I’m not going to stop watching movies from before I was born, which means I won’t stop writing about them!

It’s taken me quite a while to watch enough movies from before 19 May 1971 to make a nice post, but I’ve done it, and you get to read it (or not, because that’s the beauty of freedom, people!)! Let’s take a look!

Queen Christina (1933). Garbo was nominated twice for Best Actress in 1930 (they made a lot of movies in those days, yo!), but not for this, which is one of her more famous roles. She dominates the movie, as she’s in almost every scene, and she’s good, of course, but the movie isn’t great. John Gilbert, who plays her Spanish lover, is a bit dull (Gilbert died in 1936, aged 38, of a heart attack brought on, most likely, by alcoholism), but he’s just there to adore Garbo, and he does fine with that. There’s not much to the movie – Christina wants to rule a country of artists, so she stops making war in Europe (Sweden was, weirdly enough, a major superpower in the 1600s), but she also doesn’t want to marry and produce an heir, so she fritters about being queenly. She meets the Spanish envoy and falls madly in love with him, and abdicates her throne to be with him, but before she can leave the country, he’s killed in a duel (this is because the real Don Antonio was married with children, so she can’t run away with him). The end. It’s a beautiful film, with terrific sets and some nice outdoor stuff and Garbo looking fabulous, and because it’s a pre-Code movie (the Hays Code was instituted in 1934), it’s a bit more risqué than would be permissible a few years later. Christina and one of her ladies-in-waiting clearly dig each other, and when Christina is out gallivanting around the countryside dressed like a man (and everyone thinks she is, despite the fact that she looks like Greta Garbo), it’s clear that Antonio is kind of into her even before he discovers she’s a woman. Plus, of course, it’s clear that she and Antonio are fucking like minks, which would be looked at sternly under the Code. As a historical curio, therefore, this is an interesting movie. As a vehicle for a dazzling star, it’s very successful. As a good story, it’s not as great. But it’s fun to watch!

To Have and Have Not (1944). This movie is famous for a few things, the most important being that it’s Lauren Bacall’s movie debut and, secondarily, when her romance with Humphrey Bogart began, while it’s also the subject of a bet director Howard Hawks made with Ernest Hemingway, claiming he could make a good movie out of Hemingway’s worst novel. He made a good movie, I guess, but not a great one, as this is kind of an undercooked Casablanca, with Bogart playing Rick, Bacall playing Bergman, and parts for Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet even though neither is in this movie. It’s famous for Bacall’s line about whistling, which doesn’t make a damned lick of sense in context, and she and Bogart have good chemistry, but it’s still not a great movie. Honestly, Bogart had good chemistry with a lot of actors (including, for instance, Lorre), as his scenes with Dolores Moran (playing the wife of the French resistance fighter Bogart smuggles into Martinique) smolder just as much as those with Bacall (Moran was, a bit shockingly, younger than Bacall, but man, they made women look older in the Forties, didn’t they?). It’s fine, and the acting is good, but it’s still a bit weak sauce in terms of the story. One big problem is that it takes place over about three days, so it’s hard to accept that Bogart and Bacall fall for each other so hard (she’s inessential to the plot, too, which is annoying). In Casablanca, Rick and Ilsa had history, so their romance felt more real. This, despite the chemistry between the two, doesn’t as much. And let’s not make the Bogey/Bacall romance more than it was – they started filming when Bacall was 19 and Bogart was 44 (and married), which is still creepy even if it was more accepted back then. I mean, it’s great they had a nice 13 years together, but it was still a bit icky. Anyway, this is fine. Not great, but fine.

The Stranger (1946). TCM had a mini-Orson Welles film fest a few days ago, and I am a big fan of Welles, so I watched a few of them (and left a few for later!). This one was the best of the three I watched, although most people would probably count the third one as the best (see below). In this, Edward G. Robinson plays a Nazi-hunter who follows a lower-level Nazi to Connecticut, where the Nazi is trying to find his boss, whom Robinson claims was behind the entire idea of genocide. Oh dear. In the idyllic town, he finds Welles, the Nazi, who marries the daughter of a Supreme Court Justice early in the movie and also kills the Nazi who came looking for him, burying him in the woods. His wife, played a bit simperingly by Loretta Young, was at home when the Nazi came looking for Welles, so she’s the only one who can connect the two, and Welles eventually tries to explain himself without revealing that he’s, you know, a Nazi. Things get tense! Some things make no sense in the movie – Welles is basically undone by Young’s dog, which discovers the body, but why would Welles take the dog for a walk near the body anyway? Dogs like sniffing around for dead things, Orson! And Welles, who successfully escaped Germany and created a new identity, stays around the town far too long, which is odd, because he’s shown he has the ability to disappear. Still, it’s a good thriller. Robinson is always interesting, and Welles is terrific as the creepy Nazi, who’s kind of creepy even when he’s trying to be charming. Apparently Welles filmed a ton of stuff, mostly from early in the movie when the Nazi is wandering around in South America looking for clues as to where Welles was, but the studio chopped it down, much to Welles’s chagrin. For that reason, it seems that Welles didn’t think much of this movie, but it seems like what he filmed would have bogged the movie down considerably. Directors don’t always know best! Welles, however, is a tremendous visual director, and he uses the clock tower in the town’s church to wonderful effect, giving us shots straight up the ladder to the top, causing a bit of vertigo, and because this is a quasi-noir movie, he uses a lot of shadows very effectively. One scene where Welles kisses Young but we only see their shadows is particularly eerie. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s quite good.

Diplomatic Courier (1952). This movie was clearly trying to do for Trieste what The Third Man did for Vienna, and there’s something to be said for setting your fiction in post-war Europe (whether the First or the Second), when things were so much in flux, and while this isn’t as good as The Third Man, it’s not bad. Tyrone Power plays the courier, who is sent to Salzburg to meet a spy who has gotten hold of some Soviet documents that the U.S. would very much like to have. The spy is killed before he can hand the papers over, so Power is sent to Trieste (where the train was heading) to find the documents. Meanwhile, an American traveler, Patricia Neal, has taken a liking to Power, and there’s a woman the spy seemed to know well, played by Hildegard Knef, who also ends up in Trieste. Oh, you can be sure there’s double- and triple-crossing along the way! It’s not a complicated movie, and the “twists” are easy to figure out, but it’s a nifty spy thriller. Some of it was filmed on location, and while it’s not quite as moody as Vienna becomes in The Third Man, it’s still a nice-looking picture. Power, Neal, and Knef are good, and Karl Malden is fun as an army guy who befriends Power. Charles Bronson and Warren Oates are in this movie, but they’re uncredited Russians and I missed them, although I did catch a young Lee Marvin, mainly because he has some lines and sounds like, well, Lee Marvin. It’s a decent spy thriller, although there are, you know, better ones. (I can’t find any clips of the actual action in the movie, so let’s take a look at the man impersonating a woman and singing a fun song!)

A Face in the Crowd (1957). Director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg made On the Waterfront a few years before they made this, but this didn’t quite get the reception of that, and it died at the box office. It’s too bad, but it was a bit ahead of its time, so it’s not surprising people didn’t quite know what to make of it. It’s gotten a bit of a reassessment recently thanks to Trump, whose rise feels eerily reminiscent of Lonesome Rhodes’s in this movie. The problem with a movie like this is that despite the fact that it was remarkably prescient and feels very contemporary even today, it’s still a bit naïve. Kazan and Schulberg think that if a demagogue happens to reveal his true feelings, the people will turn against him. Unfortunately, we have plenty of evidence that Trump and the Republican party hold the “common people” in utter contempt, but they still revere the Great Orange Baboon. As chilling as this movie can be about the power of television to influence the masses, it feels like this would make people a bit more terrified in the twentieth century, when politicians still tried to follow a code of conduct, at least in public. In the crazy world of the twenty-first century, we’ve had two decades of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld and then Trump/McConnell telling us that up is down and left is right, and people just keep on believing them (if you’re going to argue that Democrats do that, too, you can fuck right off – Democrats are far from perfect, but they’re not straight up evil like Mitch McConnell is). Anyway, Andy Griffith, in his film debut, is stunning as Rhodes, a dude who pretends to be homespun and cornpone but, early on, tells us that his father was a con man, and everyone should have listened to that nugget just a little more closely. Patricia Neal, also good but not quite as excellent (mainly because she’s in a female role, so they want her to cry a bit more than is likely), sees Rhodes as a path to fame – she discovers him in jail and takes him all the way to New York, ignoring all the brief moments when he reveals who he really is – and her arc, as she sells her soul and then tries to get it back, is the heart of the movie. Walter Matthau gets a good speech at the end about Rhodes and his moments of fame, but again, in our world, it comes off as a bit naïve. Lee Remick makes her film debut, which is nice for her. This is an excellent movie, honestly, that’s atill a bit depressing because of everything Kazan and Schulberg got right but also because of how what they thought would affect someone’s fame has turned out to be so far off the mark. Jeebus, I hate fucking Donald Trump and fucking Mitch McConnell. Fuck those fuckers. But watch this movie – if you think of Griffith as Sheriff Taylor or as Ben Matlock, you won’t be prepared for how brilliant he is in a terrifying role.

The Tartars (1961). The second Welles movie I watched as part of TCM’s mini-film fest is this piece of garbage, which stars Welles but which he didn’t direct. It’s awful, but hilariously so, so it’s not a complete waste of time. Victor Mature, looking like he stepped off the set of West Side Story with his black slicked-back hair, is a Viking chieftain, while Welles plays his Tartar opposite. They seize female hostages from each other and spend the movie thinking about negotiating before the big battle at the end. It’s pretty terrible – it’s an Italian production, so almost everyone except the two leads is dubbed, quite badly, and some of the action honestly looks like a colorized silent movie, because it’s a bit sped up like some old silent movies are. The racism is in full effect, too – the narrator claims that the Vikings came to the Volga to till the soil, and they were governed by “peace, love, and honor,” which is hilarious, and then, from the East, came the Tartars, “barbaric, cunning, and cruel” – “cunning” being a particularly loaded code word for Semitic and Asian people, as it implies sneakiness but not “real” intelligence. The Tartar chieftain wants Mature and his Vikings to fight the Slavs with him, but Mature has pledged friendship to the Slavs, so he rejects the Tartars. The Tartar chieftain attacks Mature, and a fight breaks out in which the Tartar chieftain is killed. His brother, Welles, takes over, and steals Mature’s wife in retaliation for the Vikings taking his niece, the dead chieftain’s daughter. I mean, Mature’s brother just snatches the girl away during the fight, but that’s … fine? Because he’s a noble Viking? He doesn’t rape her, because before he can, she actually falls in love with him? For no reason, it seems, except that he’s a gorgeous white man. Meanwhile, of course Welles rapes Mature’s wife, because he’s a filthy Tartar! It’s a bit sad seeing Welles in this (Mature too, but he was never as talented as Welles), but needs must, I guess, and Welles still wanted to direct his own movies, so I guess he needed the cash! This is good for a sad laugh, but that’s about it. (And wow, the trailer might even be worse than the movie itself!)

The Pink Panther (1963). I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen this all the way through (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the entire movie, just not from beginning to end in one sitting), so I thought I’d do that, and it’s very impressive to see how much it’s not a Peter Sellers movie. I’m not sure if it’s the first phenomenon of … should we call it the Fonzie Effect? when a side character takes over the franchise? – but it’s a good one. David Niven is clearly the lead, and Sellers, along with Robert Wagner, Capucine, and Claudia Cardinale (dubbed voice and all!) are the secondary characters, each about equally important, although Capucine is probably the second-most important. Of course, we know from history that Sellers became a fan favorite and took over the franchise, but it’s interesting watching the original and seeing how it’s clearly an ensemble and how relatively subtle the humor is. The series devolved into slapstick quickly enough, but in this movie, Sellers is goofy but not aggressively so, and because he looks like a leading man (he was jealous of Wagner’s dazzling good looks, apparently, so he got into shape and spruced up) and because Edwards makes sure that things around him remain relatively serious, the humor is much more understated than you might remember. The two women are wonderful, Niven looks much older than 52/53 but is still suave, but it still feels a bit icky for him to be romancing Cardinale, who was around 23/24 at the time (Capucine seems to be playing someone much older than Wagner, but she’s only 2 years older than he is!), and while we’re pretty sure than Niven is the Phantom, it’s still pretty neat that the movie takes its time getting to that revelation. The way it ends is silly (I won’t spoil a 60-year-old movie for you!), but it’s not terrible. Edwards made a lot of crap in his life, but he made a few very good-to-great movies in the early Sixties, and this is one of them!

(Bonus: Here’s Fran Jeffries singing and dancing, because why not?)

A Shot in the Dark (1964). This is the second Clouseau movie, and this is where the silliness begins to really take over the “Pink Panther” series, as Clouseau, unlike the first movie, is the main character (he’s in almost every scene) and he’s much more idiotic than in the first movie. In the original, he’s not a very good policeman, but in a much more subtle way. In this movie, we get the “bad” Clouseau – not only is he incompetent, he’s cruel to his hapless assistant because he, Clouseau, keeps bumbling around, and he’s cruel to others for the same reason. We also get Herbert Lom as Commissioner Dreyfus, who starts off the movie as a normal middle-management type before going insane, and the transformation is not that great (Lom does what he can with it, but the trajectory of the character is dumb). Elke Sommer, who has some comedic chops, is given nothing to do except sit around and look fetching (which, I mean, she is), and so it becomes a wasted role. Only George Sanders, honestly, comes off looking good, as he’s deadly serious about everything but is still able to add some subtle silliness that eludes Sellers. For a light-hearted movie, it’s weirdly dark, as several innocent bystanders are killed and the final resolution is not exactly unjustified but kind of bleak. This was released six months after The Pink Panther, which is an impressive turnaround, but it does make it a bit sloppy. It’s not a terrible movie, and Sellers is a fairly effortless physical comedian, but it’s still a frustrating movie given how relatively subtle The Pink Panther was. There’s a rumor that it was shot before The Pink Panther, which explains why nothing from that movie is referenced, but apparently, that rumor is untrue, which makes the lack of references to how the first movie ended or, say, Clouseau’s wife, a bit strange. They didn’t care about continuity in the Sixties!

Chimes at Midnight (1965). This is the movie I was talking about above, as most people seem to think this is better than The Stranger, but I’m not so sure. Critics love it, and it’s beautiful to look at, as Welles (still only 50 years old at the time!) never lost his ability to make a great-looking movie, but it left me a bit cold. It’s an adaptation of Henry IV and Henry V (with other stuff from Richard II and even The Merry Wives of Windsor), with Welles playing Falstaff, and it’s very fascinating to see. Welles uses locations superbly, with the English court huge and tomb-like as John Gielgud, playing Henry IV (Gielgud was already 60 when the movie was filmed, and Henry died at 45), haunts it as he looks for his son. The inns that Welles and Prince Hal (played by Keith Baxter) frequent are earthy, humble places, also full of large spaces where Falstaff is occasionally isolated and shrunk. The budget for the movie was miniscule, which is why the battle scene is so impressive, as it looks amazing. Baxter is pretty, but he doesn’t really do an amazing job until his final rejection speech to Falstaff, which is powerful and sad and devastating. Welles is very good, too, but because this is pieced together from different plays, it often lurches a bit, robbing the story of momentum. Also, as I noted, Baxter doesn’t rise to the occasion often enough, and Hal, let’s be honest, is kind of a dick. So it’s a gripping movie, mostly because of how it looks and because Welles does such a good job, but it’s not the masterpiece people say it is!

Fathom (1967). I suspected this would be a crappy but fun movie, and while it’s more crappy than fun, it’s still not a bad way to spend 90 minutes or so. Raquel Welch (whose name is Fathom, for reasons) is the big draw here – specifically the sequence where she wears a bikini – and she’s fine – she’s not the best actor in the world, but she seems to be enjoying herself as a skydiver/dental hygienist who gets caught up in a heist. She’s recruited by a British spy to parachute to a villa in Spain (she’s traveling with her troupe) where two Chinese spies are and activate a malfunctioning bug they planted (it’s inaccessible by land, and they figure she can pretend to have been blown off course). Naturally, the Chinese spies – played by Anthony Franciosa, who’s definitely not Chinese, and Greta Chi, whose father was Chinese – catch her, and the game of cat-and-mouse begins. I won’t give anything away, but nobody is who they seem, of course, except Welch, who gets pulled this way and that by all the parties involved and always looks fabulous as she is. It’s a silly movie, and there’s surprisingly not as much skydiving as you might expect, and it’s a bit unclear at the end who one person really is, and there’s the fun sexism of the 1960s with regard to how all the men treat Welch, but it’s an entertaining, light-hearted heist movie. Nothing wrong with that!

Crescendo (1970). Stefanie Powers plays a music history student who gets dragged into a web of intrigue in the south of France when she is allowed access to a dead composer’s personal papers in this batshit thriller. It never really works that well, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t try! Powers arrives at the villa of a recently-deceased composer after the widow (Margaretta Scott) invites her, and she meets the son (James Olson), the maid (Jane Lapotaire), and the valet (Joss Ackland). Things start getting weird immediately. The son is in a wheelchair thanks to an automobile accident some years earlier, which cut short his tennis career. He’s addicted to heroin – which he took to alleviate the pain – and the maid is giving it to him in exchange for sex. Powers learns that she resembles the son’s girlfriend from years earlier, and the mother keeps giving her the clothes of the woman because Powers’s clothing has mysteriously not arrived yet (the girlfriend didn’t die, just left a lot of stuff behind). One night Powers hears someone playing the piano in an isolated room, but when she goes in, the mother claims it’s just a recording even though Powers saw someone – whose face is obscured from her vantage point (and ours) – at the instrument. The son begins to fall in love with Powers (and she with him), but he warns her to leave before things get even weirder (a warning she obviously ignores, because she’s in a movie). The maid is killed one night. Whodunnit?!?!?! It’s all very odd and unsatisfying – it’s not the worst thriller, but it is a bit predictable, and Powers, as usual in movies where plot dictates all, acts rather stupidly a bit too often. She’s cute as a button, though, so it’s nice to watch her act stupidly! It’s a decent way to spend 100 minutes or so, although it is a largely forgettable thriller. They can’t all be gems!

That’s all for now! Did you find anything you might have never seen but are now interested in? A Raquel Welch/Stefanie Powers double feature, perhaps?