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Recently Watched & Favorite Movies: Personal Reviews & More

126K views 888 replies 95 participants last post by  revahS 
#1 ·
My answer has always been Casablanca (even over Citizen Kane) since in my opinion there is not one single wasted scene in the movie.

However, after once again seeing American Graffiti last night on TV (with commercial breaks which should be illegal) I am revising my opinion. It has to be American Graffiti!
 
#412 ·
Photograph White Hat Standing Sleeve

Torrid Zone from 1940 with James Cagney, Ann Sheridan and Pat O'Brien

Yes it's an A-movie with an A-cast and A-quality special effects, and all those things help, but it's basically a very good formulaic movie of the week with a bigger budget.

A large banana company's Caribbean plantation foreman, O'Brien, tries to both cajole and bully his top man, Cagney, into coming back to work for him as Cagney is about to leave for a cushy job in the States. Simultaneously, O'Brien, trying to keep order in the nearby town where he acts like a dictatorial mayor, wants to ship out recently arrived for unknown-but-suspected-untoward reasons nightclub-singer and card-shark Sheridan.

No surprise, Sheridan and Cagney meet, rub each other the wrong way, but while they won't admit it, they really like each other. Cagney, with a month to spare before his new job, agrees to a two-week stint for a big paycheck to help O'Brien "get the fruit moving again." Thrown into the mix is a local rebel leader who keeps stealing the plantation's workers away and another plantation manager whose wife is having an all but open affair with Cagney.

From here, the movie warps through a lot of plot and action with Cagney and O'Brien spitting out dialogue in machine-gun fashion at everyone (the best part of the movie). Also, the rebel leader is captured, escapes, is hunted down and captured by Cagney anew, and then, kinda, escapes anew; meanwhile, the bananas sometimes get on the train and sometimes don't.

And while he's dealing with all that, Cagney engages in a lot of verbal fighting and foreplay with both Sheridan and the manager's wife. It's another movie where Cagney has several job issues and women all up in the air at once with him spinning like a top to keep everything from crashing down. Basically, it's Cagney being Cagney in a Cagney movie and that's a very good thing especially when he has equally talented O'Brien as a verbal sparring partner.

It's fun, it's entertaining and fast moving. Warner Brothers knew the movie gold it had in Cagney, O'Brien and Sheridan and it let its horses run. Why is Sheridan stuck on a Carribean plantation with an extensive wardrobe of Cafe Society outfits? Who knows and who cares. She's there for, sorry gotta say it, the oomph (with Cagney parodying her famous sexual sobriquet by referring to her as "fourteen carrot oomph").

Also, what is it with Ann Sheridan having to beg for sex - how is that possible? In Honeymoon for Three, the movie opens with Sheridan asking for a "quicky" from George Brent and lamenting his rejection. Here, when a female rival says Cagney's no longer interested in her, Sheridan complains that Cagney never showed enough sexual interest in her in the first place, "You can't be jilted when you haven't been given a tumble." Something is wrong with a world where Ann Sheridan is always begging for sex.

It's a quick and by-the-numbers movie that works because Cagney, O'Brien and Sheridan are insanely enjoyable to watch, especially as they fire off one-liners at each other. The story is off the shelf, but the movie is worth the watch for the talented acting and star power alone.
 
#413 ·
Shoe Hairstyle Photograph Leg White

Tender Comrade from 1943 with Ginger Rogers, Robert Ryan, Ruth Hussey and Patricia Collinge

Let's get this out of the way up front. This film was used as part of the evidence by the House Un-American Activities Committee when it accused the movie's writer Dalton Trumbo of spreading communist propaganda. Eventually, Trumbo was blacklisted.

As a libertarian-leaning, raised-in-the-Cold-War-era anti-communist, clear blips appear on my radar for even small communist propaganda, but other than a ghost image here or there, I didn't see much agitprop nonsense in Tender Comrade.

To be sure, there are a few Marxist-ish lines about a bunch female factory workers sharing and sharing alike to save expenses and some other lines about the "fairness" of "having enough," but the latter weren't far off from the government's view, at the time, of war rationing and "pulling together" on the home front.

And, yes, Trumbo has some muddled thinking about democracy and economics that sometimes sounds faintly pink, but his thoughts, overall, struck me as more stupid than dangerous. If there was a crime committed by author Trumbo in this one, it was more for immature dialogue and pompous-but-trite speeches than any great subversive effort.

That's why the movie fails to be anything more than a "B effort" as a WWII "home front" movie that is clearly not in the same class with The Best Years of our Lives or The More the Merrier. In Tender Comrades, the characters often spew out rote lines that are just not that believable.

The simple plot here is four female factory workers, with husbands away at war and wanting to improve their living conditions, rent a home together. Of course, they all have their personality quirks and preferences that lead to them sharply bumping into each other now and then, but you know all along that they'll pull together when someone takes a war-related body blow.

So we see the obligatory arguments over rationing, volunteering, keeping one's lips sealed about their factory work, husbands and even sharing household chores. However, when someone learns that her husband has been taken prisoner or, on a positive note, a husband on leave is coming home, they all support each other and "pitch in." There's even the stock character (Hussey) who doesn't buy the "pitch in" stuff at first, but of course, she sees the light by the end as we learn her cynicism was, yawn, just a cover for her fears.

The only real bright spot in this flick is Ginger Rogers and her husband Robert Ryan as this not-obvious pairing has some real movie chemistry. You want to look for the scene where a calm Ryan nonchalantly asks Rogers to marry him and she immediately starts yelling at him for being "a wolf" and stringing her along.

He's more amused than angered because, as we soon learn, she's mad that he's kept his feelings so close to his vest that she didn't even know if he cared for her. To cut off her non-stop verbal pummeling, he gives her a much-deserved ultimatum - "say yes or no, not another word -" that brings the proposal to a happy conclusion.

And, heck, it doesn't hurt that Rogers has a rockin'-tight body on display throughout the proposal scene. Even in 1943, code and all, Hollywood knew how to fire up the prurience when it had the raw material to work with.

The movie needed more scenes like the proposal one and less pontification masquerading as dialogue. In this one, Trumbo's writing is ineffectual and obvious around the propaganda, but sometimes touching and astute when limning human foibles like Roger's insecurity in her relationship.

Finally, since we had to endure a bunch of cliches and way-too-much moralizing as dialogue, at least this bit of philosophy from Rogers, to a grumbling-about-America Hussey, landed a good blow: "Mistakes, sure we [America] make mistakes, plenty of them, You want a country where they won't stand for mistakes, go to Germany, go to Japan." Oh but for that wisdom today.
 
#414 ·
Coat Gesture Military person Collar Overcoat

The Journey from 1959 with Deborah Kerr, Yul Brynner and Jason Robards
  • Taking place in Hungary in 1956 as the USSR was crushing the Hungarian rebellion, several foreigners (mainly English) trying to get out of Hungary are held up in a hotel by a Russian Major (Brynner) suspicious that they are smuggling out Hungarian resistance fighters

  • The foreigners, overall, aren't doing so, but one, Kerr, is trying to smuggle one resistance fighter out - a wounded Robards - which sets up a battle of wits and sexual tension between Kerr and Brynner

  • A bunch of other stuff takes place around the core story - pockets of Hungarian resistance attack Brynner's Soviet headquarters, we see the Hungarian locals conflicted over joining the resistance and several of the British being held are forced to choose between exposing Kerr and Robards or helping them and, thus, risking imprisonment or death for themselves

  • But most of the two-plus hours are spent with Kerr and Brynner not sleeping with each other as he continues to suspect Robards is not English (Robards' cover story), but a Hungarian resistance fighter (which we know he is)

  • Not that it's bad in a melodramatic way, but it's hard to believe that Brynner wouldn't have figured out who Robards was in ten minutes and it's harder still to believe he'd risk his career and life by not immediately arresting him and Kerr

  • Brynner is presented as a man conflicted with the moral issues of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarians - so much so, that he's willing to risk it all to let one Hungarian go, in truth, mainly because, let's just say it, he wants to bang Kerr - eh, not that believable

  • All this is made harder still because Deborah Kerr, while pretty, has an expression and body English that read as if she'd shattered into little pieces if a man touched her, but I guess the subtext and country metaphor is the fiery Russian wanting to conquer the aloof Englishwoman - yawn

  • Lastly, there's so much Russian and Hungarian spoken (without subtitles) that you feel left out of a third of the movie - maybe done to give the audience a sense of how the English captives felt, but still, you don't go to a movie to not know what the characters are saying
 
#415 · (Edited)
View attachment 47777
The Journey from 1959 with Deborah Kerr, Yul Brynner and Jason Robards
  • Taking place in Hungary in 1956 as the USSR was crushing the Hungarian rebellion, several foreigners (mainly English) trying to get out of Hungary are held up in a hotel by a Russian Major (Brynner) suspicious that they are smuggling out Hungarian resistance fighters

  • The foreigners, overall, aren't doing so, but one, Kerr, is trying to smuggle one resistance fighter out - a wounded Robards - which sets up a battle of wits and sexual tension between Kerr and Brynner

  • A bunch of other stuff takes place around the core story - pockets of Hungarian resistance attack Brynner's Soviet headquarters, we see the Hungarian locals conflicted over joining the resistance and several of the British being held are forced to choose between exposing Kerr and Robards or helping them and, thus, risking imprisonment or death for themselves

  • But most of the two-plus hours are spent with Kerr and Brynner not sleeping with each other as he continues to suspect Robards is not English (Robards' cover story), but a Hungarian resistance fighter (which we know he is)

  • Not that it's bad in a melodramatic way, but it's hard to believe that Brynner wouldn't have figured out who Robards was in ten minutes and it's harder still to believe he'd risk his career and life by not immediately arresting him and Kerr

  • Brynner is presented as a man conflicted with the moral issues of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarians - so much so, that he's willing to risk it all to let one Hungarian go, in truth, mainly because, let's just say it, he wants to bang Kerr - eh, not that believable

  • All this is made harder still because Deborah Kerr, while pretty, has an expression and body English that read as if she'd shattered into little pieces if a man touched her, but I guess the subtext and country metaphor is the fiery Russian wanting to conquer the aloof Englishwoman - yawn

  • Lastly, there's so much Russian and Hungarian spoken (without subtitles) that you feel left out of a third of the movie - maybe done to give the audience a sense of how the English captives felt, but still, you don't go to a movie to not know what the characters are saying
Unfamiliar with the film, but may be interesting to note that this was the second pairing of Brynner and Kerr, the first three years earlier in one of the most famous films of all times, The King and I (from Anna and the King of Siam* which I read as a little boy.) King made Brynner famous and gave him the Oscar for Best Actor. Kerr was already a big deal. Kerr pronounced her name Carr, for no discernable reason, especially since it wasn't her real name..

*Of course the book wasn't a musical so I had to make up my own tunes. Siam is present day Tailand. Or Denmark, I get the two confused.
 
#418 ·
Hairstyle Smile White Black Plant

Hide-Out from 1934 with Robert Montgomery, Maureen O'Sullivan, Edward Arnold and Mickey Rooney
  • Montgomery plays a New York City mob guy - an urbane "protection" racketeer - who runs away to a farm in upstate New York to hide out until a recent "issue" with the police can be "fixed"

  • There, by movie-magic happenstance, he winds up living with a honest, hard-working American farm family who also happens to have a preternaturally beautiful daughter - O'Sullivan of Jane-from-Tarzan fame who proves here that she looks gorgeous even with her clothes on

  • Since the family doesn't know he's a mobster hiding out, they think he's just recovering from an injury, there are a lot of jokes around and contretemps that occur from him concealing his true "career" from them - about half of the jokes/situations work

  • Being a code-enforced movie, all goes as planned: Montgomery transforms from cynical mobster to enlightened man who sees the good in honest, hard work and decent living (especially when a pretty girl sits like a cherry on top of it)

  • All that's left is for him to come clean to the family (and see if they reject him) and to pay his debt to society

  • It's harmless fun - nothing great, but Montgomery and O'Sullivan, with an assist from Edward Arnold as the doggedly pursuing NYC detective, make it interesting enough
 
#419 ·
Trousers Smile Standing Coat Style

George Washington Slept Here from 1942 with Ann Sheridan, Jack Benny and Charles Coburn
  • It turns out, 1948's well-known Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House was first made in 1942 as George Washington Slept Here. Not really, but the two movies all but share the same story

  • An upper-middle-class New York City family, living in a cramped apartment (a typical New York story), on the wife's (Sheridan) whim and unbeknownst to the husband (Benny), buy an in-complete-disrepair Pennsylvania farmhouse

  • After decamping to their "new" home and intent on "fixing it up," the story follows the usual arc of many fish-out-of-water stories as the local contractors and real estate agents take advantage of the "city slickers" as they spend all their money trying to make a run-down two-hundred-plus-year-old shack into a home

  • The one-liners - the reason for the movie's existence - are good, but not great with Benny trying hard to make average material funnier than it is as he both needles his wife for buying this white elephant and all the locals for fleecing them

  • Along the way, as troubles mount - no water from the always-being-drilled well, loss of the house's only access road, insanely leaky roofs, and on and on - the family also, naturally, fall in the love with the slowly-being-restored house and the warming-to-them locals

  • The climax comes as the money runs out, the bank is about to foreclose and their rich uncle (Coburn) turns out not to be rich, necessitating a deus ex machina to save the day

  • As noted, if this all sounds familiar to Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House, it's because it's, pretty much, the same story. Overall, the Blandings' version is a bit slicker, and Grant's more-subtle humor is more to my taste than Benny's "yak-yak" style, but both are reasonably enjoyable movie cognates
 
#420 · (Edited)
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Sweet Bird of Youth from 1962 starring Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Shirley Knight and Ed Begley

You enter a Tennessee Williams world at your own risk as despair, shattered dreams, broken lives and crushed souls await. The only real differences from play to play are the particular human afflictions on display.

Compared to your run-of-the-mill movie, Sweet Bird of Youth is pretty good stuff, but in the Williams' plays-turned-into-movies oeuvre, Bird feels like a poor man's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Most of the same dysfunctional family pieces are there, just arranged a bit differently, but it's not as impactful (read, soul crushing) as Cat is.

In Sweet Bird of Youth, Newman plays an aging pretty boy returning to his home town with a "patroness" in tow. He claims he's on the brink of a movie career, but he's really a gigolo / gofer for this aging Hollywood star [Page] whose career is in a downturn. Newman has returned to "get his girl back -" the daughter (Knight) of the town's corrupt political boss (Begley) who, pretty much, forced Newman out of town when no-prospects Newman tried to marry his daughter some years ago.

Making things worse - as they always are in a Williams world - Newman's patroness is an alcoholic and drug user (smoking marijuana is surprisingly shown) who is alternately kind and viciously mean to Newman who returns the favor. The majority of the movie is watching these two - secluded in a suffocating hotel suite in town - tear each other down and, then, somewhat make up when they realize that all they have is each other. It's honest, but exhausting.

When we do get out of that oppressive hotel room, we see Newman trying to get in touch with his former girlfriend, whose father, the aforementioned political boss, is doing everything he can to thwart a reunion, even unleashing his mentally unstable son (that Williams' touch again) to threaten and rough up Newman. Newman and the former girlfriend meet a few times, old sparks fly, but old baggage weighs (spoiler alert) as their last pairing and parting resulted in an abortion, whose public revelation is now threatening her father's political career.

And on the dysfunction goes: Town-boss Begley mentally and physically abuses his tucked-away-at-the-hotel mistress, while playing the wholesome family man in public. And sitting in the middle of the simmering abortion scandal is the young doctor who performed the illegal procedure on Knight when Newman left town. He's been promoted, before his time, to head of surgery at the local hospital owing to Begley's influence. Furthermore, the doctor is now engaged to Knight who, by now, is all but numb to everything being thrown at her.

Okay, that might be a lot to follow in a brief summary, but it is a bit easier to keep up with all the human wreckage as it unfolds on screen in over two hours. The conclusion (no spoiler alert, you'll have to watch the movie) was, according to TCM, watered down from the play owing to the remaining influence of the movie production code. But the conclusion, ugly and unpleasant as it is, is not that important as Tennessee Williams' goal, as always, is to show broken people breaking some more. Mission accomplished.
 
#421 · (Edited)
MV5BN2Q1MDI3MmItNDVmMi00ZjI0LTliYzMtYjI3MmU1ZDQ1MGNmXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTcyODY2NDQ@._V1_.jpg

The Office Wife from 1930 with Dorothy MacKaill, Lewis Stone and Joan Blondell
  • Early talky and pre-code with element of both that result in an good movie and an even more-interesting look at a moment in movie history

  • There's no soundtrack, little action, few sets and a lot of talking - basically, they filmed a souped-up play done in a fast sixty minutes

  • The subject is the "office wife" 1930 style: when a high-powered executive forms a bond with his secretary that is stronger and closer than the one with his wife, thus, threatening his marriage

  • Stone (who is a bit too old for the role) plays a publishing exec who encourages one of his top authors to write about the "office wife," but then ends up living the experience. To wit, his new wife loses interest in him, in part, owing to his long hours at work, while his new secretary (MacKaill) develops a romantic interest in him (and vice versa)

  • The rest is watching it play out - does he leave his wife for the secretary he's falling in love with (especially after he learns his wife is having an affair) and does his secretary leave her decent (if bumptious) boyfriend for her much older and wealthier boss? And since the movie's run time is all of sixty minutes, you don't have to wait long to find out

  • Despite its crude, by today's standards, production quality, the story's timelessness engages as does MacKaill, a talented and wanly pretty actress

  • But equally interesting are the pre-code curios such as:
    • A girl-on-girl, in-their-underwear, kiss (MacKaill and Blondell, see pic below)
    • A clearly lesbian author wearing men's-style suits and smoking cigars
    • MacKaill's inability to find a single bra to wear
    • Booze being readily consumed without condemnation despite Prohibition
    • Divorce accepted as just something that happens / not a big deal
    • In four short years, when the Motion Picture Production Code would be enforced, most of these situations would be verboten

  • Visually, the trip to 1930 is time-travel fun with Stone's outer office a wonderful example of '30s high Art Deco

Pre-code early 1930s enjoying a girl-on-girl kiss (it created a bit of a stir when the TV show Friends had a girl-on-girl kiss in 2001 - this one was seventy-plus years earlier):
TheOfficeWife9.jpg
 
#422 ·
View attachment 48137
The Office Wife with Dorothy MacKaill, Lewis Stone and Joan Blondell
  • Early talky and pre-code with element of both that result in an good movie and an even more-interesting look at a moment in movie history

  • There's no soundtrack, little action, few sets and a lot of talking - basically, they filmed a souped-up play done in a fast sixty minutes

  • The subject is the "office wife" 1930 style: when a high-powered executive forms a bond with his secretary that is stronger and closer than the one with his wife, thus, threatening his marriage

  • Stone (who is a bit too old for the role) plays a publishing exec who encourages one of his top authors to write about the "office wife," but then ends up living the experience. To wit, his new wife loses interest in him, in part, owing to his long hours at work, while his new secretary (MacKaill) develops a romantic interest in him (and vice versa)

  • The rest is watching it play out - does he leave his wife for the secretary he's falling in love with (especially after he learns his wife is having an affair) and does his secretary leave her decent (if bumptious) boyfriend for her much older and wealthier boss? And since the movie's run time is all of sixty minutes, you don't have to wait long to find out

  • Despite its crude, by today's standards, production quality, the story's timelessness engages as does MacKaill, a talented and wanly pretty actress

  • But equally interesting are the pre-code curios such as:
    • A girl-on-girl, in-their-underwear, kiss (MacKaill and Blondell, see pic below)
    • A clearly lesbian author wearing men's-style suits and smoking cigars
    • MacKaill's inability to find a single bra to wear
    • Booze being readily consumed without condemnation despite Prohibition
    • Divorce accepted as just something that happens / not a big deal
    • In four short years, when the Motion Picture Production Code would be enforced, most of these situations would be verboten

  • Visually, the trip to 1930 is time-travel fun with Stone's outer office a wonderful example of '30s high Art Deco

Pre-code early 1930s enjoying a girl-on-girl kiss (it created a bit of a stir when the TV show Friends had a girl-on-girl kiss in 2001 - this one was seventy-plus years earlier):
View attachment 48139
Is the gal standing by the side of the "Girl on girl" kiss scene a young Joan Blondell? The cheek line and facial structure seems to indicate such. :icon_scratch:;)
 
#426 ·
Forehead Coat Happy Gesture Flash photography

The Law in Her Hands from 1936 with Margaret Lindsay, Glenda Farrell, Lyle Talbot and Warren Hull

B-movies can rise above their station to be outstanding films or they can be terrible efforts of weak acting, weak writing and weak directing. But a lot of them, like The Law in Her Hands, can be - with one big caveat - fun, quick (60 minute) "movies" that are really more like hour-long TV dramas.

Here, two young women (Lindsay and Farrell) - who worked their way through law school - graduate, quit waitressing, open a law office and try to find clients - tough to do in the Depression. The smarter of the two, Lindsay, is dating an assistant district attorney (Hull) who wants her to quit working, marry him and become a mother and homemaker. She resists (for God sakes, she just passed the bar) as her passion is to build a law practise, but despite their differences, they continue dating.

To smooth things over, Lindsay, a beautiful young woman whose every pore reads well-bred nice girl - but not spoiled - invites Manhattan-centric Hull out to her place in Brooklyn for dinner with this little gem of an exchange (the first sentence is a paraphrasing):

Lindsay: "If I can get you to leave Manhattan, come out to Brooklyn and I'll cook you dinner tonight."

Hull: "How far out in Brooklyn?"

Lindsay: "Oh, way out, where 'oil' is 'earl'."

That's it, but what an inside-New-York moment as she is basically telling him she lives in the part of Brooklyn where the dialect is full-on Brooklynese and Manhattanites rarely tread. It flies by, but it's great fun hearing Lindsay break from her WASP-perfect diction for one second to pronounce "oil" as "earl" with Brooklyn verisimilitude.

But back at the law office, with their practice not attracting clients and the furniture repo man knocking on the door, the women are offered a large retainer from a known mob boss (Talbot) that Lindsay's DA boyfriend has been trying to put away. After initially rejecting his offer, the women take on his business under certain conditions that allow them to think they are staying honest, but as we all know, you can't be a little pregnant.

From here, the women's practice thrives as Lindsay proves very good at lawyering for the mob, while her relationship with the boyfriend gets strained. But then, as we knew would happen all along, Lindsay and her mob-boss client have a come-to-Jesus moment when he wants her to defend the mob in a horrible child-poisoning case.

You'll guess the outcome ahead of time, but still, I have to note the following as a spoiler alert: Lindsay stands up to the mob even though it will hurt her business. Now, here's where the movie goes full-on Motion-Picture-Production-Code stupid.

After Lindsay - unwilling to fight dirty in this one - loses the case and her largest (but not only) client, she meets up with the DA boyfriend and, smiling like she means it (she's got a heck of an arresting smile), agrees to quit the law to become a homemaker and mother as he's wanted her to do all along. End of movie - puke.

It not only rings false, you can almost feel the Motion Picture Production Code stamp coming down on the film. A lot of women and men want to be homemakers - good for them, freedom of choice is a wonderful thing - but until this forced-auto-correct moment, everything about Lindsay's character said, "I want to succeed as a lawyer," as she comes alive preparing for cases and arguing in the courtroom.

Had this been a pre-code movie, Lindsay, like pre-code heroines Ruth Chatterton and Kay Francis (the latter's horrible diction balances out the universe for Lindsay's elegantly perfection diction) would have picked herself up from the floor, shaken off the dirt and gone back to work with, maybe, a pause for a "quicky" with her DA boyfriend. Now, that's how this fun-and-breezy B-movie / hour-long TV-style drama deserved to end.
 
#427 ·
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The Breaking Point from 1950 with John Garfield, Phyllis Thaxter (a favorites less-well-known actress of mine), Juano Hernandez and Patricia Neal

"You got that stubborn stupid look on your face you always get when you're going to do something you know isn't right, but you're going to do it anyway cause that's the way you are." - Phyllis Thaxter to husband John Garfield (and God bless her)

That fantastic line is also a pretty darn good summary of The Breaking Point. Garfield, up against it as a commercial charter-boat captain behind on his boat payments and house rent and with a wife and two kids to support, basically, spends the movie making one desperately stupid choice after another all the while sporting an arrogantly dumb look on his face while doing so. Fair or not, Garfield is unable to accept that, despite being a war hero, he is failing in civilian life.

I didn't much like this movie the first time I saw it years ago, but am revising my opinion up, a lot, as the story holds together well, the emotions in it are real, raw and powerful and the acting is outstanding, starting with Garfield, but including the entire cast.

Right out of the gate, Garfield ignores the advice and offers of help and support from his kind and decent wife (Thaxter) and equally kind and decent best friend and crewman (Hernandez) as financial problems mount. Instead, on his own, he makes the fateful decision to transport illegal immigrants into the country (yup, nothing's new) for an out-sized payday.

While a lot more happens after that, that's the trigger moment as that's when Garfield crossed the Rubicon from honest struggling family man to criminal covering his tracks. Throw into the mix that, as he distances his wife, he develops a friendship with a young wayward and pretty woman, Neal, who, like the illegal charter does for his money problems, seems to offer him a way out of his collapsing emotional world.

But wife Thaxter is no wallflower; she sees the danger Neal poses to her marriage and she fights to keep Garfield, if not faithful, at least wanting to return to her. But Garfield is a one-man wrecking crew who, despite a horrible first experience at crime, tries again, while also continuing to play footsie with Neal (the Motion Picture Production Code wouldn't allow it, but we all get that he's really sleeping with her).

From here, it's all more bad decisions and bad outcomes. But you stay with it because you're seeing, ugly at times, but viscerally real life exposed. And nothing is more real than watching Thaxter fight to save her family with grit: if she could have wrestled her husband to the ground to stop him from making another bad decision, you know she would have. Instead she delivers the quoted-at-the-top, fire-all-weapons line to try and prevent her husband from doing more stupid things.

Meanwhile, in his own misguided way, Garfield tenaciously and tragically fights to survive the consequences of his bad decisions as we watch a proud man crumble under the weight of all his awful choices. And in the end (spoiler alert), no one wins as Garfield survives, but is physically and mentally broken, while his best friend has been murdered. Sure, Garfield's wife keeps her family together, but despite the happy Motion-Picture-Production-Code forced spin, what's really left of it?

If you do watch it, stay with it to the end to see the child-alone-on-the-pier shot. I won't spoil it by giving you the what and why of the scene, just note that you want to see it because it is one of the most heartbreaking and poignant moments in any movie.

Maybe the real theme of The Breaking Point is that a man needs his family to not be alone in the world. But I'll go with Thaxter's crushing quote as a darn good close second, which says, effectively, some men are so stubborn that they'll make stupid choices, even though they know they won't work, rather than lose face.

N.B., Pay attention to the performance of Juano Hernandez as Garfield's first mate as it's different but equally powerful to the one he gave in Young Man with a Horn. This man is an actor. Had he worked at a time when there were more opportunities in film for black men, you have to believe he'd have been a major star.

0ea89-breakingpoint.jpg
 
#428 · (Edited)
View attachment 48332
The Breaking Point from 1950 with John Garfield, Phyllis Thaxter (a favorites less-well-known actress of mine), Juano Hernandez and Patricia Neal.
.
The town where I spent most of my growing up, Cape Elizabeth, had a tiny wooden movie theater called The Cape. Was surprised to return a few years ago to find it a turned into a live stage theater and renamed The Phyllis Thaxter Theater, now home to the Portland Players. I grew up and buddied with a kid named Creighton Getchell. His mom's sister was Thaxter. I never saw her, probably in California.
]
 
#429 ·
Musician Black Entertainment Music Flash photography

Special Agent from 1935 with Richard Cortez, George Brent and Bette Davis
  • A good-guys-win, code-enforced movie that still brings some verve with a reasonably believable Feds-vs-the-mob script and A-list acting from Davis, Brent and Cortez

  • Cribbing from the real-world takedown of Al Capone on tax evasion, undercover Federal Agent Brent sets out to convict New York City mob-boss Cortez on tax-fraud charges

  • The local police and prosecutors have repeatedly failed to nab Cortez on racketeering charges as he's good at hiding evidence of his illicit business and, when that fails, killing off any potential witnesses against him

  • The lynchpin in Brent's effort to bring down Cortez is Cortez's top bookkeeper - super smart, young and cute - Davis (note: she's a young woman acknowledge by all as a numbers and business whiz), who is portrayed as stuck working for Cortez as, as she says, "you don't resign from this job"

  • And while it works and makes sense, the story would have been better in pre-code land where Davis would have been sleeping with both Cortez and Brent and would have had to decide which one of her lovers to, ultimately, sell out

  • But alas, by 1935, the Production Code didn't allow good girls to sleep with bad men (or any they weren't married to), so the climax revolves around Cortez trying to kill Davis before she can testify against him. A lot of gun-play and bullets flying ensue

  • Brent, as always, is solid but stolid, Davis is too corralled in the role to really flex her acting muscles but Cortez shines as the oleaginous crime boss. He's polished, urbane, ruthless, evil and always wearing glove - this was seemingly a thing for mob bosses back then (see Bogey in All Through the Night)

  • It's an entertaining enough hour-and-fifteen-minute flick held back by the Production Code and not enough screen time for Davis
 
#430 ·
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Special Agent from 1935 with Richard Cortez, George Brent and Bette Davis
  • A good-guys-win, code-enforced movie that still brings some verve with a reasonably believable Feds-vs-the-mob script and A-list acting from Davis, Brent and Cortez

  • Cribbing from the real-world takedown of Al Capone on tax evasion, undercover Federal Agent Brent sets out to convict New York City mob-boss Cortez on tax-fraud charges

  • The local police and prosecutors have repeatedly failed to nab Cortez on racketeering charges as he's good at hiding evidence of his illicit business and, when that fails, killing off any potential witnesses against him

  • The lynchpin in Brent's effort to bring down Cortez is Cortez's top bookkeeper - super smart, young and cute - Davis (note: she's a young woman acknowledge by all as a numbers and business whiz), who is portrayed as stuck working for Cortez as, as she says, "you don't resign from this job"

  • And while it works and makes sense, the story would have been better in pre-code land where Davis would have been sleeping with both Cortez and Brent and would have had to decide which one of her lovers to, ultimately, sell out

  • But alas, by 1935, the Production Code didn't allow good girls to sleep with bad men (or any they weren't married to), so the climax revolves around Cortez trying to kill Davis before she can testify against him. A lot of gun-play and bullets flying ensue

  • Brent, as always, is solid but stolid, Davis is too corralled in the role to really flex her acting muscles but Cortez shines as the oleaginous crime boss. He's polished, urbane, ruthless, evil and always wearing glove - this was seemingly a thing for mob bosses back then (see Bogey in All Through the Night)

  • It's an entertaining enough hour-and-fifteen-minute flick held back by the Production Code and not enough screen time for Davis
Don't you miss the days when actors could really act, grabbing and holding out attention and not have to depend so heavily on special effects to hold the viewers attention? I do! In many ways the old films are still the best of the bunch out there. ;)
 
#431 ·
I'm seeing some of that acting quality return, oddly, to TV shows. As the major movie releases, anyway, seem to be very special-effects driven, TV shows are where the better stories and acting appear to have set up camp.

On another site, I posted these comments about these current TV shows. All have their issues - and all have some degree of obnoxious political correctness, identity politics and virtue signaling built in - but all are pretty good story and quality acting-driven efforts that are more engaging than most of today's "big" movie releases.

I noticed we don't have a TV thread and was going to start one when I posted this stuff on the other site, but then thought that maybe we don't have one because we don't want one. Heck, our movie thread doesn't get that much traffic as it is.

If you do watch any of these shows at some point, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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Dead to Me
In season two, this well-acted mystery drama hasn't lost a step with lead Christina Applegate doing such an outstanding job that you wonder why she doesn't have a bigger career. And with episodes that are only thirty minutes long (an unfortunate rarity today), the crazy of murder, mayhem and mystery that is woven into regular family life here feels much like an updated version of those '50s Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV shows. Is it believable - no, but the characters are fun, the stories engrossing and the acting is fantastic.

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In The Dark
Season two (so far, three episodes in) is just as good as season one, but the plot is very bumpy as it appears the writers hadn't planned on a second season, so they've had to untie some loose ends they had tied up at the end of season one. The acting, like so many shows today, is outstanding, with Perry Mattfeld killing it as the beautiful young blind woman with a brilliant detective-like mind and self-destructive lifestyle. As with many modern shows, you can pick the unbelievable plot apart, or just go with it as the dialogue is smart, the storylines engaging and the acting excellent.

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Perry Mason
A solid '30s period drama that is beautifully filmed (with awesome 1930s' details), very well acted (with a parade of stars from other successful series), a story that's becoming more engrossing (two episodes in) and characters that are developing nuances and real personalities. Here, Mason is a private eye, not lawyer (yet), damaged from WWI and the Depression, but with a preternatural eye (aided by his always present camera) for details that other investigators miss. I was suspicious of this one at first, but it's winning me over. N.B. The Los Angeles funicular, Angels Flight (outstanding name), is fantastic to see and plays a major role in the plot.

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Godless
This 2017 TV miniseries (half way through) is a bit slow-moving-but-engaging offering in the 19th Century American West genre. The aging leader of a gang of outlaws takes his gang on the hunt for a former member who, he believes, betrayed him, which leads him right into a town of almost all women owing to a mine explosion that killed most of the men. Like so many shows today, it's beautifully filmed and wonderfully acted with an impressive list of well-known veterans - Sam Waterston, Michelle Dockery and Jeff Daniels deserve special mention - and up-and-coming young actors. The story and characters are well drawn and complex, with only the now-and-again virtue signaling of anachronistic modern political correctness and identity politics detracting from the narrative.
 
#433 ·
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Crossroads from1942 with Wiliam Powell, Hedy Lamarr, Basil Rathbone and Claire Trevor

A rising-star French diplomat (Powell) with a beautiful young bride (Lamarr) is on the verge of being promoted to ambassador to Brazil when he is accused of identity fraud owing to an amnesia-inducing car accident he had over a decade ago. While he wins the fraud trial, he is subsequently blackmailed by two individuals (Rathbone and Trever) claiming to be former accomplices in a robbery and murder all three supposedly committed before Powell's loss of memory.

They present Powell with, what they claim is, evidence of his former life and then demand a large sum of money in return for their silence. With that set up, the rest of the movie is watching Powell desperately trying to remember his past as he runs around Paris attempting to confirm the blackmailers' story while also trying to keep his wife unaware of his troubles and his career on track.

If this sounds Hitchcockian, it's because it is very Hitchcockian - amnesia, blackmail, important man's successful life at risk, dramatic trial, beautiful wife (albeit, not blonde), harrowing chase scene at the climax - but it misses the master-director's touch. Here, director Jack Conway does an adequate job, but he doesn't frame scenes with Hitchcock's eye for tension and fear, nor does he use Hitchcock's audience-friendly faster pace. Hence, the movie drags in several spots despite its charismatic stars and engaging story.

That said, it's still worth the watch, especially with the always lovely-to-look-at Hedy Lamarr playing the devoted and befuddled wife. Having seen Lamarr clearly comfortable being fully naked in 1933's Ecstasy, I always half expect her to take her clothes off in any movie she's in just for the heck of it. She always looks like she wants to - but alas, the Motion Picture Production Code scores another victory. Even with her clothes on though, she's still an enjoyable actress to watch.
 
#434 ·
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B.F.'s Daughter from 1948 with Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin (now that's a name), Charles Coburn and Keenan Wynn

Once in a while (almost never now), Hollywood makes a movie that looks at capitalism versus socialism (in this case, as a secondary plot) and, while giving the nod to capitalism (wait, what?), presents both sides with nuance and respect.

A wealthy industrialist's (Coburn) daughter (Stanwyck) drops her slowly rising businessman and father-approved fiance to marry a left-wing, socialist professor and writer (Heflin) who's the ideological antipode to her capitalist pater.

Her father describes himself thusly, "I'm a builder, the world needs builders," and if, in my life, I stood for something "I stood for rugged individualism." Somewhere Ayn Rand is smiling. Conversely, his daughter's new husband opposes wealth and capitalism and reflexively supports any group perceived as weak and needy regardless of facts and circumstances.

In a beautiful early scene, when the father and new husband meet, neither play to pat stereotypes: the father sincerely wants to understand the daughter's choice and the new husband sympathetically realizes the pain his marriage is causing the old man.

Modern writers would have flexed their virtue-signally progressive muscles by turning the scene into one of a cold-hearted capitalist disowning his daughter as the socialist son-in-law denounces everything the old man stands for. Here, the daughter isn't disowned and the son-in-law doesn't denounce - making the scene real and powerful.

And while the theme of competing economic systems will also indirectly drive the newlywed's bumpy marriage, the marriage itself is the main story. These newlyweds, like most newlyweds, enthusiastically believe their love will overcome all obstacles, the first ones being all but no money to live on and Heflin's career as a writer/speaker stuck in idle.

While Heflin refuses all offers of assistance from his father-in-law, Coburn covertly helps the newlyweds with money he passes to Stanwyck, while, also unbeknownst to Heflin, Stanwyck uses this money (and her father's influence) to jump-start Heflin's career. And as Heflin's career grows, his wife, combining her husband's new money with her father's, purchases a home and the other accoutrements necessary to place her and her husband in society.

As all this slowly dawns on Heflin, he and his wife become estranged as he resents her surreptitious aid and her social aspirations, but also has no intention of going backwards professionally. Instead, a modus vivendi takes place in the marriage as she stays in society in New York, while he goes off to join, his heroes, the New Dealers in WWII Washington.

With the marriage aging poorly, her father, on his deathbed, encourages his daughter to fight for her husband, despite his ideological disagreements with him as he knows her husband is a good man even if he hates his politics. And upon the old man's passing, Helfin reflects that he wasn't fair to a good man who saw the world differently than he does. The movie's strength is its nuanced balance of competing ideas and personalities versus the approach most movies today take of political and ideological purity (and virtue signaling).

Also running in the background are a couple of on-message subplots. Stanwyck, playing to type for a moment as the jealous society wife, assumes her husband is cheating on her when she finds bills in his things related to another woman's living expenses. Accusing without asking, she eventually discovers, to her embarrassment, her husband is helping a blind war refugee get a new start in America. So, we learn that even those who narcissistically put charity on the highest moral pedestal for all to see do some sincere and private good at times.

Conversely, a cocky liberal reporter (Wynn) and friend of Heflin's who denounces Ivy league commissioned officers as the pampered elite of the war - which starts another fight in the Stanwyck-Heflin household - has to eat crow as one of the "elites" he singled out for public mockery (a long-time friend of Stanwyck's) dies heroically on a voluntary mission. So, we learn that having been born to money and status doesn't define, perforce, a person as cowardly and callous.

And all of this reflects on the one question the movie asks repeatedly, can a marriage of ideologically opposed people work? The movie - until the Motion Picture Production Code forces a not-believable happy ending in, literally, the last thirty seconds - says no, while real life says it's hard at best. In our politically polarizing times, many married and dating couples are probably asking themselves the exact same question that 1948's B.F.'s Daughter debated so well.
 
#435 ·
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Gambling Lady from 1934 with Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea, C. Aubrey Smith and Pat O'Brien

Another sixty-ish-minute-long movie that's the 1930's equivalent of today's hour-long TV drama - and that's meant as a compliment.

Barbara Stanwyck is the honest gambler daughter of an honest gambler father who managed to avoid the corruption, tricks, cheats and deceptions most gamblers of that time used. Also, a gambling syndicate - a mob group that controls the illegal betting in the city - regularly tries to recruit her father; however, he manages to play it straight and solo.

But Stanwyck will need all of her aleatory talents to survive and dodge the syndicate when her father passes away suddenly leaving her a young single woman with little money. Okay, she's Barbara Stanwyck, so a few men pop up quickly like gambling shark and syndicate member Pat O'Brien. He's a long-time friend who wants to marry her, but despite having affection for him, Stanwyck feels no spark.

Next up is wealthy society scion Joel McCrea; there's a spark, but also a rub - he's "class;" she's, well, not. And in a neat twist, this bothers Stanwyck, not McCrea, as he's just a sap in love, but she's thinking big picture and sees the challenges her background will create in his world.

But McCrea's father (Smith), a prominent industrialist with, like his son, a taste for gambling dens, after initial suspicions, supports his son's efforts. The father understands that Stanwyck - whom he's known for years, having met her while gambling - singularly has more character than any combination of five of the society debutantes chasing his son.

So, despite a few more typical 1930s movie misunderstandings, McCrea and Stanwyck find their way past all of it and get married. Things initially go pretty well even with McCrea's jealous streak, especially when it comes to O'Brien. To be sure, his society friends have mixed feelings about his new wife - the men love her (tip: men tend to love pretty women); the women look down on her especially since she stole away one of the catches of their clique.

But then O'Brien gets arrested and Stanwyck, despite husband McCrea's objection, comes to his aid out of long-time loyalty that McCrea mistakes for romantic affection. From here, more misunderstandings and a concealed self sacrifice all but doom the marriage, or do they?

And remember, while we are almost at the end, all of this happens in about sixty minutes. They really knew how to pack a lot of plot into these fast efforts. To be sure, the plot is mainly contrived and cliched, but still enjoyable especially when being propelled forward by pros like Stanwyck, Smith, O'Brien and McCrea.

Is it a great movie? No. But thought of as an hour-long show in a pre-TV era, it more than holds its own with most modern TV efforts. It provided a 1930s audience with at least as much escapism as television does for us today.
 
#436 ·
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Gambling Lady from 1934 with Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea, C. Aubrey Smith and Pat O'Brien

Another sixty-ish-minute-long movie that's the 1930's equivalent of today's hour-long TV drama - and that's meant as a compliment.

Barbara Stanwyck is the honest gambler daughter of an honest gambler father who managed to avoid the corruption, tricks, cheats and deceptions most gamblers of that time used. Also, a gambling syndicate - a mob group that controls the illegal betting in the city - regularly tries to recruit her father; however, he manages to play it straight and solo.

But Stanwyck will need all of her aleatory talents to survive and dodge the syndicate when her father passes away suddenly leaving her a young single woman with little money. Okay, she's Barbara Stanwyck, so a few men pop up quickly like gambling shark and syndicate member Pat O'Brien. He's a long-time friend who wants to marry her, but despite having affection for him, Stanwyck feels no spark.

Next up is wealthy society scion Joel McCrea; there's a spark, but also a rub - he's "class;" she's, well, not. And in a neat twist, this bothers Stanwyck, not McCrea, as he's just a sap in love, but she's thinking big picture and sees the challenges her background will create in his world.

But McCrea's father (Smith), a prominent industrialist with, like his son, a taste for gambling dens, after initial suspicions, supports his son's efforts. The father understands that Stanwyck - whom he's known for years, having met her while gambling - singularly has more character than any combination of five of the society debutantes chasing his son.

So, despite a few more typical 1930s movie misunderstandings, McCrea and Stanwyck find their way past all of it and get married. Things initially go pretty well even with McCrea's jealous streak, especially when it comes to O'Brien. To be sure, his society friends have mixed feelings about his new wife - the men love her (tip: men tend to love pretty women); the women look down on her especially since she stole away one of the catches of their clique.

But then O'Brien gets arrested and Stanwyck, despite husband McCrea's objection, comes to his aid out of long-time loyalty that McCrea mistakes for romantic affection. From here, more misunderstandings and a concealed self sacrifice all but doom the marriage, or do they?

And remember, while we are almost at the end, all of this happens in about sixty minutes. They really knew how to pack a lot of plot into these fast efforts. To be sure, the plot is mainly contrived and cliched, but still enjoyable especially when being propelled forward by pros like Stanwyck, Smith, O'Brien and McCrea.

Is it a great movie? No. But thought of as an hour-long show in a pre-TV era, it more than holds its own with most modern TV efforts. It provided a 1930s audience with at least as much escapism as television does for us today.
If the movie is in black and white and was put out more than 40 years back, it must be worth watching. Besides Barbara Stanwyck is a handsome woman who traditionally played strong, sturdy women in her roles! Who has not watched an episode or two of Big Valley, the TV series? As always, an excellent review. ;)
 
#438 ·
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The Night of the Iguana from 1964 with Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Grayson Hall and Sue Lyon

It's a play turned into a movie by Tennessee Williams that ends on an upbeat note. Wait, what?

Yup, the master of stories about broken people breaking some more, wrote a story about broken people healing somewhat and finding hope. And somehow, despite being about depressed people failing in life, The Night of the Iguana doesn't weigh as heavily throughout as other Wiliams' moribundity, such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or The Glass Menagerie.

A defrocked (or not, a bit unclear, but definitely on the outs with his church) minister (Burton) - he canoodled with a parishioner - makes a bare-bones living running tours in Mexico for, at least in the movie's case, Christian school teachers looking for a morally uplifting holiday.

Well, they chose the wrong guide. Richard Burton (who, just a side note, should never have been allowed to act in the same movie with Elizabeth Taylor) is pitch perfect here as the wayward man of God. Tested immediately, Burton spends the beginning of the tour trying not to sleep with comely-and-curvy blonde and come-hither teenager Sue Lyon, especially as her ascetic and dessicated chaperone, wonderfully played by Grayson Hall, breathes down his neck threatening to get him fired at every turn.

To escape her threats, the heat and the bus-load of bible-song-singing women, Burton, in desperation, breaks with the tour's itinerary and all but shanghais the women to a remote mountain hotel run by an old girlfriend, Ava Gardner. Here, Burton hopes to buy time to save his job. With the women grumbling, and Gardner not sure she wants her old boyfriend around, into the hotel walks a middle-aged sketch artist (Kerr) and her ninety-year-old poet grandfather.

The rest of the movie is, one, watching Burton, fueled with alcohol (supposedly, not just a fiction as he was said to reek of booze throughout the filming) fight his demons and conscience as this damaged man tries to use sex and drink to overcome doubts about Church and faith. Second, is Ava Gardner having her own mid-life crisis, but suffering no such pangs of guilt as she throws back liquor while sleeping with two young, buff local boys that she keeps on the staff, seemingly, just for her enjoyment.

But while Burton writhes in agony over his dilemmas, Gardner appears to almost enjoy having them as she wisecracks her way through each crisis. The third leg of this my-life-is-crumbling stool is the approaching-forty and still-virginal Kerr, broke and hiding from life as her grandfather's caretaker.

With the chaperone still trying to get Burton fired and the other women constantly caterwauling, Burton, Gardner and Kerr alternately support and berate each other through their personal crises. Yet, as opposed to most Wiliams' offerings, there's a little light and mirth mixed in with the angst and distress. You don't want to miss seeing Burton, first with cynicism, and then, with empathy, cajole middle-aged Kerr into telling him why she's still a virgin: it's real, raw, painful and, sadly, believable.

And it comes down to this: all three ultimately realize that life is agonizingly hard for everyone, but the trick is to find out how you can fight off your own pain and despair. You'll have to watch to see what each one decides to do, but as a hint, toward the end, the titular and metaphoric iguana - tied to a rope to be fattened up as a meal for the locals - is cut free by Burton with this declamation (and awful pun): "I just cut loose one of God's creatures at the end of his rope."

It's a good, solid story and the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography beautifully captures 1960s Mexico. But this is an actors' movie and Burton, Gardner and Kerr (with a healthy assist from Hall) all rise to the challenge by giving some of the best performances of their careers.
 
#439 ·
That was good, Fast. Refreshed the whole thing to me, which I saw first-run in a theater on Staten Island when I was 19. With a bunch of rowdy college buddies. We were somewhat tanked. We always were. I remember a certain phrase, a euphemism that I've since used all my life, correct me here please, the big swim, for suicide by ocean. Is that in the film?

You of all people, and me, might like to know that starring in the play from which this is adapted, playing the Ava Gardiner rôle, a woman that I badly wanted to see on Broadway, but I was maybe 16 and still living in Maine (about a mile from where she once lived and on the same road), why that would be...Bette Daaaa-vis (in a poor attempt to imitate her cadence.).

Your review made the film seem bearable. I had never seen the then almost over-the-hill twin famousies, Ava Gardined and Deborah Kerr, and went because, though I disliked Williams and his southern gothic take on contemporary life, being then a White New England Supremacist which had nothing to do with looking down on Blacks since we looked down on everybody, went for Burton from whom I took voice lessons though he doesn't know that. His biggest young fan. And later coming to my senses, an enormous Tennessee Williams one as well. Night of the Iguana is not his best play, but is his best play title. Insightful review. Could have used you as a seat maybe, back in '64.
 
#440 · (Edited)
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Ocean's Eleven from 1960 with Frank Sinatra, his Rat Pack and a bunch of other stars

I had never seen this one before (other than ten minutes here and there), but having just read a Frank Sinatra biography (see comments here: #814 ) that talked about this movie, when it popped up on TCM, I hit record.

I'm glad I did. Yes, it's silly and contrived, but it's not hiding any of that. This is a personality movie - you either like Sinatra, his crew and their Rat-Pack-ness or not. The fun is seeing the stars - Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr. - basically play themselves (or, at least, their public personas) with nonchalance but not mockery.

The plot is simple enough: a group of WWII 182 Airborne Division vets, a decade and a half after the war, are pulled together by their former leader, Sinatra, to execute a heist of the five major casinos in Las Vegas on New Year's Eve. And the plot serves its purpose to give these guys a reason to be in a movie together, wear cool clothes, say cool things and run around a cool town.

Each star plays to type: Sinatra is the bit-angry, bit-sarcastic, but caring leader with women troubles (a reason to bring in hot-thing-of-the-moment Angie Dickinson who never gets to really do anything in the movie); Martin is relaxed cool; Lawford is the rich boy only in on the heist so that he doesn't have to keep asking his mother for money and Davis Jr. is the funny, smart guy who gets the joke all along but stays in on the heist out of camaraderie.

And in his best role ever (that I've seen him in), Cesar Romero plays a "retired" professional crook, now Lawford's rich mother's fiance who's tasked by the local sheriff with sussing out the who and what of the heist after the fact. It's kind of like the Rat Pack's father shows up to teach the boys a lesson. Romero is completely comfortable in his role, neither under nor over playing it, and seemingly having as much fun as the Rat Pack "boys" were.

The denouement is enjoyable, if not that original, with the closing shot so iconic that Tarantino riffed on it thirty-plus years later in Reservoir Dogs. I'm sure the public got the movie's joke at the time - just enjoy Sinatra and his buddies having fun and looking cool in Vegas and don't worry too much about the rest of it.

And that might be why it's aged pretty well as it was never a serious effort in the first place. It's a time capsule of early '60s cool when "cool" meant well-tailored dark suits, skinny ties, smoking, Vegas, cocktails in tumblers and crooners. By the end of the decade, all that would look "square," but it was cool in its day and it's cool to look back at it now.

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#442 ·
View attachment 48792
Ocean's Eleven from 1960 with Frank Sinatra, his Rat Pack and a bunch of other stars

I had never seen this one before (other than ten minutes here and there), but having just read a Frank Sinatra biography (see comments here: #814 ) that talked about this movie, when it popped up on TCM, I hit record.

I'm glad I did. Yes, it's silly and contrived, but it's not hiding any of that. This is a personality movie - you either like Sinatra, his crew and their Rat-Pack-ness or not. The fun is seeing the stars - Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr. - basically play themselves (or, at least, their public personas) with nonchalance but not mockery.

The plot is simple enough: a group of WWII 182 Airborne Division vets, a decade and a half after the war, are pulled together by their former leader, Sinatra, to execute a heist of the five major casinos in Las Vegas on New Year's Eve. And the plot serves its purpose to give these guys a reason to be in a movie together, wear cool clothes, say cool things and run around a cool town.

Each star plays to type: Sinatra is the bit-angry, bit-sarcastic, but caring leader with women troubles (a reason to bring in hot-thing-of-the-moment Angie Dickinson who never gets to really do anything in the movie); Martin is relaxed cool; Lawford is the rich boy only in on the heist so that he doesn't have to keep asking his mother for money and Davis Jr. is the funny, smart guy who gets the joke all along but stays in on the heist out of camaraderie.

And in his best role ever (that I've seen him in), Cesar Romero plays a "retired" professional crook, now Lawford's rich mother's fiance who's tasked by the local sheriff with sussing out the who and what of the heist after the fact. It's kind of like the Rat Pack's father shows up to teach the boys a lesson. Romero is completely comfortable in his role, neither under nor over playing it, and seemingly having as much fun as the Rat Pack "boys" were.

The denouement is enjoyable, if not that original, with the closing shot so iconic that Tarantino riffed on it thirty-plus years later in Reservoir Dogs. I'm sure the public got the movie's joke at the time - just enjoy Sinatra and his buddies having fun and looking cool in Vegas and don't worry too much about the rest of it.

And that might be why it's aged pretty well as it was never a serious effort in the first place. It's a time capsule of early '60s cool when "cool" meant well-tailored dark suits, skinny ties, smoking, Vegas, cocktails in tumblers and crooners. By the end of the decade, all that would look "square," but it was cool in its day and it's cool to look back at it now.

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The remake of Ocean's Eleven in 2001, starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon could hold a candle to the original production with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr. ;)
 
#447 ·
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Mr. Smith Goes to Washington from 1939 with James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Claude Rains, Edward Arnold and Guy Kibbee

I'm not above sentimentality and melodrama in movies (or books) - I've seen The Bishop's Wife and Shop Around the Corner more times than I care to admit - I'm just not a big buyer of director Frank Capra's particular brand of mawkishness. Maybe it's too obvious or too grandiose or too in love with itself, but I find my cynicism, not optimism, is awakened by his "single knight charging the corrupt citadel" stories.

So when naive Jimmy Stewart is plucked from political obscurity to fill the vacated junior senator seat of a Western state because the state's corrupt political machine believes it can control him, you know, immediately with Capra, what you are in for.

Every point is exaggerated and pounded in with a sledge hammer. The political machine isn't just corrupt, but so corrupt that the state's governor (Kibbee) and senior senator (Rains) snap to attention at every order from the machine's boss (Arnold). And Arnold, who made a career playing venal fat cats in the '30s and '40s, is at his most venal fat cat-ness here - demanding, pushing, shoving, fulsomely charming, bribing and threatening everyone so as to line his pockets.

But Stewart is Arnold's ridiculously innocent opposite. Upon arriving in Washington, he gushes over every building, every statue of a Founding Father and every inscription propounding the ideals of America (modern progressive won't be filming a remake of this one). With that set up - and the catalyst of a political-machine-sponsored corrupt dam bill butting heads with Stewart's "boys camp" bill (a '40s Fresh-Air-Fund-like idea) - Capra has his David-versus-Goliath narrative in place.

And I'd have yawned and rolled my eyes all the way through except for the movie's truly saving grace, Jean Arthur. As the experienced secretary to both senators - Rains (the movie's second saving grace) and Stewart - she knows the ins and outs, peccadilloes, cheats and inside baseball of the Senate. With her femininely husky voice, smart eyes and blonde pulchritude, she tries to warn Stewart about the real "ideals" and machinations of the Senate to prevent him from getting cut up into little pieces.

But this cynical city girl - she can drink with the boys or spot a dirty deal a mile away - starts to like the virtue in Stewart while seeing anew, and disliking, the mendacity in Rains, Arnold and that crew.

While a lot is fake or caricatures here, Arthur's character's personal life rings true. Despite being past her prime marrying age, this single and intelligent woman has a male suitor, a goofy-but-good-guy reporter, begging her to marry him, but she's in no hurry and is not worried. Feminist icons can be secretaries who sincerely like men, but play the game by their own rules and timeline.

Also, let's not kid ourselves, part of why Arthur rejects the offer of marriage is because she has eyes for someone else. And that someone else is Stewart who, after initially getting mauled by the political machine, is coaxed back to his feet by Arthur who will also guide him as coach and mentor for his next attempted broadside.

And in that fight, Stewart's closing Senate speech - we've lost our way from our founding values - is outstanding acting, but it's also designed bravura to be the shining moment of the movie. However, it's Arthur's nuanced and mirthful performance as his stealth Senate tutor during his speech that is the heart, soul and joy of the picture. She's too smart for either of the men in her life, but the heart wants what the heart wants.

The movie is all Capra; if you love his stuff, you'll love Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. If you, like me, are a lesser fan, then Jean Arthur's performance will carry you through the Capra schmaltz. And there's also the fun time travel to iconic 1940s Washington to keep you engaged while cloyingly good battles comic-book evil.

Ms. Arthur, what do you think of all these smart men in Washington?
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#448 · (Edited)
Two from TCM's Nina Foch Day
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Thanks for watching my movies. Yours truly, NF

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The Dark Past from 1948 with William Holden, Lee J. Cobb and Nina Foch
  • Decent noir / Freudian psychodrama

  • Escaped convict Holden and his gang (including Foch) take psychiatrist Cobb and his family and friends hostage at their country house

  • All the usual hostage-in-the-country-house stuff happens: a few escape attempt are thwarted, some secrets come out, tempers flare amongst the crooks and hostages, somebody gets shot, etc. - probably fresher material in '48

  • The hook in this one, though, is when Cobb begins to psychoanalyze Holden who resists at first, but then gives in, because one reoccurring nightmare has been haunting criminal Holden his entire life

  • Cobb's professional approach is Freudian-dream-analysis-as-cure on steroids: find the childhood reason for the nightmare and the patient is cured (and criminal reformed). If only, but it was a fairytale that several movies told at the time

  • Hint: the solution is creepily close to an Oedipal Complex

  • Cobb and Holden are engaging antagonists / their psychodrama battle makes the movie worth watching

  • Foch, looking all sunshine and cleanliness, is miscast as the gun moll, but she gives it the college try

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My Name is Julia Ross from 1945 with Nina Foch, Mae Whitty and George Macready
  • This is B-noir at its finest blending elements of Gaslight and Jane Eyre

  • Ms Foch is the innocent young lady hired into a "dream job" in London as the personal secretary to the lovely old lady (Whitty). However, on day two of her new job, she wakes up to find she's in a different house (a classic gothic mansion on a sea-side cliff), being called by another name and, effectively, being held prisoner, but with no idea why

  • Throw into the mix a creepy adult son with an abnormal passion for knives and violence, secret passageways, dispassionate servants and, maybe, a friend on the outside looking for her (or not) and all the elements of a good "I can't get out of this crazy place" movie are present

  • From there it's failed escape attempts, followed by tighter lock-downs, followed by more harrowing attempts, all while Ms. Foch tries to unravel the reason that she's here

  • It's a fun, occasionally tense, fast sixty-plus-minutes film where Ms. Foch shines as the distraught ingenue, while talented Mae Whitty, looking like every one's kind grandmother, is perfect as the mastermind of the nefarious plot

N.B. Executive Suite from 1954 (re-teaming Foch and Holden) is my favorite Nina Foch movie (it was on, but I didn't see it this time). It has a solid story where, shockingly, Hollywood takes a somewhat balanced look at how business and politics in the executive suite really work. Its all-star cast is pitch perfect, including Foch as the super-efficient, loyal and smart executive secretary. Yes, she's as buttoned-up as her bosses, but she lets her sexual passion peek out from her icy blondness now and then. Hitchcock missed on never casting this tall, aloof, flaxen-haired beauty in one of his films.
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#449 ·
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Here Come the Huggetts from 1948 with Jack Warner, Diana Dors, Petula Clark, Susan Shaw and Jane Hylton

Post-war English cinema is a treat. Lacking the funds of Hollywood, British filmmakers relied on strong stories, smart dialogue and talented actors to make engaging movies. They had to as they didn't have the budget to paper over weak efforts with whiz-bang special effects, gripping action-adventure sequences, exotic location shots or glamorous star power.

Here Come the Huggetts is not the best of these efforts, but it's still a small gem of a movie - kind of the British version of America's Four Daughters. The Huggetts are a middle-class family living at a time when England had won the war but was losing its Empire and economic might.

So, despite pater Huggett being the number two man in a small manufacturing firm, there's little opulence in their household as evidenced when we see the fuss made by his three daughters and wife over the installation of their first telephone. Which was only ordered because the father's boss wants to be able to get in touch with his employee after work hours (not unlike how firms were "giving" employees Blackberrys twenty years ago).

It is real day-to-day issues like getting a telephone put in or the family camping out overnight to get a good location to see the Royal Wedding (Grandma's corporeal demands defeat that effort at the last minute) that make the Huggetts real and relatable. Just like when mother and daughter fight over the morality of "black market" food that they both know they'll, eventually, shut up about and just eat (rationing continued for many years after the war in England) or when the oldest daughter has doubts right before her wedding.

The plot - if there is one in this slice-of-life story - involves the arrival of cousin Diana (Diana Dors) who's staying with the Huggetts temporarily while her mom has an operation. Teenager Dors, looking still baby-fat chubby to my eye, is supposedly a va-va-voom girl that throws the house in a tizzy as she kinda steals one of the daughter's boyfriends while nearly costing Mr. Huggett his position with her sloppy effort at the job he obtained for her at his factory.

But it's really the daughters who bring the interesting teen spirit, in particular, a pre-stardom Petula Clark as the smart but not snarky youngest who gets the craziness of her house. But she loves her family and its nuttiness and shows it when she wonderfully stands up to her dad's intimidating boss on his behalf. And why anyone is looking at a bit lumpy Diana Dors when blonde, lithe and angular middle daughter Susan Shaw is around makes no sense, but watching Shaw go from slightly stuck-up to aware and kinder when her taken-for-granted boyfriend drops her is life made real.

If you do see it, look for the scene when a gentleman caller, who's not her fiance, shows up for kind-of-engaged oldest daughter Jane Hylton. Few words are exchanged when dad opens the door, but the young man's attempt to overcompensate for his nervousness with a quirky offer to dad of a produced-from-his-coat-pocket peach as dad stays stone faced until giving just an inch of warmth with the slightest hand gesture is writing, directing and acting at its nuanced best.

The joy of the Huggetts are sincere moments like that or the wonderful relationship Mr. and Mrs. Huggett have as they occasionally grumble at each other, but it's clear that, underneath, their marriage is a well-oiled machine based on love and respect without a lot of having to say it.

The budget for Here Come the Huggetts was probably a fraction of the average Hollywood offering at the time, but it proves again that filmmaking is at its best when it focuses on telling real stories about real people in a relatable way. All the attention-grabbing big-budget stuff can be fun and enhancing, but nothing beats old-fashioned storytelling done well. I only learned afterwards that this is the second in a series of four Huggett movies; I'll now be on the lookout for the other three.
 
#450 ·
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Sorority House from 1939 with Anne Shirley, J.M. Kerrigan and Barbara Read

1939 deserves its reputation as the greatest year for movies ever, but it was not because of this effort. To be fair, Sorority House is a fine college-fluff B-movie with some engaging moments, but unfortunately, it takes the easy, two-dimensional way out of too-many difficulties.

It starts out with promise as we see a small-town widower and grocery-store owner (Kerrigan) quietly borrow money to surprise his devoted daughter (Shirley) with a last-minute opportunity to go to college. So off to an institution of higher education goes perky and optimistic Shirley not realizing that women's colleges (at that time) were mainly a connected and clubby rich girl's affair socially driven by the cliquish sorority system.

Stuck in the social wasteland of a college boarding house, Shirley quickly learns about and yearns to join a sorority as "rush week" begins. One of her roommates, a mousy looking girl (by Hollywood standards as they put thick-framed glasses on cute-as-heck Barbara Read) who knows she's not "sorority material," provides wonderful balance to Shirley's newbie enthusiasm as Read points out all the foibles and snobbery of the sorority system. Shirley's other roommate is a "legacy" student desperate to live up to her family's expectations that she'll be pursued by a top sorority.

After Shirley unintentionally catches the eye of one of the big men on campus (BMOC), he starts a rumor that Shirley comes from money in a naive attempt to help her chances to be rushed. As a result, Shirley - pretty, now presumed rich and dating the BOMC - is inundated with offers. Realizing she'll need more money from her dad to join - having nice clothes and funds for social events are, basically, a sorority requirement - Shirley is about to give up until her really nice dad shows up with the needed funds.

And the night of his arrival provides the movie's best sequence. When Shirley, at a sorority rush party, realizes that everyone thinks her dad is rich, she tries to tell them otherwise (good girl), but when her dad actually shows up and she sees he won't fit in with his shabby suit and aw-shucks manner, she pushes him away from the party (bad girl), but then realizes her mistakes and runs after him to apologize and invite him back (good girl).

Here is where this relatively good movie flips to quickly messaging a bunch of sugary stuff as salt-of-the-earth dad sets the just-rejected and now-depressed legacy roommate straight about what's important in life. He also gently lectures the three girls about not becoming the same snobs the sorority girls are when they pursue their plans to form an anti-sorority club.

Meh, it went from telling a story to pontificating in an effort to wrap things up in a hurry. But to be fair, it does an okay job as a sixty-minute-long effort better thought of as the equivalent of today's hour-long TV drama than a major-movie release.

N.B. There were a series of girls-at-college movies in the '30s, with the best one being the surprisingly challenging and real These Glamour Girls that is very much worth seeing. (Comments here: #24172 )
 
#451 ·
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This Land is Mine from 1943 with Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, Walter Slezak, George Sanders and Kent Smith

The word propaganda, like so many things, has been tainted by its association with Nazi Germany, but its core meaning - promoting a particular, usually political, point of view - is also part of what we call freedom of speech.

It's dangerous when the state - as in Nazi Germany - controls speech and promotes only its point of view, hence the taint, but in a free society, where everyone advocates for his or her own beliefs, everyone, effectively, is propagandizing for his or her own viewpoint and ideas.

So it is as a compliment that I say, This Land is Mine is outstanding propaganda.

"Some town" in Europe is occupied by the Germans, but as the Germans did in several places, they wanted this to be a "soft" occupation where they collaborate with willing locals to leave a patina of self-governance in place. Many opportunistic and many just understandably scared locals go along, but a few resist by printing an underground newspaper while others physically resist through sabotage.

Cowardly mamma's boy and schoolteacher Charles Laughton plays by the new rules and looks the other way until his hero, the school's headmaster, is arrested for promoting "unacceptable" ideas at the school. Later, the headmaster is chosen as one of ten hostages to be executed by the Germans in retaliation for a murdered-by-the-resistance German soldier.

Laughton, meanwhile, stumbles upon the body of a collaborator, George Sanders, whose conscience drove him to suicide after he turned his fiance's brother in for sabotage and the brother is killed trying to avoid arrest. Laughton, having found the body, is then arrested and charged with the murder of the collaborator. Adding to the complications, the collaborator's fiancé is a school teacher, Maureen O'Hara, with whom Laughton has been secretly in love.

This brings Laughton into direct conflict with the town's Nazi overseer beautifully played by Walter Slezak. Slezak is no cardboard Nazi thug. He's an educated man who quotes and clearly respects the leading philosophers of Western Civilization; a man who would prefer not to use force, not to kill the innocent. But he is also a shrewd and, when necessary, ruthless Nazi willing to kill ten innocent locals in retaliation for one murdered German soldier - order must be maintained.

Slezak doesn't want to have Laughton put on trial, but if he must be tried and found guilty of murder to maintain the fiction that the collaborator's death wasn't a suicide, then, so be it. Having the public know that collaborators are committing suicide over guilt is not in the Nazi's interest.

It takes two thirds of this better-than-average WWII propaganda film to get to this point, but then it only gets much, much better.

With his fears almost realized, Laughton, on trial in an all but rigged court for a murder he didn't commit, finds his inner fortitude, in part, when he sees, from his jail cell awaiting trial, his former headmaster executed in the prison's yard by the Nazis.

In dramatic courtroom fashion, with the prosecutor screaming to have his defense speech shut down, Laughton - disheveled, a bit nervous, but clearly not scared anymore - quietly and methodically exposes and dissects the evil of the Nazi occupation, the hypocrisy of the collaborators and his own cowardice to date.

It's not only a speech of hammering logic, it's a tour-de-force acting performance as you forget everything else as this fat, rumpled and awkward man single-handedly eviscerates all the evil fictions holding the town in its grip. And just when you think he has nothing left, this shy man, who's never expressed romantic love or passion for another in his entire life, in open court, declares his love for O'Hara and, at this point, you realize she's a lucky woman.

But there's still a little more movie left. Despite being knocked back on their heels with their immorality exposed by Laughton, Nazis are gonna Nazi, so they respond with brutal force. And Laughton is given one last moment before the inevitable, which he uses to teach his students the value of keeping the ideals of freedom and individual liberty alive in your head and heart even if all around you others are trying to stomp them out. Basically, he teaches that a book can be burned, but an idea can't be removed from your mind.

Is it propaganda? Sure, and This Land is Mine should be darn proud of it.
 
#452 ·
View attachment 49108
This Land is Mine from 1943 with Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, Walter Slezak, George Sanders and Kent Smith

The word propaganda, like so many things, has been tainted by its association with Nazi Germany, but its core meaning - promoting a particular, usually political, point of view - is also part of what we call freedom of speech.

It's dangerous when the state - as in Nazi Germany - controls speech and promotes only its point of view, hence the taint, but in a free society, where everyone advocates for his or her own beliefs, everyone, effectively, is propagandizing for his or her own viewpoint and ideas.

So it is as a compliment that I say, This Land is Mine is outstanding propaganda.

"Some town" in Europe is occupied by the Germans, but as the Germans did in several places, they wanted this to be a "soft" occupation where they collaborate with willing locals to leave a patina of self-governance in place. Many opportunistic and many just understandably scared locals go along, but a few resist by printing an underground newspaper while others physically resist through sabotage.

Cowardly mamma's boy and schoolteacher Charles Laughton plays by the new rules and looks the other way until his hero, the school's headmaster, is arrested for promoting "unacceptable" ideas at the school. Later, the headmaster is chosen as one of ten hostages to be executed by the Germans in retaliation for a murdered-by-the-resistance German soldier.

Laughton, meanwhile, stumbles upon the body of a collaborator, George Sanders, whose conscience drove him to suicide after he turned his fiance's brother in for sabotage and the brother is killed trying to avoid arrest. Laughton, having found the body, is then arrested and charged with the murder of the collaborator. Adding to the complications, the collaborator's fiancé is a school teacher, Maureen O'Hara, with whom Laughton has been secretly in love.

This brings Laughton into direct conflict with the town's Nazi overseer beautifully played by Walter Slezak. Slezak is no cardboard Nazi thug. He's an educated man who quotes and clearly respects the leading philosophers of Western Civilization; a man who would prefer not to use force, not to kill the innocent. But he is also a shrewd and, when necessary, ruthless Nazi willing to kill ten innocent locals in retaliation for one murdered German soldier - order must be maintained.

Slezak doesn't want to have Laughton put on trial, but if he must be tried and found guilty of murder to maintain the fiction that the collaborator's death wasn't a suicide, then, so be it. Having the public know that collaborators are committing suicide over guilt is not in the Nazi's interest.

It takes two thirds of this better-than-average WWII propaganda film to get to this point, but then it only gets much, much better.

With his fears almost realized, Laughton, on trial in an all but rigged court for a murder he didn't commit, finds his inner fortitude, in part, when he sees, from his jail cell awaiting trial, his former headmaster executed in the prison's yard by the Nazis.

In dramatic courtroom fashion, with the prosecutor screaming to have his defense speech shut down, Laughton - disheveled, a bit nervous, but clearly not scared anymore - quietly and methodically exposes and dissects the evil of the Nazi occupation, the hypocrisy of the collaborators and his own cowardice to date.

It's not only a speech of hammering logic, it's a tour-de-force acting performance as you forget everything else as this fat, rumpled and awkward man single-handedly eviscerates all the evil fictions holding the town in its grip. And just when you think he has nothing left, this shy man, who's never expressed romantic love or passion for another in his entire life, in open court, declares his love for O'Hara and, at this point, you realize she's a lucky woman.

But there's still a little more movie left. Despite being knocked back on their heels with their immorality exposed by Laughton, Nazis are gonna Nazi, so they respond with brutal force. And Laughton is given one last moment before the inevitable, which he uses to teach his students the value of keeping the ideals of freedom and individual liberty alive in your head and heart even if all around you others are trying to stomp them out. Basically, he teaches that a book can be burned, but an idea can't be removed from your mind.

Is it propaganda? Sure, and This Land is Mine should be darn proud of it.
As always you review is informative and well written, but given your past reviews, that is what we've come to expect from you with your current offering(s). However, the incredible level of detail(s) you are able to incorporate in your reviews is truly remarkable. I would have to watch a movie at least a half dozen times to be able to recall the level of detail you routinely report. With all sincerity I greatly respect that ability! ;)
 
#454 ·
Leg Poster Thigh Font Publication

Man Bait from 1952 with George Brent, Diana Dors and Peter Reynolds

With a small budget and at a-little-over an hour in length, this effort feels more like a TV drama than a full-length movie. Book store owner, George Brent, with an invalid wife that he sincerely loves has the briefest of weak moments and shares nothing more than one consensual kiss with his employee: young, flirting-hard and looking-for-trouble Diana Dors.

From this tiny mistake, all hell eventually breaks loose for Brent. Dors' just-out-of-prison new boyfriend, Peter Reynolds, learns of the kiss and Brent's inflated bank account as he just cashed in an insurance policy to take his wife on a needed-for-her-health vacation. While far from the sharpest tool in the shed, Reynolds, as most bottom feeders will, can see the opportunity in these two disparate facts.

Okay, you can probably guess a lot of the rest as that setup leads to soft blackmail, then hard blackmail, a cruel letter to the invalid wife, a double cross between the blackmailers that goes horribly wrong, murder, a falsely accused Brent, a flight from justice, weird allies and enemies popping up in the book store and that wonderful British invention, the put-upon, understated, but-does-his-job-ridiculously-well British detective (who has a seven-word job title including "superintendent," "chief" and a bunch of other words).

With a reasonably satisfying conclusion, it's worth the watch in the same way any good hour-long TV drama is. Plus you get to see old-acting-pro George Brent carry a small movie while a young Diana Dors wears very tight-fitting clothing.
 
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