Film review: Mr. Wong in Chinatown (1939)

Regular readers will know my feelings about Boris Karloff (born William Henry Pratt of Camberwell) and how underappreciated he is.  Can he survive appearing in yellowface as Chinese detective James Lee Wong in a series of B-pictures?  Answer: yes, actually.  While the makeup is no doubt offensive, the character is no Mickey-Rooney-in-Breakfast at Tiffany's horrorshow

largely because Karloff, much like Sidney Toler with Charley Chan, imbues his character with both good humor and dignity.  He doesn't even attempt a "Chinglish" accent, but merely sounds his actual English self with carefully enunciated words.  This is just as well, because he has to act with actual Asian actors, and I would hope it was embarrassing enough with the eye makeup.  Those actors don't exactly get big roles, however, starting with the woman who comes to see him in his house at the beginning of the film only to be dispatched promptly by a poison dart to the neck launched through a window while she's waiting for him to come in from the other room.  She just has time to write "Captain J" before she expires.  Wong calls the police, who seem to know (and respect) him, and his Lestrade, an irascible inspector called Bill Street, soon shows up.  They are in the next room where Wong is showing Street the wrist-mounted dart gun that he owns that he believes is of the type used for the murder, when a woman breaks in through his window.  She turns out to be one of those sassy spitfire girl-reporters who proliferate 30s and 40s movies, and who is a particular bane of Street's, Bobbie Logan.  She seems to know more than the cops, though, including the fact that the corpse is an actually a Chinese princess called Lin Hwa, who just arrived on a ship called The Maid of the Orient, captained by a certain Captain Jaime.  Surely he is the Captain J of the note?  Well, Wong and Street pay the ship a visit (but only after (a) getting Lin Hwa's San Francisco apartment address off Bobbie, but also (b) handcuffing her to a chair (!) so she can't follow and report everything.  A visit to the ship doesn't reveal anything, but afterwards a shadowy figure pays a visit to Captain Jaime and it's clear that neither of them are exactly innocent.  Meanwhile, Bobbie has broken free and beats Wong and Street to the apartment.  She breaks in, but shortly afterwards, another shadowy figure also breaks in, and in hiding from him Bobbie gets knocked out by a suitcase falling off a shelf.  When the men arrive they discover her, but also Lin Hwa's maid, and shortly afterwards, a mute Chinese man with dwarfism.  He is able to communicate to them that the person who just broke in had a mask and glasses and had a car parked in the alley.  Our three protagonists leave, but leave the door guarded and instructions to the maid and "the little guy" to stay put.  She does, but he climbs out of the window.  And later, when they return, the maid is found also dead by dart. The plot thickens when Wong contacts Tong members in Chinatown who reveal that Lin Hwa was on a mission on behalf of her brother, who seems to be some kind of warlord, in order to buy aeroplanes for his army, and it turns out that the figure that met with Captain Jaime is a different Captain J- Jackson, this time, who was selling the 'planes to Lin Hwa and has, as he puts it, been left holding the bag.  Also involved is her banker, Mr. Davidson.  Various things happen (including Bobbie saving Wong's life by freeing him from a booby-trapped taxi cab) before a group of armed men (including the two captains) break into Mr. Davidson's house (after shooting his dogs first!) to try to get the rest of Lin Hwa's money.  Davidson says that Wong might know who has it because he was investigating who forged signatures (in English and Chinese) on the bank drafts.  So Wong is called by Davidson at gunpoint and asked to come over.  Before he goes, however, he calls Street and asks him to follow him to Davidson's house because he's solved the case.  Before Street can get there, however, Wong and Davidson are taken to the ship, which is about to set sail.  Will Street and Bobbie get there before Wong is dumped in the middle of the sea?  And who killed Lin Hwa and her maid (given that both Captains are mad about it because it got in the way of their scam (their aeroplanes don't really exist))?  Was it the little guy, or has he been bumped off too?  You'll have to watch it and see.
Is this a good movie?  Not really, but it's also not bad at all, and the main actors (except the villains) are very appealing, especially Bobbie (Marjorie Reynolds).  It would be perfect post-teatime viewing on BBC 2 on a Winter's weekday, when it gets dark early.  It's also, makeup aside, a very optimistic view of race-relations in mid 20th century California.  All of the "Chinese" characters are treated respectfully, even the "little guy".  Maybe we'll check out some of the others in the series.

Thanksgiving!

Thomas enchants us with his improvisations on Grandma's keyboard.

 The whole gang relax in Grandma's spacious pad.G

Grandma left her comfy chair unguarded and Frederick pounced!  Meanwhile Radar has discovered an easy mark and has weaseled several choice morsels from F.
Later we returned to my Paleo-Vegan-grain-and-egg-free pie.  A bit sloppy (turns out banana doesn't hold a custard together like eggs) but yummy!

Film review: Grand Central Murder (1942)

This was a fun one.  It begins with a criminal being transported on a train who gets freed from his handcuffs by a detective who is more concerned with grousing to his partner about how he might miss his date tonight (a long-running joke throughout the film), ostensibly to go to the bathroom, but as soon as the door closes behind him, we hear a crash and he's out the window and away.  He manages to evade capture and bums a dime off a station worker to call someone.  That someone is gold-digging stage star Mida King (an assumed name because she thinks everything she touches turns to gold) whom he tells that he's coming to kill her.  He is her ex-lover "Turk" who (it later transpires) blames her (rightly) for his ex-boss and her next lover framing him for the crime he was in handcuffs for.  Already you get some idea of how byzantine the plot will be.  Well, Mida decides she's going to go hide out in a private train car (did you know such things existed?) on a siding in the titular Grand Central station (the same place, unbeknownst to her, that Turk called her from), even though this is only the interval of her headlining performance in her show.  Of course, this is followed in short order by her being found dead (and naked!) in the bathroom of her train car.  Whodunnit?  Well, there is no shortage of candidates.  Besides Turk, who is captured running away from the train car, there is Turk's nemesis Frankie (played by the oleaginous and ubiquitous Tom Conway, brother of George Sanders, whom we last saw in The Seventh Victim),

who besides also having been dumped by Mira in favor of her next target, the millionaire Mark Henderson (who is the one who found the corpse), stands to lose a bundle if she abandons her stage show, which she told him she planned to do.  There's David's ex-girlfriend Constance Furness, whom he told who he was dumping her for (and who bumped into David on the way to find the corpse), and her father, a railroad bigwig, who also knows.  There's Mira's step-dad, the self-styled psychic Ramon, who had been warning her that he foresaw death for her in the cards, but whom Mira's maid Pearl (who met her when they were both in Burlesque, she on the way down, Mira on the way up, and who is also a suspect because she was fed up with Mira's treatment and the fact that Mira was leaving) claims was always hitting her up for money, and who blames him for leaving "the death card" the ace of spades on the floor of her dressing room, which she saw after Turk's phone call.  There's also Pearl's daughter, who was a failure as Mira's stand in in the second half, and finally Paul Rinehart, Mira's ex-husband from before she was famous, whom she tricked into a divorce but who has always carried a torch for her, and who was also seen running away from the train car, because he actually has a job in the control room of Grand Central.  I've probably forgotten someone, but as you can see: a tangled knot.  Oh, and it includes a detective (and the putative star of the picture) "Rocky" Custer, played by the glamorous be-widows-peaked Van Heflin

who was helping Turk by digging up evidence to prove he was framed, and who was also snooping round the train car with his wife and assistant, whom he insists on calling "Butch".  Everyone is gathered together for questioning in very Agatha-Christie-esque (and very unorthodox for the NYPD, especially when he moves all the suspects around in a big group between the station, Mira's theater, and the train car!) by Inspector Gunther, a cherry cola-guzzling detective played by the also-ubiquitous Sam Levene:

He is half-protagonist, half comic relief, prone to fits of exasperation, especially with Rocky, whom he keeps threatening to throw in jail, immediately before taking his advice.  They have a bet late in the proceedings about who the killer will turn out to be and Gunther, one step behind as always, loses.  It's a fun little romp: as typical for the genre we get to see the events retold from everyone's different point of view, one of the suspects gets poisoned in the police station, Rocky and Frankie have fisticuffs, Turk gets hold of a gun and contemplates taking his revenge on Frankie, and when the killer is finally revealed, they meet their fate in a very fitting way while attempting an escape.  Just the kind of film they don't make any more (although, having said that, Knives Out is just out in the cinemas...).  One oddity, not so much with what's in the film as what isn't: it was made in 1942 and there's not even a single mention of the war.  Even in Jane Austen you at least see soldiers home on leave once in a while.

Film review: Johnny Guitar (1954)

Are you ready for a Western starring Joan Crawford?  Well, ready or not, here it is!

This is certainly a unique film.  It's a Western directed by Nicholas Ray of In a Lonely Place and Rebel Without a Cause fame.  It's actually a lot like the latter, with lots of seething sexual tension and lurid technicolor.  The film begins with the titular Johnny (Sterling Hayden playing an agreeable thug instead of a disagreeable one for once) riding (with his guitar strapped on his back) past some kind of mining explosion in the mountains and then looking down on a stagecoach being robbed in the valley below, with one of the men on it left dead on the ground.  He then proceeds down into the valley and a windstorm whips up before he enters "Vienna's", which appears to be a bar and casino, although currently empty.  He informs the Croupier that he's here for Vienna.  It turns out that she's hired him, supposedly for his guitar-playing skills.  But while he's sitting down for a meal, a crowd of people flood in carrying the draped corpse of the man we saw shot.  They are led by the other female lead in this picture, and Vienna's nemesis, Emma, played by Mercedes McCambridge (who kept reminding me of Paula Poundstone, for some reason).  They accuse Vienna of harboring their key suspect, "The Dancing Kid".  She isn't, but in short order "the Kid" and his gang (which notably includes Ernest Borgnine as Bart) blow in.  There are bizarre scenes where Johnny tries to make peace by playing guitar (Hayden clearly has NO guitar playing skills whatsoever, so he usually turns his back to us as he "plays") but just succeeds in annoying various people.  The townspeople do not end up arresting the Kid (who insists he is innocent, and seems to be - we never actually learn who DID kill the man (who was Emma's brother)) because of Vienna's gun-brandishing, seen above, and leave, but only after the richest man in town has (over the Sheriff's weak objections) insisted that he will pass a law outlawing gambling and drinking outside the city limits, effectively ending Vienna's business.  (It emerges also that Vienna is sitting on a gold mine because she bought her land knowing that the railroad was on the way, and rich man McIvers is very annoyed that she owns the plum real estate.)  This will happen in 24 hours, and he also gives the Kid and his gang that amount of time to get out of town.  After the townspeople leave, Bart and the Kid get into an argument (which seems totally unmotivated - a lot of the dialogue in this film is very mannered - more like a film noir, as Jami noted, than a Western, but that is Nicholas Ray's wheelhouse). and then Bart and Johnny get into a fight (Johnny wins, as anyone who has looked at both Sterling Hayden and Ernest Borgnine might have guessed) and then the gang leaves, but not before the youngest of them, "Turkey" (the names!) shows off his gun slinging to prove to Vienna that he's become a man, and Johnny reveals that he is actually an expert gunslinger, and not the unarmed musician he has heretofore claimed to be.  In fact, Johnny's real name is Johnny Logan, and he's notorious, and he and Vienna have a history.  It turns out that he was scared of commitment and left her five years ago and in the intervening years Vienna has done a lot of prostitution to save up for her casino.
Anyway, there's a LOT packed into this film.  Sexual politics!

Sexual frustration!  (Emma loves the kid and hates him for the feelings it gives her, that scare her.)  Woman vs. woman (Emma is obsessed with Vienna to the point of burning down her casino and trying to shoot her in the climactic gun battle)

There's a hanging (a very heartless one), an attempted hanging, a hideout behind a waterfall, double-crossing, jealousy (the Kid thought he and Vienna were a thing but Vienna was always waiting for Johnny) a bank robbery (the Kid's gang figure that if they're going to be accused of crimes they might as well commit one) and somebody gets shot right in the forehead, in surprising pre-Peckinpah bloodletting.  Probably the most surprising feature of the film is that the women are the main antagonists, and Vienna is the clear star.  It's an odd role for an older Joan Crawford.  She's not really gorgeous in the way that she's supposed to be to have all these men chasing her (she looks more like a severe schoolmarm than an ex-whore) but Ray loves to zoom in on her piercing blue eyes and she gets some great melodramatic speeches.  You have to wonder what audiences at the time, used to John Wayne, would've thought of it.  It almost seems to thumb its nose at convention.  Subversive, even.  But it's certainly exciting, and for all the drama and bloodshed, it's sort of a happy ending.  Definitely an oater to check out!

Wintry scenes

Jami's latest new old car

Recap: while we were still waiting for the insurance payoff for the 2010 Yaris, Jami's new 2010 Prius got crunched by crazed Taco Bell-exiting teens.  Jami had held out hope that the insurance would pay to fix the Prius, because, unlike the Yaris, it was comparatively new and expensive, and so it might cost them more to replace it than to fix it, but alas, we got the call this morning that they decided it was a writeoff.  This meant that she had immediately to return the free loaner car (a "champagne" Buick of some kind that handled like a boat) and pick up the plates, at which point she would be without a car.  What is more, we awoke to a world that looked like this:

And that was before the serious snow started.  So we platooned (along with a just-out-of-bed Frederick) to the body shop on Saginaw to pay our respects to the Prius and get the plate:

On the drive over I discovered that the brakes on my car were not working at all well in the snow and ice, and I was very worried about Jami driving down to Detroit to her law class tonight in that car.  So I suggested that instead we go and get her a new car.  It took her strangely little time to see the wisdom of my words and we found that Honda of Grand Blanc had a lot more reasonably-priced cars than Toyota (which still had a $6K 2008 Prius on its website, but a phone call revealed it had been snapped up).  It was a toss up between a 2003 Honda Element (I love the look of them, but Dave at Honda said it had been washed out inside with a hose and this tends to ruin the wiring) and a 2009 Nissan Versa.  We settled on the latter, and after some financial finagling (we're in a bit of a hole thanks to the much pricier now-ex Prius) she drove it home.

Oh, and we finally cleared out the garage for the Winter, so we could tuck our cars up cozy for the night.

Thomas the Composer

Thomas came home from Ann Arbor just to see a work of his performed by his old teacher:

Jami's bad car luck continues

Backstory: Jami had a dentist appointment this morning, so I was going to drop F. off at E.'s.  But Jami finished early and E. started late, so Jami ended up agreeing to drop off.  So I went into work.  Then at about 12:06 I got a text from E. saying she could pick F. up from home.  Sadly Jami was already on the way, and about ten minutes later I got a phone call from a Michigan number that I didn't recognize.  What I normally do with strange numbers is that I either don't answer them at all or I press the little green phone button but don't say anything (that way if it's a robocall, it won't say anything either - they're programmed to wait for you to say something first - and will pretty quickly give up).  This time, however, I could hear breathing on the other end, and long story short, it was Jami, and she'd been in another car accident, this time with F. in the car.  And here is what I found when I drove to help (E. got there first and spirited F. off to a day of relaxation and light neck massage, so he's fine):





Turns out they were sideswiped by a SUV-full of teens pulling out of the Taco Bell at top speed.  One of the teens' parents came over to apologize after showing up to take them home.



And here are both cars being towed away, and the tow guy soaking up whatever fluids flooded out of Jami's car:




To add insult to injury, Jami's phone flew out of the smashed window and is now kaput, and of course it has EVERYTHING (including her schedule) on it. And we haven't even received the insurance money for the Yaris yet...

Flint made the New York Times again!

It's never good:

Dietary issues

So I got to see my special doctor who had me do excruciatingly embarrassing stool-harvesting so that we could know all about the workings of my grossest innards.  (To be fair, the stool-harvesting wasn't as bad as the previous time I did this, because I only had to do it once (although I managed to knock over the tube that was to hold the sample and spilled most of the red liquid within and had to siphon it back in with an ear-drop-dropper) rather than three times over a week, and the test is now better because it's all DNA-based.)  I already knew my frail old colon can't handle gluten or dairy (and this was sadly confirmed) but now I learn I can't eat EGGS.  I've been LIVING on eggs, partly because we have the chickens and nobody else in the house eats their eggs.  Well eggs and tuna, which I've also been told to cut out (or down to twice a month) because I may already have mercury poisoning as a result (symptoms: hand tremors and forgetfulness).  But the good news is, I can still eat duck eggs in moderation, so I can keep eating my bread.  And also I tested positive for H-pylori, a nasty gut bacteria that could explain various intestinal troubles that have been plaguing me - and there's a pretty effective cure for that.  And I can eat chickpeas, lentils, kidney beans, tomatoes, potatoes no problem.  So we'll see.  If only my dear old mother were here to cook delicious and varied meals for me...  Maybe she could cook up our chickens.

Film review: A Colt Is My Passport (1967)

This is a super-stylish black and white hitman-on-the-run film that I wouldn't be at all surprised was an influence on Le Samourai (or vice versa) were it not for the fact that they both came out the same year.  But this is definitely very influenced by Western (as in The West) films, given the mod suits and especially the fantastic soundtrack, which sounds very Spaghetti Western (the other one this time), with whistling a-plenty.  Our hero Shuji and his younger (very caucasian-looking) partner, Shun, definitely Robin to his Batman, are given a job to whack the head of a rival Yakusa firm.  Shun gets his nifty little roadster souped up, complete with "extra brake," while Shuji pretends to be apartment shopping long enough to shoot his mark out of the window.  Then they head to the airport.  But there is no getting out that easily.  They're being paged to come to the desk, and when they don't, they get picked up by goons with guns.  These goons, however, do not appear to have their own wheels, so they are driving our heroes to their reckoning when we find out that the "extra brake" is in the back and Shun pushes it and the goons smack into the windshield.  Our heroes contact their boss, a seedy older guy fond of getting "massages" if you know what I mean, and he directs them to hide out in a motel prior to getting a boat out.  But he is approached by the new leader of the rival Yakusa and quickly persuaded to give up our heroes in return for joining forces.  The rest of the film is our heroes avoiding getting killed while being thwarted in various attempts to catch boats out of there and while Shuji and the young woman who works with her grandmother to run the motel fall in love.  As I said, this movie has style to burn, and the final showdown where Shuji faces off with MORE hired goons and a bulletproof car full of the Yakusa bosses on a windswept wasteland is great, but there is a major distraction that I found very hard to get past.  And that is the amazing chipmunk cheeks of the lead actor, Jô Shishido:

I mean LOOK at him.  Serious case of the mumps, right?  Well, Jami did some googling and swears that he was a perfectly normal-looking actor who was getting nowhere when he went for the cheek implants and suddenly turned into Japan's version of Steve McQueen/Charles Bronson/Clint Eastwood.  He certainly goes for the "minimalist" muttering-and-moping style of acting (in stark contrast to Mifune's "big" acting) that one needs for the lone wolf (sorry Shun) kind of role.
Anyway, give it a go if you're a fan of sharp suits, sunglasses inside and a slightly less nihilistic variant on the French New Wave crime films.  (But be warned: he uses just about every firearm except a Colt (including James Bond's favored Beretta) and he actually has a perfectly good passport that we see in action.  So the title is purposefully misleading.)

Film review: Blow Out (1981)

Apparently director Brian DePalma is a huge Hitchcock fan, and people who study these things say he steals from the master regularly.  If that is indeed the case, then I have to say that Hitchcock, like the Marx Brothers or Buster Keaton, cannot be placed in a modern setting, because the Brian DePalma films I've seen (with the possible exception of Carrie, but I was young and innocent then (and watching alone in a house at the end of a road except for my sleeping grandmother)) have had the patina of cheesiness that I remarked on about John Carpenter's films.  It surprised me how cheesy this one was, because it has a stellar reputation, and I was expecting a Three Days of the Condor or Klute kind of vibe.  But, despite this supposedly being one of Travolta's best performances, (he does effective work with a lot of listening, and fiddling with various film-and-audio equipment)

 the stilted dialogue and hammy acting of the others involved (with the exception of a very young-looking John Lithgow as the killer stalking our heroes),

along with the egregious heavy-on-the-super-schmaltzy-sax score, drags it down to definite B-movie level.  The plot is good enough: sound man for schlocky horror films is out recording wind sound effects one night when he witnesses (and records) a car accident where a limo skids into a river.  He jumps in and saves the female passenger, but the driver, a very popular politician and "probable next president," dies.  He takes the passenger to hospital but quickly realizes something is afoot when (a) he is told by a friend of the dead politician not to tell anyone about the woman (she obviously was not the candidate's wife) and (b) the police seem eager to write this up as an accident, when his tape shows that there was a gunshot immediately before the car skidded out of control.

We see a shadowy figure somehow sneak into the police impound lot and replace the obviously shot-through tire with one lacking bullet-holes. And that same figure later argues with his employer, who is angry, because the plan was just to disgrace the politician, hence the female passenger (who later reveals she had been hired to seduce him), before announcing he plans to tie up loose ends.  He (Lithgow) starts by attempting to garrotte the passenger (Sally, who is portrayed as something of an idiot by Nancy Allen (who later played Murphy's partner in Robocop), despite being the movie's love interest).  Well, he does successfully garotte someone with his fancy James Bond-esque watch-garotte, but it turns out not to be her.  He improvises and stabs her in a Liberty Bell pattern, because some celebration of the centenary of its last ring is coming up.  This leads to another prostitute-killing to establish a pattern, so that when Sally gets hers it'll be chalked up to the insane actions of a serial killer and nobody will tie it back to the politician's death.  Meanwhile a sleazy character played by NYPD Blue's Dennis Franz has been peddling stills from a film he took of the accident, and Travolta uses them to reconstruct a film to run alongside his soundtrack and sees a flash at the same time as there is a shot on his tape.  Turns out Franz's character was the one working with Sally and she steals the real film off him so Travolta can take it to a newsman.  But Lithgow sweeps in and convinces Sally that he is the newsman and she has to meet up with him in a train station.  Travolta smells a rat and puts a wire on her (flashback to his previous career as a cop in internal affairs where a wire of his shorts out and gets a fellow policeman killed when he has to take it off because it's burning him).  The climax of the movie is Travolta desperately trying to find Lithgow and Sally before she's killed.  Sadly, although he manages to force Lithgow to stab himself, it's too late and he's already strangled Sally.  But, in a grisly twist, Sally's death screams that are caught on the wire prove to be the solution to a jokey thread that has run through the whole film, where his director is unable to find a plausible scream for a scene in his slasher film.  Dark!
I have to admit that I was not bored, which is the only cardinal sin of a film in my view, and there were some flashy camera moves that are DePalma's MO.  He LOVES split-screens, and there's one scene where Travolta discovers that Lithgow has broken in and wiped all his tapes (including all his special effects, his bread-and-butter) where the camera just rotates for about five minutes as Travolta frantically yanks different tapes out of their boxes, that is pretty effective.  Also, it's fun to see how seedy Philly looked back then, and how primitive the technology appears.  I would've sworn the film was made in about 1975 and was astonished to see it was six year later.  Obviously the Reagan boom hadn't kicked in yet.

Film review: Shadow of the Vampire (2000)

This should have been great.  An interesting premise (based on a real myth (not an oxymoron)) - that the actor who played the original Nosferatu, Max Schreck, was in fact a real vampire - a great cast (John Malkovich! Willem Dafoe!  Eddie Izzard! Cary Elwes!), and for the first half or so it definitely had potential.  But Malkovich is strangely disappointing (rather one-note) and once Eddie Izzard disappears about halfway (presumably he's killed by the vampire, as so many of the film crew are), the film goes rather dreary (although Cary Elwes, who is a replacement cameraman to take over for Schreck's first victim, does his best to elevate matters).  The trouble is, I don't think they decided on what it was.  Occasionally that's okay - films like American Werewolf in London manage to switch gears smoothly and be successfully scary, romantic, funny and then tragic, but this one doesn't pull it off.  Part of it is that Malkovich's Murnau (the director) is both opaque and unlikable.  He sacrifices the lives of his crew and in particular, his star actress, to capture "Schreck" (who is actually Count Orlock, the name of the vampire in Nosferatu, on celluloid.  To be fair, it looks like he had a plan to avoid giving up Greta (it involved a big chain-operated sliding door that would let the daylight in to destroy Orlock before he got to chomp down on Greta), but Orlock outwitted him and sabotaged it, so in the end, just about everybody except Murnau ends up dead.  And Murnau just doesn't seem that bothered.  So is it worth watching?  Well, Eddie Izzard is fun, but it's almost impossible to watch him and not be reminded of bits from his standup.  But mainly Willem Dafoe is amazing (as always) as Schreck.  So if you're a Dafoe-head (which is a thing I just invented), you have to see it.