What? More movies? Let’s check them out!

Yes, the movies never stop! Will I watch more recent movies, as one commenter (you know who you are!!!!) suggested last time I did this? We shall see, won’t we?!?!?

Ring of Fire (1961). This is not a terribly good movie, despite some good stuff in it. David Janssen stars as a deputy sheriff in the Pacific Northwest (the town, it seems, is Vernonia, Oregon, but parts of it were filmed in Washington, and they’re tracking the bad guys to Aberdeen, Washington, and they talk about state’s capital punishment being done by hanging, which was in Washington) who, along with his partner, gets taken hostage by three desperados who robbed a bank in Tacoma and were on the lam. They leave the other deputy (Janssen tells them he’ll help them escape if they let his partner go, because that dude is married with kids and Janssen isn’t) and try to make it through the forest. One of them dies, but the cops get the other two … just in time for a big forest fire to start (I mean, of course — look at the title of the movie!). The pace of the movie is weird — Janssen and his partner walk into a diner in town and immediately arrest the three thieves — played by Frank Gorshin, James Johnson, and Joyce Taylor — with absolutely no preamble — it’s literally the first scene in the movie, and they mention the armed robbery very quickly and only once. The thieves get the drop on Janssen and his partner very easily and hilariously — Taylor has a gun on her, but because it’s the 1960s, it was inappropriate for a man to search a woman, so they just didn’t find the gun. Once they’re in the forest, the balance of power goes back and forth, as Janssen manages to get the gun at one point before Gorshin gets it back, and Taylor not-subtly-at-all is trying to seduce Janssen, and because it’s the 1960s, at one point they cut away before we can see if anything happens (which is a plot point, but, I mean, of course they cut away!). The hostage situation only takes up about half the movie before it becomes a fight against the fire, which is odd. Plus, Janssen keeps talking about the thieves as teens or youths when it’s clear they’re Steve Buscemi-type fellow kids if anything — Janssen was 29 during filming, while Taylor was 28 and Gorshin was 27, and look nothing like teenagers. This becomes a problem when Gorshin accuses Janssen of having sex with Taylor, because she’s “underage,” but she looks like what she is — a grown-ass woman … plus, they have no idea how old she is, because she won’t say and Gorshin could easily be lying. She goes along with the charge because she thinks it will get her out of jail even though she digs Janssen, and the cops seem inclined to believe the two crooks over the upstanding deputy, which seems odd for 1961. Then, at the end of the movie, it seems like they’re going to get together, even though, apparently, she really is underage! What the crap, filmmakers?!?! Despite all that, the movie does have a few things going for it. It’s filmed on location, and the scenery is gorgeous, and it’s fun to see Janssen and the others navigate the natural world. Second, the fire is pretty cool. They used footage of fires for some of it, of course, and in other places, companies were going to destroy buildings so they let the filmmakers burn them. The bridge they try to escape on was old and decrepit, so they were allowed to destroy it. Apparently, the train is still there, because it was too difficult to remove it! They used special effects to show the town burning, of course, but it’s well done and looks pretty keen. Finally, Joyce Taylor is pretty easy on the eyes, so there’s that. It’s not a terribly good movie, but it’s not the worst way to spend 100 minutes or so.

Arsène Lupin (1932). Well, this certainly doesn’t bode well for my attempts to watch more recent movies, does it …?

Anyway, this is the first of several movies in which John and Lionel Barrymore co-starred, as Lionel plays Guerchard, the detective who’s about to retire (today, that would mean he’s dead meat, but they did things differently back in the Thirties!) and John plays the Duke of Charmerace, whom Lionel believes is the famous thief Arsène Lupin. Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s not wildly deferential to him when he finds out he’s a duke, but he’s still suspicious! We’re pretty sure it’s J. Barrymore, too, but the film does a nice job showing that any of the three main characters — the Barrymores and Karen Morley as the mysterious Sonia — might be the thief, so that’s neat. It’s not that good a movie, unfortunately — it’s a bit silly, and the cops seem wildly incompetent, and John B. always come across as the slightest bit skeevy, which works when he’s supposed to be kind of pathetic as well but not when he’s supposed to be suave. Why the filmmakers had Lupin steal the “Mona Lisa” and roll it up when it’s famously painted on wood is beyond me, but the heist is kind of ridiculous all around. The best scene in the movie is when J. Barrymore meets Morley, as she’s in his bed totally starkers (her dress needed to be mended, she says) and they have a very fun ribald conversation that, a few years later, wouldn’t have made it anywhere near the screen thanks to the Hays Code. Here, though, it’s very well done. Anyway, it’s not a bad movie, just not very good. And Morley was blacklisted in 1947 because she wouldn’t cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Good for her!

The House on 92nd Street (1945). This is a very odd movie, as it’s very loosely based on real events and even uses actual FBI agents in small roles, but the central conceit is fictional and the filmmakers crammed in stuff about the atomic bomb very late, as it was released only a month after Hiroshima and they were allowed to use it in the story. It’s a bit boring, unfortunately, as they don’t seem to want to make it too exciting because it would lose its verisimilitude, but that means, for instance, that the ostensible hero doesn’t do much to thwart the Nazi spy ring he’s infiltrated. William Eythe plays that infiltrator, a dude recruited by the FBI, sent to Hamburg to be trained by the Nazis, then sent back to New York to work with some spies in the city. The minute the Nazis do their due diligence on Eythe, they figure out he’s up to something, but it takes a while, so he’s able to fool them and their masters for a time. A mysterious ringleader is trying to get information on the atomic bomb, and the reveal about said ringleader is pretty clever, I must say. Eythe, unfortunately, spends the climax drugged out of his gourd, which is frustrating. Lloyd Nolan plays the FBI agent who recruits Eythe, and he goes about his business with Joe Friday-esque efficiency. The most interesting character is Elsa, played by Signe Hasso, who runs a dress shop in the titular house and is the main Nazi spy. She doesn’t get much depth (any character development might make her sympathetic, and we can’t have that), but she goes about her work with ruthlessness and verve. The movie is unashamedly pro-FBI and pro-“locking foreigners up,” and it’s an interesting snapshot of the times, but it’s just not that good. Oh well!

Confess, Fletch (2022). I liked both Fletch movies back in the day (yes, even the second one had its moments, mostly to do with Cleavon Little), so I had some hopes for Jon Hamm’s turn with the character, and he’s pretty good as Irwin Fletcher. The movie itself is strange, as it’s kind of meandering, like the Chevy Chase ones, but because those movies leaned into Chase’s comedic talents a bit more (what with the goofy disguises and very deadpan humor), it didn’t matter as much. Hamm is a decent comedic actor, certainly, but he’s definitely not going for “broad” in this movie, so the shaggy dog-ness of the plot kind of works against it. Fletch is in Boston, and when he gets to the apartment that his Italian girlfriend rented for him (from Italy), he finds a dead woman. He calls the cops (the wonderful Roy Wood and Ayden Mayeri), who think he did it. So he kind of has to find the killer just to clear his name. Meanwhile, he’s technically working for his girlfriend, because her father has been kidnapped and someone in Boston happened to sell a painting that had been stolen from the father and the father’s new wife (Marcia Gay Harden, having a grand time) is at odds with Fletch’s girlfriend, who thinks her new stepmother is a gold-digger and probably had something to do with the theft of the paintings and her father’s kidnapping. It’s convoluted, sure, but the movie isn’t confusing, not really. Fletch investigates, and Hamm does a really good job keeping calm in the midst of the chaos — he knows he’s innocent, so all he has to do is prove it! There are a good amount of moving parts, but the cast is very good — Kyle MacLachlan, Annie Mumolo, and John Slattery all do nice work — and while I don’t love Lorenza Izzo as Fletch’s girlfriend, she doesn’t wreck anything. The biggest issue, really, is that Fletch just stumbles into the solution to the crime, and it seems like he doesn’t do much to get there. I get that he’s a reporter and his instincts serve him well, but the answer to the mystery feels a bit weak. It is fun, though, to see Hamm having some fun — I always like it when “serious” actors get to loosen up a bit, and Hamm does well in slightly comedic roles (he’s quite good in Tag and Keeping Up with the Joneses, for instance) where he can weaponize his looks a bit and play against type. This is a fun “hang” movie — nothing special, but nice to check out and enjoy. It won’t change your life, but it’s certainly not a waste of your time.

The Venetian Affair (1966). My parents were in town when I watched this, and on the description, it has one (1) star and a 22% rating, and my mother said, “I’m not watching that!” My dad and I, however, love crappy movies, especially if they’re not that long (this is about 90 minutes), and this is, sadly, a pretty crappy movie. It’s kind of a rip-off of The Ipcress File, which I just watched, in that there’s a MacGuffin that is kind of ridiculous, there’s psychological torture, and the main character doesn’t really act like a spy. Robert Vaughn is the quasi-spy — technically he’s a journalist, but he is also an ex-spy who gets his latest assignment because of that — who gets sent to Venice after a strange explosion at a peace conference that kills a bunch of people. Boris Karloff, who can be a nice presence in a movie but doesn’t have much to do, is … someone important in the espionage game, it seems, and he compiles a report about the explosion that, apparently, everyone wants to get their hands on. Ed Asner, who runs the CIA station in Venice, tells Vaughn he wants him to investigate, partly because Vaughn’s ex-wife, Elke Sommer, is somehow involved. Karl Boehm (his Anglicized name; it’s really Karlheinz Böhm) is a mysterious villainous-type person who wants the report, but it’s unclear why. This is really a messy movie that feels like it’s been heavily edited — Sommer isn’t in the movie very much, and it’s never quite clear what her role is supposed to be and whether she is a villain or not; Vaughn kind of sleepwalks through the role; the MacGuffin makes no sense by the end; Boehm has a weird scheme that borders on science fiction, and it makes no sense — and while the scenery is very neat (a lot of it was filmed in Venice, and director Jerry Thorpe and cinematographer Milton Krasner shoot it quite keenly), it doesn’t make up for the messiness of the plot. Asner does a nice job being an officious bureaucrat, Felicia Farr is pretty good as the agent who thinks Vaughn is pretty groovy, and Roger Carmel is fun as the journalist who wants Vaughn to do his job instead of zipping around getting involved with hot women. Unfortunately, it’s not a terribly good movie, but … I don’t know, I sometimes dig watching lousy movies!

Wake Up Dead Man (2025). So far, I’ve liked the original Knives Out the least, which is strange. This isn’t as good as Glass Onion, but it’s still a good movie, and the reason I don’t like it as much, I think, is because the way Rian Johnson ends it. It’s a good summary of the mystery, and it fits with the theme of the movie, but it still feels a bit too rote. As usual, we get a main character who’s NOT Benoit Blanc — in this case, Father Jud Duplenticy, played by Josh O’Connor — who is sent to a small town in New York as “punishment” for hitting a deacon (who, his mentor Jeffrey Wright points out, everyone wants to hit), where he’s expected to help out Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, played with odd brio by Josh Brolin. Brolin, of course, has “murder victim” written all over him, but what’s interesting about it is that even though he’s a big ol’ douchebag, it seems that the only person who might want him dead is O’Connor, so it’s a nice twist on the traditional murder mystery. Brolin’s acolytes — Glenn Close as the church steward; Thomas Haden Church as the church handyman; Jeremy Renner as the town doctor; Kerry Washington as the church’s attorney and her adopted son, Daryl McCormack; Andrew Scott as a writer who’s gone down the right-wing conspiracy rabbit hole; Cailee Spaeny as a young woman with a physical disability that she thinks Brolin can cure — seem devoted to him, and they all think O’Connor did it. Mila Kunis as the town sheriff also thinks O’Connor did it, but she doesn’t have enough proof to arrest him. Daniel Craig shows up very late in the proceedings, it seems (the movie is pretty long, so he’s still in it a lot, but the set-up is fairly lengthy), and as it’s a seemingly impossible murder, he digs it. The solution is pretty clever, I admit, it just feels like the movie grinds a bit to a halt in the last 15 minutes or so. The movie is about faith and belief and becoming something more than yourself and whether you should fight for what you believe in aggressively or accept changes with grace, and it does a pretty good job with all of that. The MAGA-ness of some of the characters feels a bit forced (there’s a funny sight gag toward the end that also feels a bit ridiculous), but, as with anything that picks on right-wingers these days, it can’t quite match the ridiculousness of real life, so there is that. Craig is terrific, as usual, especially as he’s an atheist in the midst of people who believe in God rather fervently, and O’Connor does a good job as the priest who’s struggling with his own demons and the direction in which the church is heading. Close is fantastic — she’s far and away the best character of the townspeople, and she really nails it — but the rest of the cast is good, too. It’s just another good movie in the series, and honestly, Johnson and Craig can make as many of these as they please, and I’ll watch them!

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961). I mean, sure, this is a ridiculous movie, as the Van Allen belts cannot catch fire and getting rid of them by chucking a nuke at them would be a phenomenally bad idea, but when this movie was made, they had just been discovered, so I don’t hold that against the movie. It’s not meant to be too “realistic,” of course, so all the nit-picking you can do — the crew of a submarine smoking (even in 1961, I can’t imagine that was a thing), the women wearing high heels on board, the wonky science throughout — is just sour grapes, as this is supposed to be a fun adventure, and it is. The one thing I don’t think it too nit-picky is the manufactured drama, as Robert Sterling, playing the captain, seems to veer wildly between supporting Admiral Walter Pidgeon and opposing him, but even that isn’t a deal-breaker. This is just a fun, slightly goofy sci-fi-ish story in which Pidgeon and Sterling need to take their sub into the Pacific to shoot a nuke at the atmosphere to save the world. Of course! Peter Lorre, Joan Fontaine, Barbara Eden, and Frankie Avalon (???) are there too, and while the special effects are rudimentary, it’s one of those movies that looks impressive just because you’re aware of the limitations of the time period and the fact that it looks as good as it does is amazing. It’s not the greatest movie in the world, but it’s still nifty to see it.

The Neptune Factor (1973). Someone at FX has a nice sense of humor, because they had this and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea on back-to-back in the dead of night, when FXM Retro takes over the channel. This time, Walter Pidgeon is the scientist in charge of an ocean laboratory that falls into an abyss during an earthquake (the lab is on the Muir Seamount, which is northeast of Bermuda, which is why it’s odd that Canadians keep coming to help the expedition!). Ben Gazzara, who knows how to pilot the small sub that could conceivably rescue the men inside the sub (if they’re still alive, of course), shows up, claiming he’s just there to assess the damage for the insurance company (but we know he’s going to Do The Right Thing when it counts). He takes Ernest Borgnine, Chris Wiggins, and Yvette Mimieux down with him, and they have to try to reach the sub before the survivors’ air runs out (if there are survivors, of course). They have some adventures, as the sea life way down in the depths is larger than usual, and the fish don’t really take kindly to the intruders. This is better, technically, than VttBotS, but the low stakes — it’s a rescue mission, sure, but the world won’t end if the seven people under the water don’t survive — make it a bit boring, as it’s hard to get too emotionally invested in the men who went down with the lab (we don’t really know them that well before they disappear) or the rescuers, as they’re just doing a job (and occasionally disagreeing, as Gazzara takes a while to become heroic, but it’s usually very slight disagreements). The effects are pretty neat — they use regular-sized fish and models to make the fish look huge, and it works pretty well — and it’s not a bad movie by any means — I mean, you can always just look at Mimieux if things get boring — but it’s not anything special, either. Oh well.

Fantastic Voyage (1966). Those scamps at FXM Retro decided that two undersea adventures weren’t enough, so they chucked another voyage in a submarine (of course, not under the sea) into their mix a few days after the previous two, and I decided to check it out! This is both a very fun movie to watch and a profoundly silly one, as its central premise is wildly dumb. Stephen Boyd arrives at a top-secret facility where General Edmond O’Brien, in the most Frankenstein (the novel)-esque way, tells him that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. have been miniaturizing things for years, and he’s going to go on a mission where he’s wee. No explanation of how it works, how long they’ve been doing it, what they’ve actually accomplished with it — just “Hey, we shrink things!” The man in the coma that they’re going to save knows how to keep things tiny for more than an hour, which is the time limit right now, but the “other side” (I always love how a lot of movies back in the day never identified the bad guys, because we all knew it was Russia) tried to kill him (in possibly the worst assassination attempt in history) and put him in a coma. They have to fix the problem from the inside, so Boyd is sent with Arthur Kennedy, William Redfield, Donald Pleasance, and Raquel Welch inside the dude to do that. Redfield is the pilot of the submarine they’re on, Kennedy is the surgeon, and Pleasance is the doctor in charge of the dude’s care. Welch is technically Kennedy’s assistant, but she’s really there as eye candy (although, nicely enough, they only put her in distress once, and it’s not through her own “womanly” stupidity). There is, of course, a traitor on board, and if you can’t figure it out within about five minutes, I’m afraid you’re not allowed to watch movies anymore. As ridiculous the movie is — so much anatomical stuff is so wrong, and, I mean, not everything that is going to automatically expand in an hour gets out of the dude, so he’s going to die very quickly — it’s still very fun, and the special effects are actually quite cool. The blood vessels, the lungs, the brain, the ear — they’re all weird and neat, and the antibodies attacking are creepy. Like a lot of older movies, it ends very abruptly, with no denouement, so some things are left unexplained, but such is life. If you ignore the very wonky science (and why wouldn’t you?), this is just a nifty sci-fi movie. 1And, you know, Welch is always easy on the eyes!

The Detective (1968). It cracks me up that, technically, Die Hard is a sequel to this movie — Roderick Thorp, who wrote the book on which this is based, wrote a second novel that, after name changes and character changes, became Die Hard, and because Sinatra had right of first refusal for a sequel, they had to offer Bruce Willis’s part to him even though he was 73 years old at the time. I love weird shit like that.

Anyway, Sinatra plays Joe Leland, an NYPD detective who refuses to kiss ass, so he’s always getting in trouble with the higher-ups. I mentioned that in Bullitt (which came out in the same year), McQueen seems like the least rebellious “cop who plays by his own rules” ever, and it’s weird that Sinatra, of all people, is far more rebellious than McQueen is. Sinatra is called to investigate the murder of a gay man, the son of a prominent businessman (who never shows up in the movie), and he finds a dude who confesses and goes to the electric chair (even though New York had stopped executing anyone except cop-killers by this time). With that case closed, he’s approached by a very fetching Jacqueline Bissett, who says her husband, who threw himself off the top of a racetrack, was murdered, because whenever she tries to find out anything about the death, she hits roadblocks. Sinatra investigates, and finds out that the man he sent to the chair was innocent!!!! How do these cases connect? You must watch the movie!!!! Meanwhile, there’s the whole thing with Sinatra and Lee Remick, whom he marries and then splits from because she can’t stop screwing other men. Oh dear. And what about all the rich and powerful people engaged in some kind of land swindle?!?!? There’s a lot going on in this movie, as you can tell, and I do wish we’d seen less of Remick (as attractive as she is) and more about the cases, because it feels like there’s some meat left on the bone there, and Remick’s psychological issues, as relevant as they are in a movie that deals with sexuality and its diversity, aren’t as well developed as they could be. Sinatra is a bit of a lefty, as he has no problems with gay people at all and rants about the rich and powerful keeping the poor in their place and how if it doesn’t get better, there’s going to be some violence in this country (which there is, occasionally, but what Sinatra didn’t know is that it can be mitigated by giving the have-nots flatscreen televisions), and he tries to keep his more violent colleagues in line (Al Gordon Jr. has a minor but crucial role as a black detective who’s learned the ways of the white detectives a bit too well). It’s a fascinating movie — it looks and feels like an old-fashioned cop movie, but because (I assume) of the time in which it was made, it’s much more politically oriented and frank about things than you’d expect, and it’s certainly not unsympathetic to the downtrodden of the country, even if that’s bit clunky at times (the famous section — seen in The Celluloid Closet, a great documentary — where a closeted gay man goes looking for sex isn’t horrible, but it’s still a bit too “1968” for modern audiences). The cast is good, too. Sinatra has good gravitas as the decent cop in a corrupt world, Remick and Bissett are fine in small-ish roles, Jack Klugman does a good job as the cop Sinatra can trust, Robert Duvall has a small role as a douchebag cop, Tony Musante as the guy who goes to the chair overacts, but it seems like he was supposed to, and Lloyd Bochner does his calm thing as the psychiatrist who was friends with the man at the racetrack (Bochner’s son, Hart Bochner, played the douchebro Ellis in Die Hard, which is a nice coincidence). Tom Atkins, who I first saw (I think) as Amanda Hunsaker’s father in Lethal Weapon, makes his movie debut in a tiny role as a cop who killed a motorist either accidentally or because he panicked (too bad he wasn’t an ICE agent, or he wouldn’t have had to come up with an excuse!). This is a far more interesting movie than it has any right to be, and if you watch it, you can try to imagine 73-year-old Frank Sinatra crawling through the air ducts of the Nakatomi Building!

Anyway, those are more movies I’ve watched recently. Look! TWO from the 2020s! How exciting is that? Any thoughts on these?