Phone Call from an Amnesiac Soldier

TCM had a spotlight a couple months back on B movies, in which they showed a bunch of movies that I hadn't seen before. This gve me the chance to record them and watch, and it's only now that I'm beginning to get to them. First up is Identity Unknown.

Richard Arlen plays, well, I can't give you the name of the character because at the beginning of the movie he doesn't really have a name. The movie was released in early 1945, or in the late stages of World War II. The character was found near death in a farmhouse in France, together with three other GIs, except that the other three were dead already. They were killed by some sort of explosion that somehow knocked the dog tags off of them with the result that Army doctors can't put each set of tags back with the soldier who wore them. And of course, this was the days before they knew what DNA was, so it's not as if they could do an identification that way. (Also surprisingly, apparently none of the four had dental records.)

The other reason I can't give the name of the Arlen character is that he wakes up in the Army hospital with a fairly severe case of amnesia, such that he doen't remember his identity; if he did, we wouldn't have much of a movie, now, would we? The one thing that saves Arlen's character is that the Army has the last known addresses of each of the four soldiers whose dog tags were in that farmhouse. Perhaps after being released from the hospital and demobbed this soldier, who has taken on the name Johnny March because, well, he does need a name after all, even if it's an obviously fake one, can go to each of the four addresses until somebody recognizes him.

The train that the Army puts him on goes through one of the towns on Johnny's list, so he gets off there to try to cross off the first name on that list. Except that he hasn't been given official leave yet, so he's technically AWOL, if not being treated as a deserter. Now, you'd think the Army could have cleared this up with the MPs, but that doesn't seem happen until the end of the movie. That town in Connecticut is home to Sally MacGregor (Cheryl Walker), who was the wife of the man whose name was on the dog tags. Johnny claims to be a friend of the man, at least once he learns he's not the man in question. Sally begins to develop feelings for him, but she's also not happy about being duped.

Johnny then goes to West Virginia where he meets a boy (Bobby Driscoll) who's lost his father; the brother of a soldier from Chicago who was involved in illegal gambling; and finally the parents of a farmer in Iowa who are planning to sell off the family farm now that their son is dead. But if none of these four people were Johnny, than just who is Johnny? And how did he lose his dog tags only for them never to be found?

Identity Unknown is the sort of movie where, if you think about it, there are a whole lot of plot holes. As I was watching the movie, I thought about the Gary Merrill film Phone Call from a Stranger, which has some of the same themes but handles them a lot better. But then, that wasn't a B movie. For a B film from a studio like Republic that rarely could afford to have a large budget, Identity Unknown isn't a bad little movie. And it's only about 70 minutes, so it's you like you'll have invested too much of your time if you don't particularly care for it. But I think you'll like it.

TCM Star of the Month, October 2023: Charlton Heston

Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur (Oct. 4, 8:00 PM)

Now that we're into a new month, it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time out, it's Charlton Heston, who was honored quite a few years back. I'm not certain how far back; a search of the blog didn't reveal any previous Star of the Month post like this one for Heston, but then, in the earlier days of the blog I didn't do posts like this for every Star of the Month. In any case, Heston's movies will be airing every Wednesday in prime time on TCM, starting tonight with Heston's Oscar-winning performance in Ben-Hur.

I'll admit that I don't have that many pictures of Heston on my hard drive. One of the obvious ones was of him playing Moses in The Ten Commandments, which I used when Heston died back in 2008. This even though it was always obvious that TCM wouldn't be running The Ten Commandments considering how ABC runs it pretty much every year in the run-up to Easter. I haven't looked in great detail at the line-up of Heston movies, other than to search for ones that are currently in my YouTube TV library in order to watch them and do posts on them. That means in a week's time, you'll be getting a post on The Hawaiians (1:30 AM, Oct. 12, or late in the evening of Oct. 11 in the Pacific time zone).

I figured (correctly) that among the movies that would show is Soylent Green, since it's fairly famous and it's also a late MGM movie; as a result, I looked for a photo of Heston in it, and found a good one of him and Edward G. Robinson, this being Robinson's final role. Soylent Green kicks off the final night of Heston programming, at 8:00 PM on Oct. 25.

Four of the musketeers

About six weeks ago, I mentioned the 1970s version of The Three Musketeers, and how because the producers really made too much material, they decided to split the movie into two, even though this would piss of the actors. The second of those movies got the name The Four Musketeers (sometimes also subtitled Milady's Revenge or The Revenge of Milady), and that movie will be on tomorrow (Oct. 4) at 10:30 AM. in honor of Charlton Heston.

If you remember the first movie, as it ended the musketeers had just saved the bacon of Anne (Geraldine Chaplin), the Queen of France, who was haing an illicit relationship with the English Duke of Buckingham (Simon Ward), even though their two countries were at war. Part of that war was religious in nature, and French Protestants were in rebellion in the Breton port of La Rochelle. Cardinal Richelieu (that's Charlton Heston) had figured out that it's the queen's dressmaker Constance (Raquel Welch) who has been passing the message between Anne and Buckingham, well, with help from D'Artagnan (Michael York) who is her boyfriend. So Richelieu orders his men to capture Constance.

Meanwhile Milady de Winter (Faye Dunaway) wants to gain revenge on the musketeers as well, so she goes in with Richelieu by seducing d'Artagnan to get him away from Constance. D'Artagnan can't be bothered to think with his big head, so he takes the bait. D'Artagnan also finds out that Milady has a brand, which was a sentence for a crime she committed. It's also a sign that she had been in a relatonship with Athos (Oliver Reed), but he killed her -- or he thought he did -- when he found out about Milady's criminality.

Anyhow, the musketeers set out to find Constance, and all of them but D'Artagnan eventually do, sending her to Armentières for safe-keeping until the musketeers can do their other duties and go back and fetch her. Milady, for her part, still wants to kill d'Artagnan and Constance, and the rest of the movie is one long series of adventures and action scenes as Milady's right-hand man Rochefort (Christopher Lee) pursues the musketeers across western France.

The plot of The Four Musketeers is not hampered as much by the editing of the movie into two separate features as I thought The Three Musketeers was. That having been said, I thought the main plot was fairly thin, and more or less a hook on which all those action scenes were hung. Now, it does feel like the stars making this are having a blast doing it, since they didn't know yet they were to get shafted by only getting paid for one movie while making two. Oliver Reed is well cast; Heston is getting into the eminence grise phase, and all of the women feel slightly miscast. But The Four Musketeers is ultimately just about entertaining enough to be worth a watch.

Don Knotts takes on the generation gap

If you've seen Don Knotts movies like The Incredible Mr. Limpet or The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, you'll know that there's something quaint about them, much the way that I described the movie Yours, Mine, and Ours as an unashamedly square movie that stood the test of time much better than 1960s movies that tried to be hip. Knotts did eventually get cast in one of those movies that was trying to be hip, and that movie, The Love God?, ran on TCM not too long back.

We don't see Knotts until several minutes in. The movie instead starts with Osborn Tremaine (Edmond O'Brien), a publisher of dirty magazines that includes nearly-naked pictures of women, including his wife Evelyn (Maureen Arthur). Osborn has gotten in trouble with the law on several occasions for sending obscene materials through the mail, and as the movie opens he's before the court yet again. He gets another suspended sentence, but there's a bigger punishment for him: the Postmaster General revokes Tremaine's fourth-class mailing privleges. This is the class that allows magazine publishers to send in bulk at significantly reduced rates, and losing that privilege means Tremaine won't be able to send out his subscriptions at an economic price.

As the Tremaines are traveling back home, they enter the small town of Peacock Falls, founded several generations back by the Peacock family that is falling on slightly hard times thanks to current generation member Abner Peacock IV. Abner is an avid bird watcher and has been producing Peacock magazine, which in theory is supposed to appeal to bird watchers, but doesn't seem to have much of a subscriber base. And since it's published from an old building, the other siblings have decided to liquidate this money-losing asset unless somebody can come up with the nearly $50,000 to save it.

This gives Tremaine an idea. He doesn't want the magazine so much as Abner's fourth-class mailing permit. Osborn comes up with the ridiculous idea of buying the rights to publish the magazine and distribute it with the permit, while Abner will remain the publisher of record, since Abner has no clue that Osborn can't be a publisher. This also serves Osborn well, as the authorities wouldn't be coming after him, but after Abner instead. And to keep the authorities from coming after Abner, Osborne sends him on a wild goose chase (no pun intended) to find a famously reclusive bird in the Amazon rain forest, far, far away from civilization.

Abner returns to America, and unsurprisingly gets picked up on an obscenity charge that he knows nothing about since of course he's been in South America for months while Osborn has been the de facto publisher togther with a gangster, J. Charles Twilight. An obscenity trial is held, and an ambulance-chasing civil liberties attorne gloms on to the case. This makes Abner a national celebrity, although he vows to clear his name from the smut allegations.

However, Osborn, Twilight, and their editor Lisa LaMonica (Anne Francis) realize that Abner has to keep publishing smut in order to keep the magazine profitable and protect civil liberties. To this end, they attempt to turn Abner into a swinger, not that Abner could ever actually live like a swinger. Besides, he's got an equally square girlfriend back in Peacock Falls who is still waiting for him....

The Love God? is the sort of movie where it's easy to see why some studio execs and stars, especially those who want to be seen as adjusting to the new times without a Production Code, would think this is great material. And in some ways, casting Don Knotts is a stroke of genius, as he's about as far from a love god as anybody could cast in late 1960s Hollywood. However, Knotts turns out not to be the right person for the role, which I think needs someone who can let everybody be funny around him -- think Henry Fonda in Yours, Mine, and Ours. Instead, Knotts' nebbish persona that worked so well in previous movies leaves him looking shrill here, and the humor seems terribly dated instead.

So The Love God? is one of those movies that should probably be seen as a sort of product of a time and watched just to see how such a movie could go so wrong. But if I were recommending Knotts to someone new to movies, I'd start with one of his other movies like the two I mentioned at the start of the post.

Our Man in Havana

I've stated on several occasions before that I'm not the biggest fan of those "serious" 1960s spy movies. One (well, technically not a 1960s film) that's not quite so serious, although also not a spoof like the Matt Helm movies, is the 1959 film Our Man in Havana. I had actually never seen it before, so when I noticed it was available on one of the streaming services, I decided to watch.

The movie informs us that it was set before the "recent" revolution in Cuba finally succeeded -- the movie was made on location in Cuba but based on a 1958 book by author Graham Greene. It tells the story of James Wormold (Alec Guinness), who is working as a vacuum cleaner salesman for a British company's Havana office. You would think that this is a job that doesn't pay all that much money, and to make matters worse, James is a widower with a teenaged daughter Milly (Jo Morrow) who has expensive tastes.

Somebody in MI6 back in London, most likely spymaster "C" (Ralph Richardson) has come up with the brilliant idea that they should recruit spies from among normal people, because apparently the professional spies aren't getting the job done and all the professionals on the other side know who the British professionals are, anyway. So the head spy in the Caribbean, Hawthorne (Noël Coward), code number 59200, approaches Wormorld with a proposition to do some spying for his motherland. Wormold isn't so sure, but he could use the extra money, so he takes up the offer.

Of course, part of what is supposed to be the humor in the movie is that Wormold has no idea what he's doing, since he hasn't been given much instruction by Hawthorne. And Wormold is expected to recruit his own spies, like some sort of twisted multi-level marketing scheme. So after a bit of picking the mind of a friend, the American doctor Hasselbacher (Burl Ives), Wormold decides that he's just going to make crap up.

But for better or worse, Wormold is good at coming up with plausible secrets. The folks back in London believe the secrets, while the Cubans think Wormold has come up with something even though he hasn't. With that in mind, the British send a secretary, Beatrice (Maureen O'Hara), out into the field to assist Wormold. The Cubans, meanwhile, assassinate of one Wormold's underlings, and the Cuban authorites in the form of Segura (Ernie Kovacs) start to put the pressure on Wormold. Wouldn't it just be easier to declare him persona non grata and deport him back to the UK?

The big problem I had with Our Man in Havana is that it felt like one of those stories that was trying to be too clever by half, and as a result winds up not being all that great, despite the presence of a pretty good cast. It's not as bad in that regards as the grimmer spy tales of the 1960s, but it still didn't work for me. But because of the cast, Our Man in Havana is one of those movies you're definitely going to want to watch and judge for yourself.

Just like last October 1

I was looking ahead through the channel listings, and as I saw what's coming up on FXM I couldn't think of what I wrote just about one year ago. I've long written that FXM has a thing about taking movies out of the vault, running them to death, and then putting them back in the vault for a while. The change-up oin which movies come out of the vault and which go back in also seemed to be at the start of a month. But then October 1, 2022 came along and I noticed a much broader change in the lineup. And that seems to be happening again this year.

A couple of the movies have been around for a few months at least, starting with the first movie of the day, My Cousin Rachel, which will probably have aired by the time you see this post. But there's a series of movies later in the day that are back for the first time in quite a while, at least as far as I can remember:

Pickup on South Street at 8:30 AM;
Night People at 9:55 AM;
House of Bamboo at 11:30 AM; and
The Third Secret at 1:15 PM.

The schedule changes continue at least as far ahead as I can look in the FXM schedule, starting with Prince of Foxes at 6:00 AM tomorrow, October 2. I'll probably have a few more posts in October over some of the movies that are finally coming back out of the vaults.

Condemned (1929)

Ronald Colman was honored in Summer Under the Stars this year, and one of his movies that I hadn't seen was the early talkie Condemned!. So, I recorded it and watched it so that I could do a post on it here.

Colman plays Michel, a French thief who has been exiled to Devil's Island because, well, that's what they did with thieves in those days. On the transport with Michel is murderer Jacques (Louis Wolheim), and the two become friends along the way, because you have to have friends in a place like Devil's Island, or else you're not going to survive.

One person who doesn't have friends is Mme. Vidal (Ann Harding). Of course, she's not a prisoner; she's the wife of the prison colony's warden, M. Vidal (Dudley Digges). He's a fairly tough warden who thinks the only way to keep the prisoners in line is with threats and force. As for his wife, she doesn't really like Devil's Island, because who would if you're a woman who dreams of being at least middle-class. Even if there is a colonial "high" society there I can't imagine being exciting or anything like what life in Paris would be like for the wife of a prison warden.

But since being a prison warden should put you in the higher levels of a society run by colonists, the Vidals need the trappings of that good life, which means the servants. Perhaps there's a prisoner who could be rehabilitated enough to work as the hired help for the Vidals. Since one of the few non-violent prisoners is Michel, who being played by Ronald Colman is clearly much too upper-crust for Devil's Island, he gets the plum job of being servant to Mme. Vidal.

Of course, you can guess what happens next. Bored Mme. Vidal finds herself falling in love with Michel, and the feeling is definitely mutual. This puts M. Vidal into a jealous rage, and he responds in two ways: one is to put Michel into solitary confinement, while the other is to threaten to send his wife back to metropolitan France so she can no longer have the one thing she really wants.

Each of the two plan to escape so that they can meet up with each other in Paramaribo, capital of the neighboring colony of Suriname, which is not a French colony. But for Michel, this means having to go through dangerous swamps in an overland journey, all the while having to stay ahead of M. Vidal's men chasing him. And M. Vidal is bound to learn about his wife's perfidy....

Condemned! isn't a bad little early talkie. Supposedly the filmmakers wanted to do some of the filming on location, although I can't imagine any way that would have happened even if there weren't the technical and financial issues in trying to do it back in 1929. As a result, the jungle scenes seem a bit silly and something that would be technically much superior in a latter-day version. But Ann Harding and Ronald Colman both do well in the new medium of talking pictures, giving good performances. The story is a bit old-hat, probably even for 1929, but it's not old-hat in a bad way.

People who prefer their "old" movies to be from the 1970s may not go in for Condemned!, but for anybody who does like movies of early sound era, it's not a bad choice.

Six of my convicts

A movie that I had never seen, although I think I had recognized the title from a showing on TCM ages back, is My Six Convicts. I noticed that it was available to watch on Tubi, so I finally got around to watching it. I also saw that it's one of the movies that's leaving Tubi soon, specifically at the end of September, so I'm moving up when I'm doing a post on it to give everybody a day or two to catch it before it leaves, since I don't know that it's on any of the other services.

Stanly Kramer's company produced this one early in his career, so you can expect that he's got some social issues he wants to explore, and with the title My Six Convicts you can guess that it has to do with the inside of a prison. Specifically, John Beal plays Doc, one of those reformer type pyschologists who wants to come up with better conditions for the prisoners and hopefully be able to rehabilitate them, at least in part. There's a new political administration, and they think prison reform is a good idea, so Doc gets sent into one of the prisons.

The first thing wants to do is come up with mental assessments of all the convicts, but that's going to be difficult since there's only one of him and a thousand or more prisoners. The prison physician suggests Doc get a staff from among some of the prisoners, but that's going to be dificult, since nobody realy wants to trust in any of the staff lest the prisoners get thought of as stoolies. And indeed, the first time Doc tries to administer one of the standardized tests, there's nearly a riot.

But Doc keeps working and eventually finds a convict in Connie (Millard Mitchell) who is willing to help. Connie is a safecracker, and one who has a pretty darn high level of intelligence. Two others, embezzler Kopac (Jay Adler), who can't stay out of prison in part becaue he doesn't know anything else in life any longer; and Punch Pinero (Gilbert Roland), a gangster who expects to be deported after his sentence; soon follow. After that, another three (Harry Morgan as a psychopathic killer, Alf Kjellin, and Marshall Thompson) join in to complete the titular six convicts.

In some ways, I found myself thinking of Gideon's Day/Gideon of Scotland Yard as it seems like there's not a lot going on or it's an episodic movie. But at the same time, My Six Convicts is a surprisingly effective little ensemble movie. I do wonder how realistic it is although it is autobiographical.

Take the chance to watch My Six Convicts now; I don't know when it's going to show up again.

National Silent Movie Day

Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock in Safety Last! (Sept. 29, 3:00 PM)

Who knew that some organization tried to get something called "National Silent Movie Day" going? I didn't but apparently that day is tomorrow. As such, TCM is running a day full of silent movies, at least a morning and afternoon but not prime time. This is going to give me the opportunity to record several things I haven't seen before.

In fact, the lineup is almost entirely films from 1923 celebrating their centenary this year. The only thing I'm not certain about is the first two sets of silent shorts. The day kicks off with Century of Animation Showcase: 1923 at 6:00 AM, so that should be films from 1923. The second set, Walt's Early Wonderlands at 7:00 AM, may or may not be entirely 1923 films.

The day concludes with the silent version of The Ten Commandments at 5:30 PM. Since TCM isn't going to be able to get the rights to the Charlton Heston version any time soon, this is the one we're going to have to live with, and I have to admit it's one I've never seen before.

Thursday Movie Picks, Sept. 28, 2023: Based on a book (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 final Thursday of the month, it's time for another TV edition, and this time the theme is one I think we've done before: book adaptations. I thought about what to pick such that it wouldn't be something I'd already done before, and then came up with the idea to do three miniseries. Well, technically since one is British I think it's more of a limited-run TV series, but the point is that I haven't used it before.

I, Claudius (1976). 12-part BBC adaptation of Robert Graves' 1934 novel focusing on Roman emperor Claudius, played by Derek Jacobi. This is one of those BBC productions that, like Upstairs, Downstairs before it, came to prominence in the US thanks to its being shown on Masterpiece Theatre.

North and South (1985). Actually, there were three miniseries based on the novels by John Jakes, set before, during, and after the US Civil War. Patrick Swayze played the main character in the first two, with Lesley-Anne Down his love interest. I didn't remember this until looking it up, but there were a whole bunch of small parts deliberately written for famous names, from Elizabeth Taylor to Wayne Newton and a lot in between. Jonathan Frakes (Will Riker from Star Trek: The Next Generation) met his wife while making the first two miniseries, and they've been married for 35 years.

The Tommyknockers (1993). Adaptation of a Stephen King novel that I haven't read, since I'm not that into Stephen King. I just remembered the title, and checked to make certain that it was actually based on a novel and not an original story that hadn't been novelized.