Do you like olde-tymey movies? So do I, so here are some I watched recently!

I watched a bunch of movies recently (the wife was out of town, so we weren’t watching shows together, so I watched movies!), hence this post so soon after the other one about more modern movies. That’s the way it goes!

Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). A lot of people will say that Bogart’s Maltese Falcon is the first noir movie, but they haven’t seen this movie, which came out the year before, because this is so noir it will turn your entire living room black and white and you’ll find yourself smoking and wearing a fedora without even knowing why. That doesn’t make it a good movie, mind you, because it’s not, but visually, it’s pretty dazzling – lots of shadows, Dutch angles, some deep focus shots, and a German Expressionist fever dream in the middle of the movie that is something to behold. It’s 64 (!!!) minutes long, and while I’d like to say it should be longer, the story is so paper-thin it would need to be severely re-written to wring more out of it. John McGuire plays a reporter who’s the star witness in a murder case against Elisha Cook Jr., who was already 37 years old but still looked 20 (Cook looked 20 until he looked 60, and nothing in between!), but the evidence is circumstantial – even McGuire’s testimony isn’t definitive – and Cook gets railroaded, which bothers McGuire but bothers his fiancée, Margaret Tallichet, even more. It turns out that McGuire has some serious anger issues, as his next-door neighbor is an obnoxious, fairly prissy older man who gets McGuire’s goat, and one night soon after the verdict, he sees Peter Lorre skulking around his boarding house and then he thinks his neighbor is dead, which leads to his dream in which he also gets railroaded by the justice system. It turns out the neighbor is dead, but McGuire is being interviewed/investigated by the cops, so Tallichet tries to find Lorre, whom no one seems to know. She does, and the climax of the movie is wildly dull (although, again, shot beautifully). McGuire is dumb as a post throughout – he flies off the handle at the neighbor at the smallest provocation (the guy is a dick, sure, but man, McGuire wildly overreacts) and he thinks he needs to leave town when he finds the body, even though, as Tallichet points out, that will make him look even guiltier and it wouldn’t work anyway. Lorre is Lorre – he owed RKO two days’ work, so he shows up, does his Peter Lorre thing, and cashes his paycheck – and Tallichet isn’t bad, but she’s not in the movie enough. The casual sexism is a bit hilarious, actually – I know it’s the time period, but a lot of movies at least tried to hide it a bit, but not this one! It’s not a bad way to spend an hour simply because it is such a cool-looking movie – if you’re looking for quality entertainment, you probably won’t find it here, but if you’re looking for a movie that just looks cool, this isn’t a bad one to take in.

The Black Swan (1942). TCM had a double feature of Tyrone Power movies one night, so I watched both of them (the other is down the list a bit), and they’re both fun but, perhaps not surprisingly for the time period, a bit problematic. In this movie, Power plays a pirate in the Caribbean who’s devoted to Henry Morgan (Laird Cregar), the famous privateer who is, at the beginning of the movie, in London about to be hanged. Power and his cronies do some piratical things, but then they’re surprised by the news that King Charles II has pardoned and knighted Morgan and named him governor of Jamaica, where he promises to clean up the pirates. Power gladly joins the side of law and order, but another pirate, Leech (not too on the nose there), takes his ship (the Black Swan) and returns to pirating, and Power has to hunt him down. Pirate movies were the shit back in the day, and this is a good one, with lots of good adventure, sword fights, and gun battles. The nobles in Jamaica, led by the ex-governor (why is he still around?), keep claiming that Morgan hasn’t really stopped pirating and is just putting on a show so he can enrich himself, and Power has to prove them wrong by finding Leech. Leech is played, somewhat hilariously, by George Sanders, who’s completely unrecognizable with orange hair and beard, but when he talks, you can hear the Sanders-ness of his voice, and he’s assisted by a very young Anthony Quinn, joyfully sporting an eyepatch and having a grand time. If the movie were just an adventure, it would be fine, but, of course, they have to throw a romantic subplot into it, and while it’s not terribly surprising, the treatment of women in this movie is roughly regressive. Maureen O’Hara plays the daughter of the replaced governor, and Power, naturally, digs her (I mean, O’Hara is very easy on the eyes, so why not?). When she first appears, Power tries to abduct her, and when she resists, he punches her, knocking her unconscious. As he’s carrying her away, Cregar shows up, and Power is so surprised he drops her like a sack of potatoes. Then, when he’s “respectable,” he makes another play for her, and she resists him. She’s engaged to Ingram, a fop who’s her father’s lackey, and Power punches him, because of course Power is a real man and Ingram (played by Edward Ashley) is effeminate. Later, Power accosts O’Hara while she’s out riding, and she falls off her horse trying to get away from him. He picks her up and takes her to a nice spot to help her with her sprained ankle, which is awfully nice of him, except he immediately tries to rape her (I mean, of course it’s played playfully, but still). She rightfully bashes him on the head with a rock and escapes, but Power still doesn’t take the hint. When Morgan is impeached by the nobles, Power has to get out of Dodge quickly to get Leech and prove that Morgan isn’t a bad dude, but he stops by O’Hara’s house, kidnaps her, and takes her with him. Of course, they figure out that Ingram is telling Leech about English targets in exchange for a share of the profits so that he can discredit Morgan, but nothing much ever comes of that except it proves to O’Hara that she should be with a “real” man, and in the end, she decides that she loves Power. To review: Power knocks her unconscious, drops her on the ground, chases her so that she falls off her horse (which could have been fatal, of course), tries to rape her, kidnaps her, takes her with him on his dangerous mission, asks her to lie for him (they’re trying to convince Leech that they’re married), never apologizes for any of that behavior, and … she falls in love with him. Women, amirite? If you ignore the Maureen O’Hara part of the movie (hard to do, I know), this is a fun pirate adventure. But … there she is, not doing what she should and falling head over heels for Power immediately. I mean, she obviously deserved to get knocked around!!!!

Kiss of Death (1947). I saw the remake of this – the one that David Caruso decided to leave NYPD Blue over because he thought it would make him a star, which it, um, didn’t – and it was fine, I guess. Nothing special. The original, I heard, was much better, so now I’ve finally seen that, and it is better, certainly. Is it a great movie? Not really, but it’s entertaining, and Richard Widmark as the psycho gangster is much scarier than Nicolas Cage in the 1995 version, so there’s that (Widmark was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in his film debut, but he lost to Edmund Gwenn as frickin’ Santa Claus). Victor Mature is pretty good, Coleen Gray (in her credited film debut) doesn’t have much to do but she does it gamely, with even a bit of sexiness that is usually reserved in those days for femme fatales (Gray was only 9 years younger than Mature, but it seems like she’s playing someone younger, and the only time it gets a bit skeevy is when she tells him she’s wanted him since she was a little girl), and Brian Donlevy is a boring straight arrow trying to get Mature to rat on his fellow criminals. Unlike the 1995 version, we don’t get to see Mature’s wife die, but he does a nice job with his kids, so we understand why he’s flipping for Donlevy. The passage of time is not handled particularly well, nor is Mature’s relationship with Widmark, which doesn’t seem to be so deep that Widmark would tell Mature so much about his business. It’s very noir, with beautiful use of shadows and interesting angles, and it was shot entirely on location in New York, which lends some nice verisimilitude to places like Mature’s house and the restaurant where he has his confrontation with Widmark. It’s a decent noir movie, not quite a classic like The Postman Always Rings Twice or Double Indemnity, but still pretty keen (although the nature of endings at this time – as in, they’re abrupt – means that we don’t quite get the resolution the filmmakers presumably wanted to give us). And it doesn’t have David Caruso, which is points in its favor!

The Black Rose (1950). This is the second Tyrone Power movie TCM ran back-to-back (as I noted above), and I watched both of them! I’ve read the novel on which this is based, and it’s a pretty good book, and the movie is also pretty good. Power hilariously plays Walter, a 13th-century Saxon still grumpy about the Norman invasion of 1066 (I mean, we’re coming up on 200 years since the Civil War and people are still grumpy about that, so this feels more realistic than it probably did in 1950) – he’s hilarious because Power is not a terribly good actor and he doesn’t even try an English accent in this movie, so he sounds like a tough American gangster who found a time machine and journeyed back to the 1270s. He and Jack Hawkins leave England to make their fortune after they get involved in some extralegal shenanigans, and they head to China because Roger Bacon, Walter’s teacher at Oxford, told them there were treasures there. They get into the army of Bayan of the Hundred Eyes, also hilariously played by Orson Welles – he doesn’t attempt any kind of accent, which is probably for the best as he’s playing a Mongol, and despite Ben Mankiewicz’s warning before the movie, his “yellowface” is really not awful, just mildly offensive. During the course of the movie, they get a servant “boy” who’s really Cécile Aubrey, the “Black Rose” of the title (don’t worry about why she’s called that, as it’s unimportant and rarely mentioned), who’s trying to get to England because she says her dad was an English crusader. Hawkins is disgusted by the “barbarity” of the Mongols, and he wants to go home to wonderful England, but Power wants to make his fortune and he still hates the Normans, so Hawkins stays for a while. Aubrey falls in love with Power, who wants nothing to do with her at this time, and eventually, she and Hawkins leave the army to head to England, which displeases Welles. They’re all reunited in a Chinese city, where Welles sends Power to persuade the empress to surrender, but they’re kept prisoner by the Chinese who believe they’re good luck charms. Eventually, Power and Aubrey escape, Hawkins dies (of course!), and they return to England, where Power learns that Normans ain’t so bad. It’s a good, rousing adventure, obviously a bit racist (Welles, of course, but Herbert Lom is in “dark” face playing a Greek merchant; Aubrey is disguised as a native boy, which she hates because her skin is stained and she can’t wait to get it off so she can be beautiful and, of course, white (see below); Alfonso Bedoya – who delivered the famous “badges” speech in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and is, needless to say, not Chinese – plays a Chinese merchant and whose voice is dubbed in a ridiculous stereotypical accent by Peter Sellers, of all people), but not as awful as you might expect – Bayan is a very smart general, and the Chinese, obviously, are more advanced in the sciences than the English, although, of course, the English aren’t as “barbaric” as the Mongols (Hawkins’s disgust is hilarious because the Mongols don’t do anything particularly nasty, and it’s nothing the English hadn’t done during warfare). It seems that Henry Hathaway, who directed the movie, was a miserable bastard and hated everyone in the cast, but it’s still fun. You don’t watch it for the acting – Power, as I noted, isn’t very good, Welles is fine, but he’s Orson Welles, Hawkins is whiny, and Aubrey is too goofy – but it’s fine. It’s shot in Morocco (well, the parts that aren’t in England), so the cinematography is wonderful – it’s a really nice-looking film. It’s a perfectly enjoyable adventure. (Aubrey had an interesting life. She was only 21/22 during filming, and she met and secertly married the son of the pasha of Marrakesh while she was there, having a son with him before divorcing him. She retired from acting in 1959 and wrote children’s books and television shows, including one that starred her son called Belle et Sébastien … which is where the band got its name.)

The Caine Mutiny (1954). This is a terrific movie – it was nominated for 7 Oscars (Best Picture, Best Actor – Bogart, Best Supporting Actor – Tom Tully, somewhat inexplicably, Best Screenplay, Best Sound, Best Editing, and Best Music, also inexplicably, as the music is often far too light-hearted) and it deserved at least some of those nominations, but it does suffer a bit from the rah-rah patriotism of the time (these days, propaganda films seem to be a bit more muted, although they’re still very prevalent). The Navy didn’t want Stanley Kramer to portray Navy men in too harsh a light, so he had to soften Captain Queeg from the novel – where he’s actually insane, I guess – to the movie, where he suffers more from PTSD. It’s not a bad change, but it does allow the Navy – in the form of José Ferrer as Van Johnson’s lawyer – deliver an angry speech at the end about how it was all their fault that Bogart had become inept as a captain. You tell ’em, José Ferrer! Still, it’s a good, tense film, as Robert Francis (in his film debut in a career that lasted for all of four films before he was killed in an airplane crash) is the POV character, an ensign newly assigned to the Caine, which is captained by a very lackadaisical Tom Tully (he’s not in the movie all that much and doesn’t do a particularly excellent job, which is why it’s strange that he got nominated and not Johnson or Fred MacMurray, who are a lot better in the film and neither was ever nominated for an Oscar, so it’s not like voters were tired of them), an attitude that is embodied in Lee Marvin and Claude Akins as two slacker seamen who provide some of the comic relief in the movie. Francis is glad when Bogart takes Tully’s place, because he’s a stickler for the rules and he thinks Bogart will whip the crew into shape. The movie does a good job showing Bogart as someone whose actions are easily defended even if they’re a little weird, so anyone objecting to them could be seen as unnecessarily butthurt by his edicts, but when he panics during an invasion and bugs out before he’s supposed to, the crew members – especially MacMurray – become a bit more concerned. When Bogart panics again during a typhoon, Johnson feels like he has no choice but to take command. In the courtroom drama that comes after, I laughed thinking about how much Aaron Sorkin ripped it off for A Few Good Men, but that’s neither here nor there. Bogart is phenomenal as a dude who seems to be rational most of the time, which makes it difficult to sympathize with the mutineers unless, as some of them point out, you were right there on the bridge with him in the typhoon. It’s also interesting to see that even in 1954, anti-intellectualism was a thing, as MacMurray is a writer who begins to notice that Bogart is paranoid and puts the idea in Johnson’s head … an idea, it’s implied, that a simple yet noble Navy man like Johnson would never have considered and which, it’s also implied, is fancy mumbo-jumbo that a snobby writer like MacMurray came up with because he didn’t like the captain. It’s a fascinating notion, and it’s kind of odd that it would be so prevalent during a time when it seemed like smart people were more valued (I wasn’t alive in 1954, so I can’t say for sure, but I guess it’s worth noting that this was when Senator McCarthy was around, and he was as dumb as a bag of hammers, so …). Anyway, Bogart, Johnson, and MacMurray are terrific, Francis is pretty good as the youngster who has to become a man (there’s a dull subplot in which he wants to marry a chanteuse but his mother would not approve, and he eventually does so in defiance of Dear Old Mom … said chanteuse is played by Donna Lee Hickey, who literally changed her name to May Wynn, the name of the character she played, because she liked it so much), and the action is very realistic because the Navy allowed Kramer to use their ships, which was nice of them. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a very good movie! (Also, for your next trivia night: Michael Caine took his last name from the movie, as his birth name, Maurica Micklewhite, wasn’t cutting it, and his stage name, Michael White, was already being used. He saw a marquee advertising this movie, and the rest his history!)

The Journey (1959). Deborah Kerr never won as Oscar, which isn’t too surprising (it’s hard to win!), but she was nominated six times, all for Best Actress (though not for this movie), and you can see why: As with most women in movies of the time, she’s a bit hysterical at times (I imagine they were told to be that way, because wimmin be cryin’, amirite?), but she has a wonderful steely resolve in this movie as she tries to get her lover, played by Jason Robards (still with the “junior” attached, as his dad was still alive and acting, and this was Robards’s first feature film after some years doing television work) out of Hungary during the 1956 uprising and away from the intense gaze (and handsomely arched eyebrow) of Yul Brynner, playing the Soviet major who detains the travelers on the bus she’s taking from Budapest to Vienna. She does an excellent job matching wits with Brynner, who digs her, of course, and she does very well showing us a woman torn between her love for Robards and her attraction to the dashing, haunted soldier whose job it is to stop Robards from leaving. Brynner is the most philosophical soldier in movie history, perhaps, as he has long soliloquys about the nature of war, his disappointment that the Hungarians don’t know that the Russians are just trying to help them, dang it, and how foxy Kerr is. As with all the movies made before about 1970, the “bad guy” can’t win, so a Soviet officer, even one as ambivalent about killing people as Brynner, even one as easy on the eyes as Brynner, does not come to a good end, but he still does an excellent job making Major Surov very sympathetic. The cast is good, too – Robert Morley is always fun to see, and he’s not playing comic relief in this movie (as he is in another movie farther down in this post), E.G Marshall is solid, Kurt Kasznar as the sympathetic hotel owner does a nice job, Anouk Aimeé has very few lines but is a haunting presence throughout the film, and some weird kid named Ronny Howard plays one of E.G. Marshall’s kids. It’s an intense movie because of what isn’t said – hey, filmmakers who understand subtext! – as the travelers are detained, seemingly at random (it’s unclear if they know a political prisoner – which is what Robards is, as according to Kerr he didn’t take part in the uprising, he was in prison for just not being Communist enough, I guess) at a Hungarian border town, and they quickly figure out that Robards isn’t English, as Kerr says, but Hungarian. The travelers are an eclectic but carefully selected bunch – there’s the ex-Luftwaffe pilot and his daughter, there’s the Israeli, there’s a Syrian man with a French wife, there’s the American (Marshall) who’s been working for an oil company in the Persian Gulf, with his pregnant wife and two young sons. When they figure out who Robards is, they have to decide what to do about it, and it’s an interesting mix of people for that kind of decision, which the filmmakers don’t push too hard, but it’s still there. Overall, this is a good, tense movie with some nice subplots and some good actors doing their thing, shot on location in Austria to give it a nice, authentic look. That’s not a bad combination!

The League of Gentlemen (1960). This is so close to being a great movie, but it just can’t escape the times in which it was made – even though, being a British movie, it wasn’t covered by the Hays Code (although the Brits enjoyed censoring movies, too!). The premise is excellent: Jack Hawkins plays a colonel who became redundant and was retired, so he collects a bunch of soldiers who left the service under less than glorious terms and plans a bank robbery, promising each of them at least 100,000 pounds. The robbery takes up very little of the movie, as we see all of the recruits in varying stages of financial distress, and then Hawkins turns them into a slick unit through the planning of the heist. Everything seemingly goes off well, but, as it’s the 1950s/1960s, criminals must be punished, and so they are. The way the cops get them is stupid, too – on their part, that is. Hawkins does a few dumb things that come back and bite him, but mostly it’s because they thought they could celebrate their fortune rather than bugging out of town. Sigh. I get that the morays of the time meant they had to be punished, but that’s why it’s not a great movie, because it’s actually not a bad commentary on how a country uses up and spits out old soldiers and how these men aren’t really trained to do anything except be soldiers, and they very clearly leave behind all – almost all – of their vices once Hawkins takes them in and gives them a purpose. The actors are solid – Nigel Bruce is Hawkins’s second-in-command, and Richard Attenborough, Roger Livesey, Bryan Forbes, Kieron Moore, Terence Alexander, and Norman Bird round out the group. The movie was filmed in and around London, and it works quite well, and while there are some plot holes, the heist is cleverly done. It’s just frustrating that crooks couldn’t get away with it, because very often in these olde-tymey heist movies, the criminals had to do something incredibly stupid to get caught, and it messes with the tone of the movie. Otherwise, this is a pretty cool flick, so if you happen to stumble across it, give it a look! (The trailer, below, does give a good amount of it away, so beware!)

Charade (1963). It had been a while since I’d watched Charade, so I thought I’d watch it again when TCM had it on as part of a theme night: The Best Hitchcock Movies That Hitchcock Didn’t Direct. This might be the best “Hitchcockian” movie not by Hitch (although Witness for the Prosecution is in the running, I suppose), as Stanley Donen, known for musicals and light comedy/romance, does a really nice job with this thriller. Of course, it lives and dies with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, whose chemistry is excellent and who have a grand time bickering and running from the bad guys and each other and trying to figure out what happened to the gold Hepburn’s dead husband stole in World War II. YOU KNOW THE STORY! The acting is terrific, the story is twisty without being too opaque, the scenery is great, and Walter Matthau, James Coburn, Ned Glass, and George Kennedy do good work in their roles, as well. Grant made sure that Hepburn pursued him because he thought it would be icky for him to pursue her, given that he was 25 years older than she was, but it’s still a bit icky, although it does allow Hepburn to be friskier than we usually saw women during this time period, which is nice. I don’t love that filmmakers always made Hepburn shriek when she was threatened, because she was the kind of woman whom you could believe would be more composed, but the times dictated that she shriek, and it always feels off with her specifically (she’s a fine shrieker, but unlike someone like Tippi Hedren, it just doesn’t seem like Hepburn would shriek all that much). It’s just a fun thriller with two actors who knew how to be movie stars. Watch it again and enjoy it!

The Alphabet Murders (1965). I wasn’t expecting too much from this movie – Tony Randall playing Hercule Poirot is just … weird – but it doesn’t even rise to that level of expectations, as it’s not very funny and the plot is convoluted to the point of ridiculousness. Randall is horribly miscast, but more than that, he doesn’t really do much detecting, as he spends the movie trying to get away from Robert Morley (who works for the government and is trying to keep him safe to avoid an international incident) and Maurice Denham, playing Inspector Japp (who just wants him to go back to Belgium and get out of his hair). Randall solves the murder, but he doesn’t do a lot of investigating, and it’s annoying. Anita Ekberg is wasted in her role, but apparently it was because she couldn’t speak English very well and her lines – which are few – had to be redubbed (why cast her, then, filmmakers – there weren’t any hot blondes in the movies in the mid-1960s who could speak English?). I remember reading this book – I’ve read a lot of Poirot mysteries – and the plot is vaguely the same, but it lacks the cleverness of the book, because everyone – Poirot included, at times – is so incompetent. It’s very frustrating. Randall is lousy, but Morley isn’t bad for what he’s asked to do, and a young Julian Glover makes an appearance, and you can believe he’ll try to claim the Holy Grail in another 25 years, because he just has that douchebag look about him. I like Poirot mysteries, so even though I knew this was a comedy, I had hoped it would work. No such luck, I’m afraid.

“The Fearless Vampire Killers” (1967). This was originally called Dance of the Vampires, a much more apt title, and it was changed for American audiences over Roman Polanski’s objections, and it’s kind of weird, because if the objection was to the word “vampires,” I mean … it’s in both titles! It doesn’t really matter what it’s called, because it’s not a very good movie either way. Polanski had made a bunch of shorts in the late 1950s, but this was only his fourth feature, and it came after Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac, two better regarded movies (neither of which I’ve seen, because I’m a bad movie fan, I guess). While Cul-de-Sac, I guess, is a black comedy, this is much broader, and maybe Polanski was trying to prove he could do comedy before he did Rosemary’s Baby, which followed this? I don’t know, but this movie isn’t funny enough to be a comedy, it’s not scary or gory enough to be horror, it’s not clever enough to be satire, it’s not even goofy enough to be farce – it’s just kind of thrown together, with a mish-mash of elements that might be fine but just don’t work here. Jack MacGowran plays a loopy old professor who thinks there are vampires in the Transylvanian mountains, so he heads there in the dead of winter with his idiotic assistant, Polanski. They meet wretched villagers who know something is going on but won’t talk about it, and Polanski falls in lust with the innkeeper’s daughter, played fetchingly by Sharon Tate. She is taken away to the castle of the local count, played by Ferdy Mayne, who is, of course, a vampire. Polanski is dumb throughout, MacGowran is a bit better but leans far too much into the doddering old man stereotype, and they wander around the castle doing dumb things until the ending, which we can see coming several miles away. Polanski has never been the best actor, but he’s hopeless here, and the others don’t really have much to work with, so they’re not great, either. Mayne has fun, as does his son, played by Iain Quarrier, who has a big-time crush of Polanski and isn’t shy about it (for a movie that came out in 1967 and is allegedly a spoof, Quarrier’s interest in Polanski is not really played homophobically – Polanski rejects him because he’s, you know, a vampire, not necessarily because he’s gay), but overall, it’s just a fairly dull movie. Although it did change the course of Polanski’s career – Jill St. John was supposed to play the innkeeper’s daughter, but the producer insisted on Tate, whom Polanski apparently had not met. Would Chinatown be as bleak as it was if St. John had done this crappy horror spoof? The mind reels!!!!

A mixed bag this time around, but that’s what happens when you watch movies – you never know what you’re going to get! I know everyone reading this is very youthful and hasn’t seen these old movies because they’re not squares, but if you have, tell me about it in the comments!