You know, I was splitting the movies I watched into “movies released before I was born” — 19 May 1971 — and “movies released after I was born,” but for this post, I’m going to switch it up to my original movie-reviewing posts, where I just did them in the order I watched them. It’s chaos!!!! Let’s go!
Beat the Devil (1953). This is a weird movie, a minor entry in John Huston’s filmography that, despite having a killer cast, kind of meanders around and isn’t quite as funny as it’s seemingly supposed to be (maybe it was hilarious in 1953/1954?). Huston had been nominated for Best Director for his previous two movies (Moulin Rouge and The African Queen) and for 3 of his previous 4 (he missed on The Red Badge of Courage, but was nominated for The Asphalt Jungle before that), so maybe he was in a mood to make something a bit goofier, and he and Truman Capote wrote the screenplay, so you’d knew it would be a bit lighter than usual, and it’s clearly at least a little bit of a satire of heist-type movies … but it’s still not great. It’s fine, but not great. Bogart plays a man who’s in cahoots with Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, Marco Tulli, and Ivor Barnard, who have cooked up a scheme in British East Africa (basically Kenya), and they’re in Italy waiting for the ship to take them there. Bogart is married to Gina Lollabrigida, and he meets a British dude (Edward Underdown) who’s traveling with his wife, Jennifer Jones, who falls in love with Bogie … which is ok, because Lollabrigida has eyes for Underdown. It’s fun to watch the scheming that goes on, as Underdown and Jones aren’t exactly who they seem, and everyone is a bit too careless with information about what they’re doing. They eventually get on the ship, where things go from bad to worse, and they eventually end up in an Arab country, where things get even worse (“worse” being a relative term, and it always remains fairly light-hearted). The cast is pretty good, and while the two couples seem a bit cavalier about their marriages, it’s one of these things where we’re never sure who’s conning whom, so it works fairly well. It’s just a bit lacking — it’s not quite biting enough to be a really good satire, it’s not quite funny enough to be a really good comedy, and the MacGuffin isn’t quite developed enough to make us believe these people would be risking so much for it. It’s not bad, and it’s fun to see the cast bounce off each other, but it’s kind of missable. Oh well!
Disturbia (2007). Disturbia isn’t a great movie — it’s an overheated Rear Window — but it’s not a bad one, and I’ve seen it a few times before, but never, I don’t think, all the way through (I always missed the beginning, so I didn’t know how Shia LeBeouf’s dad died or how he got put under house arrest), so I decided to watch it again when it came up on one the cable channels. It’s fun and tense, but, as usual, people do stupid things that have to do to advance the plot. In this movie, David Morse switches to evil far too quickly, and it feels like the movie could have been maybe 10-15 minutes longer to give us more of a sense of tension building, or perhaps cut some of the stuff earlier in the movie to get to the main plot more quickly. It just seems like Morse goes from slightly weird neighbor to full-on evil too quickly, and one wonders how he got away with his killing if he’s triggered so easily into homicidal rage, as by the end of the movie, it does seem like LeBeouf still only has circumstantial evidence against him, yet he freaks out and starts making it more blatant. Plus, when he realizes he’s probably gone too far, why doesn’t he just get the fuck outta Dodge? He’s done it before, so why stick around? Meanwhile, the cop who doesn’t like LeBeouf goes into Morse’s house without backup? Really, Mr. Cop? Anyway, it’s still a nice, tense movie, and LeBeouf does a good job as a kid (he was 20/21 when the movie was filmed) who’s not dealing with his father’s death very well, and the movie does a good job showing that having something to do — even something as weird as trying to prove his neighbor is a serial killer — helps him immensely with his issues. Sarah Roemer, of course, is hot as hell, and she does a decent job as “the girlfriend,” a thankless task in any movie of this kind, although late in the movie, LeBeouf tells her to call the cops and she basically disappears from the movie until it’s all over. If she did call the cops, they took their damned time (they do show up eventually). Oscar winner Viola Davis is in this movie, too, although she doesn’t have much to do except hilariously charge poor Carrie-Anne Moss for the privilege of having her son under house arrest. It’s a decent movie to laze away a Sunday afternoon with, which is what we all need sometimes!
Stagecoach (1939). This is John Wayne’s break-out role, of course, as he was 29/30 when it was filmed and he had spent the previous decade as a bit player and in B-Westerns before his friend John Ford insisted he star in this one. But, I wonder if this was a break-out for Westerns as well, as this was nominated for 7 Academy Awards and won 2 (Best Music, which, sure, and Thomas Mitchell won Best Supporting Actor for playing the drunken doctor, which was an odd choice and the only acting nomination it got). Anyway, it’s fine movie — a bunch of strangers end up on a stage going from somewhere in Arizona to Lordsburg, New Mexico, right through Apache country when Geronimo is stirring things up, and adventure ensues — and Ford shoots it beautifully, as he discovered Monument Valley in this movie and decided it was groovy (hilariously, it seems like the stagecoach never actually leaves the area, as Ford shot it so much)! Wayne is fairly wooden, as always; Mitchell overacts as Doc Boone; Claire Trevor (who gets top billing) occasionally overacts a bit as Dallas, the prostitute who’s run out of town by the moral ladies of Arizona (it’s 1939, so they never say why she is run out of town, but because back then people could apparently understand subtext, it’s clear what her job is), but she also provides the ethical core of the story (as an aside: is Claire Trevor wildly underrated? she won an Oscar for Key Largo, had already been nominated for one by the time this movie was made, and although I haven’t seen a lot of her movies, she’s always very good in them, but you rarely hear of her as an acting powerhouse, and I wonder why); John Carradine has fun as the gambler who takes far too much interest in Louise Platt, the pregnant lady who’s trying to reunite with her husband the cavalry officer (Carradine’s presence is never really explained — he obviously has some connection to Platt’s Mrs. Mallory, but what it is remains mysterious); Berton Churchill fulminates as the banker with a secret (and at one point he claims that what the country really needs is a businessman as president — how’s that working out, Mr. Gatewood?); and Andy Devine provides comic relief as the whiny stagecoach driver. It’s probably for the best that Ford doesn’t do much with the Apaches — they do attack, but they remain just a plot device to get some action in the movie — because by just showing them in action and not letting them speak, he avoids making them too stereotypical (they’re still just savages who attack the good white people, but there’s no indication they’re stupid drunkards, which is how Indians were often portrayed back then … and to be fair, Ford seemed to be much better at portraying Indians than most directors of this era). It’s an exciting movie that zips along nicely, and while the coda — once they reach Lordsburg — is a bit anticlimactic (Wayne wants to get to Lordsburg for a good reason, but it doesn’t resolve terribly well), it’s still quite good. Check it out when you have a chance!
Volunteers (1985). It had been a while since I’d watched Volunteers, so when it came up on cable recently, I decided to re-watch it. It’s still a fun movie, coming right before Hanks decided that comedy was not for him and he’d get the Oscars if he switched to dramatic work (he did make The Money Pit and Dragnet after this, but he also made Nothing in Common a year after this, and then Big, which was funny/not funny, and then he was off to the races!). He still has that smarmy charm that made him such a good comedic actor — it’s there in Splash and Bachelor Party, but here it’s turned up a bit — and he does a good job making Lawrence Bourne III, as sleazy as he is, someone who’s fun to spend time with, even when he’s dismissing Rita Wilson because she won’t have sex with him. Wilson is fine, Candy does nice work as Tom Tuttle from Tacoma (I get that his transition from all-American dude to Communist is supposed to be funny, and it is, but it still feels weird, especially because he snaps out of it so quickly), and Gedde Watanabe has fun as the one dude in the village who understands English and becomes Hanks’s Guy Friday. There’s less racism than you might expect, there’s some gay panic that’s completely unnecessary, and Nicholas Meyer, the director, does a decent job making all the people in power — whether American or Thai — are ridiculous and silly (Meyer, of course, was the director of Time After Time — the time-traveling Jack the Ripper movie — then Wrath of Khan, then The Day After — yes, the nuclear war TV movie — and then … this movie — man, that’s quite a resumé!), so there’s that. It’s funny, and the Bridge on the River Kwai parallels are fun, and it might be a minor entry in the Hanks filmography (I mean, it did get him a wife, so good for them!), but it’s a fun one!
Cry of the City (1948). Victor Mature and Richard Conte star as a cop and a thief who grew up in the same neighborhood, so Mature is close to Conte’s family, for instance. At the beginning of the movie, Conte is already in custody, having been arrested for killing a cop, a crime we learn very little about, which seems odd as Conte is not supposedly murderous until he becomes desperate, and there are hints that the cop was crooked. But it’s the 1940s, and we have no time for nuance! Conte has been shot, too, so he’s sent to a hospital, from which he escapes laughably easily, so Mature gets on his trail. Conte is trying to get out of town, but it’s the 1940s, so you know he’s going to pay dearly for his crimes! It’s a pretty good movie — neither Mature nor Conte was the best actor, but they’re good and square-jawed, and that’s all they need to be — and it’s fun to see Mature track Conte and Conte try to get away. Shelley Winters shows up as one of Conte’s girls, and Debra Paget makes her film debut at … 14? As the woman Conte wants to run away with? That’s strange. I mean, it’s the Golden Age, so stylists made everyone — no matter if they were aged 15, 30, or 50 — look about 30, so she doesn’t look that young, but … still weird. Anyway, it’s not a bad noir movie, and some of it was shot on the mean streets of New York, and the cinematography is pretty keen, so it’s not a bad thing to watch on a gloomy Saturday, which is when I watched it!
Out of the Past (1947). This is another nifty noir movie starring Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas (Mitchum was already a leading man, while Douglas — in only his third movie — was not, but this helped make him one) as a private detective who gets hired by a criminal-esque guy (Douglas, whose business we never learn but who cheats on his taxes, so it’s safe to say he at least skirts the edge of the law) to find his girl and bring her back to him. Said girl (Jane Greer) shot Douglas a few times (he got better) and stole $40,000 from him (although she denies it, and we do find out who’s telling the truth), so he’s keen to see her again. The movie begins in Bridgeport, California (which is near the Nevada state line and a little bit south of Lake Tahoe), where Mitchum is running a gas station and dating a sweet girl, played by Virginia Huston. One day a shady character shows up who knows Mitchum from the old days, so Mitchum has to go and meet Douglas in Lake Tahoe. He takes his girl along and tells her about his past — how Douglas hired him, how he tracked Jane Greer to Acapulco, how he fell for her and they decided to hide out in San Francisco, but how Mitchum’s old partner tracked them down and wanted a payoff, but Greer shot him while he and Mitchum fought. Greer ran off, and Mitchum ended up in Bridgeport. When he meets Douglas again, Greer is back with Douglas and Douglas wants Mitchum to pay off his debt. Murder, theft, and betrayal ensue!!!! It’s a good movie — Mitchum does his laconic thing, Douglas is very intense (apparently the styles matched the actors, and it took a while for them to get along), and Greer is terrific as the femme fatale that you don’t quite trust but also think maybe she’s really the “good girl” after all. Rhonda Fleming as a secondary femme fatale does nice work in her limited screen time, and even Huston, who’s a true good girl, does nice work in her limited time. It’s a beautiful movie to look at — like Cry of the City, the director and cinematographer knew how to shoot a movie — and it’s a typical 1940s movie in that anyone even remotely connected to crime has to pay for it. Mitchum doesn’t seem like a bad guy and he doesn’t seem to do anything wrong, but he’s associated with criminals, so 1940s morality comes for him! Both Mitchum and Douglas were around 30 when this was made and kind of at peak hotness, and Greer was 22 and Fleming was 23, so there are a lot of attractive people in this movie!
The Fury (1978). I didn’t mean to watch two Kirk Douglas movies in a row, but that’s how it worked out, and because I’m doing it in this chaotic format, you get to read about them one after the other, so there you go! This is De Palma’s follow-up to Carrie, of course, and it’s clear that he’s still working through some things and hasn’t quite been able to make a really great movie yet, even 18 years and 11 features into his career. This movie can be a mess, but it’s an entertaining, bonkers mess, more Phantom of the Paradise than Carrie (even though telekinesis is a plot point in both this and Carrie), as there are some goofy plot holes, goofy characters, and oddball tangents that don’t make a ton of sense but are still fun to watch. Douglas is the father of Andrew Stevens, who has some kind of “ability” that Douglas, in the beginning, wants him to learn how to control, which is why he’s sending him to a special school in Chicago with John Cassavetes, who’s Douglas’s old buddy. They’re in Israel in the beginning, and suddenly there’s a terrorist attack by sinister-looking Arabs, and when Douglas is apparently killed, Cassavetes is able to take Stevens away. Douglas is not dead, of course, and Cassavetes staged the attack just so he could get Stevens away from Douglas. Douglas and Cassavetes both work for a Shadowy Government Agency™, it’s clear, but it’s not clear if Douglas is still working for them a year later, when he finally tracks down where Stevens is (I mean, he knows the name of the Institute where they take him and that it’s in Chicago, so who knows what he was doing for that year). Meanwhile, Amy Irving is exhibiting some of the same telepathic/telekinetic abilities as Stevens supposedly has, so her mother sends her to the Institute, as well, where she begins to have a psychic connection with Stevens, who’s been taken somewhere else because the government wants to use him … I guess as a psychic assassin, although nobody ever really says. Douglas manages to get Irving out of the Institute, and they track down Stevens, who has been turned into a monster by Cassavetes and his SGA™ scientists. Oh dear. De Palma has a lot of fun doing the death scenes, as you might expect, as the people who are killed generally deserve everything that’s coming to them.
Like I said, bonkers. But still fun. Douglas is intense but occasionally — as in one of the weird tangents where he flirts with an old woman and ties up her son (played by Gordon Jump of WKRP in Cincinnati fame) and the son’s wife — goofy; Irving really gets into the role; Stevens is either a good actor or he really is menacing, because even in his early scenes, there’s some scary stuff going on with him that comes out fully later; Carrie Snodgress does well with the unenviable role of “sacrificial victim” — the moment we find out she’s Douglas’s girlfriend and mole inside the Institute, she might as well have a big target on her back; Cassavetes was apparently a douchebag to De Palma because he was a different style director than De Palma, ignoring the fact that Cassavetes wasn’t actually directing the movie; and Charles Durning and Carol Eve Rossen are surprisingly sympathetic doctors at the Institute who do seem to want what’s best for the people there but have sold their souls to the Government Devil. The special effects are pretty cool — the two major deaths at the end are really well done, gore-wise — and while the movie is a bit too long, De Palma does a nice job building up the tension until it explodes, something he always does very well. There are some fun quasi-cameos — Jump, of course, and Jim Belushi is apparently in the movie, although he’s just in a crowd and you have to be watching for him, but Dennis Franz gets a longer role as one of the cops that Douglas hijacks when he’s on the run from the SGA™, and Daryl Hannah at 17/18 years old is one of Irving’s classmates. It’s worth a look — De Palma movies are always interesting to look at — but it does have some flaws! Plus, look at all the great 1970s hair styles in the trailer!
The Day of the Jackal (1973). I swear I saw this … in school, no less, in the late 1980s. In high school (so 1986-1989), we would have assemblies where we would watch movies — I know we saw Mary Queen of Scots in one — and I don’t remember if I saw this there or in a class, but I know I saw it. While I was watching this, I kept thinking I had seen it before, and the final scene confirmed it, because I remember that clearly. Why did we watch it in school? Beats me. It’s a political thriller, sure, so maybe in a history class, even though it’s about France in the 1960s, which we certainly didn’t learn about? I don’t know. But I saw it, I swear!
Anyway, it’s a good, tense movie, far better than the Richard Gere/Bruce Willis remake (which isn’t terrible, but it’s just kind of there). Edward Fox was relatively unknown, which director Fred Zinnemann wanted, even though he thinks it hurt the box office, and he’s very good playing the icy assassin, and Michael Lonsdale (Hugo Drax!!!!) as the cop who hunts him down does a nice job, too (with help from Derek Jacobi, looking really young even though he was 34 or so at the time). The quasi-documentary style of the movie works very well, as it tends to be more tense because Zinnemann eschews music and films it almost as if it’s a “found-footage” movie. Fox is very meticulous about his mission, although he does make one mistake early in the movie when he chooses his codename (and the men who hire him make another mistake by referring to him as the “Jackal” somewhat cavalierly), and he knows his identity is blown and he has a chance to get away but he decides to go through with it anyway, which seems foolish (he had already gotten a considerable amount of money from the men who hired him). But he has to go through with his attempt to kill de Gaulle, because the plot says he does, and it’s very well done how he eludes the police and how Lonsdale is able to track him down. It was filmed quite a bit on location, and that works well, too, because you really get a sense of where Fox is and what he’s doing. A lot of people die (Fox is really good at killing people quickly and quietly, which is not realistic, and I wonder if it was a censor thing, although there is a bit of nudity, so perhaps not?) but it’s very bloodless, so maybe that’s why we could watch in high school (and the nudity is very brief and not sexual, so maybe it was easy to snip or my high school just left it in)? It’s a cool thriller.
Berlin Express (1948). The poster for this movie reads “Trapped on a Train of Terror!” which sounds pretty keen but doesn’t really describe the movie. First of all, nobody is trapped on the train. Second, most of it does not take place on a train. Third of all, it’s not really a train of terror — I mean, someone dies on it and someone else is almost killed, but it’s not like some evil person is stalking all the passengers or something. Despite the somewhat false advertising, this is a pretty good noir-adjacent movie that’s more about international intrigue than bad men and woman making bad choices, which is why it’s probably not true noir. Merle Oberon gets top billing, although Robert Ryan seems more like the star (Oberon had already been nominated for an Oscar and Ryan had not yet, so maybe she was just the bigger name?), but it’s also a pretty decent ensemble cast, so maybe that’s why Oberon is listed first. Anyway, the movie is set in post-war Europe (it was the first American movie filmed in post-war Germany, and producer Bert Granet — who later kind of discovered Rod Serling — had to get the cooperation of the various occupying governments to shoot there), as a bunch of people from the countries involved in the war — an American, an Englishman, and French dude, a French woman, a Russian soldier, and a few Germans — board a train in Paris headed to Berlin via Frankfurt. One of them is trying to come up with a plan for Germany which involves cooperation with the Allies, and he becomes the target of Nazis who want to revive the Third Reich (weirdly, no one ever calls them Nazis). He vanishes in Frankfurt, and Oberon, Ryan, Charles Korvin (as the French dude), Robert Coote (the English dude), and Roman Toporow (the Russian dude) try to find him. There’s a lot of fun double-crossing and twists and turns, and the scenery is amazing — director Jacques Tourneur and DP Lucien Ballard get a lot of footage of the wreckage of Frankfurt and Berlin, and there’s a haunting quality to a lot of the movie, as it’s so soon after the war and we know how raw everything is, even if it’s a fictional movie. The acting is fine, but nothing special — I like Oberon, but she feels a bit miscast here, and Ryan is just there to be square-jawed and ‘Murican, and he does that with his eyes closed. It’s a tense thriller and it looks amazing. Who needs great acting when you have that? It’s not too long — just under 90 minutes — and the narration is a bit much (apparently the filmmakers wanted to give context to what’s going on, because it’s a bit complicated, but sometimes it’s just too much … as in, we don’t really need to know that the U.S. Army has appropriated the IG Farben building in Frankfurt as their headquarters, do we?), and it’s an interesting, entertaining movie. Watch this and The Third Man some night, and that should do you!
The Ipcress File (1965). This “anti-James Bond” spy thriller, along with Alfie (which Caine got based on his performance in this movie), made Michael Caine a star, and it’s not hard to see why — despite his love of classical music and coffee in this movie, he kind of embodies the rebellious 1960s in this movie, and he’s certainly easy on the eyes. As Harry Palmer, he doesn’t quite exude sex appeal like Connery in the early Bonds, but he still has that insouciance that filmmakers in this decade in particular but also in movies in general think men need to show to score with women, and he’s intense when he has to be in pursuing the case of important scientists who seem to lose interest in their life’s work for no reason. One of them is kidnapped, and when he’s returned, he has lost his ability to speak on his subject. Now, what the bad guys exactly want in this movie is never explained — I guess making a nation’s scientists unable to do their jobs is good enough, as then their enemies will move ahead of them — but this movie is all about style, as it was specifically billed as a more realistic take on spycraft as a counter to the Bond movies. It certainly does that — there’s not a lot of glamor in this movie — and Caine sells the more taciturn, efficient, and dull spy who just goes about his business. He’s loaned out by his superior to another department to find out what happened to the kidnapped scientist, and it quickly becomes a question of who he can trust — of course, it’s a spy thriller, so maybe nobody? — and the movie does a good job showing the dark side of … bureaucracy, I guess, as his two superiors both seem to have ulterior motives, but he doesn’t know if it’s because they’re actually traitors or if it’s just that they want their section to get the glory. It gets a bit weird at the end, but overall, it’s a fine thriller. Sidney J. Furie directs it and Otto Heller shoots it almost like a noir movie — it’s very dark (but only once that I can recall does it really interfere with us seeing what’s going on) and it’s shot very well, with Dutch angles and shots from below and shots with a point of view of a random observer, almost like the audience itself is spying on these characters (a fight between Caine and a henchman, for instance, is filmed from far away and through a telephone box, so the red frames of the box hinder our view of it a bit, and it’s kind of neat). There’s a superb shot where Caine turns on a light and the shot is from above the lamp, and the lampshade encircles a dead body on the floor, and then we cut to Caine seeing the body, and he’s filmed from far back, with the shade bisecting the screen right above his head in a unsettling forced perspective view. Furie uses deep focus a few times very effectively, and as I must, I always have to wonder why more filmmakers don’t use deep focus, because it’s so nifty. It’s a cool-looking movie, because of Furie’s noir sensibilities (producer Harry Saltzman apparently hated Furie and claimed that the editor, Peter Hunt, really directed it, but Hunt denied this, and Saltzman seems like an asshole, so maybe we shouldn’t believe him), and it makes the efforts to make this an “anti-Bond” movie work quite well. (They do explain “Ipcress,” by the way, but it’s a bit silly, and I’d show the trailer, but dang! they give away a lot of it, so I don’t think I want to spoil a 60-year-old movie that many of you have probably seen, so I won’t! Here’s Caine in The Muppet Christmas Carol instead. Look at that awesome Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come!)
Thoughts? Questions? Comments? The floor is yours!
