention so you won't miss what's going on as things relate to events shown previously in the movie. If you've seen La jetée, you might be able to guess where 12 Monkeys is going, but it still does a pretty darn good job getting there.

Bruce Willis isn't necessarily my idea of the world's greatest actor, but director Terry Gilliam does a good job of playing to Willis' strengths as an action movie star by keeping the focus more on action and suspense than a serious drama. Pitt seems to me to be a bit over the top as an insane man, a stark contrast to the more catatonic mentally ill who are in the asylum in the opening scenes. But I'd assume that was a deliberate decision on the writers and directors, since he also has to be charismatic leading the animal rights group.

As I was watching, I of course couldn't help but think of current events with the coronavirus, and wondering whether the sort of virus released in 12 Monkeys could really be that deadly. After all, we've seen other viruses like Ebola (in Outbreak, which came out around the same time as 12 Monkeys) which is more fatal but also harder to transmit since the afflicted die so quickly, so the outbreaks die out. Still, we've seen in the past eight months just how easy it is to induce mass panic. We're not going to wind up living underground like in 12 Monkeys, but the authorities still seem intent on creating as much dystopia as possible. 25 years ago when 12 Monkeys was released, I don't think anybody would have expected it.

12 Monkeys has received a DVD and Blu-ray release. Apparently, there was a TV series adaptation several years ago, and that's on DVD too, so watch out if you're looking to buy this one.

TCM Star of the Month November 2020: Shelley Winters

Shelley Winters picking up her last Oscar nomination in The Poseidon Adventure (airing Nov. 30 at 8:00 PM)

We're into the first full week of a new month, which means it's time for the monthly programming themes on TCM to change. First up is the Star of the Month. For November, it's going to be Shelley Winters, the two-time Oscar winter who got a lot more great supporting roles than starting roles, and whose outsized style brought a lot of verve and fun to the roles she played. Her movies will be airing every Monday night in November on TCM A good example would be The Poseidon Adventure (Nov. 30 at 8:00 PM), where she plays an older woman on the doomed cruise with her husband. A lot of those roles came in the 1970s, which is the focus of the final Monday night lineup.

Winters won two Oscars, both in the Supporting Actress category. The first was for The Diary of Anne Frank (airing at 8:00 PM Nov. 16) in 1959. The second was for A Patch of Blue (airing at 1:30 AM Nov. 10 and again outside of the Star of the Month salute at 4:00 PM on Nov. 18) in 1965. Other supporting roles are in movies like Odds Against Tomorrow (Nov. 16 at 11:15 PM), and I Died a Thousand Times (overnight tonight at 1:30 AM).

But Winters' movie career started in the 1940s, and the spotlight begins tonight with a couple of those early performances. Interestingly, there are some fine early performances overlooked, such as He Ran All the Way, while Winchester '73 gets moved to a night of Shelley Winters westerns. I'm not surprised they couldn't get the Ronald Colman movie A Double Life, which I think is Universal. Also missing is Night of the Hunter.

One early performance that is showing up is in A Place in the Sun (Nov. 9 at 11:00 PM), where Winters is excellent as the grasping young woman who has a doomed relationship with troubled Montgomery Clift, which earned her her sole Best Actress nomination, losing to Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Number One

With this being football season, I recently had the chance to watch a new-to-me movie about football: Number One.

Charlton Heston plays Ron Catlan, quarterback for the New Orleans Saints. As the movie opens, it's the week of the final preseason game, and Catlan isn't doing very well. He's pushing 40, and although he led the team to a championship in the past, there's a young gun looking to take his place, and all the hits have been taking their toll. However, Catlan insists he can still lead the team to another championship.

Ron's long-suffering wife Julie (Jessica Walter), a successful fashion designer, wants to pick him up right after the game because they're supposed to be hosting a party, but Ron would rather drown his sorrows at a local restaurant. He does get picked up, however, by Ann (Diana Muldaur), a guest at a party being held by one of Ron's old, now-retired teammates, Richie Fowler (Bruce Dern).

Richie, having retired, has made the brilliant decision of going into business with a car dealership, leasing luxury cars to well-heeled clients. He suggests to Ron that perhaps Ron should hang it up and join him hawking cars. Later on, an executive at a computer company (these being the days of room-sized mainframes) offers Catlan a job, but he's going to have to take it now; it might not be there in even just a few months.

Ron, for his part, decides to sleep with Ann, something that's going to piss of Julie when she finds out, except that she's seen it before. In some ways she's to the point that she just doesn't care. Eventually, we get to opening week, at home against the Cowboys....

Number One is a movie that in theory has a lot going for it, but ultimately winds up falling well short of anything that it sets out to do. Probably the best thing is the vintage look at late 1960s football. The movie was released in 1969, and was made with the full cooperation of the New Orleans Saints (and presumably the NFL). Real Saints players and coaches of the time appear, although I don't think any of them are major characters. We also see the old Sugar Bowl stadium, since the Superdome wouldn't start construction until 1971.

As a narrative movie, however, the film is a mess. I suppose it's supposed to be more of a character study of Catlan, and anybody who's reached the end of the line should probably be able to identify with the character. But there's not much narrative here, and not much character in Catlan either. The structure of the movie isn't helped out much by an overuse of flashbacks. It ultimately feels more like a series of disconnected scenes rather than a coherent whole.

Still, I think anybody who's interested in vintage football when the sport was really beginning to take off thanks to color TV will probably be interested by the internal look at the Saints, as well as what the movie gets wrong because Heston was decidedly not a football player. Heston was 45 at the time and looks it. Also, although Heston had the size to be a football player, the Saints involved in the making of the movie said that he didn't look like a football player at all and certainly didn't have the ability.

Number One finally got a DVD release a few years back.

Sean Connery, 1930-2020

Sean Connery (l.) and Michael Caine in The Man Who Would Be King

Sean Connery, who had a long and varied movie career although he'll probably always be best remembered for having played James Bond as the film franchise took off, has died at the age of 90. Among the many iconic moments in the early Bond movies is of Bond being strapped to a gold slab as a laser is heading toward his crotch in Goldfinger. He asks Goldfinger, "You expect me to talk?" to which Goldfinger sardonically responds, "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!" If one had a morbid sense of humor, one could say Gert Frobe up in heaven is no longer expecting Mr. Bond to die. Goldfinger was the third of seven times Connery would play the role, in the first five Albert Broccoli-produced Bon films, a one-film break before returning for Diamonds Are Forever, and then a dozen years later in Never Say Never Again, which some Bond fans don't consider an official Bond movie.

Connery first quit playing Bond after You Only Live Twice in part because he didn't want to be typecast; indeed, he took roles in other movies even while he was doing the Bond pictures, such as Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie in 1964, where he was teamed with Tippi Hedren (pictured above). Whatever problems the movie has (and it definitely has problems) are not Connery's fault. Another non-Bond movie Connery made in this period is The Hill, a gritty World War II POW drama.

After quitting the Bond franchise, Connery played in some quite good 1970s movies, including The Man Who Would Be King which I've pictured above. There are also films like The Anderson Tapes, The Wind and the Lion, and The Great Train Robbery. There's also the cult classic Zardoz, although how good a movie Zardoz is is left to the viewer. Connery would finally win an Oscar for his role in The Untouchables.

I haven't seen whether TCM has a TCM Remembers piece up yet, or whether they're going to run a programming tribute to him at some point.