Movies I've Missed Until Now: The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947)

I’ve been a big fan of Cary Grant’s movies for a long time, but there are some I’ve just never gotten around to watching. I’m not sure how I missed THE BACHELOR AND THE BOBBY-SOXER, from 1947, since it ran endlessly on TV when I was a kid, but I’ve seen it now. Probably most of you have, too, so bear with me.

Grant plays Richard Nugent, a famous painter who’s also something of a ladies’ man. After a nightclub brawl, he comes up in front of Judge Margaret Turner (Myrna Loy, who will always be Nora Charles to me), who lets all the participants go with a warning not to get into any more trouble, especially Nugent. Later, he gives a lecture on art at the high school where Judge Turner’s younger sister Susan (Shirley Temple, no longer a child star but a cute 19-year-old in real life) is a student. Susan falls in love with Nugent, sneaks into his apartment, and is caught there with him the next morning by her sister and the assistant district attorney (Rudy Vallee, of all people). Nothing happened, but the impropriety of the situation lands Nugent in trouble, as does the punch he lands on the ADA’s jaw. After that, the court psychiatrist, who happens to be the uncle of the Turner sisters and is played by Ray Collins, who will always be Lt. Tragg from PERRY MASON as far as I’m concerned, hatches the crazy scheme of having Nugent pretend to date Susan so that she’ll grow tired of him naturally and realize he’s much too old for her.

If you’ve followed all that convoluted set-up so far, you’ll know that it’s all just a flimsy excuse for Grant to act like a teenager, spouting slang and driving a jalopy and being his usual charming but flustered self. It’s a well-worn bit, but let’s face it, nobody was ever better at it than Cary Grant. And there are no bonus points for anticipating that a real romance will develop between Grant and Loy, who admittedly have some pretty darned good screen chemistry together.

The cast is top-notch, no doubt about that. I think the director, Irving Reis, could have kept things moving at a bit faster pace at times. This movie was written by Sidney Sheldon, long before he created I DREAM OF JEANNIE and became a best-selling novelist, and it won the 1947 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. I didn’t think this was my idea of an award-winning script at all. It’s consistently pleasant, mildly amusing now and then, but not all that funny and the cast has to work hard to achieve the laughs they do. Don’t get me wrong. THE BACHELOR AND THE BOBBY-SOXER is not a bad film. I enjoyed it and am glad I finally watched it. But I don’t think it lives up to its reputation.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Apache Rifles (1964)

As many Audie Murphy movies as my dad and I watched when I was young, I’m surprised I never saw APACHE RIFLES, one of Murphy’s later movies that came out in 1964. But missing it back then gives me the opportunity to watch and enjoy it for the first time now.

This is a cavalry vs. Indians movie, but only sort of. Murphy plays Captain Jeff Stanton, a young officer whose father, also a soldier, got himself and his troops massacred because he was sympathetic to the Indians. Naturally enough, this makes Murphy’s character more hostile to the Apaches . . . until he gets to know some of them and falls in love with a young missionary teacher who lives among them. A bunch of white men scheming to get control of Apache land so they can mine on it complicates matters. These plotters are led by L.Q. Jones and Ken Lynch, both of whom are suitably despicable.

This is an odd little movie, a bit of a forerunner to the revisionist Westerns of the Seventies in which all Indians are noble and all white men (except for the one or two who sympathize with the Indians) are evil. Honestly, Murphy looks a little uncomfortable playing a character who becomes so sensitive by the end of the movie. For another thing, when I saw that this movie was directed by William Witney, I thought, “Oh, boy, lots of action!” Well, no. There is some action, and when it takes place, it’s staged excitingly and effectively, as you’d expect from a movie helmed by Witney. But an awful lot of time is spent on guys standing around talking.

All that said, I had a good time watching APACHE RIFLES. Murphy may not have been a very technically skilled actor, but the camera loved him and he takes full advantage of that screen presence. The movie looks great with excellent photography and production values. If you’re a Western fan, it’s a perfectly fine way to spend an hour and a half and I’m glad I finally saw it. Just don’t go into it expecting a lost gem.

Movies I've Missed (Until Now): The Outriders (1950)

I usually check to see what old Western movie the digital TV channel GRIT is running on Saturday nights. GRIT shows old Western movies all the time, of course, but for some reason when they run one on Saturday night that I haven’t seen before, I try to watch it. Most recently, it was THE OUTRIDERS, a Joel McCrea film from 1950 that not only had I never seen, I don’t remember ever even hearing of it before. So I had to check it out, of course.

The movie opens late in the Civil War. McCrea, Barry Sullivan, and James Whitmore are three Confederate soldiers who escape from a Union prison camp in Missouri. They throw in with a gang of irregulars led by Jeff Corey and are sent all the way to Santa Fe, where they’re supposed to infiltrate a wagon train taking several loads of hides back to St. Louis. Hidden under those hides, however, is a million dollars in gold headed for the Union treasury. Corey plans to steal it and take it to Richmond to prop up the Confederacy, but in order to do that, McCrea, Sullivan, and Whitmore have to lead the wagon train into an ambush.

Tensions develop among the three men, of course, and are made worse when a beautiful young woman played by Arlene Dahl joins the wagon train. There are Indian attacks, a flooded river, a tragic death, some fisticuffs, and finally an epic showdown. Western movie fans will have a pretty good idea what’s coming, all the way through.

Along the way, however, there’s some spectacular scenery (besides Arlene Dahl), excellent photography, and a lot of action. McCrea is his usual stalwart self and Corey hams it up effectively as the epitome of wide-eyed evil. There are a couple of lapses of logic in the plot that could have been explained away easily with a line or two, but mostly things hang together all right. THE OUTRIDERS is worth watching for Western fans, as long as your expectations aren’t set too high.

While watching this, I was struck by the fact that when it comes to Westerns, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott are practically interchangeable. I think McCrea had considerably more range and could play effectively in different kinds of films. For example, I can’t imagine Scott in DEAD END or SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS. But the characters they played in Westerns were almost identical. THE OUTRIDERS would have been the same movie with Scott in McCrea’s part. So it’s kind of fitting that they’re both in RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, with Scott playing a little against type for a change. And that’s a movie that I ought to watch again, one of these days.

Movies I've Missed (Until Now): Law of the Lawless (1964)

I enjoyed that Audie Murphy movie enough last week that when Grit TV ran a Dale Robertson movie I hadn’t seen on Saturday night, I watched it, too. Adding to the appeal is that LAW OF THE LAWLESS (1964) was written by the old pulpster and paperbacker Steve Fisher, whose work I’ve always found to be entertaining and interesting.

Robertson plays a former gunfighter who’s become a circuit-riding judge. He arrives in a town in Kansas to conduct the murder trial of the local big shot’s son, who killed a man in a saloon shootout. Complicating matters is that this is Robertson’s former hometown, and the man on trial is an old friend of his. The defendant’s wealthy father, played by Barton MacLane, wants to get his son acquitted of the charge, of course, but he also has another agenda that prompts him to bring in hired gun Bruce Cabot, whose character just happens to have killed Robertson’s father years earlier. This script rivals a Walt Coburn yarn for angst-filled backstory!

Elsewhere in the top-notch cast, William Bendix plays the local sheriff, who is also the prosecutor and the pastor of the local church. Yvonne De Carlo is a saloon girl, Kent Taylor is the defense attorney, John Agar plays the defendant, and Lon Chaney Jr. is a hulking henchman. Don “Red” Barry shows up briefly, also as a henchman. Jody McCrea, fresh from his role as Deadhead in the beach movies, plays Agar’s victim in the shootout.

There’s a little action along the way, but for the most part, LAW OF THE LAWLESS is a pretty talky film. There’s a long courtroom scene reminiscent of Perry Mason. The ending is a bit of a twist, but while I can see what Fisher was trying to do, it was also a bit of a letdown to me and I’m not sure it really worked. The movie is solid entertainment up to that point, however.

This was the first Western produced by A.C. Lyles, who turned out a string of such medium-budget films featuring veteran actors. When I was a kid, those Lyles-produced Westerns were a staple at the drive-in theater a quarter of a mile up the road from where I grew up, especially on Merchant’s Night during the summers. Merchant’s Night was usually on Tuesday, and you could get in free with tickets given out by local businesses when you bought something. The first half of the double bill was usually an older Elvis picture or a beach movie, and the second half was usually a Western, often one produced by Lyles. Most weeks I walked to the theater and watched the movies from the benches down front, by the playground. This was before Daylight Savings Time was a thing in Texas, so the movies would start around 8:30 in the evening and were over around 12:30, at which time I would walk home. It seems crazy now that a 12-year-old would do such a thing and nobody ever thought twice about it, but it really was a different time back then. A better time in many ways. But there’s no going back, is there, and at this point, I’m not sure I’d want to. I’ll revisit that era in my mind, though, any time.

Movies I've Missed (Until Now): Gunpoint (1966)

Looking around for something to watch on TV the other night, I noticed that Grit was showing an Audie Murphy Western I didn’t remember ever seeing. Audie was one of my dad’s favorite movie cowboys, along with Randolph Scott and Rod Cameron, and I watched many of those movies with him. Watching an Audie Murphy Western these days feels a little like my dad is visiting me for a while.

So, naturally, I watched GUNPOINT, from 1966, one of Audie’s last few movies before his untimely death in 1969. It starts with something else that held considerable nostalgia value for me: a train robbery filmed on the Durango-to-Silverton narrow gauge line in Colorado, which we rode on during a family vacation in the early Sixties. I recognized it right away. Audie, as the local sheriff, suspects the train will be held up by a gang of outlaws led by the vicious Drago (Morgan Woodward, who else?), but his efforts to foil the robbery are thwarted by his treacherous deputy who’s actually in with the gang. The deputy is played by Denver Pyle, a rare occasion of him playing a bad guy, but he handles the role well.

Through a rather convoluted setup, the outlaws wind up kidnapping a saloon songbird as well (Joan Staley), whose fiancée is gambler/gunman Warren Stevens. Before you know it, Audie and Stevens have teamed up with some other townspeople to form a posse and go after the outlaws. It's a long chase with plenty of action as the posse gets whittled down until finally there are only a couple left to settle things with the bad guys.

I have to admit, there’s not much in this movie that I didn’t feel like I had written dozens of times in dozens of my books, which made for a definite sense of déjà vu. But I enjoyed GUNPOINT quite a bit anyway. The cast is comfortingly familiar. In addition to those already mentioned, it includes Roy Barcroft as the town doctor and Edgar Buchanan and Royal Dano as a couple of half-loco mustangers. There’s a spectacular scene with the train early on and then good stunt work all the way through. The photography and scenery are nice. There are a few lapses of logic in the script by Mary and Willard Willingham, but veteran director Earl Bellamy keeps things moving along briskly enough that they’re not too much of a distraction.

GUNPOINT isn’t as good as most of the movies Audie made earlier in his career. It’s just an average Western. But sometimes that’s all you need, and I had a good time watching it. I think my dad would have, too.

Fatman (2020)

We haven't watched many movies lately, but we saw this one which I'd only vaguely heard of. FATMAN is a perfect example of how to play a movie with a goofy, over-the-top premise: absolutely straight. I'm not sure this movie about a badass Santa Claus (Mel Gibson) being stalked by a ruthless hitman (Walton Goggins) would have worked any other way. It could have descended into silliness very easily, but instead, it was funny and has excellent action scenes. I really enjoyed this one, and if you're in the mood for an offbeat Christmas movie . . . well, you don't get much more offbeat than FATMAN.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1958)

Regular readers of this blog probably know that I’m not a big fan of humorous Western fiction, with the notable exception of work by Robert E. Howard and W.C. Tuttle. I like it better, however, when it comes to movies and have enjoyed a number of lighthearted Westerns over the years. For some reason, though, I never got around to watching THE SHERIFF OF FRACTURED JAW (1958) until now, maybe because one of the leads is Jayne Mansfield, and I’m not a fan of her work, either.

THE SHERIFF OF FRACTURED JAW makes use of the old “dude goes West” plot. In this case, the dude is an English gun salesman named Jonathan Tibbs (Kenneth More) who winds up in West Texas trying to expand his company’s sales territory. The stagecoach he’s riding in is attacked by Indians, and through a series of misunderstandings he manages to make the Indians break off their attack and allow the stage to proceed to the town of Fractured Jaw, where Tibbs is hailed as a hero. The town is in the middle of a range war between two rival ranches. Both sides mistake Tibbs for a hired gun brought in to fight for the enemy. Things get more complicated when Tibbs is appointed sheriff and also falls in love with the beautiful saloon owner played by Mansfield. Eventually everything works out, of course. Peace is restored, and Tibbs even puts an end to the threat of Indian attacks in an unexpected but effective way.

This is far from a hilarious movie. I smiled a few times and I think I chuckled once. But it is lighthearted and whimsical and thoroughly inoffensive. Kenneth More does a good job, and Mansfield is miscast but okay. There are a few musical numbers with her singing voice dubbed by Connie Francis. The supporting cast includes Bruce Cabot, Robert Morley, William Campbell, and Henry Hull, none of whom have much to do with the exception of Hull, who plays the mayor of Fractured Jaw and does some effective scenery-chewing. This is a pretty minor film overall, but not a bad way to pass a couple of hours. I’m glad I finally watched it.

2 Days in the Valley (1996)

After I reviewed the movie BULLET TRAIN recently and mentioned that I like complicated, interlocking plots, a friend asked me if I’d seen 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY. I looked it up and realized that I hadn’t, so I figured it might be worth a try. As you can tell from the title, it takes place in Southern California and has a large cast including a couple of hitmen (James Spader and Danny Aiello), an Olympic skier (Teri Hatcher), a burned-out writer/director (Paul Mazursky), a nurse (Marsha Mason), assorted cops (Jeff Daniels, Eric Stoltz, Keith Carradine), and a beautiful blonde (Charlize Theron in her film debut, and I’d be falling down in my job as a thoughtful critic of the cinema if I failed to point out that she gets nekkid in this movie). Writer/director John Herzfeld’s script jumps around a lot starting out as it establishes all these characters and more, but then things begin to come together and we see how everything is related, although some of those connections are just pure coincidence.

Double-crosses abound, along with bloody shootouts. Characters you think will probably survive maybe don’t. Some of them do survive to find redemption. If a dark, nihilistic movie like this can be heart-warming, 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY kind of is. I enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s not as good as ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD or BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE, both of which it reminded me of, but I think it’s well worth watching.

Man's Favorite Sport? (1964)

This is a late Howard Hawks-directed comedy that I somehow never saw until now. I remember when it came out and it’s been on television many times, but I missed it anyway. I’m glad I finally caught up to it since Hawks is one of my favorite directors.

In a role that seems to have been written for Cary Grant, Rock Hudson plays an Abercrombie & Fitch salesman who specializes in fishing gear and has even written a successful book on fishing. But he has a secret: he’s never been fishing in his life. Then the publicity director (Paula Prentiss) for a lake lodge that sponsors a big fishing tournament has the bright idea of having Hudson’s character enter the competition. Hudson’s boss agrees. When he finally admits to Prentiss’s character that he can’t fish, she sets out to teach him. Slapstick hijinks ensue, as does romance, of course. This is, after all, a screwball romantic comedy from the director who made BRINGING UP BABY and MONKEY BUSINESS.

I enjoyed MAN’S FAVORITE SPORT? quite a bit. The reviews on IMDB talk about how hilarious it is, but I didn’t really find that to be the case. Consistently amusing and good-hearted, yes, definitely. I smiled a lot, chuckled a time or two, but didn’t really laugh out loud. I got caught up in the story, though, and the cast is good. I’ve never been a big Rock Hudson fan, but he’s a likeable lug and handles the slapstick stuff fairly well. Paula Prentiss really had that cute, early Sixties, Mary Tyler Moore thing going on. Or maybe Mary Tyler Moore had a Paula Prentiss thing going on, take your pick. Either way, I always liked her. John McIver, Norm Alden, and Roscoe Karns provide sturdy support. Maria Perschy, a beautiful German actress who didn’t make a lot of American films, is good as Prentiss’s sidekick. Charlene Holt, a latter-day member of the Hawks stock company, plays Hudson’s fiancee and doesn’t have much to do, but she’s spectacular to look at in one scantily dressed scene.

Hawks was past his peak when he made this film, but he was still a very good director and keeps things moving along quite well in MAN’S FAVORITE SPORT? It’s a good but not great film and is certainly worth watching.

Movies I've Missed (Until Now): The Colossus of Rhodes

I remember when this movie played at the local drive-in theater, almost fifty years ago, and I wanted to see it then, of course, because I knew it had sword fights in it and I loved anything with sword fights. But I missed it. Then years later, I found out that it was the first movie directed by Sergio Leone, which made me want to see it even more because by then Leone had become one of my favorite directors. Even with that extra motivation, more years went by without me ever watching THE COLOSSUS OF RHODES.


Well, I’ve remedied that now . . . and I’m not sure it was worth the wait.


Washed-up American cowboy star Rory Calhoun plays Dario, a Greek visiting the island nation of Rhodes in the year 260 B.C., and looks a little uncomfortable at times in an ultra-short toga. He finds himself in the middle of a lot of political intrigue involving Rhodes, Phoenicia, and Greece. The Colossus of Rhodes, a giant statue and one of the original Seven Wonders of the World, stands guard over the harbor at Rhodes and plays a major part in all the plotting and double-crossing going on.


To put it bluntly, the first half of this movie is pretty dreadful. Everybody stands around and talks, and since too many of the characters look too much alike, it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on. Thankfully, things pick up a little in the second half. You’ve got rebels attacking the palace, Phoenician soldiers smuggled into the city to overthrow Rhodes’ king, Rory Calhoun being captured by the bad guys and escaping several times, molten lead being slung by catapults so it rains down from the sky, and numerous sword fights, including one where Calhoun battles against half a dozen soldiers while standing on the arm of the giant statue, a scene that provoked a comment of “Okay, that’s actually pretty cool” from me.


Overall, though, there’s very little sign of the brilliant director Leone would become only a few short years later. There are a few sweeping vistas, and that’s about it. None of his other trademark shots or pacing, and it probably doesn’t help matters that the music isn’t by Ennio Morricone. THE COLOSSUS OF RHODES could have been a pretty good pulpish adventure movie, but it’s too long, too talky, and too complicated. If you’re a Sergio Leone completist, by all means go ahead and watch it. Otherwise I can’t recommend it.


(As I commented to Livia, a few years later and that might’ve been another washed-up American cowboy star playing Dario: Clint Eastwood. As for my favorite Rory Calhoun movie, it’s probably ANGEL, a surprisingly good piece of Eighties sleaze with a title character who is, according to the movie poster, “high school honor student by day . . . Hollywood hooker by night!” Calhoun plays a homeless denizen of the Sunset Strip who’s a, uh, washed-up cowboy star, and he’s great in the role. If you haven’t seen ANGEL, that one I recommend. The sequel, AVENGING ANGEL, is okay but not as good.)

Movies I've Missed (Until Now): A Face in the Crowd

When I was a kid I was a big fan of THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW on TV, as most people were in the early Sixties. I also liked the movie NO TIME FOR SERGEANTS, where Griffith played an affable country boy in the Army. I’d also heard some of his comedy bits on the radio, such as “What It Was, Was Football”. But somehow I never got around to watching his film debut, which was much, much different from those other things. I’m talking, of course, about A FACE IN THE CROWD.


At first glance, Griffith plays a similar character in this one, a grinning, guitar-playing, yarn-spinning good ol’ boy from a small town in Arkansas. He’s discovered in the drunk tank by a local radio personality played by Patricia Neal, who does a man-in-the-street show called “A Face in the Crowd” on her uncle’s small-market radio station. In short order, Griffith’s character, Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, becomes a radio star, then a TV star on a station in Memphis, and then the networks come calling and he heads off to New York to become the biggest thing on nationwide television, eventually wielding such power over his fans that he may well be able to determine who’s going to be the next President. Neal’s character goes along with him, as does a writer from the Memphis TV station played by Walter Matthau.


There are hints early on, though, that Lonesome Rhodes isn’t the friendly sort that he pretends to be. In fact, Griffith turns in a great performance as a character who’s actually rotten to the core, as big a heel as any to be found in an Orrie Hitt novel. A FACE IN THE CROWD is a very dark film, a bleak, almost vicious attack on the advertising business, the TV business, and America’s obsession with celebrities. Despite the Fifties trappings, it plays very much like it could have been made in today’s increasingly bitter climate.


This film was directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg, and it reminds me in places of their earlier collaboration, ON THE WATERFRONT, especially the sense of despair that runs through it. It also puts me in mind of the fact that Schulberg was responsible for another Movie I’ve Missed, WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN? I probably ought to watch it sometime, or at least read the book, which I think I have around here somewhere. Most of you have probably already seen A FACE IN THE CROWD, but if you haven’t, it’s well worth watching. It’s not what you’d call a likable film, but it is very well done.

Movies I've Missed (Until Now): Splendor in the Grass

When we started to watch this one, I commented that I’d never seen it before, and Livia asked, “How could you have missed it? It was on TV all the time when we were kids.”


Well, that’s true enough, but when I was a kid, I watched Westerns, comedies, Tarzan movies, war movies, monster movies . . . You get the idea. I wouldn’t have had much interest in a romantic drama about dysfunctional families and teenage lust, angst, and madness in 1928 Kansas.


Now, of course, I was able to watch it with considerable interest. It’s the kind of movie they just don’t make anymore. Yes, it’s a little hammy at times. Pat Hingle, as an oil wildcatter who’s struck it rich, chews the scenery shamelessly, but character actors like that could really make it work, and Hingle does here. Mostly, though, the movie belongs to Warren Beatty (in his film debut) as the rich boy in love with the butcher’s daughter, played by Natalie Wood. I’m not sure there’s ever been a movie star as pretty as Natalie Wood, and she’s beautiful here, as always, and turns in a pretty good performance, too.


If you haven’t seen it before, most of the plot won’t really surprise you. Let’s see, it’s 1928 when the movie opens, and people are talking about getting rich off their stocks . . . hmm, I wonder what’s going to happen. However, the way the movie plays out does eventually take some unexpected turns. I was a little disappointed that some of the vital action takes place off-screen and is referred to rather casually by some of the characters, but other than that the story is pretty solid. William Inge, the playwright who did the screenplay, has a cameo as a minister. Always good to see a writer get some screen time.


I don’t think SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS is a great film, but I enjoyed watching it. And it’s one more movie off my list of Movies I’ve Missed (Until Now). (I don’t really have such a list, by the way. If I did it would be too long to manage.)

Movies I've Missed (Until Now): Frequency

This movie is ten years old, so I think it falls into the Movies I’ve Missed category. For those of you who haven’t seen it, Dennis Quaid and Jim Caveziel play father and son (Quaid a New York City firefighter in 1969, Caveziel a homicide cop in 1999) who wind up talking to each other on the same ham radio thirty years apart. They’re able to do that because of something about solar flares and the Aurora Borealis (don’t bother trying to figure it out, just accept the gimmick and move on). Caveziel’s character, who knows that his father died fighting a fire in 1969, seizes the opportunity to change the past and save his dad’s life.


Of course, things don’t work out like he intended, because as anybody who’s ever read any science fiction knows, when you change even one thing in the past it has a ripple effect and a lot of other things get changed, too. In this case, people die who weren’t supposed to and lives get ruined. Father and son wind up having to work together to solve a thirty-year-old mystery and catch a serial killer.


There are a lot of twists in this plot, which, while not completely unexpected, work very effectively. It’s a well-written film, nailing down all the loose ends I could see, and well-acted, too, which helps to generate considerable suspense in some scenes, especially toward the end. I liked this one a lot, and if you haven’t seen it, it’s certainly worth watching.

Hitchcock Double Feature, Part 2

Both of these pictures turned out to be Movies I’ve Missed (Until Now). I’m not sure how I managed not to see so many famous movies . . .


THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY is a gorgeous film, full of beautiful autumn scenery in Vermont. Dropped down right in the middle of it is a murder mystery, with a dead body found in the woods. The victim could have been killed by any number of people who turn out to have unexpected connections with him, and they keep burying and digging up Harry (the dead guy) for a number of screwball reasons. This is a comedy more than anything else and actually is pretty funny in places, but it’s more of a “This is a really weird movie” funny than laugh-out-loud funny. It also has a good cast, being the film debut of Shirley MacLaine as well as featuring performances by Edmund Gwenn (very odd seeing Santa Claus without the beard), John Forsythe (most famous for DYNASTY, probably, but he’ll always be BACHELOR FATHER to me), and Jerry Mathers (not yet The Beaver). I think this is a likable film, not great but fairly entertaining.

MARNIE is another one I’d heard a lot about but never seen. Tippi Hedren, another of Hitchcock’s icy blondes, is a compulsive thief with a host of other psychological problems who winds up being blackmailed into marriage by the head of a publishing company (played by Sean Connery, not long after he started being James Bond) who discovers her secret. It’s pretty slow-moving and the big reveal at the end is easy to guess, but it still held my interest all the way through. I generally like Sean Connery’s work, and he’s pretty good in this one. Tippi Hedren is much more inconsistent, fine in some scenes but not very believable in others. Bruce Dern shows up late in a small but pivotal role. I think this is regarded as one of Hitchcock’s lesser movies, but I thought it was okay.


More Hitchcock coming up, but probably not for a while.

Hitchcock Double Feature

Livia’s working on a project that involves Alfred Hitchcock movies, so we’re going to be watching some of them. I’ve seen most of the films Hitchcock is famous for, but not all of them. First up are one that I saw many years ago and one that falls into the Movies I’ve Missed (Until Now) category.


VERTIGO – I was in high school or college the last time I saw this one, which tells you how long ago it’s been. I recalled liking it a lot, though. For the very few of you who haven’t seen it, James Stewart plays a former homicide detective in San Francisco who has retired from the force because his fear of heights caused another cop to get killed during a chase after a suspect. An old friend of Stewart’s asks him to tail the friend’s wife, who has been having blackouts. The friend is worried something may happen to her. Reluctantly, Stewart agrees. Tragedy ensues, but it’s followed by an intriguing mystery that turns the movie on its head.


This film still looks great. The shots of the Golden Gate Bridge are spectacular, and many of the other shots are staged in a striking, very effective fashion. And I’m a big fan of Jimmy Stewart and love to listen to him talk, no matter what he’s saying. However, other than that the movie really doesn’t hold up very well. The pace is glacial, and it’s not suspense-building glacial. It’s more a matter of “Okay, how many lengthy shots of Stewart’s character driving and driving and driving do we really need?” On top of that (and yes, I know, where do I get off criticizing the Master of Suspense?), the movie tips its hand ’way too early. Yes, even if you’ve never seen it before, you’ll likely guess the big twist early on, but despite that I think it’s a mistake to bring the movie to a screeching halt halfway through so that one of the characters can sit down and explain everything that’s been going on. Even a viewer who thinks he or she has figured out might still have a little doubt at that point, but not afterward. And then I found the ending a real letdown. Dramatic, yes, but it leaves so much unresolved that could have been resolved and made the ending even more dramatic. So overall, if you’ve never seen VERTIGO I think it’s probably worth watching, but this time around I considered it pretty disappointing.


SHADOW OF A DOUBT – This is the one that somehow I had never seen until now. It was reportedly Hitchcock’s favorite of his films, and I liked it quite a bit, too. It’s a somewhat uneasy but highly entertaining mix of small-town Americana and serial killer thriller, as a young woman (the lovely Theresa Wright) tries to figure out whether her charming uncle (Joseph Cotton, who will always be Jed Leland from CITIZEN KANE to me) is really a murderer. There’s a great supporting cast in this one and a lot of humor despite the grisly subject matter. Macdonald Carey strikes me as an odd casting choice for the FBI agent who’s the hero. Wallace Ford, who played the taxi driver in HARVEY, is much better as Carey’s partner. This is one of the few movies I’ve seen where I was really uncertain how it would end, so I think Hitchcock deserves that Master of Suspense label on this film. If you haven’t seen it, you should definitely check it out.


There’ll be more Hitchcock coming up.

Movies I've Missed (Until Now): Mogambo

I’m not sure how I managed to miss seeing MOGAMBO, because it played on TV all the time when I was a kid. However, I hadn’t seen it until now. Actually, now that I think about it, I was never really much of a Clark Gable fan until I saw him in THE MISFITS in the early Seventies. That won me over, and I’ve enjoyed most of his films that I’ve seen since then.


But to get back to MOGAMBO, for the undoubtedly few of you who haven’t seen it, Gable plays a white hunter in Africa who captures animals for zoos and circuses, much like John Wayne’s character in HATARI!, which came out a few years later. His life is disrupted by the arrival of a brassy, wisecracking American showgirl played by Ava Gardner, who was supposed to go along on a safari with a maharajah. The safari was cancelled, but she didn’t know that, and now she’s stuck at Gable’s hunting camp for a while. An English couple show up later. The husband’s an anthropologist who wants to study gorillas; the wife is Grace Kelly. A romantic triangle soon develops between Gable, Gardner, and Kelly.


That’s just about the entire plot, and therein lies the problem with MOGAMBO. Not much happens, and there are some really slow stretches, which surprised me since it was directed by John Ford and his films usually perk along at a pretty good pace. The photography is great, the scenery is beautiful, and the acting is okay for the most part. I was never much of an Ava Gardner fan, either, but she’s really good in this movie.


I wanted to like this one more than I did, but I'm glad I saw it anyway. It’s certainly not a bad film, there’s just not much to it. I guess when it comes to jungle movies, watching all those Tarzan movies as a kid ruined me.

Movies I've Missed (Until Now): Empire of the Sun

We hadn’t seen a big, epic historical drama for a while, and this is one from the Eighties that we never watched. My fondness for war films is well-documented, too, so we gave EMPIRE OF THE SUN a try and I’m glad we did.

Based on an autobiographical novel by British SF author J.G. Ballard, the story centers around his childhood in Shanghai during World War II. The character, called James Graham in the film, is about twelve years old when the war begins and the Japanese attack and occupy Shanghai. Separated from his parents, young Jim is forced to survive in the devastated city on his own for a while until he falls in with some Americans who are somewhat shady characters. Eventually they’re all captured by the Japanese and forced to live in an internment camp for British and American prisoners until the end of the war.

Boiled down, that’s the plot of the movie, but it’s rich with characters and incidents that fill up its two-and-a-half-hour running time. There’s plenty of spectacle, as you’d expect in a film directed by Steven Spielberg, and yes, while some of it is a little hokey and overblown, it’s also pretty effective. When he tackles big historical dramas like this, Spielberg reminds me a little of David Lean (a director whose films I need to revisit someday soon).

A young Christian Bale plays Jim and does a good job. John Malkovich, eccentric as always, is the American who befriends him and saves his life more than once. The supporting cast is uniformly good, including one young Japanese actor who does a great job as a would-be pilot. (The internment camp is right next to a Japanese airfield, probably to discourage Allied attacks on the field, a strategy that doesn’t always work.)

EMPIRE OF THE SUN is an old-fashioned yarn that I enjoyed a lot. If you like historical dramas and/or war movies and haven’t ever seen it, you ought to check it out.

Some Movies

Some brief comments on a few movies we’ve seen recently, including a couple that fall into the Movies I’ve Missed (Until Now) category:

THE BOONDOCK SAINTS – From 1999, this action movie that has developed a cult following is a crime yarn about a couple of working class Irish brothers from Boston who have a run-in with the Russian mob. After surviving that, they decide to become vigilantes and clean up the town by killing all the criminals they can find, leading organized crime to unleash a legendary hitman on them. Extremely bloody and so over-the-top that it verges on silly at times, it’s also surprisingly funny in places and the action scenes are very good. I can only give it a qualified recommendation, though. Fans of movies like SHOOT ’EM UP might like it, but I suspect it’s too goofy for most people.

MIDNIGHT MADNESS – Another teen comedy from the Eighties that we missed somehow, and in this case, it probably should have remained a movie that I missed. It’s about several teams of college kids running around town looking for clues in a game called the Great All-Nighter. The star is David Naughton, who parleyed his singing and dancing role in a series of commercials for Dr Pepper into a short-lived movie and TV career. Badly acted and not funny, this movie is notable only because of the presence of Michael J. Fox (his film debut) and a cameo by Paul Reubens. Don’t go looking for it.

MY LIFE IN RUINS – I didn’t really mean to watch two Nia Vardalos movies in the space of a week, it just sort of worked out that way. This is a lightweight but fairly enjoyable romantic comedy that finds her working as a tour guide in Greece, leading around a group of eccentric tourists that includes Richard Dreyfuss, Harland Williams, and Rachel Dratch. The ubiquitous Ian Gomez plays a lecherous Greek hotelkeeper. Hijinks ensue, punctuated by the occasional poignant moment. Nia finds true love with the driver of her tour bus. It’s better than I’m making it sound. Worth watching.

The best of the bunch, THE INVENTION OF LYING, is an odd little comedy written by and starring Ricky Gervais. The concept is that the world is exactly as we know it, except that the human race never evolved the ability to tell a lie. So everyone tells the exact truth, no matter what, leading to a near-constant stream of awkward moments. Until the character played by Gervais suddenly discovers the ability to lie, which winds up changing the entire world. This one is smart and very funny in places, touching in others. And it has the added bonus of having Jennifer Garner in it, who, like Sela Ward, is universally beloved by guys the world over.

Movies I've Missed (Until Now): Three O'Clock High

I would have sworn that we watched every high school comedy movie made in the Eighties, but somehow we never got around to this one. It’s what I call a “bad day” movie, where things start out wrong for our decent, everyman hero Jerry Mitchell and keep getting worse as the day goes on. The low point, though, is when a new student who happens to be a psychopathic bully decides that he and Jerry are going to have a fight on the parking lot as soon as school is out at three o’clock.

Jerry and his best friend, who’s the editor of the school newspaper, try to figure out a way for Jerry to avoid getting beaten up, but every scheme they try just backfires on them. Eventually, of course, the showdown, the moment of truth, arrives, and the question is whether Jerry will step up and at least survive.

THREE O’CLOCK HIGH is a pretty good film, with a funny script co-written by Richard Christian Matheson. The cast is populated by actors who hadn’t done much then and didn’t go on to do much, although there are a few exceptions (Mitch Pileggi, Jeffery Tambor, and Yeardley Smith, to name three). Jerry is played by Casey Siemazko and Richard Tyson plays the bully, and while both of them have worked steadily over the years, neither is what you’d call a big name. But they’re fine in their roles, as are most of the other people in the movie.

I’m glad we finally got around to watching this one. It’s no FERRIS BUELLER, mind you, but it’s pretty entertaining and well worth investing an hour and a half of your time if you haven’t seen it.

Movies I've Missed (Until Now): Somewhere in the Night

I’ve been trying to catch up on some older movies, and the plot of this one from 1946 sounded intriguing: a GI comes back from combat in the South Pacific with amnesia, a fact that he conceals from his doctors. Everybody tells him his name is George Taylor. When he gets back to the States he sets out to discover who George Taylor is. His only clue is a fragment of a letter from a woman who’s angry with him for breaking up with her, but he soon finds another, a letter addressed to George Taylor from someone named Larry Cravat, telling him that a bank account has been opened in his name. So the first step in finding out his true identity is to find the mysterious Larry Cravat.

You see the big twist coming already, don’t you? You will if you watch the movie, too. But that won’t spoil it for you, because the fun is in watching everything play out in pure film noir fashion, as Taylor’s quest gets him involved with vicious mobsters, small-time grifters, a pretty torch singer, missing millions, and of course a murder for which the cops blame him, so he has to track down the real killer and clear his name before he can be arrested. The Gold Medal writers who came along a few years later had to have watched this and dozens of similar movies.

Sporting a pencil-thin mustache that looks a little silly today, John Hodiak makes an earnest but somewhat goofy protagonist. He’s well-supported by a great cast, though, including Lloyd Nolan, Richard Conte, Sheldon Leonard (in only one scene but really fun to watch, as always), Harry Morgan (likewise), and the ubiquitous Whit Bissell. SOMEWHERE IN THE NIGHT is a pretty minor film but still entertaining. If you like noirish thrillers from the Forties and haven’t seen it, you ought to give it a try.