Film review: Paper Moon (1973)

 About every six months or so, Criterion.com has a 50% off sale on their blu-rays/DVDs and they must make a good 90% of their sales in that window, because it's definitely a thing online.  Anyway, I try to curtail my habit, especially as we have films that are years old and we've yet to watch them (not to mention those last 5 or 6 in the box set we've had for well over a decade), so I tend to buy things that I think we'll watch regularly.  This includes Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd films (Criterion only does one Buster Keaton - his final masterpiece before the studios ruined his life by taking away his creative control, The Cameraman, but we have all the others by the less-trendy but no less reputable Kino Lorber), and, in a similar black and white vein, this film, which I'm sure I saw once on telly as a child, but had very little memory of.  It's actually the 4K version, which is supposedly one step up from Blu Ray, but I don't notice the difference.  Anyway: verdict - very good indeed, and not sentimental as I feared.  And Ryan O'Neal, while of course overshadowed by Tatum (to her detriment, apparently - not a great father), is very good.  It's funny, he's definitely a limited actor, but that didn't stop him being in truly excellent films (two of them - this and What's Up Doc? directed by Peter Bogdanovich, but probably the best being Barry Lyndon).  Shame about the alcoholism and general abuse.

Also a standout (and also nominated for best supporting actress, losing to Tatum) is the always great Madeline Kahn, playing a rather coarser and sadder character than her normal Mel Brooks fare, and only in the film for 17 minutes, although you'd never know it from her outsized footprint.

The film is pretty picaresque.  It begins with Tatam O'Neal's Addie attending the funeral of her mother (who seems to have been the local lady of the night) with a few neighbors at a desolate graveyard out in the middle of a very flat landscape, when we see a backfiring car approaching across the plains.  It's Ryan O'Neal's Moze, come to pay his respects.  He is immediately suspected of being Addie's real father, owing to a remarkable similarity in chin shape, noted by the neighbors.  They soon persuade him to take Addie to stay with her aunt in Missouri, and while he initially seems reluctant, we soon discover that he had plans all along to use Addie to extract money from the local plant owner whose relative (son?) it was that caused Addie to be orphaned.  He gets $200, and uses a fair chunk of it to fix up his car (all new tires) and a small chunk of it to buy Addie a train ticket.  But in a diner over a Nehi and coney island she rejects the idea of going by train and insists that the $200 (she was listening in) is hers.  So begins their odyssey.  Very quickly Addie discovers (a) that Moze's business is a con job whereby he looks up recently widowed women in the newspaper and arrives at their door claiming to have a deluxe monogrammed bible for the husband that he bought to give as a gift to the wife.  Addie quickly works out that she is better at assessing how much each woman will pay (and, occasionally, that she shouldn't be swindled at all) than Moze and they make a pretty good team.  Until, that is, they stop off at a fair and Moze becomes besotted with Trixie Delight (Kahn) who, along with her teenage black "maid" Imogene (who is only still with Trixie (who hasn't paid her) because she can't afford to go home), joins their party.  Addie soon becomes tired of Moze's infatuation (he doesn't work and he's blowing all their money on things like a new car) and works out a way to get Moze to dump Trixie by tempting her into an assignation when she thinks Moze is away for the day.  We then catch up with them weeks later, having hit a bit of a dry spell in the bible-selling business, when they oversee a bootlegger's operation and find out the shed where he's stored all his booze.  They steal a far quantity of it and sell it back to him, before making good their escape.  Well - not quite.  Turns out he's related to the local law (played by an actor (John Hillerman) I recognized from Magnum P.I., only doing a Southern accent rather than an English one) who arrests them and tries to find the $600+ that he knows they should have.  Fortunately Addie has it stashed in the lining of her hat, and they manage to do a runner.  As he is in hot pursuit, though, they have to go off road and try to swap out their car.  This they do by Moze winning a wrestling match (Ryan O'Neal actually was a wrestler) with a hulking hayseed played by a very young Randy Quaid, and in the ancient truck they get in exchange they manage to reach the safety of Missouri.  Addie is obviously scared that Moze intends to dump her with her aunt, but by this point he's clearly enamored of their partnership and they set up a big score involving duping the owner of a silver mine.  Alas, just as Moze is setting out to the arranged meeting, he runs into the corrupt cop, who, while he can't arrest him in Missouri, can still beat him viciously and take all their money.  So it's off to Addie's aunt for Addie.  Fortunately, she seems a lovely woman who lives in a very nice house, with a piano, just like Addie has always wanted, and seems genuinely concerned with Addie.  All's well that ends well (except for the penniless, battered Moze) right?  Well... 

Tuesday night ritual

 Thai Food and a movie (or, lately, a couple of episodes of an old BBC Jane Austen adaptation).  Surprisingly, the food from this restaurant embedded in a gas station (off Belsay in Flint) is very palatable!

That's March for you

 Yesterday:

Sound up for this next video:

Today:

Super slo-mo to capture the snow:

Film review: The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950)

We've been on a Launder and Gilliat streak (starting with our Lady Vanishes re-watch) and an Alastair Sim streak (there's a lot of overlap) and this is definitely up there with the best of both.  According to one of the special features, this was Launder (who directed this, as with the St. Trinian's films)'s attempt to do an Ealing Comedy (it helped that he co-wrote it with John Dighton, whose play it was, but who also wrote Kind Hearts and Man in the White Suit) and it certainly delivers.  As Sim plays the harried headmaster of a school of not-great-repute, and as Rutherford shows up with a girl's school, you can see why this is seen as sort of a dry-run for the St. Trianian's films (also, there is a fair amount of cast overlap, including Joyce Grenfell and Richard "ubiquitous" Wattis, and of course George Cole crops up in a tiny uncredited role, a la An Inspector Calls, and to top it off, Ronald Searle drew the opening credits) 

but it is, in my opinion, not only quite different, it's considerably better.  So, the basic outline: it's the first day of term at Nutbourne College, a minor private boys' school, and we arrive on the train with the new English master (who looks like a knock-off Montgomery Clift) and the jaded Maths master (the aforementioned Wattis, who was born jaded).  

They are driven to the (very nice-looking - parts of the building are said to date back to Henry VIII's time) school by the harried general school dogsbody Rainbow and discover that it has been spruced up a bit over the holidays, something that makes Wattis's Billings suspicious.  It turns out that Sim's Wetherby Pond is up for a job at a more prestigious school, whose board are coming to look over Nutbourne to see if they think Pond is of the right calibre.  But sudden complications arise in the form of 100 more trunks and tuck-boxes than they are expecting arriving, along with news that the Ministry of Education (of which Wattis plays the head in the St. Trinian's films - clearly it Loomed Large for Launder) is billeting another school at Nutbourne.  Apparently in the postwar years this kind of thing was not uncommon, what with all the bombings.  Pond is momentarily discombobulated, but leads a charge of the masters to prepare to billet the children and (he presumes) masters, and is up in the attic doing this when Margaret Rutherford's Miss Whitchurch and a retinue of female teachers (one of whom is Grenfell's "Sausage" Gossage, an even-more overgrown schoolgirl than her undercover policewoman of the Trinian's films, this time a sports teacher).  

Nobody is there to meet them, so they troop inside and are very dismissive of what, to us, looked like the height of luxury (albeit coated in a layer of dust that "Sausage" absent-mindedly writes her name in).  They, of course, think that it is a girls' school, which makes them rather shocked by the school motto "Guard Your Honour," not to mention the vaguely smutty books (Casanova's biography) on the bookshelf in the teachers' common room, but are still ignorant of its true nature when they take up possession of Pond's office so that they can use his phone to call the ministry to complain.  Meanwhile, Pond is suddenly faced both with his staff leaving in protest at having to cook for 100 more pupils than they were prepared for, and a horde of girls suddenly arriving, the first one of which breaks it to him the true nature of "St. Swithin's".  And then he finds Miss Whitchurch on the phone, just finding out that the Ministry is closed for the day.  

Then it's a race to see who can commandeer the dorms first - a race that the women win by locking the men in their common room while they're getting the keys to lock the girls out of the dorms.  But then the boys show up and find the girls in their rooms...  

What I like more about this film than the St. Trinian's series is that the humor is more grounded and is more earned rather than relying on the shock value of the violence of the young girls and the hyper sexuality of the older girls.  In this film the children are actually very obedient, the boys get on fine with the girls (except for an initial pillow fight and a climactic brawl on the playing fields) and it's the adults that are the source of the comedy because of their various schemes.  Also, just as you're settling in for a prolonged war between Pond and Whitchurch, they form a friendly alliance in the face of (a) the knowledge that the Ministry is far too chaotic to correct the error they've made any time soon, (b) a group of St. Swithin's parents are coming to visit and mustn't see the boys (this is initially resolved by hiding the boys for the day off at the swimming pool but then...) and a shock moving-up of the visit from the board at the school Pond wants to be the next head of to that very day.  So the climax of the film is a glorious extended set piece where Whitchurch is guiding a tour of the parents around at the same time as Pond is showing the board of his dream school around, and to make it all work they have to time it so that the girls are in the classrooms when Whitchurch's party arrives, but trade places with the boys for Pond's party.  Lots of lovely touches like the children who are advance scouts 

using such tools as mirrors to see round corners, or rollerskates to get down the corridor fast, one particular girl being in every class that her increasingly bemused parents enter, Pond and Whitchurch having to think on their feet to explain things away (like Whitchurch explaining the bikini girl pics belonging to the randy games master Hyde Brown 

as being the champion swimmers of yore, or Pond explaining away the knickers that the girls' dress-making class left in the desks when replaced by the boys).  Will they pull it off?  Let's just say the film ends a bit suddenly with the Man from the Ministry arriving with a third school, as Pond and Whitchurch ponder the merits of vanishing off to the colonies.  A very breezy and effective farce that I found surprisingly progressive, all things considered.  Two thumbs up! (Bonus Trivia: the attractive love interest for the Clift-esque Mr. Farrell, his counterpart English teacher Miss Harper (Bernadette O'Farrell), ended up marrying Frank Launder the same year the film came out.  They were married 47 years until his death.)

Film review: The Prodigal Son (1981)

Second in our Sammo Hung series, and this one's a stone-cold classic.  Sammo's filmmaking skills seem to have improved by leaps and bounds since Warriors Two - not that that one was bad, but this one is just much more cinematic.  It also looks a lot more high budget, with great sets, but the camera movement and shot framing is just fantastic.  It also stars a very young-looking Yuen Biao (third of the "Three Dragons" along with his Peking Opera "brothers" Jackie Chan and Sammo) who is not just perhaps the most spectacular martial artist of the three but also a very appealing performer.  A slimmer-than-I've-ever-seen-him Sammo 

shows up halfway through the film and is his usual fun self, but perhaps the most intriguing presence is Ching-Ying Lam, supposedly a buddy of Bruce Lee's, who plays Yeun Biao's (very reluctant) master.  But let's set this up properly.  We begin with Yuen Biao's Leung Chang and some hangers-on visiting a restaurant where some people at a nearby table decide to take him on because he's known as the "street brawler" and beating him will enable the mouthiest of them to set up his own kung fu school.  Well, Leung dispatches them with ease, and all seems well until we see the most goofy-looking of his hangers on slip outside and pay off the men.  

It turns out that, while Leung isn't terrible, he's nowhere near as good as he thinks, because his wealthy parents have arranged for all of his combatants to be bribed to lose so that he doesn't get hurt.  Next we cut to the henchmen going for a night out at the opera, where one of them falls for the female lead.  

They all go to visit her backstage and get a bit insistent until she beats the crap out of them (painting the main one's face with clown makeup in the process).  This is all done with feminine grace, perhaps a nod to the fact that, as with Warriors Two, this is a showcase for Wing Chung (and in fact, Leung Chang is the master in that one, so this is a prequel of sorts), which is said to have been invented by a woman.  However, it is revealed that "she" is actually a man (which one would think would be pretty common knowledge to anyone who knows anything about Chinese opera), albeit one with permanently shaved eyebrows and who seems very comfortable with his feminine side.  

This is Lam's Leung Yee Tai (I don't there's any significance in the shared "Leung" because it is never commented on, but it's a tiny bit confusing).  The sidekicks come back that evening with our Leung and he confronts the Opera Leung.  To the sidekick's horror, he reveals to our Leung that he is known as "The Prodigal Son" behind his back because of all the bribing (which the sidekicks even attempt on him, to no avail). (Sidenote: I don't quite understand the usage of "prodigal" here.  As I now know, it just means spendthrift, and it's not actually him who's doing the spending.  (When I was little I thought prodigal meant "goes away and comes back again" because of the parable.  But that doesn't fit here, although it does predict what will happen with Leung Chang.))  And to prove it, Leung Yee Tai makes very short work of Leung Chang, causing him to realize that, indeed, he has been set up (and just to confirm it, he goads the teachers who had formerly been easy for him to beat into actually trying, and it does not go well for him).  

He then attempts to get Yee Tai to accept him as a pupil, but he keeps refusing, until Chang gets his father to buy the opera company, and for them to take him on as Yee Tai's valet (he brings along his goofiest servant 

as his valet, and instructs him, a la Kato in The Pink Panther, to attack him at random intervals).  The company sets off in a boat to travel to nearby towns, and next we see them arrive in what seems like a very prosperous one.  Also arriving in town is a Prince, 

who is a royal version of Leung Chang, both in that he travels from town to town seeking challenges and in that he too is a "Prodigal Son" - his two bodyguards also bribe (or otherwise nobble) his opponents (although not all of them - the prince is actually very good, and we see him challenged by somebody whose arm he crippled five years previously, who has spent the intervening years becoming very adept at one-arm fighting, but who ends up getting that arm paralyzed, and told to come back when he's worked on his legs).  Leung Yee Tai is not happy having Leung Chang along, and in fact sets him up: the main "male" actor in the company is a lothario and sleeps with the wife of the wrong man, so cannot go on in his usual role as a famous general.  Yee Tai sees a chance to prank Chang and says he should play the role.  There are some Macbeth-esque traditions around this role that complicate things: most notably that you cannot speak before going on stage, so when the angry husband and a band of thugs show up to castrate "the general" Chang cannot explain but has to try to fight them.  

This spills out on to the stage and Yee Tai is forced to intervene.  Thus it is that legend of his fighting skills reaches the Prince and he demands a fight.  They are neck and neck when Yee Tai is overcome with asthma, and the prince honorably stops the fight and says that they will resume when he recovers.  However, the prince's bodyguards relay to the prince's father that this opponent is a little too good and he instructs them to round up 20 assassins and slaughter the entire company.  Long story short, they do (and it's very upsetting - lots of innocent actors and actresses get their throats cut in bed) but Chang (who initially thinks the ninja-like assassins attacking him are his Kato in action) helps save the still-wheezy Yee Tai, in an amazing sequence set inside a giant flaming tent.  In the process it is Chang who gets his arm injured and he is taken by Yee Tai to recuperate with Yee Tai's brother on his farm.  The brother is Sammo, and he has an adorable plump daughter (called "Twiggy") whom he is trying to train in both calligraphy and kung fu.  

While here, the squabbling between the two brothers leads to Yee Tai realizing that he's fond enough of Chang to accept him as a pupil (as in the Warriors Two this involves being served tea by your prospective pupil on his knees and you accepting and drinking it), and there are some very fun training sequences of both brothers training Chang.  However, Yee Tai continues to be troubled by his asthma, and his "herbs" are cheap (according to his brother) so Chang insists that they head back to his home town where his father can pay for the best medicine.  This they do, and find the goofy servant both alive and astonished to see them alive, and proceed to start a school.  But the prince shows up demanding that the fight continue, leading to Yee Tai indignantly accusing him of the slaughter of his company and the bodyguards panicking and stabbing Yee Tai to get him to shut up.  He dies, the prince realizes the truth and is conscience-stricken, and gives up his wealth and status (and has the bodyguards beheaded!  This movie doesn't stint on the gore).  This sets up a rather non-standard final fight scene between the prince and Leung Chang.  Unusual in that the prince isn't really a villain, and has in fact recanted, so it's just for pride.  But duke it out they do, and it's an excellent final fight, leading to some non-fatal blood-spurting and painful-looking falling-on to-stone-steps.  

Very satisfying, positively pro-gender-experimentation, and worthy of standing alongside peak Jackie Chan films, which is the highest praise one can give.  And as with Warriors Two, the Arrow Blu Ray print is absolutely gorgeous and crystal clear (somewhat to the detriment of the slightly amateurish makeup).

Film review: Blue Murder at St. Trinian's (1957)

This should really be called "St. Trinian's Abroad" or something like that, because the main plot is a party from the school traveling through Europe to end up in Rome.  It does begin at the school, where, sadly, Alastair Sim's headmistress is "departed"... to prison for the duration of the film, so we just get shots of him at the beginning and end.  A suitably battle-hardened replacement is en route from Australia where she has been in charge of a borstal, 

but when she arrives she is quickly trussed up and stored in the belfry because they want to use her persona as a cover for one of the "girls'" (the older girls are quite clearly full-grown women, which, given the plot, is just as well) fathers, who is a jewel thief (played by Lionel Jeffries, whom I know mostly from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) who is the subject of a manhunt and needs to escape the country. This is facilitated by the girls "winning" a Unesco academic competition (by blackmailing an Oxford Don who is in hock to the bookies that Flash Harry (George Cole, his role expanded to replace the missing Sim) 

works for to provide the answers, which are then substituted for the actual, no doubt egregious, St. Trinian's attempt in a daring Rififi-esque heist on the Ministry of Education) the prize for which is said cross-Europe trip.  Reprising her role as the hapless policewoman is Joyce Grenfell (unrecognized by the girls, as this is supposed to be years later, but Flash Harry remembers her and is not fooled by her "interpreter" disguise) and newly on board is Terry-Thomas, who runs the only coach company disreputable enough to be prepared to rent to St. Trinians, who falls for Grenfell's copper.  

The real reason the girls want to go to Rome is explained in a pre-amble (that mirrors the one from the first film set in a fictional Middle Eastern country) where we see Flash Harry meeting with a rich eligible Italian bachelor with his "marriage service" where he arranges unions with the older girls in St. Trinian's.  

The Italian demands to meet with the girls in person, hence the need for the trip.  Subplots abound, like the jewel thief hiding his jewels in a water polo ball, and Michael Ripper 

as the Ministry of Education lift operator forced to go along on the trip because he's easiest to threaten, and the Army attempting to keep the girls in check in between headmistresses.  The new stock of girls includes 50's glamor it-girl Sabrina, who has nothing to do but look sultry, pretend to read Dostoyevsky in bed and pretend to be the "school swot," for which she gets near top-billing.  

And this time round the cops include a young Terry (of "and June") Scott.

Again directed by Frank Launder, of the storied Launder & Gilliat team, and of equivalent quality to the first, although Sim is sorely missed.  

Jami particularly liked the scene where a man at the ministry of education falls through the hole under the carpet left after the aforementioned reverse heist.

Film review: Warriors Two (1978)

I got Jami a trio of what are supposed to be the best Sammo Hung films, the portly childhood pal of Jacky Chan, who is a favorite of ours already in such collaborations as Wheels on Meals, Project A, and Dragons Forever.  First to be viewed was this one, which Sammo was making at the same time that Jacky was working on the immortal Drunken Master, and it can hold its head up in that exalted company.  Sammo (in a distractingly awful monk-like bald wig - why?) plays a somewhat buffoonish seller of rice cakes (that is, he is at the beginning, but gives it up after a pair of his "friends" manage to "scam" (or so the subtitles said, although it didn't seem to be a scam, more an unwise bet) him out of his entire stock.  He goes to the bank for advice from "Cashier Hua" (what was he called before he got the job, I wonder), who will be our other Warrior, and who is played in his debut by the delightfully named Korean actor/martial artist Casanova Wong, who (rather unkindly) points out that he would've eaten the stock anyway.  On Hua's advice Sammo's "Fatty" Chun takes up a job transporting literal shit, which will be safe both from scamming and eating.  This is just a preamble before the plot gets going: Sammo is a student of (famous, actual) Wing Chung teacher Leung Tsan, 

who is a noble and peace-loving man, who can also beat the shit out of anyone.  Early on we see that he has a regular table at restaurant that is taken by a group of soldiers who seem new to the area, and while his niece, who is with him, is ready to fight them, he calmly disengages and takes her away.  Meanwhile, Cashier comes back to the bank after work to return a banknote he accidentally had in his pocket (demonstrating his unimpeachable character) and overhears a plot to kill off the mayor by Mr. Mok and his band of henchmen, who include the rude soldiers from before.  Cashier runs to warn the mayor but is headed off by a man who works for him 

who listens to the news, asks the dreaded question "have you told anyone else about this?" and then takes Hua off to a remote location where, he says, the Mayor will meet him in private.  Of course, Mok and his henchmen show up instead (in broad daylight, so presumably this is the next day).  Hua puts up a good fight but is pretty badly beaten up by the time he runs off into the trees with them in hot pursuit.  He collapses in front of Fatty's house, and is whisked away by Fatty to be nursed back to health at Leung Tsan's school.  Meanwhile the bad guys, unable to find Hua, murder his mother (with whom he is said to be close) to flush him out.  As he recovers Hua sends Fatty to give her a message, but when he discovers her dead he tries to protect Hua as long as possible.  Fatty also tries to warn the mayor and his bodyguard that somebody's trying to kill the mayor, but they don't believe him until... they are surrounded in the middle of the countryside by the same group of baddies.  Realizing his fatal error, the bodyguard puts up a good fight (we've already had three great fight sequences and there are more to come!) but alas, he and the mayor meet a predictable fate.

Hua recovers and Fatty reveals his mother's death, and Hua is desperate to fight the baddies, but Fatty convinces him that first he needs to learn Wing Chung from Leung Tsan.  Leung doesn't want to take Hua on as a pupil (realizing that Hua will use the skills to take revenge) but Fatty more-or-less tricks Leung into taking on Hua as a pupil.  Then we get the usual montage of Hua learning to kick ass, including pole skills 

(smashing olive pits on the ground, hitting a pendulum through a small ring) and fighting those weird wooden-poles-with-chair-legs-coming-off-them that we've seen Jacky practicing his skills on in many a movie, only with the added wrinkle that there are two of them and they're on little rails and can come at you. Oh, and there's also blindfolded fighting that will come in useful later.

MEANWHILE, Mok and crew are worried that Leung might be a problem, so they ambush him in his favorite restaurant (his predictable routine is his undoing) and, while he puts up the most valiant fight (even with his foot in a bear trap) he is eventually dispatched, and his body bought to his school and dumped in front of his appalled pupils.  Then they are dispatched, mainly by Ho's three worst henchmen, one of whom has skin of iron, 

another of whom is called "Tiger" and is a spear expert.  Well, almost all are: Hua and the niece escape and Fatty feigns death by daubing the blood of a fellow student on his face.

Well, they regroup and basically the entire rest of the film is one fight sequence after another.  Standouts are when Fatty, who is supposed to be fighting one of the unarmed henchmen but gets the name wrong and ends up with Tiger, lures him into the dark bamboo and uses skills learned in the training sequence of reacting with his other senses than sight and manages to beat Tiger to death.  Yes, this one is definitely more violent than the contemporary Jacky Chan vehicles.  There's a significant amount of (incredibly lurid) blood spattered in the course of this movie and a very high body count.  Alas it will include the niece (whom we recognize from the Jacky film Young Master, and who wields dual blades very impressively) - after all, it's not Warriors Three - before the denouement, when we discover that the seemingly old Mr. Mok has been wearing a mask all along, and is actually young and looks like a vampire 

(and seems to be able to float like one).  It takes both Sammo and Hua teaming up to take him down 

(Sammo takes the punishment, Hua deals it out, including one incredibly impressive leap-across-a-table-while-turning-360-degrees kick that I would have sworn required wires, but (we saw in the accompanying documentary) was 100% real (Casanova was hired for his amazing kicking and jumping skills)).  NOW who's going to be mayor?

The documentary revealed that the fights really did use a style called Wing Chung that apparently was (a) comparatively simple and direct, (b) invented by a woman and considered "feminine" but that didn't seem to worry any of the men involved in the film, and (c) very cinematic.  So everyone involved took several months training to pick up the moves (and when interviewed, bemoaned the fact that nobody does their own stunts any more so action stars aren't really good at Kung Fu, but at the same time conceded that it's nice that you can use pads these days and don't have to spend weeks in the hospital after the film wraps!).  Overall, solid entertainment, and an excellent print, crystal clear and incredibly vibrant - Arrow is clearly the Criterion of pulp cinema.

Birthday Cakes for Jami

Jami is a known carrot cake fiend, so I got her one when I visited Whole Foods last week.  And then I thought, what the hell - why not make her one?  So she got two (the homemade one is GF - see if you can guess which one it is):