Film review: The Westerner (1940)

I feel like I say this a lot, and it might just reveal the differences in viewing expectations across the decades, but this was a bit of a weird one.  It has a strange mixture of tones (again, a running theme): the backdrop of the film, revealed in an opening monologue with scrolling text, is the battle between cattle ranchers and homesteaders in Texas before it was properly a state.  The film then begins with an incident where ranchers run into fences put up by homesteaders, a firefight breaks out, during which a homesteader shoots a cow.  This unfortunate man is then hauled off by the ranchers and set before "Judge" (he appears to be entirely self-appointed) Roy Bean (a movie-stealing Walter Brennan, whose very distinctive voice is clearly the one being imitated by the Simpsons when they do crotchety old Western types, and who won his third Oscar for the performance) who runs a bar in a place called Vinegaroon which doubles as his courtroom (and a shrine to "Jersey" Lily Langtry, of which more later) who promptly orders the man hung (after he tries to defend himself by saying that he was trying to hit one of the ranchers, a lesser offense).  And he is, to surprisingly jaunty music!  Immediately following this incident, our hero Gary Cooper ("Cole Harden") is dragged in, on a charge of stealing the horse of one of Bean's cronies ("Chickenfoot").  Cooper being Cooper (i.e., laconic to a fault) does not put up much of a defense, only saying that he bought the horse, he didn't steal it, but he quickly catches on to Bean's adoration of Lily Langtry and stalls him by saying that he has not only met her, he has a lock of her hair (after describing its color in lyrical terms).  Bean is desperate to see it, but Cole says he will have to write to El Paso to get it and it'll take a couple of weeks to arrive.  So Cole's sentence is suspended (instead of him being suspended) for that time.  While they drink to this (with liquor that dissolves the surface of the bar if you spill it) the man who sold the horse to Cole walks in. 

A fight ensues, the man tries to shoot Cole but is shot by Bean (after Cole's got his $60 back for the horse) and they all drink to celebrate.  Oh, before this, when it looked like Cole was going to get hung (before he dreamed up his Langtry defense), one of the homesteaders, a young woman called Jane Ellen stormed in to demand the return of the man who'd been hung (at which Bean said he'd "seen him hanging around outside").  She obviously made an impact on Cole (she spoke up in his defense too) because when he wakes up (lying in bed with Bean) after the drunken celebrating, and after he convinces Bean that he won Chickenfoot's horse back in a poker game ("Don't you remember?") he canters off (chased by Bean to ensure he honors his promise to give him the lock of Langry's hair) and joins her among the homesteaders.  Of course they're going to end up together, but not before several very un-comedic incidents.  It starts with a posse of homesteaders going to kill Bean, but Cole rushes ahead and warns Bean and thwarts them, then convinces Bean to be more of a real judge for all and remove the cattle from the valley.  This leads to a successful harvest for the homesteaders, but as they're celebrating, Bean and his cronies set fire to crops and houses and the homesteaders lose everything (including Jane Ellen's father).  She is convinced that Cole was part of the plot, and that removing the cattle was just to protect them from the fires.  Cole rides off to Vinegaroon only to discover it has been renamed "Langtry" in honor of Jersey Lily, who is coming to the local city (I can't remember the name - it might have been made up).  Cole, who has earlier given Bean a lock of Jane Ellen's hair (the scene where he snips it is very funny) claiming it is Langtry's, uses it to force a confession out of him about the firestarting, and then announces he's going to that city to get a warrant for Bean's arrest.  Bean is undeterred, determined to see Lily, and in fact sends someone ahead to buy up all the tickets to her show, only keeping one for himself, and rides into town in a posse, dressed in his full Confederate uniform, complete with sword.  There follows a shootout in the Opera House

where Bean is mortally wounded by Cole, but Cole carries him to meet Lily before he dies.
As I said, strange film.  Cooper is said not to have liked it, at first because he knew that Brennan would steal the movie (but they got on so well that they made several pictures together later), and second because "You can't make a Western without a gunfight" (maybe the shootout in the opera house was a late addition).  It's definitely watchable, although Brennan's performance has clearly been mimicked so many times that it appears cliched.  The funny bits (the hair snipping, and a scene where Bean and the usher argue about which seat he's supposed to sit in, in the totally empty theater) are genuinely funny, and the scenes in the fire genuinely gripping, and Gary Cooper is Clint Eastwood before Clint Eastwood was Clint Eastwood.

Film review: Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

This originated as a radio play, and, having watched it, I can see why Orson Welles might say it was the best radio play ever. It's a pretty famous play/film, but if you don't know how it goes, I'll try not to reveal too much, because this one has a real sting in the tail.  It begins with Barbara Stanwyck (Mrs. Leona Stevenson) sitting in bed in a fancy New York City apartment on a hot Summer night trying to get hold of her husband (Burt Lancaster), who should have been home hours ago, but only getting a busy signal at his work.  So she tries the operator, who connects her only for her to first get the busy signal... but just as she's about to put the phone down, she gets a crossed line.  The two men she can hear cannot hear her, and to her horror she realizes they are discussing murdering a woman for a "client" at 11:15 that night.  The time is significant because they are timing it so that a passing train muffles her screams.  Just as they are about to give the address of the house they will break into, the line disconnects again.  Leona is frantic, particularly as she is (a) an invalid, confined to her bed, and (b) alone in her big apartment, the couple who helps to look after her having gone out, and her husband (Henry) being missing.  And in that bed she remains (except for brief staggering excursions to the door or window) for the course of the movie, which is made up of flashbacks from her point of view and the point of view of various people she 'phones or who 'phone her.  These include:
Leona's father, the self-made drugstore millionaire (played by Ed Begley Sr.) for whom Henry (reluctantly) works (and, we later find out (or do we?), from whom he is stealing)

Nice Sally Anne Lord (Ann Richards), Leona's roommate in college from whom she stole George,

and who is now married to a DA, and whom she contacts because Henry's secretary tells her that her husband left the office with Sally and never returned. Sally reveals that her husband has been investigating Henry and that she followed her husband to a deserted beach house on a lonely part of Staten Island that was registered to a Waldo Evans.  And guess what?  Waldo Evans also calls her, and tells her a tale of how he, a humble horse-loving chemist was talked into slightly diluting pharmaceuticals and selling the skimmed-off parts to a shady character so that Henry could make up money to leave his father-in-law's company and set up for himself.  But they screwed up by trying to double-cross said shady character, leading him to demand hundreds of thousands of dollars in recompense, and suggested that the way to get it would be to claim on the insurance when Leona dies.  Waldo also reveals that the cops have just closed in, the shady character was arrested, but he got away. He is desperate that Leona relay this information to Henry.  "But where is Henry?" Leona asks frantically.  Well, says Waldo, he may be at the Bronx number he's about to give her, and if she finds him, she should tell him that he, Waldo, will also show up at that address soon.  Leona calls the number--and it's the morgue...
Another interlocutor is Leona's doctor for the condition that is keeping her bedbound.  This is (she thinks) a worsening heart condition, just like the one that killed her own mother in childbirth.  But the doctor reveals that it's all been psychosomatic, and he's told Henry that weeks ago.  Leona doesn't seem to feel better at this information.
Finally, she gets a call from Henry.  Earlier he'd sent her a telegram saying that he'd been called away suddenly to a convention in Boston, and he calls from New Haven saying he's changing trains on the way.  She  confronts him with all she's heard.  Will he admit guilt?  Is it all a plot by Sally to get him back?  Is he trying to frighten her to death?  No spoilers here, but the phone call does take place at...11:15.
This is a very tightly structured affair, so it feels a little artificial, and Stanwyck and Lancaster are not exactly likeable people, but it rushes you along to that kicker ending so fast that you won't object.  In fact, you'll be glad you dialed this nasty little film up.  (Yeesh.)

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.