Film review: The Invisible Man Returns (1940)

Halloween approaches, and more terrifyingly, so does the election, so escapist fare it is.  This one was part of my box set of Universal Monster movies, and seemed like just the ticket.  It starts very auspiciously with a great animated title:

It lacks for Claude Rains, but this time our invisible man is Vincent Price in one of his earliest roles, and even if we don't see his face until the very last scene, we get to hear his velvety tones.  He plays Sir Geoffrey Radcliff, who, as the film opens, is about to be hanged for killing his own brother.  He is the well-loved, safety-respecting owner of a colliery, so it is extra galling that his brother was killed in a mine collapse.  Looking after the colliery in his absence is his friend Richard Cobb, played by a real "Sir", Cedric Hardwicke, who gets top billing on the poster, Price being a relative unknown.  Fretting over Sir Geoffrey's plight are his beloved, Helen Manson (for whom Cobb clearly has eyes), played by the striking (if rather stiff) Nan Grey (whom we've already seen as the sexy Lili in Dracula's Daughter) and Dr. Frank Griffin, the scientist whom Geoffrey bankrolls, who, it turns out, is the brother of the Claude Rains character in the original film.  

He visits Geoffrey in prison and then a couple of hours later, Geoffrey literally vanishes.  However, immediately cottoning on to what has happened is the best character in the film, the portly and deceptively avuncular Detective Sampson (Cecil Kellaway).  He has researched Claude Rains' file and knows the family relationship.  He pays the doctor a visit and reveals that he's on to him.  He also tucks a cigar into his pocket and himself blows cigar smoke everywhere because smoke and rain will reveal even an invisible man.  In fact, later on, when Geoffrey's character is known to be in a house, he brings in teams of be-gas-masked coppers to pump smoke everywhere to flush him out, 

so an unusually resourceful Peeler, he.  Of course, there is a race against time (a) for Geoffrey to find who really killed his brother (hint: the motive could equally be financial or romantic) and (b) for Griffin to find an antidote to the invisibility potion, because, as we well-know from Claude Rains' fate, it quickly turns one mad (mad! I tell you!).  (There are adorable scenes of Griffin experimenting on invisible Guinea pigs - a true laugh-out-loud scene.)  Well, Geoffrey does find the killer, and he meets his fate falling from a coal car in the colliery, but Geoffrey also goes a bit monomaniacal, and has to be drugged with champagne by Griffin at one point.  

However, he escapes and while wrestling with the killer, he catches a stray bullet.  Can he be saved?  (Hint: it turns out it's a good thing he's so popular with his employees given the blood he's lost.) 

Verdict: a minor Universal, but with some nifty special effects, including (but not all as funny as) the invisible guinea pigs.  And Detective Sampson deserved a spinoff series.

It's that wood time of year again

 A week or so ago I finally got round to ordering more wood.  This is always an internal struggle, because it's usually warm for a lot of October, but I know that it turns suddenly in November and then rains or sleets most of the month, so ideally I should get the wood delivered in plenty of time to stack it before it starts raining, but I can't be arsed.  For the past few years I've ordered from the same guy, who delivers a truck load from somewhere up in the Thumb.  Prior to that I tended to have a different wood guy every year, as they were all local sad-sacks who had decided that selling wood was their path to escape from their shitty lives, but realized quickly enough that it was very hard work and hard to find if you didn't have your own land, and when I tried to call back the next year the phone number was always discontinued.  This guy isn't the cheapest, but his wood is actually dry (not just claiming to be dry but actually green enough to tar up the chimney) and we've made it all the way through the past few winters without the chimney getting choked as a result.  Downside is that he ALWAYS moans about our driveway, because his truck is HUGE and it gets scratched backing up.  Get a crappier truck, I say, but it falls on deaf ears.  He also usually brings his girlfriend (not the first relationship for either of them - both have kids prior, I have gleaned) for this visit to the Big City, and they usually go out for a slap up feed at a "fancy restaurant" (they favor local chain Black Rock, which advertises giant thick steaks and magic cocktails that change color).  Anyway, he got back to me surprisingly quickly and delivered this past Tuesday (20th). This time they were both grumpy because her son had demanded that they return to watch his soccer game (why that's going on in a pandemic is beyond me).  But she came along anyway, as did their poodle/bichon frise.  However, despite me cutting back our hedges to the bone, he backed only halfway up the driveway this year, and when he dumped out the wood it blocked our side entrance, so we've been going out the back porch and round through the front yard since.  And I haven't really got going on the wood, although I perked up briefly when the wagon I ordered arrived.

Last year I invested in some super-large tarps to cover the wood and that's probably a mistake.  It keeps the wood dry (we've already had one TORRENTIAL storm) but there's no incentive for me to rush stacking the wood.

Film review: Trouble in Paradise (1932)

 

This is a breezy little number!  Definitely pre-code - no actual nudity but plenty of very suggestive imagery and talk (such as showing a couple's shadows falling on a bed).  The three leads are excellent.

Herbert Marshall we've seen before in If You Could Only Cook and the early Hitchock talkie Murder! and I, frankly, could stand to see a lot more of his velvety urbanity.  (Looking him up, I am reminded that he lost a leg in WWI, but you'd never know it.)  He would be ideal in The Importance of Being Earnest.  And this film is also perfect for him, as requires him both to be suave and romantic, while also being funny, a trio he pulls off effortlessly.  Adopting a more crass, slapstick style is his co-star, Miriam Hopkins.  The two of them play swindlers both pretending to be rich people in order to get close enough to rob them, and at the beginning you think that you're going to have the tired plot point of swindlers fooling each, but we skip past this almost immediately, as neither is fooled by the other (and both manages to pick each other's pocket) 

but fall madly in love anyway.  Their meeting takes place in Venice, but they cannot stay long lest they be caught, and the rest of the film takes place in Paris.  There we meet the third lead, who is Kay Francis playing Madame Mariette Colet, 

heir to the perfume company her father started, and pursued by two men she finds equally dreary: the Major and M. Filiba 

(played by very familiar face Edward Everett Horton), who was robbed by Marshall's Gaston Monescu (in disguise) in Venice, and who will eventually recognize him.  Meanwhile, Marshall and Hopkins steal Mme. Colet's incredibly expensive purse at the opera, intending to sell it, but, reading about her reward for its return, decide that's more lucrative.  But when Gaston meets Mariette, he hatches the plan to become her secretary and defraud her of a whole lot more.  But things are complicated when he starts to fall for her, and she for him.  And she is no wilting violet - when she wants something, she goes for it.  Meanwhile Miriam Hopkins has been hired as his secretary and is starting to worry.  Will they get found out?  Will it be Filiba or will it be the trusted family advisor whom Gaston has squeezed out (who may not be fully on the level himself)?  Very droll and lots of good lines - too suave to be a screwball comedy - something Wilde might have turned out if he had been working in Hollywood in the 30s.

Film review: I Was a Male War Bride (1949)

 

I was hoping this would be of the quality of other Howard Hawks films like Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, Ball of Fire, or perhaps The Big Sleep, but sadly not.  It has its charms, but it's trying a bit too hard.  And Cary Grant has an occasional tendency (particularly in weaker comedies) to mug and resort to various tics like muttering under his breath and doing double-takes.  Plus, while I'm sure Ann Sheridan has her charms, she just looks too matronly here, and is a bit too self-assured.  Someone a bit more wild would've been better.  Here's the premise: she (First Lieutenant Catherine Gates) is in the US Army in post-war occupied Germany, and he (Captain Henri Rochard) is French and in the same circumstances.  (Weirdly, he never even attempts a French accent, and calls himself "Henry", but pronounces "Rochard" in the appropriate French way, even correcting Americans when they mangle it.)  The film jumps right in with them already knowing and feeling antagonistic towards each other 

because he's worked with her in the past and tried to make moves on her, but they're put together for one last job.  This involves going to the village of Bad Neuheim and locating black marketeer Schindler (presumably unrelated to he of The List) and persuading him to move to France and pursue legitimacy.  Their first problem is that all of the cars in the motor pool are checked out, so they have to go by motorcycle, and because she's the only one with the relevant license, she gets to drive!  (There's an odd mixture of progressiveness and regressiveness in this one.  Grant is happy to be a Male War Bride, and Sheridan plays a very competent officer, but a lot of the humor is in the ridiculousness of people transgressing gender roles.)  After having to load the bike and sidecar into a boat and almost going over a weir, and getting soaked in the rain, they make it there, and take separate rooms.  But he rubs her back, and, despite her thinking the worst of his intentions, tries to leave but the door handle falls off!  So she finds him in the morning... and more pratfalls.  Then he tries to find Schindler after instructing her that she is not to acknowledge him if she sees him, but is then arrested and she practices malicious compliance.  Eventually they find Schindler and on the ride home, after a crash into a haystack, they decide to get married.  

And that's just the first half!  The rest of it is rather infuriating battles with army bureaucracy about getting him back to the US with her as her unit is recalled.  There's a LOT of him being refused accommodation (he can't sleep with her because he's (by now) a civilian and she's in the army, and he can't bunk with the "other" wives, because, well obviously) and he just trudges hither and yon getting more and more tired and irritable, and it just made me tired and irritable.  (I even had dreams about it!)  And then on the ship ride back he has to disguise himself as a woman, using a horse tail as a wig

(was this the film that prompted Tony Curtis's Cary Grant impersonation in Some Like It Hot?).  Overall, a lesser effort, but I'm sure there are worse Cary Grant films if you're a completist.

Summer into Autumn (photo dump)

 Changing scenes from our various favorite walks.

This one's Holly Recreation area, the walk that isn't round the big lakes.  Starting with September 4th:

It got a bit drizzly on September 28th:

 October 6th:

Now Indian Springs Metropark, September 5th:

...and October 10th:

 

Now Highland Recreation Area (we do a lot of recreatin'), September 7th:

September 30th:

 October 7th:

 

Now we see the first fall colors/autumn colours at the lake walk at Holly (cabin that I will one day rent for a weekend in the background), September 10th:

Now we rediscover the delights of a place we only visited once before, when it was a muddy mess, Ortonville Equestrian area, September 13th.

This is "Pinnacle Point" - off the trails and the highest point of the park (duh).  Clearly a hangout for delinquents who are nonetheless hiking enthusiasts.

September 18th:

 

On September 14th, also feeling adventurous, we went back to another place we'd only been once before, "The Hogbacks" - a very wild area (that is, no signs with little maps!) out by where Emily's parents live.  Lots of horse trails, though.

October 5th:

 

Now an old favorite, Seven Lakes (September 17th):

October 8th:

 

Here's the Holly Recreation Area hike that takes you round the lakes, September 19th:

September 24th:

October 2nd:

 October 9th (it's a favorite, as you can tell):

Now all the way out to Shiawassee Bird Reserve (Sept. 21):

A shorter walk, because I stubbed my arthritic toe: Atlas park, opposite Goodrich High School, September 29th:

Deerfield Hills Nature Area, October 1st: