What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Fading Fast]

Double Deal (1950) with Marie Windsor, Richard Denning, Fay Baker, Carleton Young, and Taylor Holmes


There are so many deals and double deals and so much backstabbing that Double Deal could have been titled Triple Deal or Quadra Deal (there's one to torture the marketing department), and it would still be accurate as the plot just rips through so many twists you lose your way a bit.

At a high level, you get it: it's Oklahoma; oil is the thing; and several factions, a few from one family, are fighting for control. You also get that lying, cheating, stealing, and even murder is on the table. It's high-stakes, no-holds-barred competition that foreshadows TV shows like Dallas.

It also starts like many noirs, with a single man carrying a smallish bag getting off a bus, looking for a fresh start in a town with closets chockablock with skeletons. Richard Denning plays the new "oil man" in town – broke, but with knowledge and skills needed in a wildcatting region.

Those skills are most needed by Carleton Young, playing a man who has to get his one well producing within months or lose the rights to it to his mean sister, played by Fay Baker, because their idiotic father wrote a will designed to ensure that his family would fight long after he was dead.

Another piece of the puzzle is the wonderful Marie Windsor, playing Young's what? Platonic manager, maybe? After a full-on noir opening scene – bar fight, crooked cr*ps game, a huge pile of money, and Denning trying to right the game's wrong – the pieces start to assemble.

Young, with Windsor's encouragement, hires Denning to get the well producing before the deadline. Being a smart oil man, Denning works on the well as the town and even the sister cheer him on, and it gets up and running without a hitch...not.

The town is a cesspool of double deals, crooked shenanigans, hired thugs, a (surprisingly) reasonably honest sheriff, played by Thomas Browne Henry, an alcoholic lawyer with a pet monkey (it is what it is), played by Taylor Holmes, and the sister from h*ll, Baker.

As the trio tries to get the well working, they are physically attacked, the well is sabotaged, and Baker makes a play for Denning – (paraphrasing) "I can pay you more money, plus we can jump in the sack right now if you like, so quit 'those' people and join my side."

Legal machinations by Homes are also at play as is a web of s*xual undertones: every sane man wants to sleep with Windsor (it's almost a s*xual tautology) and, seemingly, every man who can help her business has slept with Baker (it's s*xual mercantilism).

As the twists and knots keep building, eventually an absurd climax tries to untangle everything. No spoilers coming, but you are left with a nagging feeling that you'd have to watch it again if you wanted to tick and tie all the storylines together neatly...and you doubt that they would tie up anyway.

At just over an hour, with a modest noir atmosphere reflecting a modest budget, the actors – Windsor at the forefront, but Baker too – drive this bumpy tale with enough verve to keep you interested. Heck, your average Dallas episode with commercials was only a bit shorter.

Windsor, who looks like the love child of Ann Dvorak and Aline MacMahon (don't question "the science"), is a better actress than her career let on – and she looks great in jeans and a T-shirt when she's dressed for wildcatting.

Watch for the sequence in which she confronts Baker (with a good old-fashioned "I don't like you" slap tossed in), followed by her grilling by Henry at the police station, with a drunk Holmes maybe helping as her attorney. Windsor shows you impressive non-scenery-chewing range.

Baker, to be fair, adds a sharp femme fatale edge that, oddly, Windsor usually adds to her noir movies, but in this one, Windsor plays the good girl. She also plays nicely off Denning, who comes across as handsome and competent but flat. He's no Mitchum or Cagney.

It doesn't seem that the budget was there to create a classic noir visual, as a lot of it looks like a 1950s TV show, but it has its better moments. Still, this is not the movie to choose for noir aesthetics.

What you do choose Double Deal for is an enjoyable helping of Marie Windsor (with a side of Fay Baker) in a short noirish effort that anticipates the nighttime soaps of the 1970s.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Carey Treatment (1972) with James Coburn, James Hong, and Jennifer O'Neill


There's a lot that's good in The Carey Treatment, except for the movie itself, which has plot holes, sloppy transitions, garbled storytelling, and a discordant ending. But darn it, James Coburn is so good – and the Boston background so engaging – that it holds your attention.

Coburn plays a pathologist who moves to Boston for a job, but quickly finds himself playing amateur detective when a good friend and fellow doctor, played by James Hong, is arrested and accused of murder for performing an illegal ab*rtion that resulted in the death of the patient.

After witnessing the autopsy and knowing Hong, Coburn is convinced Hong is being framed, which sparks his private sleuthing – the central focus of the plot. It is also a foreshadowing of the soon-to-come and popular TV show Quincy, M.E.

The girl who died was the daughter of the hospital's high-profile chief of staff, which brings even more attention to the case than a normal homicide would. Hence, the hospital board cares and the police care, and they both care that Coburn's one-man investigation could embarrass them.

New-in-town Coburn also starts up a romance while basically taking on two powerful institutions – every day is busy in his life. His new girlfriend, played by Jennifer O'Neill (best known for Summer of '42), is pretty, very 1970s (free love), and not essential to the plot (big miss).

With all the pieces now assembled, Act II is Coburn pushing on people and doors that powerful people want left alone, leading to a lot of institutional pressure being brought down on "I don't give an eff" Coburn. It's very 1970s man against the system / "never trust anyone over thirty."

It's hard to keep up, but Coburn scares the truth out of a hardened, lying teenage girl, puts a way-too-sure-of-herself socialite Brahmin back on her heels, twists several hospital administrators and doctors around, and even has the police scrambling more than once.

All are good scenes, but the two to keep an eye out for are the Brahmin scene – she's all buttoned-up arrogance; he pops each button – and the hospital chief of staff scene (you'll know it), where Coburn shows he can't be blackmailed in a full-force, in-your-face manner.

One more scene that is wonderfully done is when Coburn shows up at the home of the uncle of the deceased girl; he is a prominent physician known, sotto voce, to perform "high-end" abortions for Boston's elite. By era standards, he's "coded" as a h*mos*xual.

Played by Alex Dreier, the uncle is "coded" through his effeminate mannerisms – he's persnickety about a gourmet sauce he's preparing – while Coburn tries to push his buttons to get him to confess. It's one of those subtly intense scenes that can stand on its own away from the movie.

By Act III, this thoughtful investigation movie becomes more of an action flick with chase scenes, slashing knives, g*ns, car crashes, and several attempted murders. Individually, most are okay, but in total, it changes the tone of the movie and not for the better.

You watch Act III to find out what happened – pay close attention because it's complex as heck. But you almost don't care, as the value in the movie isn't the overengineered mystery but the act of one iconoclastic but honorable man risking everything to stand up against a corrupt system.

Act III also feels rushed and "altered," as if – and this is one of director Blake Edwards' complaints – the studio wanted to package the movie as another 1970s action flick, so Edwards wasn't allowed to finish the picture the way he envisioned.

This obvious change of direction throws the movie off balance. Transitions become jarring, the plot holes pile up, and the storytelling gets mangled as the goal seems to be to force in a lot of action, gore up the ending, and call it a day.

None of this would work – and it does until Act III – if not for Coburn. An odd-looking leading man, he has the thing leading actors must have: the ability to lift a movie up and make it better because their performance is that electrifying – and, here, his is.

In his romantic scenes with O'Neill, his confrontational ones with almost everyone, and his kinder ones with Hong, he's the guy you're watching. The few scenes without him seem flat. He had a good career, but based on this one movie, it should have been bigger.

Based on a novel by Michael Crichton – written under a pseudonym while he was still pursuing a medical career – one assumes the complex pathology and hospital work is accurate; plus, the man is simply a very good storyteller.

The movie's window into 1970s hospitals and 1970s Boston is an incredible time capsule for us today. From doctors smoking to the sleazy street-level drug trade, the movie captures a time when the wheels seemed to be coming off the cart. Plus, the cars are the size of small houses.

The Carey Treatment isn't as good as another Crichton-penned 1970s hospital drama, Coma, but it is still very watchable for Coburn's performance and its window into 1970s Boston. You'll also notice an early vapor or two of Crichton's 1990s TV blockbuster ER.

 

[Harp]

^ I saw this eons ago. Recall an ER scene after Charlie was injured and he asked
some probing questions of attending staff; whom inquired if he was a physician.
Jennifer wonderful as always.

Coburn impresses as acknowledged but somewhat shorted thespian. Too much left table.

 

[Fading Fast]

Homicide (1949) with Robert Douglas, Helen Westcott, and Esther Howard


Sometimes, thankfully, a B movie is happy just being a B movie without any pretensions of being an A movie or, worse, an "artsy" film. Homicide is a straightforward noirish police-procedural-drama B movie that nicely if modestly entertains – if you just let it be its simple self.

After an officious overlay about homicide, the film cuts to a down-and-out man hitchhiking to a farm community looking for itinerant work. He then witnesses a murder – is seen witnessing it by the murderers, but is "convinced," at g*npoint, to later lie at the inquest to save his own life.

"The farmer fell off his tractor and hit his head" is the story he tells at the inquest, which, after a few rough minutes – (paraphrasing) "You sure you didn't kill him because he didn't give you a job?" – results in a finding of accidental death by the inquest jury, leaving the man free to go.

He heads off to Los Angeles, but the murderers see him as the loose end that he is, so they kill him in his boarding room in LA but try to make it look like a suic*de. All the detectives but one, played by Robert Douglas, believe it's a suic*de: Douglas sees small but meaningful clues.

Whether or not this happens in real life, it happens in movies regularly: Douglas is so convinced he's right that he takes his vacation time to investigate what happened. A matchbook cover leads him to a swanky hotel near the farm community where the itinerant was looking for work.

Act II is Douglas doing the hard, boring investigative work – asking a thousand people if they know this man, remember anything about this event, or ever saw something like this, and then following up on any reasonable lead – as suspicious things start to happen at the upscale hotel.

Pleasantly tossed into the hotel mix is a newsstand girl, played by Helen Westcott, clearly attracted to Douglas, but is she playing him or on the good-guys team?

A little inside Hollywood detail is that Westcott is reading Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead when she first appears on screen – a likely Warner Bros. plug for its upcoming film adaptation, in which Douglas himself played Ellsworth Toohey, a major character in the story.

Also in the mix is a bartender, played by Robert Alda, who is helpful when talking with Douglas, but appears suspicious when Douglas isn't looking. Douglas, who asks a lot of seemingly innocuous questions, remembers all the answers, which leads to smart dot-connecting.

Watch those "casual" conversations in the bar across several scenes as they hold almost all the answers if you're good at putting seemingly random clues together. If not, they are still excellent scenes, as you can feel the underlying tension build even while everyone is nice on the surface.

It gets a bit confusing because everything, including dirt, a small piece of telephone cable, someone taking a shot at Douglas, and saccharine pills, comes into play as Douglas tries to untangle the knot that connects the "suic*de" in LA to the dead farmer and the swanky hotel.

Eventually, of course, he does untangle it – in a violent climax – but the enjoyment, and it is an enjoyable movie, is Douglas smartly plodding his way through all the misdirections and cover-ups to get to the truth – with adorable Westcott often at his side.

Why super-cute twenty-one-year-old Westcott would be attracted to a nice-looking forty-year-old falls into one of two categories: "the heart wants what the heart wants" or it's just Hollywood's penchant for matching pretty young girls up with middle-aged men.

Still, they have really good chemistry, which is all that matters as you enjoy seeing them together. Spinning them off into their own TV show or B-movie series might have worked had the timing been a touch different: five years later for the first or five years earlier for the second.

Warner Bros. kept the budget small, but still, for us today, there are a lot of fun period details in all the clothes, cars, and architecture, as well as a peek into the farming community with a local farm labor bureau and the very of-the-period LA boarding house with the smart, disaffected landlady.

The landlady, played by Esther Howard, provides an early spark as her personality, world-weary but with a buried decency, adds energy to the few scenes she's in – especially when she and Douglas play off each other as friends, but friends tussling over information.

Some of it is a cliché, but clichés come from somewhere, and usually it's at least tangential to the truth. It took a tough broad to run a boarding house in the middle of the last century, and Howard seems more than up to the task. Police detectives with badges do not intimidate her.

Homicide could be dropped into the dictionary next to "postwar noirish police-procedural-drama B movie" as it checks all the right boxes, doesn't aspire to be more, and leaves you modestly entertained...and wishing you could see what happens next between Douglas and Westcott.


N.B. Even Hallmark, the dotted-line descendant of the screwball romcom, realizes the romantic value of the mystery-police-procedural story: it now has an entire channel – Hallmark Mystery – heavily devoted to them. It could easily update and use Homicide as a movie.

 

[Biff42]

I just watched Das Boot (1982) free on Youtube.

This was a phenomenal movie. I seldom if ever have rooted for German's in war films but this movie was different because the politicization and barbarism of the German war machine was more abstract. Instead, what you see is men (and mostly young men) doing a very dangerous and dirty job, sometimes with orders they didn't understand or agree with. This movie moved beyond other familiar archetypes commonly seen in war films. The captain, for example, was highly capable and fundamentally a decent man, but he wasn’t perfect. During one battle, he grabbed a *** and nearly shot a sailor who was having a panic attack.

The claustrophobic nature of the U-boat is palpable, and the sense of imminent danger is constantly present. The sets felt incredibly authentic, as did the actors’ portrayals of these sailors. You really get a sense of what it must have been like to live and fight in such a confined, terrifying environment.

I wont spoil the ending, but it shows the extraordinary effort these men went through to get home and the true futility of their journey and war.

 

[Trenchfriend]

I just watched Das Boot (1982) free on Youtube.

This was a phenomenal movie. I seldom if ever have rooted for German's in war films but this movie was different because the politicization and barbarism of the German war machine was more abstract. Instead, what you see is men (and mostly young men) doing a very dangerous and dirty job, sometimes with orders they didn't understand or agree with. This movie moved beyond other familiar archetypes commonly seen in war films. The captain, for example, was highly capable and fundamentally a decent man, but he wasn’t perfect. During one battle, he grabbed a *** and nearly shot a sailor who was having a panic attack.

The claustrophobic nature of the U-boat is palpable, and the sense of imminent danger is constantly present. The sets felt incredibly authentic, as did the actors’ portrayals of these sailors. You really get a sense of what it must have been like to live and fight in such a confined, terrifying environment.

I wont spoil the ending, but it shows the extraordinary effort these men went through to get home and the true futility of their journey and war.

You need to watch the 1985 uncut tv series (282 min)! The "real thing".

 

[Harp]

^ The Tom Hanks film, Convoy-I believe dubbed-offers a worthwhile opposite spectrum look
at the German submarine effort against Atlantic supply route.

 

[Biff42]

^ The Tom Hanks film, Convoy-I believe dubbed-offers a worthwhile opposite spectrum look
at the German submarine effort against Atlantic supply route.

That was a great (and I feel overlooked movie). Absolutely wonderful.

 

[Fading Fast]

While Paris Sleeps (1932) with Helen Mack, Victor McLaglen, Jack La Rue, and William Bakewell


After her mother dies, a young woman, played by Helen Mack, is left destitute in Paris. She also believes her father is dead—he’s actually in jail. From there, with the help of a young man, she finds a job as a cashier in a rough version of a taxi-dancer bar in While Paris Sleeps.

The young man, played by William Bakewell, is a nearly starving artist himself. He falls in love with Mack but is too poor to marry her. Worse, Mack's employer, played by Jack La Rue, is really a pimp who wants to turn Mack into a prostitute – sadly, a real 1930s thing.

While Mack's life is spiraling down, Mack's father, played by Victor McLaglen, who she was always told died honorably in WWI – he did serve with distinction – but who was actually sent to a penal colony for killing a man after the war, escapes and makes his way to Paris.

McLaglen wants to help his daughter, but he's a penniless man on the run from the police. He also knows his daughter believes that he died honorably in the war. Wanting to help and being able to – just like Bakewell – are two very different things.

Eventually, La Rue and his scummy gang of hoodlums try to force Mack into prostitution, which has Bakewell desperate to help, just as McLaglen finds where Mack is, but again, he's got his own challenges.

McLaglen presents himself to Mack as a friend of her father's. He tells Bakewell he'll be back to give them some money to get away. McLaglen then goes to a pawnbroker who stole the money McLaglen had left with him for his wife and daughter when he was sent to jail many years ago.

The climax sees La Rue trying to force Mack into prostitution by sending her to South America while he holds Bakewell at bay. At the same time, McLaglen, now with the money from the pawnbroker, is arrested by the police, who have been looking for him since his prison escape.

You'll want to see the climax fresh, which, for the day, is pretty dramatic. The above is the plot, but two things really drive the story: faith and corruption. Mack represents faith as she buys two candles every day to light for her parents.

That scene is the emotional heart of the movie: she walks to the church, purchases two candles from a poor old woman out front, enters the imposing Gothic structure, kneels, crosses herself, and gently kisses and then lights a candle for each parent. Christianity keeps Mack's soul alive.

On the other side are La Rue and his gang, who have no morality. Beating up women because they won't become prostitutes is brutal even for criminals. There are, after all, other dishonest ways to earn a living. Your soul has to be dead if that's what you've landed on to make money.

This part of Paris, as imagined on Fox studio sets, is a dark, grimy place of cobblestone streets, foreboding alleyways, dank, poorly lit rooms, and desperate, menacing-looking people. This is definitely not the Paris of Fitzgerald's post-WWI expat community.

The one thing that holds this forced morality tale together is Helen Mack. She is, of course, pretty, but she also has an innocent, delicate air about her. She's lovely and fragile, but she doesn't know she's fragile; she also doesn't yet know how bad the world is around her.

She is the one you care about; she's the one you are rooting for. You'd rather she never has to find out how bad the world can be, but if she does, you want someone to rescue her. Yet give her credit, too, as she fights with all 110 pounds of her strength against men twice her size.

While Paris Sleeps doesn't hold back. It's a full-force precode that shoves the worst Paris has to offer a destitute, young girl right in your face. But armed with Christian faith, she tries to hold on through the darkness.

It is not a big leap to see it as a parable for Depression-era audiences facing their own challenges...and maybe feeling a bit less overwhelmed by comparison.

 

[Zombie_61]

^ The Tom Hanks film, Convoy-I believe dubbed-offers a worthwhile opposite spectrum look
at the German submarine effort against Atlantic supply route.

I think you're meaning "Greyhound" in which Hanks plays a U.S. Navy Commander on his first assignment. I haven't had an opportunity to see it yet, but I'd like to.

 

[Fading Fast]

There Was a Father (1942), a Japanese film


The movies from noted Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu have aged well because they reveal underlying truths about human nature that transcend their era and their culture. There Was a Father is ostensibly a story about a father and son in the decades before and during WWII.

It's very Japanese on the surface – it's set in Japan, the dress is a blend of Western and traditional styles, the customs, like honoring one's ancestors, are fully Japanese, and the institutions, like schools, are all Japanese – but anyone, from any culture, can see parts of their family relationships in it.

Shuhei is a young widower and schoolteacher with a ten-year-old son, Ryohei, who attends the school where Shuhei teaches. After a tragedy on a field trip that was not Shuhei's fault – but in keeping with the Japanese cultural emphasis on duty, he feels responsible – he quits teaching to relieve his emotional distress.

This throws his and Ryohei's lives into turmoil, with the outcome being that Ryohei is sent to a prestigious boarding school and Shuhei goes to Tokyo to work in a menial job to pay for his son's education. Shuhei takes it as his responsibility, but Ryohei just wants to live with his dad.

The middle of the movie is Shuhei working in Tokyo as a clerk in a factory and rarely seeing his son, who loves it when his dad comes to visit. Ryohei always asks to live with his dad, but Shuhei always reminds him of his duty to study.

In time, Ryohei graduates and becomes a teacher himself, but when he and his dad take a vacation together at a Japanese hot-springs resort, he tells his dad he wants to quit and come live in Tokyo with him. Shuhei pulls out his "do your duty to your students" speech.

This sequence is the emotional center of the movie, as the father and son, after a life mainly separated, spend ten days relaxing, talking, and – in a fantastic scene – fly fishing together. You want to see it fresh, but the harmony Ozu captures here is symbolic and deeply touching.

Stepping back, watch enough Japanese movies from this era and you'll also see relatives often suggesting potential spouses for other relatives in an informal “I think you should marry this person” way. It's not necessarily done with force, but it can carry significant weight.

Shuhei chooses the daughter of a close friend for his son, who really doesn't want to get married but just wants to live with his dad. But dad knows he will eventually die and his son must carry on, so in another moving scene, he cajoles his son to consider his suggestion.

These scenes – fly fishing together, discussing one's potential bride – are wrapped in Japanese prewar characteristics, but with a little vision, they easily translate across time and culture as many fathers and sons have a shared hobby and also discuss the son's eventual marriage.

There is, of course, an Act III including a climax, but Ozu films are not about a linear story; they are about the portrayal of a life in both its mundane moments and crises and how, much like Voltaire, the point is you just have to keep living. It's a version of the British "keep calm and carry on" thing.

Released after Pearl Harbor – Japan had already been fighting in China for years – the "do your duty" message that Shuhei delivers repeatedly to his son does double duty here as Japan wanted its people to do their duty for the state. Every country has its wartime propaganda films.

None of that distracts from the movie as its two themes – the father-son relationship that stays incredibly strong perhaps because of the distance and the view of life being about duty, not happiness – would have been the same without the war overlay, which you hardly feel anyway.

There is also a backbeat of time moving on no matter what. Decisions are made – good or bad – but life inexorably moves forward. Trains and streams rush by, visually emphasizing this, and parents become grandparents and pass away as children grow up and move on.

Ozu's framing shots – often from ground level and with a tendency to keep the camera focused on a room or hallway after the scene is over – also emphasize that humans are only passing through whatever is here.

Despite the version I watched being badly worn in spots (it's been restored, but shows the limitations of modern restoration techniques if the original has already suffered too much damage), you can tell that it is a beautiful film. Even with scratchy sound and fading pictures, it still deeply moves you.

That's because it is essentially a story about a father and son navigating their way through life. Neither gets quite what he wants from the relationship but both get more than enough to keep them together across time and distance. It's also why it transcends its own time and place.

The "do your duty" message also resonates even in our "make yourself happy first" culture as we all feel a duty to others even if we are told we don't have one. Do you owe your parents anything? Your friends who have helped you? Or your country? Ozu seems to say yes.

There Was a Father forces you to think about all these things that you pretty much knew all along you should have been thinking about. That is exactly what is meant when themes are called timeless.

 

[Fading Fast]

Central Airport (1933) with Richard Barthelmess, Sally Eilers, and Tom Brown


There are better precodes, better early-flight movies, better William A. Wellman-directed movies, and better Richard Barthelmess movies, but if you are in the mood for a shameless melodrama, Central Airport is a fun seventy-two-minute blast through all those things.

Barthelmess plays a pilot who misjudges the weather (the thing we still get wrong today with all our advanced technology) and crashes a commercial flight, so he's blackballed from the respectable airlines. Now he "barnstorms" with a cute "parachutist," played by Sally Eilers.

Airshows, parachutists, wing walkers, stunt pilots, and the entire crazy culture of barnstorming were very much a thing in the 1920s and 1930s and often collected people like Barthelmess, who loved flying but couldn't get into, or back into, the more respectable parts of the profession.

He and adorable Eilers go traipsing over the country. What happens when two young, good-looking, risk takers wind up in the same hotel night after night? They don't read the Bible to each other – they take off all their clothes and get into the same bed; that's what happens.

It's very cute and precode that they book adjacent rooms and use the connecting door to bypass prying eyes. It's all fun and (naked) games until Eilers suggests marriage and Barthelmess explains they shouldn't marry because either one could die in a crash.

Just as his mind is changing on that point, his younger brother, played by Tom Brown, shows up, joins the flying show, and – after a little this and that – marries Eilers. Barthelmess, broken, wishes "the kids" good luck and heads off to take dangerous flying assignments anywhere.

You could almost turn it into a drinking game every time Eilers embraces her husband while looking forlornly at Barthelmess. It's not subtle, but it captures the central melodrama in one image: she married the wrong man, yet only she and Barthelmess know it.

That's the long soapy set-up that also has some incredible scenes of early mono and bi-wing planes doing all sorts of stunts mixed in with some spectacular crashes. Director William A. Wellman shows here an early talent for blending action scenes with weepy melodrama.

All that comes together in a climactic rescue that is still a powerful one today. Sure, you can pick the special effect apart if you want to, but taken as shown, the air-sea rescue in a storm is one heck of a cool sequence that leads to a surprising ending.

Barthelmess is not the most talented actor ever – huge in silent films, he's a bit "closed in" for talkies – but there is something that captures your attention, something the camera likes, but doesn't always love. Eilers, conversely, is loved by the camera.

Eilers is one of a surprisingly large number of talented young blonde precode actresses who didn't have the same success once the Code was strictly enforced. For every Barbara Stanwyck whose career didn't skip a beat, there's an Eilers, and a Madge Evans, and an Ann Harding.

The value today in Central Airport is pretty much the same as the day it was released: its confidant precodeness – particularly, its joyous wink and a nod at premarital *** – it's cool peek at 1930s barnstorming culture, and its young pretty stars looking all young and pretty.

Today it has the added benefit of being a time capsule of all that, but the movie itself really works exactly as it did back in the Depression: a quick, fun, exciting melodrama centered around the insane riskiness of early flight. Far from the best, but engaging as heck.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Alien 3 - Assembly Cut/Special Edition (145 minutes), Blue-ray DVD.

 

[Fading Fast]

King Kong (1933) with Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, and Bruce Cabot


They got two big things so right in King Kong that, even with its 1933 challenges, the movie has held up incredibly well. First, it is a darn good action-adventure story that rips along, and second, the actively promoted and well-done beauty-and-the-beast metaphor is timeless.

It's fast paced out of the gate, with Robert Armstrong playing an action-adventure movie director pushing everyone to get on his mystery ship while he continues to look for a woman to play the lead. We, though, can only wonder, along with everyone, where the New York ship is going.

Armstrong pulls Fay Wray's character out of the Bowery, another hungry person in the Depression, and takes her along on his destination-unknown trip. Even the captain doesn't know the destination, which Armstrong only reveals when the ship gets to tropical waters.

The destination, a fog-shrouded, uncharted "Skull Island," is populated by a native tribe separated from a mysterious beast by a huge wall spanning the width of the island. Armstrong's plan seems to be to shoot his movie on the beast's side of the wall.

Having not signed his Screen Actors Guild card, though, the beast – King Kong – doesn't play along and takes Wray captive, which has the ship's laconic first mate, played by Bruce Cabot, lead a search and rescue party into an early version of Jurassic Park.

Kong now has Wray, but to keep her, he has to fight off several prehistoric-looking beasts, including a ferocious bird, a massive snake, and what looks like a T-Rex. It's one exhausting day, but a man must protect his woman, or here, his tiny, pretty, blonde human captive.

The brilliance of directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack is that despite the fact that Kong has taken Wray against her will, our sympathies are all with Kong as he battles these frightening creatures to the death. It's like an early b*stial Stockholm syndrome.

This incredible sequence – the heart and soul of the movie – also has some suggestive shots of Kong undr*ssing Wray and then smelling his fingers – it's not subtle – and Wray all but flashing her br*ast in a water scene. Interpret it as you will; the s*xual overtones are there.

Wray survives – Cabot helps rescue her; Armstrong captures Kong; and soon we're on Broadway with Armstrong promoting "King Kong – The Eighth Wonder of the World" to an audience of society swells with Kong in "chrome steel" chains. Again, you feel bad for Kong.

The next is a spoiler alert if you somehow don't know the movie ends with Kong, having taken Wray captive again, atop the Empire State Building, being attacked by biplanes. Your heart is breaking as the confused beast tries to fight off the fast-moving, machine-g*nning planes.

As Kong's giant, b*llet-riddled body tumbles from the top of the skyscraper to its death in a darn good special effects scene for 1933, you again feel demoralized that this disoriented giant ape had his life destroyed for no real reason other than Armstrong's greedy showmanship.

Fay Wray, with no prior actress having been in such a role to use as a model, defined the "scream queen" character for generations to come. More importantly, she gave her character, and by proxy the Kong character, an emotional depth that makes the movie timeless, not campy.

Armstrong and Cabot both have a dated style of acting, but still, there's enough complexity and emotion in their performances to connect to modern audiences willing to approach King Kong on its terms. But in truth, they don't matter as no one in this movie matters but Wray and Kong.

Even though Cabot evolved from a "no women belong on a ship" guy to "my, isn't Ms. Wray a wonderful woman (but I won't say that aloud)" guy, and she falls for him, you won't really care, as this is, again, the Wray-Kong show.

So what about Kong – effectively, a giant puppet – himself? Kudos to the special effects men Willis O'Brien and Marcel Delgado for their innovative work making you weep for the often violent beast. His facial expressions convey a confusion and sadness that are heartbreaking.

The obvious metaphor the movie promotes is beauty and the beast. Kong sees "beauty" and wants her, but "beauty" is repulsed by his "beastliness." What is writ large here on screen is also writ small in almost everyone's life: who, at some point, hasn't felt that they were the beast?

You can also see the movie as a parable for Hollywood greed – Armstrong is counting box office receipts the first night – as his "star attraction" is held in chains against his will, almost like, hmm, a seven-year studio contract that bound an actor to the company.

You can also see the movie as a parable for man's arrogance toward nature, like taking an animal off his native island for profit and amusement. And those two examples are just the most obvious metaphors after beauty and the beast.

King Kong, at its core, is a good old-fashioned action-adventure movie that still works as an engaging story, again, for someone willing to bend a little to 1933 movie style. But it is also the fountainhead of so many movies to come that you'll be a bit awed by its originality.

The beauty and the beast story, of course, didn't begin with Kong; heck, the outstanding 1931 Frankenstein has echoes of it, but so many quintessential movie images and tropes started with King Kong that seeing it is like looking at a piece of iconic movie history.

 

[Edward]

View attachment 813586
King Kong (1933) with Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, and Bruce Cabot


They got two big things so right in King Kong that, even with its 1933 challenges, the movie has held up incredibly well. First, it is a darn good action-adventure story that rips along, and second, the actively promoted and well-done beauty-and-the-beast metaphor is timeless.

It's fast paced out of the gate, with Robert Armstrong playing an action-adventure movie director pushing everyone to get on his mystery ship while he continues to look for a woman to play the lead. We, though, can only wonder, along with everyone, where the New York ship is going.

Armstrong pulls Fay Wray's character out of the Bowery, another hungry person in the Depression, and takes her along on his destination-unknown trip. Even the captain doesn't know the destination, which Armstrong only reveals when the ship gets to tropical waters.

The destination, a fog-shrouded, uncharted "Skull Island," is populated by a native tribe separated from a mysterious beast by a huge wall spanning the width of the island. Armstrong's plan seems to be to shoot his movie on the beast's side of the wall.

Having not signed his Screen Actors Guild card, though, the beast – King Kong – doesn't play along and takes Wray captive, which has the ship's laconic first mate, played by Bruce Cabot, lead a search and rescue party into an early version of Jurassic Park.

Kong now has Wray, but to keep her, he has to fight off several prehistoric-looking beasts, including a ferocious bird, a massive snake, and what looks like a T-Rex. It's one exhausting day, but a man must protect his woman, or here, his tiny, pretty, blonde human captive.

The brilliance of directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack is that despite the fact that Kong has taken Wray against her will, our sympathies are all with Kong as he battles these frightening creatures to the death. It's like an early b*stial Stockholm syndrome.

This incredible sequence – the heart and soul of the movie – also has some suggestive shots of Kong undr*ssing Wray and then smelling his fingers – it's not subtle – and Wray all but flashing her br*ast in a water scene. Interpret it as you will; the s*xual overtones are there.

Wray survives – Cabot helps rescue her; Armstrong captures Kong; and soon we're on Broadway with Armstrong promoting "King Kong – The Eighth Wonder of the World" to an audience of society swells with Kong in "chrome steel" chains. Again, you feel bad for Kong.

The next is a spoiler alert if you somehow don't know the movie ends with Kong, having taken Wray captive again, atop the Empire State Building, being attacked by biplanes. Your heart is breaking as the confused beast tries to fight off the fast-moving, machine-g*nning planes.

As Kong's giant, b*llet-riddled body tumbles from the top of the skyscraper to its death in a darn good special effects scene for 1933, you again feel demoralized that this disoriented giant ape had his life destroyed for no real reason other than Armstrong's greedy showmanship.

Fay Wray, with no prior actress having been in such a role to use as a model, defined the "scream queen" character for generations to come. More importantly, she gave her character, and by proxy the Kong character, an emotional depth that makes the movie timeless, not campy.

Armstrong and Cabot both have a dated style of acting, but still, there's enough complexity and emotion in their performances to connect to modern audiences willing to approach King Kong on its terms. But in truth, they don't matter as no one in this movie matters but Wray and Kong.

Even though Cabot evolved from a "no women belong on a ship" guy to "my, isn't Ms. Wray a wonderful woman (but I won't say that aloud)" guy, and she falls for him, you won't really care, as this is, again, the Wray-Kong show.

So what about Kong – effectively, a giant puppet – himself? Kudos to the special effects men Willis O'Brien and Marcel Delgado for their innovative work making you weep for the often violent beast. His facial expressions convey a confusion and sadness that are heartbreaking.

The obvious metaphor the movie promotes is beauty and the beast. Kong sees "beauty" and wants her, but "beauty" is repulsed by his "beastliness." What is writ large here on screen is also writ small in almost everyone's life: who, at some point, hasn't felt that they were the beast?

You can also see the movie as a parable for Hollywood greed – Armstrong is counting box office receipts the first night – as his "star attraction" is held in chains against his will, almost like, hmm, a seven-year studio contract that bound an actor to the company.

You can also see the movie as a parable for man's arrogance toward nature, like taking an animal off his native island for profit and amusement. And those two examples are just the most obvious metaphors after beauty and the beast.

King Kong, at its core, is a good old-fashioned action-adventure movie that still works as an engaging story, again, for someone willing to bend a little to 1933 movie style. But it is also the fountainhead of so many movies to come that you'll be a bit awed by its originality.

The beauty and the beast story, of course, didn't begin with Kong; heck, the outstanding 1931 Frankenstein has echoes of it, but so many quintessential movie images and tropes started with King Kong that seeing it is like looking at a piece of iconic movie history.

View attachment 813589 View attachment 813588

Of all the monster movies I watched on TV when I was about six, this was always my favourite. So much so, that when the '76 version with Jessica Lange came to our TV set about eight year later, I really didn't care for it at all. My appreciation has changed over the years: still not as good as the original, but it did some interesting things with the narrative to fit it into the modern day.

The Peter Jackson picture was a whole nother ballgame, not least because Jackson was, unlike the previous outings, not seeking to make a contemporary picture, but rather a period piece. In many ways that makes it the more interesting direct comparator to the original because we can see what has been changed for modern sensibilities. While it had its downside (I felt it was a touch overlong, and could have done with the fight with the dinosaurs curtailed somewhat, even if that did help address the key plothole of the original. Think about it: if you had the option of a big ape (apes still very much around), or bringing back an actual dinosaur.... what would you choose?), one the whole I think it holds up well. For a modern audience less aware, perhaps, of Ann Darrow's desperate situation when we first meet her it clarified that well, and I liked the building of the relationship between Ann and Kong on Skull Island. This was done well enough that the key change of Ann refusing to be a part of Kong's exploitation in NYC, and his breaking free being to find her rather than defend her from the flashbulbs, feels a natural, organic part of the story rather than a shoe-horned in play to modern sensibilities.

All done and said, though, the original Kong will always be the King of all the big ape genre pictures that followed in its wake, just like Romero's original Night of the Living Dead created a genre of its own and is still the reference point so many pictures go back to, whether Romero's own Dead series, or others that followed, from Shaun of the Dead to even the reference to the opening scene in the Dammit, Janet opening sequence of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Back in 2002, I visited the Berlin Movie Museum. I believe it's still open, though has move from Potsdammer Platz where I saw it? They had Dietrich's Oscar and her costume collection, which was amazing, but one of the most exciting things I saw there was the skeleton of one of the original Kong models used in the original King Kong. I hope it's still there.

 

[Doctor Strange]

I of course have loved the 1933 film for my entire life - I had a King Kong poster over my bed in my teen years. Back in the sixties there was a bumper sticker that read KING KONG DIED FOR YOUR SINS.

One point that hasn't been made is that Max Steiner's score for the film was hugely influential at a time when sound was still new and filmmakers hadn't quite figured out how to integrate music. This score, with its dramatic three-note motif for Kong and unique themes for Ann, the other characters, the islanders, and prehistoric beasts demonstrated how "Mickey Mousing" (so called because the technique was already being used for cartoon scoring by Disney and his competitors) could crank up the drama and emotion. This is still a major method for scoring - e.g., the different themes used for each character and race in Howard Shore's amazing Lord of the Rings score do much of the emotional heavy lifting.

I hated the 1976 version. Somewhere inside Peter Jackson's absurdly bloated remake there's a great 90-minute movie - it has some really great moments, but geez, it's so overwrought and schlepped out!

 

[Bfd70]

The killing of two lovers. Circa 2020. Phenomenal 9/10.

 

[Fading Fast]

Charley Varrick (1973) with Walter Matthau, Joe Don Baker, and Andrew Robinson


Directors like Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie didn't spring de novo from celluloid vapors but advanced a genre that dates back to the silent era, got a boost from the preCodes, and then again when the Motion Picture Production Code's gloves finally came off in the late 1960s.

Charley Varrick is one of those post-Code efforts that expanded the mob movie with a thoughtful exploration of low-level crooks who accidentally cross paths with high-level Mafia hoods, which, as in Tarantino and Ritchie movies, makes the police an afterthought.

Varrick, played by Walter Matthau (an odd leading man, considering he looks like a large frog), heads a tiny gang of crooks who rob nondescript banks in the middle of rural Nevada. However, sometimes a bank isn't as nondescript as it seems...if it's a front for mob laundering.

After a gripping opening scene – involving the robbery of that Mafia-connected "small time" bank, a police chase, and a massive diverting explosion – bank robbers Matthau and his young and arrogant partner, played by Andrew Robinson, are holed up in Matthau's trailer park home.

Now it's time to count the money, which should be a few thousand dollars, but lo and behold, it's three quarters of a million dollars! Robinson's ecstatic as he's already mentally spending it, but Matthau, an older and smarter man, knows this is not a good thing, not a good thing at all.

A podunk bank might have $10,000 or $20,000, but not $750,000 without there being a reason. Matthau quickly intuits that it's a mob drop (money the mob is sending out of the country to be laundered). As he tells Robinson, these are not people who give up looking for their money.

The movie now becomes a Tarantino- or Ritchie-like insanity of a mob agent, played by Joe Don Baker, hunting down Matthau and Robinson, as Matthau tries to stay a step ahead of the mob agent he knows is coming, while Robinson never really understands how serious all this is.

From here it's full-on Tarantino with Matthau trying to get Robinson, the money, and himself to somewhere safe, but where on earth is safe from the mob? It helps that Matthau is a pilot with a failing crop dusting business – which is why he went into bank robbing as a side gig.

The plane, though, still has to land somewhere, which is the rub. So as Baker closes in, Matthau struggles to find an exit strategy while Robinson acts dumb enough that you want the mob or Matthau to just shoot him (it's a movie morality thing where you are okay with an illegal action).

Act III is long and complex in a good way as there are more tangles to come, which means even more things to ultimately untangle in the final confrontation that has the money, the mob, and Matthau all in one place for the first time. It's a darn good twisting finish.

This, though, is Matthau's movie, with a big assist owed to Baker, and then a series of character actors who make several scenes memorable. Matthau brings his core world weariness to a role that calls for world weariness. Yes, he's a ruthless bank robber, but still, he's also worn out.

Had his crop dusting business been a little more successful or something else along the way worked out okay, you sense he'd have stayed on the right side of the law, but now that he isn't, he's just trying to do the best he can to survive and quietly get out. Good luck with that.

He knows it too. From the second Robinson tells him the total take, Matthau's face says it all: "We're screwed; there's no out." But when you're being chased, you run; so run he does and that's what makes the movie. He's a man who wants to sit down but is forced to run.

Credit director Don Siegel here for somehow turning a haggard-looking middle-aged man into an intriguing character despite most of what makes him intriguing being thinking better than the next guy. Siegel captures that by setting up the conundrum first.

Matthau then noodles on it and, finally, makes his next move, which, as in one scene, is nothing more than him trying to connect into the small town's black market in passports. This leads him to a few sketchy stores where he has to play dumb until he outsmarts the proprietors.

That's the movie's magic: this seemingly tired-out man somehow, time and again, outsmarting a lot of people who take him for granted because he looks like a tired-out middle-aged man. Baker, though, is not taking him for granted at all.

Baker methodically pursues Matthau – even killing a few people out of necessity. In a Tarantino scene (which means a Siegel scene that Tarantino later riffed on), he ultimately works his way to capturing Robinson: It's gruesome but frighteningly believable.

Siegel doesn't stint on the action, from the opening bank robbery scene, combined with several more action scenes along the way, to the final twisting climax that has b*llets flying, cars smashing, people dying, and post-battle detritus spread over a large crime scene.

It is, though, Matthau thinking his way through all this, with smartly psychotic Baker tracking a few moves behind, that makes this so much more than just a shoot-'em-up movie. You know it's wrong, but, heck, it's just mob money, so you want to see Matthau win, but how can he?

Maybe he can and maybe he can't, but Matthau and Siegel have you white-knuckling it to the end. Oddly, there is something, not quite pleasant, but uplifting about the story: maybe that's because it's over fifty years old and so much around it feels quaint.

Would the Mafia really turn over heaven and earth today to retrieve $750,000? How many today even know what a biplane crop duster is? Can you imagine in the age of AI faking an ID with a cut-out picture from a driver's license or listening to the radio to know what the cops are doing?

Charley Varrick captured early 1970s Nevada almost as an accidental time capsule – pay phones, long hair, polyester clothes, pencil and paper notes, casual g*n buying, big-and-powerful cars, and more – while making a template for future crime/mob movies.

Looked at that way, Samuel L. Jackson's character in Pulp Fiction owes a hat tip to Walter Matthau's Charley Varrick as both are thinking men criminals. Both are interesting not because they can outshoot the next guy, but because they use their brains to outthink the next guy.

 

[Mister Cairo]

Cairo Cavalcade of Hallowe'en Horror continues with...

 

[Harp]

View attachment 814087
Charley Varrick (1973) with Walter Matthau, Joe Don Baker, and Andrew Robinson


Directors like Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie didn't spring de novo from celluloid vapors but advanced a genre that dates back to the silent era, got a boost from the preCodes, and then again when the Motion Picture Production Code's gloves finally came off in the late 1960s.

Charley Varrick is one of those post-Code efforts that expanded the mob movie with a thoughtful exploration of low-level crooks who accidentally cross paths with high-level Mafia hoods, which, as in Tarantino and Ritchie movies, makes the police an afterthought.

Varrick, played by Walter Matthau (an odd leading man, considering he looks like a large frog), heads a tiny gang of crooks who rob nondescript banks in the middle of rural Nevada. However, sometimes a bank isn't as nondescript as it seems...if it's a front for mob laundering.

After a gripping opening scene – involving the robbery of that Mafia-connected "small time" bank, a police chase, and a massive diverting explosion – bank robbers Matthau and his young and arrogant partner, played by Andrew Robinson, are holed up in Matthau's trailer park home.

Now it's time to count the money, which should be a few thousand dollars, but lo and behold, it's three quarters of a million dollars! Robinson's ecstatic as he's already mentally spending it, but Matthau, an older and smarter man, knows this is not a good thing, not a good thing at all.

A podunk bank might have $10,000 or $20,000, but not $750,000 without there being a reason. Matthau quickly intuits that it's a mob drop (money the mob is sending out of the country to be laundered). As he tells Robinson, these are not people who give up looking for their money.

The movie now becomes a Tarantino- or Ritchie-like insanity of a mob agent, played by Joe Don Baker, hunting down Matthau and Robinson, as Matthau tries to stay a step ahead of the mob agent he knows is coming, while Robinson never really understands how serious all this is.

From here it's full-on Tarantino with Matthau trying to get Robinson, the money, and himself to somewhere safe, but where on earth is safe from the mob? It helps that Matthau is a pilot with a failing crop dusting business – which is why he went into bank robbing as a side gig.

The plane, though, still has to land somewhere, which is the rub. So as Baker closes in, Matthau struggles to find an exit strategy while Robinson acts dumb enough that you want the mob or Matthau to just shoot him (it's a movie morality thing where you are okay with an illegal action).

Act III is long and complex in a good way as there are more tangles to come, which means even more things to ultimately untangle in the final confrontation that has the money, the mob, and Matthau all in one place for the first time. It's a darn good twisting finish.

This, though, is Matthau's movie, with a big assist owed to Baker, and then a series of character actors who make several scenes memorable. Matthau brings his core world weariness to a role that calls for world weariness. Yes, he's a ruthless bank robber, but still, he's also worn out.

Had his crop dusting business been a little more successful or something else along the way worked out okay, you sense he'd have stayed on the right side of the law, but now that he isn't, he's just trying to do the best he can to survive and quietly get out. Good luck with that.

He knows it too. From the second Robinson tells him the total take, Matthau's face says it all: "We're screwed; there's no out." But when you're being chased, you run; so run he does and that's what makes the movie. He's a man who wants to sit down but is forced to run.

Credit director Don Siegel here for somehow turning a haggard-looking middle-aged man into an intriguing character despite most of what makes him intriguing being thinking better than the next guy. Siegel captures that by setting up the conundrum first.

Matthau then noodles on it and, finally, makes his next move, which, as in one scene, is nothing more than him trying to connect into the small town's black market in passports. This leads him to a few sketchy stores where he has to play dumb until he outsmarts the proprietors.

That's the movie's magic: this seemingly tired-out man somehow, time and again, outsmarting a lot of people who take him for granted because he looks like a tired-out middle-aged man. Baker, though, is not taking him for granted at all.

Baker methodically pursues Matthau – even killing a few people out of necessity. In a Tarantino scene (which means a Siegel scene that Tarantino later riffed on), he ultimately works his way to capturing Robinson: It's gruesome but frighteningly believable.

Siegel doesn't stint on the action, from the opening bank robbery scene, combined with several more action scenes along the way, to the final twisting climax that has b*llets flying, cars smashing, people dying, and post-battle detritus spread over a large crime scene.

It is, though, Matthau thinking his way through all this, with smartly psychotic Baker tracking a few moves behind, that makes this so much more than just a shoot-'em-up movie. You know it's wrong, but, heck, it's just mob money, so you want to see Matthau win, but how can he?

Maybe he can and maybe he can't, but Matthau and Siegel have you white-knuckling it to the end. Oddly, there is something, not quite pleasant, but uplifting about the story: maybe that's because it's over fifty years old and so much around it feels quaint.

Would the Mafia really turn over heaven and earth today to retrieve $750,000? How many today even know what a biplane crop duster is? Can you imagine in the age of AI faking an ID with a cut-out picture from a driver's license or listening to the radio to know what the cops are doing?

Charley Varrick captured early 1970s Nevada almost as an accidental time capsule – pay phones, long hair, polyester clothes, pencil and paper notes, casual g*n buying, big-and-powerful cars, and more – while making a template for future crime/mob movies.

Looked at that way, Samuel L. Jackson's character in Pulp Fiction owes a hat tip to Walter Matthau's Charley Varrick as both are thinking men criminals. Both are interesting not because they can outshoot the next guy, but because they use their brains to outthink the next guy.

Sawed several late night logs over this one. Varrick loses his girl in this heist, and its demo
cover car explosion scene particularly seared heart and soul. Matthau fit Varrick finger to glove,
yet left unanswered questions. I like a flick that leaves me thinking. And as I recall now fifty
years later, Varrick struck me as highly intelligent, way too smart and worldly wise for the
chosen racket. Coincidentally, thought about this film earlier several days ago after stumbling
across a Jimmy Stewart-Matthau story somewhere. Apparently both served WWII in same
Air Corps outfit. Made mental note to take another look flick, still have a few nagging about
Matthau's intriguing character.
A thought provoking below radar film that placed a large jewel in Matthau's career crown.