Riding Shotgun

Randolph Scott made a bunch of westerns in the second half of his career. I've got a couple of box sets of his westerns, but not too long back TCM ran a western that I hadn't seen yet, Riding Shotgun. So recently, I watched it to do a post on here.

Scott plays Larry Delong, who does the titular "riding shotgun", that is, riding next to the guy who's got the reins of the horses on a stagecoach, shotgun in hand, to watch for Indians or possible robbers. He's been working for a bunch of different stagecoach lines all over the west, in part because he's good, but more because he's looking for a criminal who harmed him some years ago, Dan Marady (James Millican). Marady finds out that Delong is in the area, and has a plan for dealing with Delong.

Marady has a gang, with Pinto (Charles Bronson when he was still early enough in his career to be credited under the surmame Buchinsky) second-in-command, and plans to use those gang members to lure Delong away from the stagecoach. Marady has a special handgun he knows Delong will recognize, so one of the men in the gang takes it into the stagecoach station and makes certain Delong sees it. This leads to the gang capturing Delong and tying him down, leaving him to die.

Delong is eventually able to extricate himself, but in that time the Marady gang has robbed the coach on which Delong was supposed to be riding shotgun. The stage does make it back into town, but the passengers describe Delong having been with the gang members who showed him Marady's gun, so when the posse goes out looking for the gang that includes Marady, who is of course guilty of nothing more than negligence.

Delong shows up in town, alone, since he was of course not in the gang. But he can'tconvince anybody in town that he wasn't part of the gang, and they're out for blood what with the coach driver having been killed in Marady's attack. The only person who has any support for Delong is the sheriff's deputy, Tub Murphy (Wayne Morris). He at least wants Delong to get a "fair" trial, inasmuch as that might be possible.

Worse, Delong can't get anybody to believe what's more likely to happen. He's bright enough to figure that what Marady did was a ruse so that the townsfolk would find the coach and send a posse out to look for the gang. Marady then plans to come in to town and rob the local businesses. Delong tries to warn everybody but nobody will listen. And he can't leave town because nobody will give him a horse. Worse, they basically corner him with the intention of stringing him up if it weren't for Tub's presence.

Riding Shotgun is the sort of programmer western that was still being made in Hollywood into the mid-1950s, not too long before such stuff would be supplanted by episodic television. Riding Shotgun is more than competent, as is only to be expected considering the presence of somebody like Randolph Scott in the starring role; a director like Andre de Toth; and the resources that a major studio like Warner Bros. could bring to such a movie.

Sure, there are better westerns out there, but for people who already like westerns and want something undemanding that they might not have seen before, Riding Shotgun fits the bill just fine.

Mata Hari (1931)

Ramon Novarro was one of the stars in Summer Under the Stars last month, which gave me the chance to watch -- or maybe re-watch, since I might be confusing it with some of the other pre-Code spy movies -- Mata Hari.

Novarro is obviously not in the title role, since that's the famous female spy from World War I. So Mata Hari is played by Greta Garbo. In this movie, she's in Paris, wowing everybody in 1961, including the Russian army officers stationed there. (From reading the Wikipedia page on Mata Hari, there was a force sent to the western front by Tsarist Russia before the February 1917 revolution took the country out of the war.) That force is headed by Gen. Shubin (Lionel Barrymore). Flying in to France is dashing young Lt. Rosanoff (Ramon Novarro), with some coded dispatches from Russia for Shubin.

Needless to say, the other side would like those dispatches. Andriani (Lewis Stone) is the head of those enemy agents, with a bunch of people working under him, including Mata Hari as well as woman named Carlotta (Karen Morley). Working for the allies is Dubois (C. Henry Gordon), convinced Mata Hari is a spy but unable to prove it.

Mata, for her part, works as an exotic dancer at one of those nightclubs in Paris that, at the time the movie was made, so about 15 years after the setting of the movie, would be employing people like Josephine Baker as the entertainment. Mata Hari's exoticism and beauty charm all the men, and the newcomer Rosanoff is no exception. He would like to see her after the show, not realizing that she'd only be usin him to get those dispatches once she learns he has a copy of them.

Rosanoff also doesn't know that his superior, Gen. Shubin, has been carrying on an affair with Mata Hari. But Mata Hari falls in love with Rosanoff, too, which is unsurprising because Ramon Novarro is a much more obvious romantic lead than Judge Hardy. It all leads to Mata Hari getting caught since that's what happened in real life, and sentenced to death, although Rosanoff, having been injured in a plane crash, doesn't actually know what's going to happen to the woman he loves.

I'm not certain exactly how much bearing in reality this version of Mata Hari has. It's got the sort of competence that MGM was able to bring to its programmers, although since we're still in 1931, it doesn't have quite the technical expertise that later movies would have. Still, the story is interesting enough.

If I were going to recommend any of the movie's stars to people, I'd recommend other of their movies first, although that doesn't mean that Mata Hari is bad by any stretch of the imagination. It's just that there's other stuff easier for people to get into.

TCM Star of the Month September 2021: Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson in Body and Soul (1925), tonight at 8:00 PM

Now that we're done with Summer Under the Stars for another year, it's time for another Star of the Month on TCM. This time around, it's Paul Robeson, an actor who was enough of a dupe to believe the Communist government weren't racist at all, a belief which would lead to all sorts of problems in his professional life. This, combined with the fact that there was a paucity of good roles for black actors in those days, means that there aren't too many movies in the Robeson salute.

As a result, Robeson's movies are airing on Sundays in prime time, since there's the Silent Sunday Nights and TCM Imports slots later in the evening to limit how much time TCM needs to program. The salute kicks off tonight at 8:00 PM with Body and Soul, a really interesting silent film from Oscar Micheaux that unfortunately suffered at the hands of the censors. As I posted back in 2020, the censors really didn't like the ending and how the whole movie dealt with organized religion, so the ending had to be changed into something that doesn't work with everything that came before it.

There's also a documentary at 9:45 PM tonight, and Emperor Jones at 10:30 PM, which I don't think I've seen yet. I'll have to check if I've got enough space on my DVR to record it.

Bananas

Probably like a lot of other people, I had seen the Woody Allen movie Bananas when I was college-aged, since some of the individual scenes were fairly famous gags. But in the 13 years I've been doing this blog, I never did a post on it. TCM ran it some months back, so I DVRed it and finally got around to re-watching it to do a post on here.

The movie stars off with a coup in the fictional banana republic of San Marcos, somewhere in Latin America, as narrated by the ABC's Wide World of Sports reporter Howard Cosell. Seemingly unrelated to this is Fielding Mellish (Woody Allen, as if you couldn't tell). He works as a product tester and is a fairly meek man barely getting by in life. One day the young woman Nancy (Louise Lasser) comes to his apartment door, and it changes his life.

Nancy is one of those "socially engaged" types, campaigning for whatever the cause of the day is. The current cause is the revolution in San Marcos, which has the coup leader, Vargas (Carlos Montalban) becoming increasingly dictatorial, to the point that there's a new group of rebels looking to overthrow him. Nancy has a petition regarding getting the US to take action to deal with San Marcos for Mellish to sign, but Mellish seems more interested in bedding Nancy. Nancy figures this out, and wants to break off the relationship since Mellish doesn't show any initiative.

Mellish figures that the best way to win Nancy back is to become socially involved himself, and go down to San Marcos to investigate the situation for himself. Vargas sees in this an opportunity. He can have Mellish killed and blame it on the rebels, which will certainly win him sympathy in the United States. Mellish is just incompetent enough to have enough Mr. Magoo-type calamities befall Vargas' men, with the rebel leader Esposito's (Jacobo Morales) men capturing him instead. But since Vargas says Mellish has been killed anyway, there's not much for Mellish to do but to fall in with Esposito's men.

Eventually, through a comedy of errors, Mellish gets installed as the president of San Marcos, and has to return to the US to try to get the US to give San Marcos foreign aid. However, his real identity is bound to come out, and being a mercenary abroad might be legally problematic for him.

Or at least, all of that is the ostensible plot. In fact, Bananas is more of a series of set pieces hanging on a rather threadbare plot. If you're looking for a coherent story, you're not going to get it here. If you're looking for humor? Well, that depends on your taste in humor. A good portion of the movie still works well, although I have to admit that on the whole I didn't find it quite as funny as I had remembered 30 or so years ago. Certainly, some of the scenes still work, perhaps most notably when Mellish is trying to buy a porno magazine. But in the scenes where he has to be the neurotic sort that is the hallmark of Allen's movies from Annie Hall and beyond, it's not nearly as funny, at least not for me.

Kidco

The latest in the new-to-me movies that started showing up in the FXM rotation recently is Kidco. It's got another airing tomorrow, Sept. 4, at 11:30 AM, so as always, I made a point of sitting down to watch it so that I could do a post on it here.

Dickie Cessna (Scott Schwartz) is a kid of about 11 who is also a smooth operator of the sort that would make Jack Carson's vintage characters like Wally Fay blush. As the movie opens, Dickie is running a keno game at his elementary school together with his kid sister. Unsurprisingly, the school eventually catches him and he gets suspended for it, being forced to go back home.

Home is a house attached to a resort just outside of San Diego. On the way home, he sees a couple of guys who are clearly feds in the way that River Phoenix sees the feds at the beginning of Running on Empty. They ask for directions to what is the Cessna house, and Dickie gives them directions that will send them to the Mexican border. But they eventually show up, looking for the parents (Charles Hallahan and Margaret Blye) as they have some tax issues to clear up. Dickie responds by making it look as though the family is living out in the barn, as if any adult would believe such nonsense.

Indeed, Dickie has all sorts of nonsensical schemes like that to try to make a buck. His father tends to the horses that the resort keeps and rents out to patrons who want to ride the trails, and even in that the Cessna kids have a scheme. But they're about to get a much bigger scheme.

Orville Peterjohn (Clifton James) runs one of the local businesses, supplying fertilizer both to the resort, which needs it for the golf course, and to other farmers and landscapers. He's pretty much the only game in town. But Dickie realizes that Dad, having to take care of 170 horses, has a lot of horse manure on his hands, which he is contractually required to dispose of, not the resort owner. Dickie concludes that all of this manure can be used to make fertilizer! And since he's got sub-minimum-wage child labor in the form of himself and his siblings, he can undercut Peterjohn!

It's a ridiculous scheme, because who's going to buy fertilizer from a 11-year-old kid? But there are a lot of independent contractor landscaping types working in cash off the books who are looking for any way they can to shave a buck or two off their expenses, so when word gets around that these kids, who by now have named the company Kidco, have lower-cost manure, they're willing to give it a try.

Peterjohn, understandably, is irritated, and wants to figure out some way to get rid of the competition. The first way is the legal one of trying to co-opt Kidco and basically make it a subsidiary of Peterjohn's company. But Dickie says no, leaving Peterjohn to call up the tax men and knock heads together to see if there's some way Kidco hasn't broken one of the myriad laws on the books.

Of course Kidco has violated all sorts of laws, from not getting the permits the state mandates to not paying income taxes. This is all enough for the authorities to issue an injunction and send the case to court, where Dickie decides to defend himself even though he has no knowledge of the law. By now all of the kids in America, having seen a segment of some show that nowadays would be used to fulfill the E/I requirements, are on Kidco's side, which puts political pressure on the court.

Kidco was a movie I was prepared to dislike deeply as it started, mostly because Dickie, even though he's just a kid, is the sort of character who's so obnoxious that you want to see somebody smack him, like Julie Harris in Member of the Wedding. But as Dickie gets into the manure business, and especially once the movie reaches the courtroom, Kidco becomes more and more unhinged from reality. Strangely enough, it's something that actually works in the movie's favor.

I'm not a lawyer, but if I had to guess, I'd figure that Dickie would be declared not old enough to sign any of the contracts he'd signed, at least not without a guardian involved, and his parents were never involved in the original contract. How to deal with the profits Kidco made is a thornier matter, but some arrangement could be worked out. The movie comes up with a different solution, but one that more or less works.

Kidco is a movie that's probably not going to be to everybody's tastes, but if you can make it through the first half hour or so, it really picks up and is definitely worth a watch.

First thoughts on TCM's "Refresh"

If you're in the US and a fan of Turner Classic Movies, you probably heard the news last week that TCM was going to get a "refresh" on September 1. Unsurprisingly, that led to a lot of panic among fans, many of whom thought that this was going to be the beginning of the end for the channel, if they didn't already think that the beginning of the end was some point in the past. At any rate, now that the changes are active and I've seen some of them, I've got a few thoughts of my own:

The obvious change is in the fonts. When I first saw the new TCM logo, I thought it was something close to Arial/Helvetica, but looking a bit more it seems the fonts are somwhere between that and URL Gothic, although closer to the former and a bit condensed. For some reason I have memories of the Reagan-era government food that was handed out to the poor but in our town the seniors got because there weren't enough people on food stamps. But I can't find any pictures. More generally, I got the vibe of functionalist from the 70s/80s, and it wasn't the best mental picture.

I also noticed that the screen of upcoming films is now blocked for 16:9 screens. Previously (and needless to say I preferred the old font), the background filled the whole screen -- no pillarboxing -- but the list of movies would fit if somebody were still watching on a 4:3 screen. That's no longer the case. I think the transition to digital TV was back in 2009, so it's been a dozen years for everybody to replace their old 4:3 TVs. I'd guess that what happened in society in general is what happened with my parents: they only replaced the old 4:3 TV sets as each one broke and needed to be replaced, much the same I did with my computer monitor. When they first did the big change to Robert Osborne's intro, the old one (the "Feature Presentation" revolving around a building) wasn't ready for HDTV.

Speaking of intros, I only got to see the overnight one since I woke up early and made the point to watch the end of Key Largo to see the new graphics package. I didn't like that one, as it's cold and doesn't have any feeling of the time of day the way the old overnight intros did. I also really liked the pop-up book (6AM to noon) and Rube Goldberg (noon to 8PM) intros. I'm guessing they're gone, but I haven't looked.

I also noticed that the film clips in the Eddie Muller piece that aired between the end of Key Largo and the start of the next movie were all cropped to be 16:9, which made them look a bit grainy. The piece on Robert Benchley predates all the changes and was pillarboxed. I assume all the "Word of Mouth" (if they still use that name) and other similar pieces will be pillarboxed when showing old clips.

As for the corporate press release, I should probably devote a little more thought to it. But my first impression is that I've really grown to hate the word "curated"; to me it's one of those corporate words that really rubs me the wrong way.

Thursday Movie Picks #373: Best Score and Best Original Song (Oscar 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 first Thursday of the month, we get another Oscar-themed edition of the blogathon. This time out, the categories are Best Original Score and Best Original Song. I decided to mix and match between the two categories so that I could have a theme within a theme, and picked one score and two songs. Other people are going to stick to one category, or pick three winners from each of the categories. And this time, I've also included the awards clips that the Academy has put up on Youtube:

Midnight Express (1978). Based on a true story, the movie stars Brad Davis as Billy Hayes, an American sentenced to prison in Turkey for drug possession, finding out that Turkish prisons are extremely brutal. The movie won two Oscars, one for Oliver Stone's screenplay and the other for Giorgio Moroder's original score.

Flashdance (1983). Jennifer Beals plays a young woman who works at a steel mill by day but has dremes of becoming a ballerina despite having no training. She works by night as a dancer in one of those night spots where they definitely don't do ballet. The movie won an Oscar for the Best Original Song, "Flashdance... What a Feeling", co-written by Irene Cara (her first Oscar; she sang the Oscar-winning song "Fame" but the Oscar goes to the songwriters) and Giorgio Moroder.

Top Gun (1986). Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, and others play naval aviators at the TOPGUN school for would-be elite fighter pilots. Cruise and instructor Kelly McGillis start a romantic relationship which is highly frowned upon. The movie won an Oscar for the Best Original Song, "Take My Breath Away", co-written by Tom Whitlock and Giorgio Moroder.

Andy Hardy Comes Home

I don't think I've actually blogged about any of the Andy Hardy movies before. They were incredibly popular for about a decade from 1936 to 1946, and with World War II having ended, tastes changed. A further decade after that, however, MGM decided to bring Mickey Rooney back for one more movie, Andy Hardy Comes Home.

Andy, having grown up finally, has become a lawyer out in California. But he's taking an airplane back to his hometown of Carvel where he has some business. For some reason, he even has his high school yearbook with him on the plane, which is really just an excuse to show a clip from one of the early Andy Hardy movies. Andy gets home to Carvel, and Mom (Fay Holden) and Aunt Milly (Sara Haden) are both thrilled to see him. Dad, of course, is no longer there, Lewis Stone having died five years before the movie was made.

Andy is a lawyer for one of the big defense firms that had sprung up in land-rich California during the war, and the one he works for is planning to expand by opening a factory to make electronics for missile systems or somesuch. Carvel is a small town stuck in the past, and Andy is convinced that a big factory like this would revive the town's fortunes. And since he's originally from the town, his support of the new plant should make things easier.

Andy goes to City Hall to look through the property maps to find a suitable plot to put the factory on. Eventually he does find a plot, owned by relative newcomer to Carvel Thomas Chandler (Vaughn Taylor). Andy goes to see Chandler, and the two are able to come to a verbal agreement on the price of the land. But after a night's thought, Chandler decides he's going to gouge Hardy, since they don't have any signatures yet.

One of Andy's old friends, Beezy, finds out from Andy what's going on, and has a whole bunch of land sitting unused that would be perfect for the factory. He even offers to sell Andy enough to build the factory, and asks for a price that's less than Andy had offered to Chandler in the first place! Chandler is pissed, and when he's at the meeting of one of those service organizations small towns back in those days had, another member who got the wrong impression about his wife and Andy gives Chandler the idea to change the zoning on Beezy's land so that they won't be able to build a factory there.

The amazing thing is that Andy goes to the town council, says more or less, "Don't you know who my father was?", and that's enough to get the council to vote down the rezoning proposal. If that's not enough, the town fathers immediately name Andy the local judge!

Andy Hardy Comes Home is a bit of a mess, in part because it doesn't go far enough in being a nostalgia picture. I'm assuming MGM couldn't get Judy Garland to reprise her role, which is why we only get her in one clip. I don't think we get Ann Rutherford as Polly at all, not even in clips. And much of the movie seems tired, such as the thoroughly phony soda shop scene. Once again, the kids dance to the sort of bland instrumental music that we just saw college kids dance to in Get Yourself a College Girl. (There is, however, one fun clip of the late 50s teens listening to Andy's old 78s. Can you believe the music they listened to back in the day?) Finally, the movie ends with a big "To Be Continued...." plastered on the screen. A blatant attempt at a cash grab that thankfully didn't happen.

Andy Hardy Comes Home is interesting to watch if only to see what a misfire it is. But if you want to see why the Andy Hardy series was such a big hit back in the day, watch some of the originals.

Get Yourself a College Girl

Hollywood tried to appeal to the youth demographic in the 1960s with a bunch of beach movies. Sometimes they tried to be original by moving the action from the sand to the snow, but that didn't necessarily make the movies any better. As an example, TCM is showing Get Yourself a College Girl tomorrow at 6:30 PM.

The Wyndham School for Girls has been teaching college-age girls refinement for a couple of generations now. One of the classes is teaching the young women ballet, led by one of the younger teachers, Miss Endicott (Joan O'Brien). Endicott suggests that the class' successful musical student, Terry Taylor (Mary Ann Mobley), put on a record for them to dance to, and Terry plays one of those anodynde uptempo things without lyrics that consistently came out of the radios in 1960s movies; the students dancing something that is definitely not ballet.

It's almost Christmas break, and the students go to a concert at the local club headlined by the Dave Clark Five as well as Eric Burdon and the Animals, both at the beginning of their careers not wasting one of their hit songs on a movie like this. Meanwhile, back on campus, the dean, Martha Stone, gets a call from a Gary Underwood (Chad Everett). Gary, it turns out, is a music publisher, and he's been publishing songs that Terry wrote, under a pseudonym. Gary wants to get in touch with Terry, even though she gave him strict instructions not to get in touch with anybody from Wyndham.

And that's with good reason, because Terry's songs like "Get Yourself a College Girl" are the sort of thing that's going to scandalize the trustees of the school, including the original Wyndham's grandson, Hubert Morrison (Willard Waterman), who is a senator facing a tough reelection bid. He thinks the scandal could sink him, but Dean Stone is more sympathetic. So a compromise is reached with Terry and her friends: Sue Anne (Chris Noel) and Lynne (Nancy Sinatra) going off to Sun Valley for the holidays chaperoned by Miss Endicott, not to have any relationship with boys.

Senator Morrison heads off to Sun Valley as well to investigate for himself. But also going there is Gary, who wants to see Terry and handle the PR for the new song. To that end, he's brought along an artist, Armand, whose job it's going to be to get a painting of Terry in just a bikini for the advertising. Really. Talk about scandal. But at least Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto show up in Sun Valley to do "The Girl from Ipanema".

If that plot isn't inane enough, just wait. After the misunderstandings in Sun Valley are cleared up, there's still the question of Senator Morrison's campaign. He now sides with the youth, and decides to have a "Checkers speech"-like TV appearance in which he's going to appear with the kids and music acts of the day, hoping to get enough calls from the young to continue the campaign. It makes no sense whatsoever.

The highlight of Get Yourself a College Girl is some of the musical numbers. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, the Animals and Dave Clark don't sing the songs you've heard of, but at least Astrud Gilberto does. There's also a jazz combo up in Sun Valley I hadn't heard of called the Jimmy Smith Trio who are pretty good. But the plot is ridiculous. If you enjoy having a laugh at the stupidity of truly dumb plots, you'll probably have some fun with Get Yourself a College Girl. But there's not much other reason to watch it.

The Brasher Doubloon

FXM has been putting a higher than normal number of movies I haven't blogged about before into its rotation. Thise time out, the movie in question is the 1947 B mystery The Brasher Doubloon. It's on the FXM schedule again, tomorrow at 4:45 AM, so as always, I made a point of sitting down to watch it so I could do a review here.

George Montgomery plays Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's private detective more memorably played by Humphrey Bogart and others. This time, Marlowe is out in Pasadena, at one of those rich people's houses of the sort where Mildred Pierce first met Monte Beragon. He's greeted at the door by Merle Davis (Nancy Guild), secretary to wealthy widow Elizabeth Murdock (Florence Bates). Murdock also has an adult son Leslie (Conrad Janis), who seems none too happy at the presence of Marlowe.

Eventually, Marlowe gets an audience with Mrs. Murdock, who informs him that she owns one of two known copies of a famous early American coin known as the Brasher Doubloon. (In fact, there is such a coin as the Brasher Doubloon, but there are more than two surviving copies.) Well, owned it. The coin has recently been stolen from her safe, and she'd like it back. But she doesn't want her name brought into the public eye in conjunction with such a crime, which is why she's employing the services of a private detective. It seems that only Mrs. Marlow, Leslie, and Merle know the combination to the safe, so logically it would seem one of them took it, and considering Leslie's attitude, he's an obvious suspect although that could just be a red herring.

Marlowe's first two leads are to a coin dealer and another man who seems to have an interest in the case, but the coin dealer gets killed after Marlowe's visit while the other man is found by Marlowe already having been killed. Understandably, the police are going to find that Marlowe is on the case and they're going to want information.

Meanwhile, Merle is beginning to act erratically, and Mrs. Murdock suggests that it's because Merle went crazy after having one of her bouts of amnesia where she couldn't remember what, if any, involvement she had in the incident in which Murdock's late husband fell out of a window to his death. There's some suggestion that perhaps somebody might be trying to blackmail Merle, or maybe Mrs. Murdock. More blackmail, death, and violence for Marlowe occur.

The Brasher Doubloon being a decided B movie, it doesn't get the polish that some of the other mystery movies of the 1940s got. That's a bit of a shame, since there's the kernel of a good story here, that really needed to be fleshed out to around the 90-minute mark. As it is, the movie is mildly entertaining, but with an ending hinging on the same flaw Call Northside 777 had, which is that it posits you can take film and blow it up as much as you want and not lose any detail. There's also the 40s trope of everybody being able to get right up with no aftereffects after having yet another concussion. You'd think all those film detectives wound up dying of CTE.

Fans of Raymond Chandler may be interested to see how this particular story of his (the book was titled The High Window) was handled. For people looking to get into 40s mysteries, I'd recommend other stuff first.