Briefs for February 6-7, 2021

This week's entry in Noir Alley is The Killer that Stalked New York, which I blogged about many years ago. It's somewhat of a docudrama about a woman (Evelyn Keyes) smuggling diamonds from Cuba who picked up a case of smallpox while she was down there, and is now spreading the disease through the city. Timely with all the coronavirus kerfuffle, and nice to see authorities not panic and put everybody under house arrest and then say that the people thrown out of work by this should have gotten "essential" jobs. The Killer that Stalked New York is on at midnight tonight and 10:00 AM tomorrow.

Over on FXM, Anna and the King of Siam is one of the movies that's back in the rotation after a while. I don't think I've actually blogged about that one before, and haven't seen it in ages, so I'll have to record tomorrow's showing to do a post on it at some point. You can catch it at 7:20 AM tomorrow Also in the rotation -- and I don't know if I've ever seen it on FXM or even FMC back in the day -- is The Man from Snowy River, an entertaining double role for Kirk Douglas. It's on tomorrow at 1:10 PM and again Monday.

I was going to mention the passing of Haya Harareet earlier, but then Christopher Plummer died and he really deserved an entire post to himself. Israeli-born actress Harareet, who is probably best known for playing the female lead in the Charlton Heston version of Ben-Hur, was 89. I didn't realize she married British director Jack Clayton and co-wrote the screenplay to Our Mother's House, an effectively creepy movie Clayton directed.

Today marks 110 years since the birth of Ronald Reagan; unsurprisingly for a Saturday TCM isn't doing a birthday programming salute, even though this is one of the few years they'll get the chance since 31 Days of Oscar is being moved to April this year. (I suppose it's possible that the Oscars could permanently go back to April, where they were decades ago.) One person whose fans are in luck is Lana Turner; her centenary comes up on Monday and with no 31 Days of Oscar and Turner having worked a lot at MGM, she'll get what looks like a 24-hour tribute.

Christopher Plummer, 1929-2021

Christopher Plummer with the Oscar he finally won for Beginners (2011)

The death has been announced of actor Christopher Plummer, whose stage and screen career spanned some seven decades. Plummer was probably best remembered for The Sound of Music although he apparently didn't care much for the movie. Plummer was 91.

Plummer got cast in a lot of movies that turned out to be be not quite so good, such as Inside Daisy Clover, where he's pictured above with Natalie Wood; or The Night of the Generals where he's pictured below as Erwin Rommel. That's somewhat unfair to Plummer, who I think brought something positive to all of the roles I've seen him in, even if the scripts didn't always turn out to be the best.

With that in mind, I should probably include a screencap from a better movie, so I've got The Man Who Would Be King, in which he played Rudyard Kipling (who wrote the story on which the movie is based); in the photo above that's Plummer in the center with Michael Caine on the left and Sean Connery on the right.

I haven't seen if TCM has scheduled a programming tribute. They have an obituary posted, but no mention of a change in programming.

Thursday Movie Picks #343: Fake Relationships

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. I'm back after a one-week hiatus, which was mostly because it was a TV edition looking for new TV shows in 2020, and I don't watch enough episodic TV to do a Picks post on new TV shows. This week, however, we're back to movies. Since we're in February and there's Valentine's day, we get themes based on different types of love, or lack of love as the case may be. For this first Thursday in February, the theme is "Fake Relationships". I was going to go with movies in which one person marries another for malicious purposes, but noticed that one of my choices, The Two Mrs. Carrolls, is on TCM tomorrow. So I went in a different direction, only to discover that a different choice is also on TCM tomorrow:

Come Live With Me (1941). Austrian-born showgirl Hedy Lamarr is engaged to Ian Hunter, but has overstayed her visa, so she risks deportation unless she can get married. She meets struggling writer Jimmy Stewart, and proposes a sham marriage to him, which he agrees to because he can use the money. He decided to write about the experience, but sends a copy of his work to the publishing company run by Hunter. This is also the sort of movie where you expect the Lamarr and Stewart characters to fall in love along the way, too.

John Loves Mary (1949). John (Ronald Reagan) returns home from World War II with a fiancée waiting for him, Mary (Patricia Neal), who is the daughter of a senator. However, John has also brought a wife home with him, Lilly (Virginia Field). Lilly is a showgirl who was in love with John's best friend Fred (Jack Carson), but news reached Fred that Lilly died so he went back to America. John found out that Lilly was in fact still alive and wanted to bring her over to America for Fred, but the only way to do that was to have a sham marriage and then divorce her once she's in America so she can marry Fred. The catch is that Fred, thinking Lilly was dead, got married to an American who is very pregnant.

Welcome to Hard Times (1967). Aldo Ray destroys the town of Hard Times, leaving an Indian medicine man and three unrelated whites as survivors. Those whites are "mayor" Will (Henry Fonda), Molly (Janice Rule) and young Jimmy (Michael Shea). As other people (most notably Keenan Wynn and his bordello) begin to come to town to rebuild, the three survivors have to pretend to be a family, even though Molly thinks Will was a coward for not stopping Aldo. This one is on TCM tomorrow at 2:30 PM.

H.M. Pulham, Esq.

Another of the movies that I've had on my DVR for a while that I finally got around to watching because it's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive (or at least was last I checked) is H.M. Pulham, Esq.

Robert Young plays Harry Moulson Pulham, who at the start of the movie is in his late 40s and, one can guess, a lawyer in private practice in Boston. He comes from the upper-crust of Boston society and lives the sort of "proper" life you expect from Bostonians of that era; think the Vales in Now, Voyager before Bette Davis insists on having that nervous breakdon. Mr. Pulham has a wife Kay (Ruth Hussey) and two children, and walks the dog every morning before walking to the office.

On this particular day, however, a couple of things shake up his routine. One is a call from Rodney Brown, nicknamed "Bo-Jo" (Leif Ericson). Brown was one of Pulham's friends from Harvard back in the day, and with their 25th class reunion coming up, wants to get together with all the friends and do some capsule bios of their lives in the quarter-century following graduation. The other is a message from a then young woman that Pulham knew from working with her in New York a few years after graduation, Marvin Myles (Hedy Lamarr). She's up in Boston, and invites Harry to see her at a partciular hotel. He goes, and looks at her, but can't brin himself to actually talk to her again....

Flash back to early in Harry's life, long before even meeting Marvin. He had a wealthy father in John Pulham (Charles Coburn) married to Mrs. Pulham (no first name given and played by Fay Holden from the Andy Hardy movies), and went to the right schools, even knowing Kay from a fairly early age but not caring for her because she, like a lot of the Boston families, are from stuffy stock. Then he goes off to Harvard and, after graduation, goes off to fight in World War I (the movie was actually released the week before Pearl Harbor; do the math).

World War I changed a lot of people, and Pulham seems to be one of them. He's not so certain he wants to go back to Boston, and one of his more liberal friends from Harvard, Bill King (Van Heflin), gets Pulham a job in advertising in New York, something that would scandalize the family, as this isn't exactly the most respectable job out there. Marvin is a copyrwiter at the agency, and Marvin and Harry seem to work a lot together.

Unsurprisingly, they fall in love too, although we know at the very beginning that they don't wind up together in the final reel since Harry and Kay are married in 1941. It turns out that Harry brings Bill and Marvin up to Boston to meet the family one weekend. Harry's kid sister Mary (Bonita Granville) likes Marvin, and Mom professes to, but Marvin understands that the whole familiy is so tradition-bound and stuffy that this could never be the place for her. But don't Marvin and Harry love each other?

H.M. Pulham, Esq. is one of those movies that MGM made well, much like Madame Bovary which I mentioned several weeks ago. Unfortunately, in the case of H.M. Pulham, Esq., the plot is a bit maddening. Harry and Marvin's reasons for breaking up just make me shrug my head and wonder why either of them thought they'd go on to live happily ever after snubbing each other.

So, while H.M. Pulham, Esq. is a stylish and well-acted movie, it's in service of a script that definitely has its problems. But, as always, judge for yourself.

TCM Star of the Month February 2021: John Garfield

The Postman Always Rings Twice, tonight at 8:00 PM

We're into the firt full week of a new month, which as always means time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time out, it's John Garfield, who made about three dozen movies in 12 years before his untimely death at the age of 39. Garfield's movies are airing every Tuesday in prime time going into Wednesday morning, starting tonight at 8:00 PM with one of his best known films, The Postman Always Rings Twice.

What with the new website format at TCM, I don't notice quite as far in advance who the new Star of the Month is on TCM. That's why I not too long ago did a post on Blackwell's Island, instead of thinking to save it for now, since it's airing tomorrow morning at 6:15 AM. I also did a post on Castle on the Hudson (Feb. 17 at 6:45 AM), which probably ought to have switched spots with Blackwell's Island as the movie up after Blackwell's Island is 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. Speaking of Garfield in remakes, he was in Between Two Worlds (Feb. 10 at 7:30 AM), which is a remake of the early talkie Outward Bound (not on the schedule this month.) Once I realized Garfield was Star of the Month, I deliberately held off on watching Four Daughters (Feb. 17 at 12:15 AM) to do a post on it then.

Garfield's final movie, He Ran All the Way, is on tonight at 11:45 PM. Another movie airing in the second week of February is They Made Me a Criminal, at 5:45 AM Feb. 10. I picked that one largely for the photo of Garfield with some of the Dead End Kids, who would of course go on to become the Bowery Boys:

The broadcast of size

About a year ago, I mentioned picking up a cheap Bob Hope box set with a whole bunch of movies I hadn't blogged about before. Recently, I got it back out and put the DVD containing The Big Broadcast of 1938 in the DVD player since I hadn't mentioned a Bob Hope movie in several months.

This was Hope's first feature film, although he had made half a dozen shorts, so he's technically not the star here, although he shows up right at the beginning of the movie. He's Buzz Fielding, a radio announcer who is supposed to be on the S.S. Gigantic, which is going on a transatlantic boat race with the S.S. Colossal, the former having a new radio-powered propeller. But Buzz is currently in jail, because he's got three ex-wives: Cleo (Shirley Ross), Grace (Grace Bradley), and Joan (Dorothy Howe), who are all looking for their alimony. He's also got a fiancée in Dorothy Wyndham (Dorothy Lamour), who bails him out by hocking the engagement ring. Of course, that ring isn't paid for. And Buzz has a $50,000 bet on the Gigantic winning the race.

As for the nominal star of the movie, that's W.C. Fields, playing two characters. T. Frothinghill Bellows owns the Gigantic, and has a brother S.B., also played by Fields. Frothinghill wants his brother to be on the Colossal, as S.B. has a reputation for extremely bad luck, and putting him on the competing ship means it a certainty Bellows' ship will win the race. However, after a golfing scene that has nothing to do with the plot, such as it is, S.B. flies off and lands on the Gigantic.

Buzz and his ex-wives all wind up on the ship, as does Dorothy, along with S.B.'s daughter Martha (Martha Raye, who already has her big mouth in the opening credits). Bob Hayes (Leif Erickson) is the engineer behind the radio propeller, which he may or may not be able to use for various reasons.

But the real point of the movie is for a series of variety numbers. First up is bandleader Shep Fields, whose shtick was "rippling rhythm", whatever that was; he conducts a song with an animated backdrop of an anthropomorphic drop of water. There's a male Mexican singer, and a female opera singer who does Wagner. Some of the stars also get to sing, most notably Hope and Ross doing "Thanks for the Memories", which of course would become Hope's signature song. Fields gets to do a couple more routines.

The Big Broadcast of 1938 was the third (I think) movie Paramount released in the Big Broadcast series, and wasn't really meant to be watched for the plot, more for the musical interludes and comic sequences, making me think of Hollywood Party. I have to admit that I wasn't a huge fan of the variety numbers, and Fields was relatively irritating here. Why, for example, would he stop to play golf (and be obnoxious to everybody around him) instead of getting on the ship? Surely his brother would have made certain he got on the right ship. The movie also ends rather abruptly, as if the writers didn't know how to come up with a real resolution.

Some people may like the variety numbers, as well as Fields' comedy, more than I do. Those people will probably like The Big Broadcast of 1938. For the rest of us, it's more of a time capsule of what audiences might have wanted back in 1938.

Snakes on an RV

One of the movies that recently started showing up in the FXM rotation is Race With the Devil. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 1:30 PM and again Tuesday morning at 11:45 AM. So, having recorded it from a previous FXM showing, I watched it to do a post on here.

Peter Fonda plays motorcycle racer Roger, friends with Frank (Warren Oates), who seems to be his race crew, although that's not really important since that's not what the movie is about. Frank has bought a state-of-the-art (at least for the mid-1970s) RV, and is planning to go on vacation from their home in Texas to Colorado to get in some skiing and other fun. Frank is going with his wife Alice (Loretta Swit), and Roger and his wife Kelly (Lara Parker) are welcome to come along.

So the two couples set off, and I'd think that having to spend that much time together in a cramped RV would make the two couples start to hate each other by the end of the trip, but again, that's not what the movie is about. After a day's worth of driving, Frank finds an isolated country road and, with no indication of whether or not this is private property or whether camping is allowed, decides that this would be a good place to stop and spend the night. After all, it doesn't make that much difference where they stop, since they're self-contained and can make dinner and bed down anywhere.

The ladies walk the dog and the guys do some motorbike riding; eventually, the two guys and up on a bluff on one side of a river, looking across to the other side where there only seems to be one dead tree that hasn't fallen over yet. But as they look, they see some people start a bonfire and start up some sort of singing. The guys have a pair of binoculars so that they can get a better view, but that might be a mistake. What they see is actually an apparent human sacrifice from a Satanic religious sect! Oh dear. But worse is that the wives, worried about where their husbands are, call out. Of course the Satanists are going to hear them, putting everybody in jeopardy!

So we have the makings of an interesting little movie, with the couples trying to escape in the RV with the Satanists chasing on foot, with the added problem for the couples that they drove over a shallow creek on their way to the campsite and get stuck on the way out, escaping just in time. They could just drive home (or to Colorado, I suppose) overnight, not taking any further part in the murder investigation, but the Satanists smashed a back window; also, having witnessed a crime, the couples feel obligated to tell the police.

The bad news for them is that it means they have to remain in the area. And somehow, these Satanists have a lot of support in the region. So much support, in fact, that it seems as though they can round up thousands of people to go chasing after our two couples, together with the infrastructure needed to do the chasing. Simply beating them up, killing them, and dumping the bodies in shallow graves is what I'd think would be the most likely thing for the Satanists to try to do, but instead, these Satanists act as though they want to terrorize the couples before finally killing them.

With that, the couples are faced with a series of increasingly implausible, and increasingly hilarious scenarios foist upon them by the Satanists who chase them all over west Texas. I think my favorite was when one of the wives opened up a cabinet and found... a rattlesnake! I was rather hoping Warren Oates might say "Get these motherfucking snakes off the motherfucking RV!", but nobody had considered that juicy bit of dialog in the 1970s.

Race With the Devil was conceived as horror, but to me as horror it doesn't quite work. As unintentional comedy however, it's incredibly funny and entertaining. Sit down with a bunch of friends, grab a big bowl of popcorn, and have fun yelling at the scree at the silliness of it all. Race With the Devil has received a DVD release, as part of a two-movie set with another Fonda movie I blogged about not too long ago, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry.

TCM's Cicely Tyson tribute

Actress Cicely Tyson died during the week at the age of 96. I'd been meaning to do a post on her passing, but have been busiy with other things.

Fortunately, TCM had already scheduled an evening of her movies for tonight, in the couple of hours of prime time before Silent Sunday Nights. This was scheduled well before Tyson died, as it's on the monthly schedule that I downloaded at the beginnign of the month. I don't know if TCM was able to get anybody in to do new intros and outros, but it wouldn't suprise me if they were able to get Ben Mankiewicz to do that.

Anyhow, the evening of programming has two films, Tyson's Oscar-nominated performance in Sounder at 8:00 PM, followed by another pretty good performance in A Man Called Adam at 10:00 PM, starring Sammy Davis Jr. as an alcoholic jazz trumpeter.

While looking for a trailer for Sounder, I also came across the following:

The Killers (1964)

A couple of months back when TCM did a spotlight on the Film Foundation. One of the movies they showed was the 1964 version of The Killers. It's going to be on again as part of Noir Alley, overnight tonight at 12:30 AM and then again tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM. So I sat down to watch it and do a review here.

As you may know, there's a 1946 movie called The Killers based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway and building a fuller story around that short story. This 1964 version is a sort of remake in that it takes the original Hemingway story and, like the earlier movie, extends it, although as it turns out not in quite the same way. John Cassavetes plays Johnny North, who is teaching at a school for the blind. Two men come in, Charlie (Lee Marvin) and Lee (Clu Gulager), looking for Johnny. It turns out that these two are contract killers, with a $25,000 contract to kill Johnny. They find him, and Johnny seems strangely resigned to his death.

That's more or less where the Hemingway story ended, but both movies decided to add a much bigger story: why was Johnny so accepting of his fate that he doesn't do a darn thing to keep these guys from killing him? Charlie is the brains of the operation, and realizes that there must be something much more than the $25,000 out there or else why would anybody want Johnny dead? So Charlie decides he and Lee are going to find out what the bigger payoff is, to see if they can get at it themselves.

This leads them to Miami, where they meet Earl Sylvester, a mechanic working on muscle cars and other sports cars. Earl had known Johnny out on the west coast when Johnny was a racecar driver. But Johnny got in a smash-up that more or less ended his career. Along the way, he had met Sheila (Angie Dickinson) and fallen in love with her, but Earl warned Johnny that Sheila was the kept woman of Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan), so any romance was doomed.

But there's more to Johnny and Sheila's relationship. At some point after the smash-up, Johnny has been reduced to doing demolition derby and short dirt track racing, but as related by Mickey (Norman Fell), Browning's right-hand man at the time, Sheila finds Johnny again. He would be perfect as the driver in a scheme Jack is cooking up. That plot is a heist of a mail delivery which will be carrying the takings for a bunch of resorts on the Pacific coast, and should be close to seven figures. Johnny could use the money, and this is a chance to see Sheila again. Not only will he get to see Sheila; perhaps he can figure out a way to double-cross Browning so that he and Sheila can run off with the money and live happily ever after.

Now, we know from the beginning of the movie that Johnny and Sheila don't live happily ever after. But what happened to sour the relationship? Well, for that, you're going to have to watch this version of The Killers.

There's a lot different between this movie and the 1946 original, but both are absolutely worth watching. The 1964 version was originally conceived as a TV movie, but the network rejected it because of the amoral violence, so it got pitched as a movie, turning out to be Ronald Reagan's final film before he would switch to politics and run for Governor of California.

There are any number of places in which the TV movie origins are evident, most notably in the interiors, which really look like they've got a TV budget, as though they came out of episodes of the 1960s Dragnet, even though that series debuted later. There's also some scenes that are obviously done on the Universal backlot.

But the movie itself is solid, with Cassavetes good, Marvin playing a character similar to the one he essayed in Violent Saturday, and Reagan being surprisingly good cast against type since his forte was really good guys. Here, Reagan acts and delivers his dialogue as though he's channeling Jack Webb's Joe Friday, if Webb had believed that the cops weren't your friend and instead on the take. It might be a strange characterization but it works; after all, somebody like Browning wouldn't be the sort of oafish hoodlum that Clu Gulager comes close to playing (rightly, I think).

So despite the low budget, the 1964 The Killers is a very entertaining way to spend an hour and a half. Criterion released a DVD with both versions of the movie.

Una giornata particolare

I don't think I had done a blog post on a foreign film recently, so I decided to watch A Special Day off the DVD since it's on DVD courtesy of the Criterion Collection.

In 1938, German Führer Adolf Hitler visited Italy to meet with Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini and sign a treaty. Mussolini wanted to impress Hitler, so large cheering crowds were arranged all along the train's route and a big military parade was organized in Rome.

Antonietta Taberi (Sophia Loren) is a housewife and mother of six living in a cramped apartment with her husband Emanuele (John Vernon) and those children. All of them have a part to play in those cheering crowds at the parade, except for Mom, who's going to stay home to clean the apartment and make certain the family has dinner ready when they get home from the parade. It's not much of a life for Antonietta, whose only joy in life seems to be her mynah bird.

Worse for Antonietta, the bird escapes from its cage and flies out the window, landing on the sill of an apartment across the way. In that apartment lives Gabriele (Marcello Mastroianni), an announcer for Italian National Radio who isn't working that day because, well, that will be explained later in the movie. Gabriele catches the bird and invites Antonietta over to pick up the bird.

The two talk, and one thing leads to another, with Antonietta eventually bringing Gabriele back to her place for conversation to bring something into her lonely life, and perhaps a bit more. The two spend most of the rest of the day together, revealing some secrets about themselves.

Surprisingly, that's mostly what happens in the movie, although Gabriele's secrets drive the plot. He's got friends who have political views and lifestyles that have gotten them in trouble with the Fascist regime, and Gabriele is the same, so certainly trouble for him can't be far behind; indeed, he already lost that job at the radio station. And Antonietta seems to be committed to Fascism, or at least politically naïve enough to keep a scrapbook of the virile Mussolini.

So instead, A Special Day is a character study of these two very lonely people, one who has no life outside her family and the other a subversive. The two have the lion's share of the dialogue, with Antonietta's family showing up in the first and last scenes, and the apartment complex concierge coming in from time to time to snoop on the ad hoc couple that's not really a couple.

Unsurprisingly, the character study works because of the strong acting from the two leads; would you really expect any less from either Loren or Mastroianni? From the moment we see Gabriele we can tell that he's keeping something deeply secret, while with Antonietta it's so obvious that she's lonely and looking for any escape from her humdrum life.

In the print TCM ran (which I'd guess is the Criterion print, although I don't have the DVD), there was a card at the beginning mentioning this is a restoration, and specifically mentioning the color timing. Indeed, the production design and the color is itself almost as much of a character as the two leads. Antonietta's apartment is suitably cramped, drab, and run-down, helped by a washed-out color scheme that is mostly browns, with some dull green and a few reds in the Italian and German flags. As noticeable as this is, it's also quickly unobtrusive.

For anybody who doesn't need their movies to be full of action, explosions, and special effects, I can definitely recommend A Special Day.