Olde-tyme movies are always fun to check out, aren’t they?

I’ve been watching movies from all time periods, but the ones from before I was born have come up more frequently recently, so let’s take a look at some of them!

Mark of the Vampire (1935). This is one of Tod Browning’s last movies, as after the success of Dracula, he wrecked his goodwill with the financial disaster of Freaks (which I still haven’t seen, although it’s now considered a classic). So he didn’t have much say about this, which is why it feels a bit truncated, as it runs for only an hour and Browning wanted 20 extra minutes in it that the studio disallowed. Still, it’s a very clever vampire story, with Bela Lugosi showing up as the “count” (the notoriously litigious Bram Stoker estate obviously didn’t want Browning to use Stoker’s names, so he changed them) and his daughter, played by the strikingly beautiful Carroll Borland, haunting the castle outside a small town somewhere in Eastern Europe (the police officer on a murder case comes from Prague, and that’s the only indication we get of where we are). Lionel Barrymore hams it up wonderfully as the Van Helsing analog, investigating the deaths of a few people in the town, one of whom was a local aristocrat whose daughter and future son-in-law are being targeted. It moves along at a pretty good clip, and while some things don’t make sense once we know the entire story, it’s still a good, solid horror movie (which is, I guess, a very close remake of Browning’s silent 1927 movie, London After Midnight). It’s one of those movies that feels more “modern” than many of the flicks made in the 1930s. In fact, I’m a bit surprised someone hasn’t remade this. Jordan Peele should get on it!

Brother Orchid (1940). Edward G. Robinson plays an aging gangster who decides to retire and buy some class, but he goes to Europe and spends all his money, so he returns to New York and tries to take his gang back, only Humphrey Bogart, to whom he ceded control, doesn’t want to give it back. Bogie’s goons take Robinson out into the woods to kill him, but he manages to escape (with some bullets in him) and collapses outside a monastery, where the monks nurse him back to health (and he calls himself “Brother Orchid” – they sell flowers – to conceal his identity). It’s a strange movie, because Robinson is kind of a douchebag (he’s not a complete ass, especially considering the times, but he’s not the greatest dude in the world), so his journey toward some kind of Christian charity doesn’t feel very real. The monastery parts are, of course, crucial to the movie, but they still don’t hold up compared to the “outside world” parts. It’s not a dark movie, but Bogart is menacing, and he feels like he’s in a different movie. Ann Sothern is terrific as Robinson’s long-suffering girlfriend, who seizes the bull by the horns during his European sojourn and makes a name for herself, which Robinson wants her to stop doing the instant he returns (as I noted, he’s kind of a douchebag). Ralph Bellamy is also seemingly in the wrong movie, playing a Western rancher flashing his cash in the big city – he digs Sothern, but defers to Robinson whenever he’s around and does some of the dirty work for Robinson. It’s not a hopeless movie – the cast is too good – but it is somewhat odd, and it would probably work better if Robinson’s ethical journey was more interesting. Oh well.

High Sierra (1941). This isn’t the greatest movie, but it, along with The Maltese Falcon (a much better movie), established Bogart as a leading man (after George Raft famously turned them both down), so it’s an important movie, and it’s certainly not bad, just a bit messy. Bogart is pardoned after spending eight years in prison, and the guy who got him the pardon, Big Mac, got him out only so he could head up a heist in the Sierra Nevadas (Bogart’s in prison in Indiana) at a posh resort. His three accomplices are greenhorns, played by Alan Curtis, Arthur Kennedy, and Cornel Wilde in his first credited role (he’s the inside guy) – Curtis was 31, Wilde was 28, and Kennedy was only 26 at the time of shooting. Curtis hooked up with a girl – played by Ida Lupino – in Los Angeles before heading up to the mountains, and Bogart of course ends up falling for her (Lupino, who was 22 at the time, was top-billed because Bogart wasn’t a star yet and the studio thought she’d be a draw). The three accomplices are idiots, of course, but they manage to pull off the heist, although it then goes horribly wrong. Eventually, Bogart and Lupino are on the run, and they end up on Mount Whitney, because why not (geographically, the movie is a mess, as everyone seems to jump from the Sierras to L.A. in no time at all). Too much time is spent on the subplot with Bogart and a farmer’s family (said farmer is played by Henry Travers, who would later tell Jimmy Stewart how much everyone’s life sucks without him), as Bogart falls for the granddaughter, played by 15-year-old Joan Leslie (she’s playing someone a bit older – 20 or so – but it’s still creepy). It’s supposed to show how Bogart wants a normal life, but it just drags the picture down and takes away time showing the heist, which ought to be the focus, especially because Bogart keeps commenting on the green-ness of Curtis and Kennedy and the untrustworthiness of Wilde, all of which plays a part in Bogart’s downfall. There’s also the worker at the camp where they plan the heist, played by Willie Best. He’s the comic relief, which is unnecessary, and of course, being the comic relief in the 1940s and being a black man in the 1940s means cringey racist stuff, but luckily Best isn’t in the movie all that much, so he saves some of his dignity. The reason the movie works is because Bogart is really good, showing us a man who’s tired of this shit but doesn’t know what else to do with his life, and his tragedy, of course, is that even when he wants to change, nobody will let him (Leslie does a really nice job with a role that doesn’t seem like much, showing why Bogart can’t be in her life without being obvious about it). Lupino is superb, too, as she’s a woman in the 1940s, and perhaps the audience of that time wouldn’t understand her yearning for freedom as much as more modern audiences would, but while the script does make it a bit less subtle, Lupino’s acting makes it clear that she’s a prisoner as much as Bogart is. The scenery is also terrific (it was filmed on location at Mount Whitney and around Lone Pine for a lot of the scenes, which is neat), and it’s occasionally exciting, but it’s just unfocused for too much of the film. It’s worthwhile to see, but shouldn’t be at the top of your list.

The Beast With Five Fingers (1946). Poor Peter Lorre. If he ever shows up in a movie, you can be pretty confident he’s going to be, if not the actual villain, at least somebody creepy whom you wouldn’t want to hang out with. In this movie, he plays the secretary of a rather unpleasant pianist who changes his will one night and immediately ends up dead (he falls out of his wheelchair and tumbles down the stairs). It’s unclear if he was murdered, but, I mean, come on – of course he was! Lorre is one of the suspects, of course, but soon weird stuff starts happening and it seems as if the pianist’s hand, which was severed after his death (he could only use one thanks to a stroke some years earlier) is actually the culprit, as it seems to be stalking people. Oh dear. It’s a pretty weird and creepy movie, and of course Lorre has a lot to do with that – the rest of the cast is somewhat bland, unfortunately, but the effects are pretty neat, and the mystery is not a bad one. I’m not going to tell you if the hand is actually the killer – go watch the movie!

The African Queen (1951). Bogart finally won an Oscar for this (making him the final Best Actor winner to be born in the 19th century), but this is clearly a “make-up” Oscar, as he’s perfectly fine in this but better in several other movies. This is a bit melodramatic, like a lot of olde-tymey movies, but it’s not like Bogart is bad, naturally, just not as good as he was in other movies (he was better in Casablanca, for instance, which prior to this was his only nomination). Hepburn had already won one and been nominated three other times; she’d win three (!) more and get nominated four other times, because she’s freakin’ great, and she probably didn’t deserve to win here, and she didn’t (Vivien Leigh won for Streetcar, because she’s amazing in that movie). This is a good movie, although it is, as I noted, a bit melodramatic, but it was the Fifties – what are you going to do? It’s a bit ridiculous – Hepburn wants to blow up a German warship on a lake so that the British can use the lake to … do something, and she wants Bogart to use his boat – the “African Queen” – to do it. The reasons she want to do this, beyond simplistic patriotism, are not really good, and nobody mentions that it’s Bogart’s sole means of making a living, so what the hell is he going to do if he blows it up? The Germans are cartoonish villains in this, but they’re not in it that much, so that’s okay. Basically, John Huston stuck Bogart and Hepburn on a boat and let their characters fall in love in a tough environment, and the movie works perfectly well. The scenery is superb (it was filmed in Uganda and the Congo), the chemistry between Bogart and Hepburn is pleasant, and Huston and co-writer James Agee make sure that Hepburn is an equal partner to Bogart. It seems like this could easily be remade – some movies shouldn’t be because of the excellent cast, but while these two are titans of the acting world, the story and scenery carry a lot of it, and George Clooney and, say, Jennifer Jason Leigh could probably pull this off. Somebody get on it!

The Gazebo (1959). This is a comedy, so the fact that Glenn Ford spends most of it trying to cover up a murder is a bit odd, but we just have to roll with it. Ford is a television producer who’s getting blackmailed for some reason (we do find out what it is, but because it’s 1959, the characters discuss it obliquely, plus it’s part of the reveal of the movie, so I won’t get into it), so he asks his friend, assistant DA Carl Reiner, how to kill someone (as a hypothetical for a show he’s working on, although Reiner is suspicious). He tries to pull off the crime, but things go horribly and hilariously wrong. Eventually he tries to bury the body under the new gazebo in his back yard (built by John McGiver, who enlivens anything he’s in despite his deadpan-ness), but that goes horribly and hilariously wrong, too. He’s also trying to act normal for his wife, Debbie Reynolds, who’s kind of suspicious of things, too. It’s a silly movie, but Ford’s serious mien works to his advantage in the film because he looks so unlike someone who would have these problems. Reynolds is sexy as hell, and it’s kind of refreshing – for 1959 – that they imply that she and Ford have a healthy sex life. Martin Landau shows up, too, which is fun. It’s a fun and inconsequential movie, but aren’t they all, really?

The Lost World (1960). I’ve read The Lost World, so I thought an Irwin Allen version of it might be fun, and it is, although it’s not as fun as it could be. Claude Rains, sporting a ridiculous fake beard (couldn’t he just grow one?) is Professor Challenger, who comes back from the Amazon with tales of dinosaurs and takes an expedition back to prove it. He’s joined by Michael Rennie as a big game hunter, David Hedison as a reporter, Richard Haydn as his rival, and Jill St. John, there for the sex appeal (none of the men want her to be there; the movie is a bit too regressive for my liking). What’s most annoying about St. John being there is that when she volunteers for it (which is shot down by all the men), she claims she can shoot and ride and is a tomboy, but once they get to the Amazon, she spends her time shrieking and running away from everything and being protected by Rennie or Hedison. In Brazil they’re joined by Jay Novello and Fernando Lamas, playing natives who can get them to the plateau where the “lost world” exists. In a group with only two non-white men (and, eventually, a native woman), I’ll give you one guess who the only people who die are. Sigh. Anyway, people criticize the effects because Allen wanted stop-motion dinosaurs but it was too expensive, so they used iguanas, monitors, and baby alligators with various things stuck on them to simulate dinosaurs. It’s really not terrible – it’s not great, of course, but stop-motion wouldn’t have been that much better, if at all. So they did what they could, and it’s not too bad. The movie is sexist and racist, sure, but it’s not as awful as you think, especially if you consider the time period. The actors are fine, even St. John (when she’s not shrieking and running away), and Lamas gets to play his ukulele a lot, so there’s that.

Village of the Damned (1960). George Saunders, who always plays the exact same character, plays the exact same character he always does, this time in an isolated English village where everyone falls asleep one day for three hours and then, nine months later, 12 women give birth to 12 weird children. You know the plot!!!!! This is a pretty good horror movie, with budget constraints meaning that we don’t see too much weirdness from the children, but they splurged on their eye effects, so we know when they’re being evil! I do like how they don’t really explain what’s going on with the children, as it adds a bit of creepiness to the whole thing. It’s also unclear why all the children have to go to lessons with Saunders when they all share knowledge. It’s a nifty, short movie, the black and white works very well, and the kids are just freaky (they had padding on under their wigs to make their heads look elongated, which adds to the weirdness). And Barbara Shelley is easy on the eyes, which is also pleasant.

Harper (1966). This is a well reviewed movie, but I’m not particularly impressed by it. Paul Newman is terrific, of course, but Newman is always terrific. The cast is strong – Lauren Bacall has a small role, and she tears into it, Robert Wagner is a louche playboy, Pamela Tiffin is Bacall’s step-daughter, someone who knows she’s sexy and isn’t shy about exploiting it, Janet Leigh is Newman’s long-suffering wife, and Shelly Winters has a blast playing an over-the-hill actress. The plot is needlessly convoluted – Bacall hires Newman to find her missing husband, not because she loves him (she, in fact, hates him), but because she wants to make sure he isn’t squandering their fortune on some bimbo. This leads Newman to a whole host of seedy characters, from Winters and her husband, to Strother Martin as a weird cult leader, to Julie Harris as a junkie lounge singer. There are all sorts of plot threads that lead to MacGuffins, and they just take up time. The problem is that Newman’s character, Lew Harper, just isn’t that compelling a dude. Newman tries his best, but Harper is kind of a dick, and he’s also kind of passive, so he kind of stumbles into things that he really should see coming. In so many mysteries, the writer makes things complicated to throw us off the track, but the solution is always fairly simple, so the bad guys are easily discerned. Such is the case here. It’s not a bad movie, by any means, but I’m not sure why so many people love it.

Games (1967). This is a terrific movie until the end, when it flounders a bit – not enough to ruin it, but enough to annoy. James Caan, looking incredible baby-faced (he was 26/27 at the time), and Katharine Ross, looking luminous as always, are a married couple with a weird life – we meet them demonstrating “galvanic electricity” to a group of bluebloods, but they don’t seem to be conning them out of their money. We learn that Ross is the rich one of the couple, so they don’t need money, and I guess they just like being weirdos. They live at 11 E. 64th Street in Manhattan, which is just off Central Park, so it’s a very nice neighborhood and a very nice brownstone. Ross meets a woman outside one day who tells her she knows a friend of Ross’s, so Ross invites her in. The woman, played by Simone Signoret, turns out to be a saleslady who conned her way inside, but before anything else can happen, she collapses from “heat prostration.” Ross allows her to stay, and she begins to fit into their weird world a bit, even though she criticizes their mania for harmless games (they have a game room with pinball machines and the like). Soon enough, someone is dead, they’re covering it up, Signoret is acting weirder and weirder, and things spiral. It’s not too hard to figure out what’s going on, and that’s fine, but the ending feels far too tidy for me – I don’t want to spoil anything, but it raises far too many questions. Caan is fine as the dissolute art collector, Ross doesn’t have enough to do, but she looks great doing it, and Signoret dominates the proceedings, because that’s the kind of actor she is. The rest of the cast doesn’t show up very often, but Don Stroud, a reliable actor, does good work as a delivery man who wants to move in their weird world, Estelle Winwood is always fun to see, Ian Wolfe shows up as Ross’s nosey doctor, and George Furth, perhaps most famous for the dude who won’t open the train door for Butch and Sundance (“Woodcock!”) has a small part, too. There are some Lichtenstein rip-offs in the house, too, which are fun to see. In fact, the movie is shot very well, with the art on the walls forming a crucial part of the scenery and director Curtis Harrington using some nice deep focus occasionally. It’s a nifty movie, and I’m just a bit bummed that it ended somewhat poorly. Que sera, sera.

So those are some more movies from prior to 19 May 1971, when I was born. Go check out some old movies, you people! You never know what cool stuff you might find!