Film review: White Heat (1949)

To think, just last year I had no idea who Edmond O'Brien was, and now I've seen him in three great films: DOA, The Killers, and now White Heat.  Of course, while O'Brien plays the main "good guy" in this film, it truly belongs to Jimmy Cagney playing one of his nastiest hard cases of all, Cody (only Cagney could make someone called "Cody" threatening) Jarrett.  This is, of course, the movie that's famous for Cagney's final line - "Made it Ma!  Top of the world!" but actually it's packed with great lines.  Alec Baldwin is particularly taken (although he misattributes it to Public Enemy) with the scene where Cody has somebody he has a grudge against trapped in the trunk of a car and he taps on it and asks how he's doing.  "It's stuffy in here, I needs some air!" says the hapless stooge.  "Oh stuffy eh?  I'll give ya a little air" says Cody, and casually shoots four slugs into the trunk and strolls off, chewing on a chicken drumstick.  And that's actually a good example of how this film manages to be very violent without actually showing too much of the violence onscreen (presumably because this was in the height of Hays Code strictness).  This is done almost to a fault, because the murder of Cody's beloved (almost TOO beloved) mother, a pivotal moment, is not even shown at all, perhaps because a young woman shooting an old woman in the back (it's described, at least) was particularly shocking.  But toned-down on-screen violence aside, this is a non-stop thrillfest.  It starts with a train robbery (where two people die just because one of Cody's henchman blabbers his name in front of them, and that henchman accidentally gets scalded hideously), we then get various chases until Cody cops to a much more minor crime in Illinois to get a short sentence.  However, his no-good moll joins up with his no-good head henchman (something he more-or-less predicted: "You know something, Verna, if I turned my back long enough for Big Ed to put a hole in it, there'd be a hole in it") and said henchman tries to get Cody bumped off in the pen.  But his life is saved ("Whaddya want - a medal?") by the Edmond O'Brien character, who is undercover in jail.  He butters Cody up and soon they're planning their escape (so that the cops can finally nail Cody for something serious) when Cody hears of his mother's murder (she'd been trying to avenge the assassination attempt but Verna plugged her) and goes off the deep end.  See, Cody's been having these excruciating headaches (which, supposedly, started as fakes to get attention when he was a kid then somehow became real) and thinks he'll end up like his dad, dying in the nuthouse.  But after he flips out in mess hall and ends up in the psych ward, we find out he's been planning his own escape.  But he takes Edmond O'Brien (who is a cop called Fallon playing a con called Vic Pardo) along with him, and after the scene with the guy in the trunk, he bumps off big Ed and takes back Verna and reassembles the gang for a big score at a chemical plant.  And that's where we get our big denouement and one of the best deaths in cinema history. I see now why Cagney was a staple of every crap impressionist because he's just a total icon.  He commands the screen whenever he's on it (perhaps even more so in the earlier Public Enemy with the iconic grapefruit scene): he's just somehow so much more alive than everyone else, and even when he's crawling around cackling insanely, it's never ridiculous, it's totally compelling.  He was James Dean before Marlon Brando was James Dean.  We watched this because it's leaving the Criterion Channel in August, but I can't believe we hadn't seen it before.  Everyone should see this movie and bask in Cagney's greatness!  His re-telling of the story of the Trojan Horse alone is worth the price of admission.

Second lake swim - a bit more dramatic

Film review: Coherence (2013)

This is a fun little film (free if you have Amazon Prime) that manages to be an entirely special-effects-free science fiction film set entirely around a dinner party for a group of pretty obnoxious Angelinos (at least, I think it's in Los Angeles - could conceivably be the Bay Area given that one of them is supposed to run Skype, but (a) that's based in Estonia, and (b) their house is nice, but not that nice).  I only recognized one of the actors, who is playing an actual actor who claims to be in Roswell.  But I've never seen that show, and it turns out what he was actually on was Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which I've also never seen, but it so permeated the zeitgeist for a while there that I suppose I must have picked it up by osmosis).  It reminded me a little of The Exterminating Angel, if only because of the whole dinner party aspect, but I don't think it had any socially redeeming commentary in it.  The essence of the idea is this: a comet is passing over and one of the party's number's brother, who is some bigshot science professor at one of the California schools, has told him to call him if anything strange happens.  Another party-goer, a dancer named "Em" recounts a story of when it last passed over and a woman in Finland insisted that the man in her house was not her husband.  The police came and said "we know that's your husband - why do you say it isn't?" "Because last night I killed my husband." Dah dah DAHHH!  Adding to the paranoia is that cell phone service and (gasp!) the internet go out, and not only that, but two people's phones actually shatter as they're using them.  Then the power goes out - everywhere in the neighborhood except for one house a couple of blocks away.  The guy with the egghead brother decides to go over there and see if they have a landline so he can call the brother, and another guy agrees to go along.  While they're gone, there's a bang on the door, but nobody's there, and people start to get really rattled.  However, they remember that they have a generator (seems like something you wouldn't forget...) which they turn on and now they have power again.  Then the pair return (or do they?) carrying a metal box that they "stole" from outside the other house, and the guy with the brother has a cut on his head and is very reluctant to say what he saw when he looked in the window of the other house.  But finally he admits he saw... them.  That is, the people at the party.  And here you have the plot: it's a "Spiderverse"/"sliding doors" alternative realities movie, only the comet is causing them to be accessible to each other.  Oh, and they open the box, and besides a ping pong paddle, it contains pictures of every one of them with numbers on the back.  Things get hairier and hairier, with more and more alternate realities, and the actor falls off the wagon, and the dancer's boyfriend's ex-girlfriend hits on him... and, well, you'll just have to see it.  If I had to summarize the real upshot of the film, it's just a really torturous way for Em to learn to commit to things.  (And in the course of doing so she attempts a murder-suicide.)  Is it good?  Well, yes - surprisingly so.  The performances are natural (almost to a fault - there's a lot of shakycam and people talking over each other) and the ideas ingenious, although there a plot holes galore if you think too hard about it (there shouldn't be two rings!).  But that's part of the fun!

Film review: The 49th Parallel (1941)

This is an oddity.  It's by The Archers (Michael Powell, director, Emeric Pressburger, writer) but it's an early, obviously propaganda-ish work.  It has an amazing cast (Laurence Olivier!  Leslie Howard!  Glynis "the mother in Mary Poppins" Johns (as a 16 year old Canadian Hutterite)! but they're never together, because the main focus of the film is a group of Nazis on the run through Canada.  So basically, we follow the bad guys on their travels and sympathize with the various people they interact with.  But the Nazis are in a sense the underdogs, as they're stranded in a foreign country trying to escape.  They get into this predicament by being the crew of a U-boat and (a) beginning the movie by sinking a Canadian ship off the coast of Nova Scotia, (b) deciding they need to hide out for a bit, (c) deciding it would be a genius move to do it in Hudson Bay, where nobody would expect it, but (d) getting spotted going in, and (e) the U-boat getting bombed as a result, stranding a landing party whose job it was to find fuel and supplies.  It is this landing party whose journey we follow.  And what a journey!  The first stop is at the remote trading post they were originally going to target, where we get to see Laurence Olivier, the premier actor of his generation, hamming it up as a very broad French Canadian fur trader, who has just come in from the wilds after spending a year trapping animals with his Eskimo (as they said then) assistants, and was unaware there was a war on.  He gets shot making sure that an American on the radio knows that they're being held by Nazis, so they have to go on the lam.  They are helped by two people arriving in a seaplane, which they steal (after shooting the two men, and any number of Eskimo men, women and children, just so we know how ruthless they are.  They only manage to be light enough to launch after one of the remaining Eskimos picks off one of their number.  They manage to run out of fuel long before their planned journey is up and crashland in another lake, losing a couple more of their number in the process.  They wander for a bit then happen across a Hutterite settlement where most of them speak German.  One of them wants to stay and be the baker there, especially after their leader, Leutnant Hirsh (Eric Portman - by sheer screen time and lines the clear star of the film), makes a miscalculating bid to win them over to Nazism, and they realize they have to leave, but he gets shot for deserting instead.  Then the remaining three have various adventures until they are in a crowd at "Indian Day" at Banff national park where the Mounties ask the crowd to examine their neighbors to see if they're Nazis.  One of them is caught, the rest flee into the wilds, where they run into Leslie Howard as an eccentric author who welcomes them until they abuse his hospitality and sang goes from froid to chaud and he punches out the one that isn't Hirsh.  Hirsh escapes (again!) and almost makes it over the border (after doubling back east to Niagara Falls) where he intends to give himself up to the Americans (who were presumably still neutral at that point) but instead meets the fists of fightin' Canadian Raymond Massey (an actual Canadian, actually playing a Canadian for the only time in his film career).  And scene.  As you can see: definitely picaresque.  Jami's theory is that each of the encounters represents a different reason not to join the fight against the Nazis - being a (mildly) persecuted minority (the French Canadian), being religious, being an intellectual or being upset at the government (Massey is a serviceman who grumbles about his treatment to Hirsh before Hirsh reveals his true nature).  Lots of stirring speeches given by the people the Nazis encounter about how they're united as Canadians and value freedom and Nazi-punchin'.  Again, watching some of these old Wartime movies, it's depressing how much these things need saying again.  (Oh, and in case you were wondering, the 49th parallel is the dividing line between the US and Canada.)

Thomas's Road Trip Pictures

I know that some of our readers (looking at you, Grandpa) refuse to use Instagram, so they're missing out on Thomas's amazing (and amazingly people-free) photographs of the road trip he's currently on up through the UP (Upper Peninsula of Michigan).  So this is a reminder to check it out!
Click here: https://www.instagram.com/thomas.cushing.i/
(Be advised that each picture you see usually represents a set of photos, so click on the photo then look for the little arrow (in a circle - not the big > symbol) on the right hand edge of the photo to see the others in the set.)

Film review: Son of Frankenstein (1939)

Did you know that Airplane! is not primarily a spoof of 70s disaster movies like Airport '77, but was instead an almost shot-for-shot remake (with added jokes of course) of a 50s film called Zero Hour?  It's true.  I bring that up because, prior to watching Son of Frankenstein, I'd thought that Young Frankenstein had invented most of its weirder ideas (like the one-armed inspector who plays darts with the baron and just sticks his darts into his fake arm) and was a general parody of all the Frankenstein movies.  But Son of Frankenstein features a one-armed inspector who sticks his darts into his fake arm!  And the darts-playing is as incongruous and weird as you might expect.  If anything, the sight of an aggrieved Basil Rathbone (who plays the titular scion) hurling darts at a dartboard with venom is even more bizarre in a movie that's not intended to be a comedy.  And now I know this, a little googling reveals that the influence of this film above all is an open secret.  In fact, read this, and it'll save me the trouble of writing a precis.  My comments are these.  First, what a cast!  Rathbone as the Baron, Karloff in his third and final performance as the Monster, and (stealing the movie) Bela Lugosi as Ygor.  We've recently watched (I got the box set of Universal Monster movies as a present a while back) the original Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein (both directed by the great James Whale) and this is generally acknowledges as the best of the remainder after those two all-time classics.  (Whale was apparently dismissed from directing Son after his script was too wild and crazy.)  The differences among them are interesting: as everyone knows, the Monster in mute in the original, but in Bride he can talk.  But now, in Son, he's if anything even more mindless than in the original, and is a puppet of the evil Ygor.  He's also immortal, even though he starts out very sick - bizarrely because of a lightning strike.  The Baron revives him with a third jolt of lightning, so clearly it's odd numbers of lightning strikes that he likes.  He also has a new outfit - instead of the jacket he wears in the other two, he's wearing what looks like a shag carpet as a waistcoat.  Why?  I can't tell you.  Finally, he's actually consigned to a bit part in what should be his movie.  The main characters are the Baron and Ygor, who uses the Monster to bump off the jury that had him hanged ("he got better").  (Talking of Monster: it's become a trope that people mistakenly refer to the Monster as being called Frankenstein - but Rathbone's character complains about this in 1939, so it's hardly a new phenomenon.)  Actually, the Monster is pushed into 4th place by the character of the Inspector, played by Lionel Atwill, who is much more sympathetic than in Young Frankenstein, and in fact, comes off much better than Rathbone's frankly deranged Baron (who mysteriously reforms by the bizarrely-abrupt happy ending).  While it is indeed a step below the preceding classics, this one isn't half bad and certainly the sets are amazing, and the performances very satifyingly over-the-top.  The only thing that grates is the Baron's super-cutesy infant son, who just escapes (chiz chiz) being hurled into a superheated sulfur pit.

Film review: Bottle Rocket (1996)

I've always thought of this as Wes Anderson's most charming, least mannered (because it was his first) film.  It's the one that introduced the Wilson brothers (Luke and Owen) to the world.  I saw that it was about to leave the Criterion Channel at the end of the month, so I persuaded Jami to rewatch it, and as so often happens these days, I found there was a lot I'd forgotten about it.  The basic plot is that Owen Wilson (with short hair for the only time ever in a film) plays Dignan, who is a great character and something of his own archetype, who persuades his friend Anthony (Luke) and Bob to try robbery.  They succeed in robbing a bookstore (disguised, for no good reason, with anti-snore strips across their noses) and go on the lam.  They "hide out" at a motel in the middle of Texas (where the whole movie is set, because that's where Anderson and the Wilsons are from) where Anthony falls for one of the girls who cleans the rooms, a non-English speaker from Paraguay called Inez.  But Bob gets panicky because he gets word that "Future Man," his bullying older brother (played by a third Wilson brother, Andrew) has been arrested because of the marijuana plants that he (Bob) was growing in their front year.  (Bob and Future Man are the spawn of incredibly rich parents and have the run of their house because the parents are perpetually abroad.)  So Bob (whose car they've been using) sneaks off in the night leaving Dignan and Anthony behind.  Anthony is sympathetic (and wouldn't mind being stranded with Inez), but Dignan is furious, and insists that they steal a car and go back.  Anthony wants Inez to come along, but she (communicating through a young dishwasher called Rocky) makes it clear that she is leery of Anthony's rootless ways.  But on the morning they are to leave, Anthony gets Dignan to give Inez an envelope and Inez tries to send a message ("I love you") to Anthony via Rocky via Dignan, but Dignan thinks that Rocky is trying to tell Anthony that he loves him.  The car they steal breaks down (they steal it from a mechanic's, so it probably had problems) and Dignan and Anthony fight and go their separate ways.  Cut to months later and we see Anthony and Bob teamed up again working a variety of odd jobs in an attempt to earn enough to pay off Future Man's legal bills.  But then Dignan shows up again, apologizes, and tries to recruit Anthony to join him with "Mr Henry" (who runs a landscaping business from which Dignan got fired before the point we came in in the movie, but also a burgling business on the side).  Mr. Henry is played by James Caan, in a great turn (that he says took three days to shoot - "about as long as appearing in an episode of Hollywood Squares"), that is both funny and very sinister.  Everything builds to an attempted heist of a refrigeration company, where our three heroes are part of a jump-suited gang along with an old driver called Applejack and an old (totally inept, as it transpires) safecracker called Kumar, and everything goes wrong.  People show up who should be at lunch, Bob's walkie-talkie breaks, Kumar has a crisis of confidence, the fire alarm goes off and Applejack has a heart attack (or does he?)  Meanwhile, Mr Henry is emptying everything out of Bob's parents' house (including their grand piano) which was his plan all along.  Dignan is the only one who gets caught, though, because he goes back for Applejack, and goes down for 2 years.  But he is proud of their attempted robbery nonetheless, and seems quite cheerful when Bob and Anthony visit him in prison.  And Anthony worked out the misunderstanding with Inez and they patch things up.  Bittersweet.  I still like it, although I now find it more poignant than outright funny, even though it's peppered throughout with jokes provided by Simpsons producer James L. Brooks, who believed in this project even though the people behind it were a bunch of kids from the middle of nowhere, and even when everybody hated it in test screenings.  Doesn't hurt that it has a great soundtrack.

Road trip for Thomas!

It's that time of the Summer when even Thomas gets bored of playing computer games in his room and decides to hit the open road.  Where will his adventures take him?  The only way to tell is to check his Instagram (oh, and judging by his bank account he had a meal outside of Bay City yesterday).

 Gotta pick the right drivin' tunes.

We'll never see THAT car again.

Chimney cleaning time!

We get a special Summer rate if we have Stan come and clean our chimney in the offseason, so we did.  And not only that, he (or rather, his young apprentice) put new glass in our stove and replaced a cap on a vent in the roof that got knocked off by a falling branch some time last year.

 Here's Stan, who is in his 60s but says for the first ten years of his career he would do this in a top hat and tails, as a kind of signature.  He seemed serious.

And here's his younger apprentice doing the heavy lifting.

Film review: Tarantula! (1955)

Triffids whetted Jami's appetite for 50s monster movies, and this one was the best one we'd never seen.  It's now more famous for having Clint Eastwood appear in the last 5 minutes (to drop napalm on the titular beast) but don't get excited because you can only see his eyes behind his fighter-jet mask.  The most recognizable face otherwise is Leo G. Carroll (in the hall of fame for "what else have we seen him in?" actors) who plays the nutrition scientist who is only trying to develop a nutriet that will feed humanity in this rapidly (in 1955!) overcrowding Earth.  The film opens very nicely (although not quite as well as the very similar Them! from the year before) with a hideously disfigured man (clad strangely in pajamas combined with smart shoes and socks) stumbling and then expiring in the desert.  He is soon discovered and the town sheriff gets our hero, the town doctor, to look at the body.  The sheriff thinks it's the man who's been working with Professor Deemer, but the doctor thinks it can't be because it looks like he's died because of acromegaly, but they'd both seen the man very recently and he seemed fine.  However, when Deemer is contacted, he confirms that it is indeed his colleague and that he did indeed die of acromegaly.  We then see Deemer return to his lab where he is working with giant guinea pigs and... a giant tarantula.  (The effects in the lab are very well done - no sign of obvious green-screening.)  But then he is attacked by another acromegaly sufferer, who clubs him unconscious, sets fire to the lab and injects Deemer with something, before collapsing.  We also see the tarantula escape and head off into the desert.  Deemer recovers, though, and puts out the fire and then buries his attacker (who, we learn later, was a graduate student assistant, who had joined the original acromegaly victim in trying out the nutrient on himself).  The rest of the movie is the tarantula getting bigger and bigger (and some pretty decent effects that are obviously an actual tarantula superimposed over the background, but it looks a lot better than it really should) going round eating cows, sheep, horses, old codgers etc.  Also our doctor hero is seriously hitting on Stephanie "Steve" Clayton, a sharp-dressed and sharp-eyebrowed young woman who has come to be another graduate assistant to the God-playing Deemer.  Oh, and Deemer succumbs to acromegaly himself, thanks to that injection.  It all builds until the tarantula attacks Deemer's house and our doctor hero rescues Steve and then the tarantula chases them towards the town and Clint and the bombers are called in.  A bit slow in parts, but surprisingly well put-together and serious for such an obvious B-movie.

Film review: The Day of the Triffids/Invasion of the Triffids (1963)

I think I probably saw the (definitive) early 80s BBC version of The Day of the Triffids before I read it, but either way, it made a deep impression on my young mind.  (I know we also read another of John Wyndham's "cozy catastrophes" - The Chrysalids - in school.)  Enough to know that the opening of 28 Days Later is shamelessly ripped off from Day.  Anyway, I had never seen this 1963 version, called Invasion of the Triffids in The US (Jami thinks that's a better title because there's no single day that the Triffids win on, but I think (a) "Day" is just much classier and (b) "Day" doesn't refer to the unit of time, but is being used as in "every dog has its day").  It's a mixed bag.  On the one hand, the special effects are pretty damn good for the time, and the incidents portrayed surprisingly grim.  One the other, some unnecessary changes are made to the plot of the book.  On the one hand again, the actual events depicted make sense, and if anything, the Triffids are moved to the forefront of the action (in the book it's the now-common (the Walking Dead also ripped off Day) "humans are the real monsters" theme) and it effectively conveys the sheer numbers and indominatability (if that's a word) of the damn things, but on the other, there's a cop-out ending.  In a nutshell, as with the book, a man is in hospital with his eyes bandaged as an incredible meteor shower happens that everybody else watches in awe because it's the most amazing sight they've ever seen.  In this case, however, the man is an American Navy officer, and no explanation is given for why he's had eye surgery.  In the book (as I recall) he's (a) English, (b) not in the Navy, and (c) the reason his eyes are in trouble is because he's taken a triffid sting to the face.  And that raises another difference between book and film: in the film it's clear that the triffids arrive on the meteors (although one is already in the botanical gardens (one of the more effective scenes in the film is it creeping up on a hapless security guard as he eats his sandwiches and drinks from his thermos) and a character also states that some had arrived on an earlier meteor) whereas in the book triffids are already well-established and known about, and under control.  But of course in both, the meteor showers make everyone blind who witnessed them and in the ensuing breakdown of human society the triffids take over.  The scenes of chaos are effectively rendered and as I said, pretty grim: mass death of characters who are introduced ahead of time so you care that they die.  One fault with the triffids is that you don't see the stingers.  At one point it looks as if they squirt their poison (in another effective scene where the young girl that the main character adopts is stalked in the fog and then they struggle to escape in a car that's stuck in the mud).  Another is that their means of communication (the tapping noise) is never explained, even though you hear it throughout.  Another couple of differences: the focus of the film is split between the travels (to France and Spain (!) again unlike the England-bound book) and travails of the American (presumably to appeal to the US market) Navy officer and his acquired "family", and a couple who are stuck on an island in a lighthouse because the boat that's supposed to come and pick them up never arrives after the meteor night, and a triffid somehow takes root on their island.  (Fun fact: the woman is played by actress Janette Scott who is name-checked for the role in a song in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  She went on to marry Mel "Velvet Fog" Torme.)  Their escapades are a little tedious, the main point of them being that they are the ones who discover that triffids dissolve in salt water - the convenient (relatively) happy ending.  Overall, I'm not sure you could do the book much better in one film, and as I said, for the times it's fairly effective.  The film's gotten a bad rap over the years, and it does drag in parts (Jami was not a fan) but it's honestly better than all but the very best Toho studios monster movie of the day.  (Bonus: one minor character is played by Carol Ann Ford, the actress who played Susan in the first couple of seasons of Doctor Who, presumably around the same time as this film was made.)

Film review: The Stranger (1946)

I didn't know that there were so many Orson Welles films - I thought it was just Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil, but here's another one.  Supposedly it was taken away from him and re-cut, and is thus a "lesser Welles" but we certainly enjoyed it.  Its major strength is the three main actors, Welles himself, playing a Nazi who is hiding out as a teacher in a small Connecticut town, Edward G. Robinson as Wilson, a war crimes investigator who is on his trail, and, perhaps doing the most dramatic heavy-lifting, Loretta Young as Mary, the woman who marries the Welles character on the day Robinson arrives in town. Welles is playing Franz Kindler, a notorious architect of the death camps who is famous for two things: his anonymity (he managed never to be photographed) and his obsessive love of repairing old clocks that is to be his undoing.  Wilson tracks him down by allowing another, lesser Nazi (the last one alive whom they know knows what Kindler looks like) escape and lead him to Kindler.  However Wilson is careless and the escaped Nazi (a skinny older man called Meinike) works out he's being tailed and leads Wilson into a deserted high school gym and gives him such a crack on the head (with a rope swing) that he thinks he's killed him.  Then he meets up with Welles and tells him that he's been followed, but (in the mistake people in films always make) that he is the only one who knows where he, Welles, is.  So Welles throttles him in the woods.  (What makes the scene particularly shocking is that Meinike has "found God" and is trying to get Welles to pray with him as he does it.)  Then Welles tidies up and goes off to his wedding.  However, Wilson is of course not dead and proceeds to stalk Welles, made suspicious by the fact that he is deeply engaged in getting the long-broken town clock to work.  He attends a meal with Welles and wife and in-laws (her father is a well-respected judge) and tries to get Welles talking about the Germans.  Welles recommends total extermination of the German people, a statement that, rather implausibly, initially makes Wilson believe he can't be Kindler.  However, in the same conversation he says that Marx was not German because he was a Jew and Wilson decides that "only a Nazi would say that" (see - this film is relevant again!)  The rest of the film plays out like a Columbo episode, except on location.  A lot goes on in the village store, where the owner likes to sit by the register challenging all and sundry to checkers games.  It's also where Meinike left his suitcase for safe-keeping, and the fact that he never shows up to reclaim it leads to a search for his body in the woods.  But not before Welles has poisoned his own wife's beloved dog because it kept trying to dig up the body.  The main drama of the film, and the reason why so much rests on Loretta Young's shoulders, is watching her resist and then slowly accept that she's married a Nazi.  (She did Nazi that coming.)  Really the only sign that it was directed by Welles is the great film noir cinematography - lots of faces coming out of the shadows, that sort of thing.  The tension ratchets up nicely to a very satisfying denouement atop the tower that holds the town clock.  A lesser Welles is still a cracking good film, I'd say.  He may chew the scenery a bit, but his character is monstrous enough that you expect it, and Edward G. Robinson makes a fine, decent but with steely resolve, foil.

Film review: Deep Red (1975)

I've been meaning to try Dario Argento again for a while.  I gave up on Suspiria when I tried it once, but that was half-hearted, and so many people seem to love the giallo genre of which he is the acknowledged master.  Well... if one is expecting wackiness, inventive kills and gallons of technicolor-red fake blood, then one will not be disappointed.  It's clearly an influence on the "slasher" films of the late 70s/early 80s (Halloween, Friday The 13th, etc.) but you might also see it as taking Hitchcock films to their post-logical extremes in the same way that the Spaghetti westerns did to, well, westerns (fun fact: Argento was buddies with both Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci, Italians being apparently perfectly happy to mix the highbrow with the low).  Or finally, you might see it as the Italian version of Hammer Horror (I thought at first it was an almost direct rip-off of Hands of the Ripper, but that proves to be a fake-out).  There is no plot to speak of, but essentially an English pianist living in Rome gets obsessed with investigating gruesome murders with the help of a female reporter (who beats him in arm-wrestling as a blow for women's lib).  There are supernatural overtones (the first person killed is a German clairvoyant, a major plot point is a supposedly haunted house) and lots of very groovy camera work, as well as closeups of dead animals (and, rather upsettingly, a live lizard skewered by a pin) and creepy dolls, as well as some seriously disturbed artwork.  Oh, and the soundtrack is a deranged rock masterpiece by Goblin, who are to Argento what Morricone was to Leone.  But the gore is what makes it: meat cleaver attacks!  Person dragged along by a hook hanging off a garbage truck until his head is run over!  Decapitation by necklace caught in lift!  Head boiled in seriously hot bathwater!  It takes its title seriously.  Am I a giallo convert?  Not really, but as Jami said, if she'd seen this as a teenager she would've been hooked, and I concur.  Oh, and the main actor is David Hemmings, who co-starred with Vanessa Redgrave in Blow-Up by the much more highbrow Italian director Antonioni, but whose star had fallen a bit in the 9 years between the two.

50 years ago today...

Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon!  More importantly, I was one year and one day old.  Yesterday was a good day for me!

Thomas got Sylvester a little harness

There used to be an old guy on our street who would take his cat for walks on a lead.  As you can imagine, this took a while, because the cat would flop every ten feet for about ten minutes each, but he was incredibly patient.  Somehow I got the idea (perhaps from talking to him, I forget) that this was because the cat had feline aids and was not long for this world, so the old guy wanted to do whatever the cat wanted for as long as it had.  But then this went on for a good TEN YEARS, so methinks that cat faked him out good.  Anyway, the old guy has moved, so Thomas is going to take on the tradition.  (So far he's just tested it on the porch...)

Film review: T-Men (1947)

Make this a quickie, because this was probably a step below B in terms of plot and dialogue, although I would argue that some of the acting was pretty good and the cinematography was occasionally excellent.  It's about two treasury department agents going undercover in Detroit and Los Angeles (hey, like us!  All it needed was Little Rock) to bust open a counterfeiting ring.  One of them doesn't make it, and it's because he's outed by a friend of his wife's, so that's pretty harsh.  There's also a tubby little guy called "The Schemer" who likes to chew Chinese herbs and whose predilection for Turkish Baths proves to be his undoing.  The main actor is a likeable lug called Dennis O'Keefe (playing a character called Dennis O'Brien - what a stretch) and in a minor role is actress Jane Randolph, whom I remember from one of the greatest scenes in the history of horror.  Oh, and another one just as good.  Back to T-Men, though: there are some fairly effective set pieces, but overall less than the sum of its parts. Give this one a miss.

Film review: Elevator to the Gallows (1958)

Only the French could make such a silly film so ineffably cool.  Well, it's not really silly, but the characters do some very stupid things.  However, apart from being Louis Malle's debut film, it has two major aces up its sleeve: Jeanne Moreau in her breakout film role and a soundtrack by Miles Davis.  Here's the plot in a nutshell: Moreau is the wife of a rich arms dealer who has fallen in love with his right-hand-man Julien Tavernier.  They have (prior to the film's events) come up with a plan to bump him off that involves Tavernier scaling up one story on their building to the boss's penthouse office, shooting him, and then locking all the doors so it looks like a suicide.  Tavernier (who was in the foreign legion and has done various dirty tricks for the boss) accomplishes this and then leaves, making sure the security guard sees him doing so, and goes to where his car is (illegally, as the girl in the flower shop admiringly notes) parked, starts it up to go rendezvous with Jeanne Moreau, and then glances up and notices that he's left the rope and grappling hook hanging off the building!  He goes inside, gets in the lift to go up to get it... and the security guard, who thinks the building is empty, turns off the power!  So he's stuck in the lift, with clear evidence of his crime hanging off the building for all to see.  But it gets worse for poor Julien, because the flower girl's delinquent leather-jacketted boyfriend sees his car running and decides he's going to take it for a joyride.  She disapproves, but is evidently a bit of an airhead, because it doesn't take long before she's laughing and ransacking the glove compartments (where she finds a gun that all the rules of drama tell us will be used to no good end).  There follows the escapades of the world's dumbest Bonnie and Clyde as they get into a race with a German couple, end up rear-ending them, but the man (who is older) is incredibly forgiving and invites them to stay at the same motel and gets them drunk.  They sign in as "Mr and Mrs Julien Tavernier" and the boy tries to spin stories to match what they know of Tavernier's heroic past, but the German isn't the least bit convinced.  Meanwhile the girl takes photos using the tiny spy camera she found in Tavernier's coat.  While this is all going on we also cut back and forth between Tavernier desperately trying to escape the elevator (and nearly getting killed because he's hanging underneath the elevator when a nightwatchman briefly turns the power on because he needs light to find his lost keys) and Jeanne Moreau pacing the city asking everyone she meets if they've seen Tavernier.  (Smart move: on the night your husband is killed, you're wandering around asking after the prime suspect.)  She also thinks he may have dumped her because she saw the young couple drive by in Tavernier's car and she couldn't see the driver.  Anyway, the dumb kids get up in the middle of the night (in a rainstorm) to make their escape (presumably to avoid paying for the motel) but the boy wants to steal the German couple's sporty Mercedes.  He grinds the gears so badly it wakes up the German, who, throughout all this remains avuncular, and jokingly pretends to hold the kid up with what looks like a cigar tube.  The boy panics and shoots both him and his wife dead!  Then they drive off and abandon the Mercedes near the girl's flat where they go and panic.  The girl's solution is that they should kill themselves by overdosing on tranquilizers, and they take a fistful each and lie down on her bed.
MEANWHILE, the cops think the killer really was Tavernier and are on the lookout for him.  They come to his office to look for him and start up the power, so he can finally get out (without them noticing) and goes to a cafe for breakfast, where a little girls stares at him because he's in the papers and the cafe owner calls the cops.  MEANWHILE Jeanne Moreau has worked out basically what's happened and gone to the flower girl's flat where she finds the kids just groggy, because they didn't take nearly enough pills.  She locks them in and goes to get the cops, but they have a spare key and the boy leaves to get the photos which the girl was having developed at the photo developer that is somehow attached to the motel (because it's where holiday-makers go?)  Jeanne sees him go and follows him in her car and they both arrive at the developer... only to both get arrested.  Because not only do the photos show the kids with the murder victims, they also show Tavernier and Moreau snuggling, and the detective has worked out that Tavernier must have killed her husband.  (But, rather bathetically, he figures that Tavernier will only get ten years, so the title is VERY misleading.)
So should you watch it?  Sure!  It's oozing with style and it has endless shots of Jeanne Moreau wandering the neon-lit streets of Paris muttering to herself in the rain. And while there isn't all that much of Miles Davis's score, what there is is too cool for school.

Film review: Mother (1996)

Just a quickie, because we watched this a couple of nights ago.  We watched it because it's leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of the month, and it's Albert Brooks.  We actually saw it at the time, but it's funny watching it again and recognizing Lisa Kudrow, Rob Morrow and John C. McGinley.  But the main thing I'm surprised at is how good it is.  I liked it better than his more famous ones (like Defending Your Life, which has Meryl Streep in it (and which Jami and I stumbled into the shooting of in Exposition Park)) and Debbie Reynolds is absolutely transcendent in it.  It's also interesting in that it's the kind of film they literally do not make any more.  It looks more cheaply made than most episodes of prestige TV these days (I guarantee, for example, that one episode of (say) The Americans would cost way more to make).  It's incredibly small-scale and small-stakes, and refreshing for that.  Essentially Albert Brooks plays a moderately successful science fiction writer who is getting his second divorce as the picture opens.  He goes out for a drink with John C. McGinley (either before or after a disastrous date with Lisa Kudrow) and they work out that he was attracted to women who don't believe in him, which, they agree, is not ideal.  After a phone call with his mother (Debbie Reynolds, duh) he thinks he's got the answer: go and live in his old room at her house and work through the issues they have.  That's it!  That and some comedy with his younger, more successful agent brother (Rob Morrow) and you have the whole film.  Small scale humorous bickering with his mother who loves him really but (it emerges) resents him because the children killed her writing ambitions.  There are some lovely lines and in general it's a feel-good yet witty film that I heartily recommend to anyone, especially if you're a bit down in the dumps.

Film review: Snow Trail (1947)

I've figured it out: Toshiro Mifune is Lee Marvin. 

Hear me out: Mifune is obviously better than Lee Marvin, but Lee Marvin is pretty damn good, and their career arcs (minus maybe Cat Ballou and Paint Your Wagon) are pretty similar.  Lee Marvin starts out playing nasty heavy types in movies like The Big Heat but moves on to play stoic leading men in films like Point Blank.  In between he shows that he can play wild-and-crazy types (The Wild One).  Well, this is Mifune's debut film (of course the reason we watched it) and he's very much the irredeemable thug. (It's funny: he already has all his signature tics - the scratching, the pacing, and in this one, an unattractive habit of spitting while indoors.) His Wild One phase is Rashomon and Seven Samurai, and his Point Blank is Yojimbo.  Of course Marvin and Mifune actually appeared in a film together (John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific) so I'm probably not the first person this has occurred to, but I stand by it nonetheless.  The actual film I'm writing about is watchable, and has its charms, but Mifune is a little wasted.  He only lasts through the first 3/4 or so before he is dispatched by that other Kurosawa standby, Takashi Shimura (I see that Kurosawa actually wrote this one, even if it was directed by Senkichi Taniguchi), who is the protagonist, although you don't know it until that point, really.  Actually, the structure of the film is kind of interesting: it's a while before we even see Mifune or Shimura.  In the opening credits it becomes clear that a bank robbery has occurred, and the film opens on a police warroom discussing what to do about the three perpetrators, who have fled into the mountains.  (Perhaps the main strength of the film is its location: the "Japanese Alps".  Certainly made me want to visit.)  They discuss the very few options for the robbers to hide out - a hotel and a remote hunting lodge - beyond which there is nothing but snow and mountain.  So they set off for the hotel, knowing that the phone lines have been cut, but stating that this shouldn't matter because the hotel has a radio.  Cut to a person examining a radio and announcing that the valves have been removed.  There then follows a lengthy discussion between two hotel employees, one of whom has worked out that three of their visitors are the bankrobbers and is trying to convince the other.  The giveaway will be that the ringleader (Shimura) is missing two fingers on his right hand, but he won't take off a glove.  So they lie in wait in the hot spring waiting for him to take a dip.  Even then, he keeps his hand covered by a towel, so one of them uses a pretense to knock it loose.  Realizing they've been rumbled, the three lock up all the employees and force a party of laborers to strip and get in the hotspring while they go on the lam.  The cold and the snow start to get to them, though, and they are very relieved to find the hunting lodge.  They just have time to distribute the cash three ways (Shimura had it all up to that point) and talk about going their separate ways (Mifune's character is all in favor, but the third, who is the oldest, is very much against it) when they hear the cops coming.  They make a run for it but the old one is a straggler.  He's about to get caught by a dog when he turns and shoots at it and the sound triggers an avalanche.  This sweeps him away and forces the cops to retreat, giving Shimura and Mifune a reprieve.  They keep going until they spot some ski tracks and follow those to an alpine cabin (about which, if we remember the beginning sequence, the cops must be unaware).  Here the movie takes another turn: inside the lodge are three people: an old man (the owner), his granddaughter (who is in her mid-to-late teens, I would guess) and a youngish man (called Honda), whom we later learn is a mountaineering expert.  Our two robbers are welcomed in, and Shimura in particular is entranced.  The granddaughter is very warm and outgoing and plies him with honey tea, while also wheedling Honda until he dances drunkenly to one of their American records ("Oh Susanna!" I think).  Mifune, however, goes stir crazy.  Jami pointed out to me that while Shimura seems to fall in love with the family and their life, Mifune has only base motives and refuses to believe that others are not the same. He accuses Shimura's character of lusting after the girl, and when Shimura says she reminds him of his own daughter who died about that age, Mifune snorts and says he's heard that before. It's round about the time when Shimura's character is getting misty-eyed over the family's record of Old Kentucky Home that Mifune snaps and pushes Shimura to join him as he blackmails Honda (played by the impossibly gorgeous Akitake Kono) to lead them.  After a couple of occasions where Honda saves their lives (including just at the peak, where he breaks an arm doing it), they reach the top of the mountain.  Shimura wants to help Kono, whereas Mifune is prepared to let him rot.  Announcing that the money is wasted on Shimura if he's going to get got by the cops, Mifune pulls a gun on him and demands his share as well.  Shimura hands it over but then knocks the gun out of Mifune's hands.  It goes off... and hits Honda in the leg (some days it doesn't pay to get out of bed).  They struggle

and then eventually are out on a ledge when it gives way and they plummet... but Honda has the rope and eventually only Shimura climbs back up it.  Honda is in bad shape now, and Shimura resolves to carry him back to the cabin.  Along the way he asks why Honda didn't just cut the rope, given that he was being coerced by criminals.  "It's the climber's code - never cut the rope.  We are human beings bound together."  Yes, you've got it, this film has a MESSAGE.  And it could be ham-handed were it not for Shimura's very unshowy and affecting acting.  They make it back and the cops arrest Shimura, but Honda and the family think well of him and even play "My Old Kentucky Home" for him one last time as the cops march him away.
Should you see it?  Honestly, only if you're a Shimura or Mifune completist, but I'm not sorry we did.

First lake swim of the Summer

(for me, if not for Frederick)

Film review: The Front Page (1931)

This is the film version of the play that was remade as His Girl Friday.  It's a very early talkie, but you wouldn't know it (apart from the fairly poor quality of the film stock) because it's very fast-talking and with amazingly modern and sophisticated camera-work.  The camera moves around rooms as if it were a modern steadycam instead of an ancient giant thing.  I don't recognize any of the actors, which (along with their quality) suggests to me that they might have been the actors who performed these roles on stage.  As with HGF, the basic plot is a bunch of newspapermen (and it is all men in this case - the innovation of HGF was to genderswitch one of the two main characters to Rosalyn Russell (not hard when he's called "Hildy")) sitting around waiting for a condemned man to be hanged.  He's Earl Williams, an accused communist who killed a "colored" policeman "in a town where the colored vote matters".  (Turns out he's not a communist, he's an anarchist, a reminder that the US of the 20s and 30s was more politically diverse than before or since.)  The film is almost breathtakingly cynical - the fact that the execution is to be public and has been postponed until right before election day by the mayor who is in cahoots with the sheriff, and who is counting on this ensuring his re-election.  The only character with a genuine heart is Molly Molloy, a "streetwalker" who was the only witness who came forward to defend the accused at trial.  The newsmen sneer at her and imply that Earl's her lover, when in fact she just likes and feels sorry for him.  Molly is a thoroughly tragic figure who may or may not die (the film doesn't tell you) because she jumps out of a window in an attempt to distract pursuers from Earl's hiding place (which, as with HGF, is in a desk).  Hildy is a the star writer for the Morning Post, who is trying to avoid its editor, Walter Burns, because he wants to elope with his fiancee and knows that Burns has a history of doing anything to retain his writers.  (Turns out he is right, as Burns sets him up at least twice in the film, including pretending to give him his pocketwatch as a wedding gift and then phoning the police to say that Hildy's stolen it.)  There are plenty of entertaining scenes of reporters from different papers reporting the same event completely differently, with wild embellishments (turns out "fake news" is not a new accusation), as the film's view of the newspaper business is just as jaundiced as its view of politics.  It's interesting that the film is even more cynical and just as fast-paced as HGF.  Hildy and Burns deserve each other - Hildy is ready to give up his fiancee and consign her mother to a kidnapping (and a falsely-rumored death, from which he recovers remarkably quickly) for the glory of a regime-toppling story.  I think perhaps that is the mark of a pre-code film, as HGF seems almost tame by comparison.  They would make a good double-bill.  Now we need to watch the Billy Wilder-directed 1974 version with Walter Mathau and Jack Lemmon...

Film review: The Killers (1946)

The Killers (not to be confused with the excellent early Kubrick The Killing (1956)) is a classic noir that I didn’t get around to watching when I was preparing that section of my Philosophy of Film class, but it certainly fits the mold. As so often in noir, you see the putative protagonist of the film, “The Swede,” played by Burt Lancaster in a very early role, get killed by the titular killers about ten minutes in. And the weird (and therefore compelling) thing about it is that he seems resigned to his fate and doesn’t put up much of a struggle or even try to escape when forewarned. And those killers are a very nasty pair, as we’ve already witnessed because the start of the film is them holding up a diner because they know the Swede frequents it. So why was the Swede killed, why did he know he was going to be killed, and why didn’t he run? That’s up to our actual protagonist (although we see the Swede plenty in flashback, as per the norm for noir) played by one of those “ooh, what have we seen him in before?” actors (answer: D.O.A., but it could’ve been a million things), Edmond (sic) O’Brien (sic). As with Double Indemnity, he is not actually an official cop, he’s an investigator for an insurance company. Who knew insurance companies were the ones out there solving crimes? Where’s our Law & Order: Insurance franchise? Anywho, here’s the gist: “The Swede,” who is going by the name Pete Lund and working in a gas station in a small town when he is killed, is actually Ole Andreson (sic), an ex-boxer. We see him in his last fight where he fails to win by using his right because it’s hopelessly broken (one of the unresolved mysteries of the film is how it got broken. You think you’re going to find out that some mobster smashed it earlier or something, but it’s left dangling or maybe it’s just that he broke it in the fight). Watching him are his old buddy Sam Lubinsky (another “where have we seen him?” – answer: a couple of Thin Man movies and Sweet Smell of Success) actors, Sam Levene (sic), and the woman who loves Ole, but is loved (and eventually married) by Sam, Lilly. Lilly eventually gives up on Ole one night when he takes her to a party with some people she recognizes as seedy, and watches him drool over Ava Gardner (well, who could blame him?) in her first big role, playing femme fatale Kitty Collins. Sure enough, Ole falls in with the bad crowd and Kitty, which is a bad idea because she was Big Jim Colfax’s girl before he went to prison. Ole’s true downfall happens when Sam, now a lieutenant, is about to arrest her in a restaurant because she’s wearing stolen jewelry, when Ole intervenes and takes the fall for her. While he’s in prison, Big Jim gets out and takes Kitty back, but when Ole gets out he nonetheless agrees to do a big payroll-robbery (of a hat factory! Sweetly dated) job with Jim and two stooges called “Dum Dum” and “Blinky” (weren’t those two of the ghosts from Pac Man?). There follows a double-double-cross, where after the robbers split up to escape, they are initially supposed to rendezvous at a “halfway house” but this burns down the night before and they rendezvous at a farm instead. At least, Jim, Dum Dum and Blinky (and Kitty) do, but not Ole, because he wasn’t told about the change of plans. Or was he? Because he shows up and takes the whole pot for himself, justifying it because they were going to double cross him. But (spoiler) this was the plan all along: Kitty, who was the one who revealed the double-cross to him (are you following this?) hooks up with him and they escape together, but then she double-crosses him and runs off with the money a few days later. (He tries to kill himself but is saved by the housekeeper at the dive he’s staying at, and for her reward she gets his life insurance after he’s eventually killed – one of the threads that enables Edmond O’Brien to untangle the whole affair.) Guess who she runs back to? O’Brien suspects that Dum Dum and Blinky will still believe that Ole has the money and when they hear of his death, will try to search his room. He catches Dum Dum in the act and they talk, but Dum Dum escapes. O’Brien then goes to visit Colfax, who is a successful building contractor now, and lets him know Kitty is in trouble. Long story short: the original killers show up to the restaurant Kitty meets O’Brien at, but are shot by O’Brien and Sam, and they follow Kitty to Colfax’s house where they find that Dum Dum has been shot dead by Jim but not before mortally wounding Colfax. Kitty’s only concern is that Colfax exonerates her with his dying breath, but is disappointed. Cue rather jokey ending where O’Brien’s insurance boss grudgingly admits he was right to follow the case. It's a good noir, but as some reviewers pointed out, the best bit by far is the beginning sequence. It’s truly gripping: moody and suspenseful. As soon as our insurance guy is introduced, it’s more of a procedural, less existential. Turns out that first part is from the Hemingway story that gives the film its name, while the rest is a screenwriter invention. And even though one of the screenwriters was John Huston, it’s a little formulaic. Plus the titular killers are reduced to such minor roles, it becomes odd that the film is named after them. Slightly rectifying this is the 1964 remake, where the role of the insurance investigator is combined with one of the killers (Lee Marvin) who is so puzzled by how much he’s being paid to kill his target (John Cassavetes – a car driver rather than a boxer) and how stoically he takes his death that he takes it on himself to investigate. Overall: not a first tier noir but definitely top of the second division, and notable for Lancaster’s and Gardner’s early roles.

How Frederick spends his Summer when he's not with us

 

Up to London to meet some old friends

I booked a round trip on the train from Exeter to London, going down on Monday afternoon and coming back Tuesday evening (and it cost more than the flights from Dublin to Exeter and back) to see friends from University, some of which I hadn't seen since 1989.

Exeter St. Davids - a convenient 5 minute walk from Taddyforde. It was designed by Brunel, you know.

Turns out I got on the wrong train at first, so I had to change at Taunton.  Oops.  It hasn't changed since I were a nipper.  I remember getting off here when we first came up from London when I was 6.

Finally made it to the part of Lewisham where Philip and Emma and Jane live a few yards from each other.  Note anti-obesity campaign that Jane gave a lukewarm review to when asked.

Philip, Emma, Jane, all in P & E's dining room.  I am extremely envious of their nice houses.

 Now it's the next day (Tuesday).  I spent the night at P & E's and somehow managed to bust their shower.  Philip is very forgiving and as you see, all excited for the boat trip on the Thames he has planned for us.  Will he get to see...  Greenwich!?  (Spoiler: yes.)

 Jane and Philip trying to give some idea of the size of the shard and failing because I wasn't prepared to lie on the pavement to take the photo.  Although I should've - this isn't the dog-shit-spattered London of my youthful memories, it's like London By Disney.

 See what I mean?

 A view of the Walkie-Talkie.  (Don't get Grandpa started on that one, but I like it.)

 More giant glass buildings that weren't there when I were a lad.  Or even when I last visited.  We are now on the Thames, as you might gather.

 Jane and Big Ben.

 This was in the Tate Modern.  Philip is heroically helping me carry my luggage.  (Quit whining, it's just some clothes.)

 The view from the top of the Tate Modern.  Jane is solely interested in snooping on the people in the fancy flats.

 And here's Anabel!  The PPE crew have reunited!

 Tower bridge.  Anabel is probably telling Jane how boring the Law is.

 Dim Sum for lunch.  Yummy!

 Me too!

Borough Market, for some coffee and dessert.

 Here we are.  Has it really been 30 years?  (Spoiler: yes.  Yes it has.)  Thanks to the walk on Dartmoor with Grandpa I am Mr. Lobster.

 More in Borough Market.  Very fancy.

Finally Anabel had to go home to her family and Jane and Philip and I get on the Bakerloo line to go our respective ways.  Let's do it again in less than 30 years next time.

Footnote: this is the London of my youth, specifically kindergarten in Chiswick, before London got all tarted up.  See if you can spot me.