margot Reviews

The Heartbreak Kid (1972)

A disappointment; so little makes sense

[5/10 · 22 January 2022]

I was expecting to love this film for its cynicism and absurdity, but I couldn't get past the cold and self-absorbed characters and the overall *meanness* of their depiction. Motivation is in short supply too. Why would Lenny and Lila want to get married? Does Lenny just want sex? Can't he do better? Lila must have been repellent even while they were dating. Who goes to Miami for a honeymoon? What is Kelly Corcoran's attraction to Lenny? What are the Corcorans doing in that hotel? Shouldn't they be Catholic if they're named Corcoran? Etc. Etc.

I recognize the chilly absurdity from the Bruce Jay Friedman source, but I guess it didn't translate well to the screen. Others seem to like it though.

Rebellion (2016–2019)

Historical analysis is missing, but still a lovely production

[8/10 · 19 October 2021]

This is a very pretty, but confused telling of the 1914-1922 period in Ireland. There are too many characters who look and talk the same, and have little to distinguish them.

More significantly, we are given no idea that in the decades leading up to 1914 there actually were three different factions in Ireland with regard to the country's membership in or relationship to the United Kingdom:-

• Home Rule campaigners: they were the dominant political movement in Ireland. They looked to have the Irish Parliament reestablished in Dublin, as it had been prior to 1801. This initiative was finally passed by the Parliament in Westminster in 1913-1914, and would have been put in force had it not been for the outbreak of war in August 1914.

• Irish Republicans, or so-called Fenians: this was a small but vociferous minority that sought withdrawal from the UK and a total break from Great Britain. Unlike the Home Rulers, the Republicans preached armed revolution. ('Rebellion' suggests that this was the main independence faction in Ireland, but it most certainly was not.)

-The Unionists, who regarded Ireland as 'West Britain' and wanted no autonomy for Ireland at all.

With regard to the last, it's notable that this TV series leaves out the essential fact that rebellion in Ireland was initiated not by the Republicans but by the Unionists.

In 1914, just before Home Rule was to be put in effect, Unionist officers in the Curragh Barracks in Dublin declared themselves in defiance of the British government and readied for armed revolt. This so-called Curragh Mutiny was defused by the outbreak of the Great War. But it's crucial to know that it was senior British officers in Ireland, not Republicans or Home Rulers, who first rebelled and set the stage for the civil wars that followed. Without this backstory, the events set forth in 'Rebellion' really make no sense.

Where Danger Lives (1950)

Above-average noir, outstanding Mitchum

[9/10 · 31 July 2021]

This is one of the real standouts from the Howard Hughes RKO era. I don't know why it routinely receives pans and Rotten Tomatoes. Perhaps it's just too effective, and makes people uncomfortable. A very simple plot that gets set up in the first act and then unfurls itself relentlessly. Borderland thrillers have never been better.

Fair Exchange (1962–1963)

Marvellously weird

[10/10 · 24 September 2010]

"Mum, can I have five shillings?" "Whatever for, Neville?" "I need to buy a doll."

One exchange I remember. Neville was doing some science project. Other episodes: Eddie was treating his English friends to a Christmas present of central heating, something very rare, apparently, in the London of the time.

The American girl practicing the Weird Sisters' chant at the beginning of Macbeth.

A sniffy Englishman admitting to one of the Walkers that that there was one American he approved of: "Benedict Arnold."

A rave smash if it could be rerun today.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

Not a perfect portrait of its time and place, but as good as you'll get

[9/10 · 9 March 2010]

This is one of the few movies I can recommend without reservation to anyone who has never seen it. Like 'Citizen Kane,' it may annoy you with its artifice and politics, but there's enough richness in dialogue and production values to carry you through to the end.

Let's talk about some of the out-of-the-way stuff that usually gets forgotten or overlooked. Joe Frisco--legendary vaudeville star, bowler-hatted hoofer with the "Jewish Charleston"; and inspiration to the Marx Brothers in the 1920s. Frisco appeared in few movies, and this is his last. He's Herbie Temple, the washed-up vaudeville comedian whom J.J. gives a plug to, and whom Sidney Falco snares as a client. Barbara Nichols--the unattractive blonde (second-string Shelley Winters) who is Sidney's working girl. Barbara appeared in dozens of movies, yet this is the only classic in which she is usually remembered. Leonard Lyons and Earl Wilson: they don't appear, though they are suggested by the two rival columnists whom Sidney tries to butter-up as alternatives to J.J. Hunsecker (presumably a Walter Winchell type). All these columnists were household names in the 50s, at least in the New York with its seven daily papers.

The tragic Clifford Odets, plugging away heroically in Hollywood after a brief and blazing career as a daring leftist playwright, wrote the screenplay from the Ernest Lehman story. Odets never really got beyond the 1940s in his outlook, and this shows here, as it does in his play and screenplay, 'The Big Knife.' Here we are in 1957, and the big slur is still being a Commie. We are expected to believe that press-agent Sidney Falco can trash a jazz guitarist's career by implying Red-front associations. No no no...no one would have cared by this point. This premise, like the café society setting, is too anachronistic.

This deserves a remake, but set in the latter 40s rather than the 50s.

But it's still a great movie, as-is.

Sincerely Yours (1955)

Excellent Vehicle and a Moving Film

[8/10 · 26 February 2010]

This is a tasteful and moving piece of cinema, no more schmaltzy or campy than most Hollywood fare of the era. Unfortunately Liberace did not make any other films, so this one is a curiosity with a freak-show aspect. Everyone knows the tabloid scandals of Liberace's latter years, and I can imagine how difficult it is to get past those when eyeing this film today. But I watched it twice as a child, long before Lee's Vegas period, and I was enthralled. "I think I'm going to have to go back to reading lips," he says when the deafness comes back and he realizes the initial treatment didn't work. This is as good a scene as anything in 'Citizen Kane.' It's appropriate that the film is considered a camp item in Australia, land of second-hand culture and received opinions: they never knew Liberace except as a joke. But it's a good film nevertheless.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

Modest, lovely, entertaining

[8/10 · 12 January 2010]

I came to this with an open mind and had none of the misgivings that some others brought with them.

I know there are people out there who knew 'The Fantastic Mr. Fox' in book form, but I'd never heard of it, and I'd read a lot of Roald Dahl, particularly the short stories. The film's setting is clearly Home Counties England, somewhere between Reading and Cheltenham, but the half-Norwegian Dahl was such an Americanized writer that I never really thought of him as really English, so I had no problem with the American actors who played the animals.

The charm of the film is in its unpretentious sets and its refusal to engage in grand themes. That movie-trailer scene of Clooney/Foxy looking at the stars and wondering why he's a fox and not a badger--that seems to be joke about all overwrought film scripts. The film ends with a dance in a supermarket--what could be less pretentious or more open-ended? I do feel it is a shame that more couldn't be done with Meryl Streep as Mrs. Fox. She has nothing to do but stand around and be the wary, censorious wife. Most of the other characters are variants of the Wes Anderson stock company we've been looking at since 'Bottle Rocket,' and that's fine with me, but it makes the characterization flatter than it needs to be. The most exciting character is Willem Dafoe's rat, who never gets a chance to develop.

Still, it's all very pleasant and technologically interesting, without ever hitting you over the head with techno-innovations and philosophical pain. That's charming enough in itself.

The Wizard of Baghdad (1960)

Bad Danny Kaye Vehicle with No Kaye

[3/10 · 10 April 2009]

I saw this once by accident at a kiddie matinée. I was expecting the spy-comedy fare on the marquee. It was apparent that the scenarist and director were attempting to strike a note similar to the Danny Kaye costume comedies, but without the panache and high gloss. It is revealing about the early career of Dick Shawn that his fey, campy, manic mannerisms were thought to make him a possible successor to Kaye. But Kaye had class that transcended his Borscht Belt beginnings; Shawn never got beyond the tummler you see here.

The production values are of the Low Budget school. The Baghdad setting was a convenient way of making use of all those old Middle Eastern sets and costumes left over from the 40s. The film was no better or worse than Saturday morning TV fare--old Blondie and Bowery Boys comedies, which suggests a real condescension to its audience.

Sweet Nothing (1995)

Who are these people? What is the social context?

[8/10 · 18 January 2008]

One of the scariest movies I've ever seen, right up there with "Requiem for a Dream." Paul Calderon, a good actor, plays a small but key (and nasty) character that cannot have helped his career but makes the terror of the film work splendidly.

This is a film about crack addiction, and how it can suck in even a hard-working young man with a good wife and some ambition. We are given just enough backstory about the lead character to make his fall seem credible and terrifying.

Another reviewer referred to the Imperioli character as 'Angelo' and he could well be an Angelo. However the character's name is actually Angel, which makes me wonder. Was this really supposed to be about Puerto Ricans, but adapted to make them maybe Sicilian-Americans instead? It reminds me of those Frank Sinatra comedies (e.g., 'Hole in the Head') where the lead was originally Jewish, but made sort-of-Italian to fit the actor. This misfit casting makes the social context implausible--an Italian family that lives mostly among Puerto Ricans and blacks. Nevertheless the script still manages to ring true in certain details, particularly during the last third when Angel attempts to make a little money by getting back into low-level dealing and finds himself in ever-more-sordid situations.

The Verdict (1982)

Phantasmagorical Setting

[9/10 · 24 September 2007]

An excellent story with superb if eccentric production design. Either the version I saw recently was a 'director's cut' with new scenes inserted, or the movie is more watchable on TV than in the theater. When I saw it recently on the tube I caught backstory and sideplots I'd missed before. For example: Frank Galvin (Paul Newman) started out working for courthouse hack Mickey Morrisey (Jack Warden), landed a job with a white-shoe firm that exploited his naivete and ruined his career, and then finally Mickey Morrisey took him back. Frank Galvin still naively loves his ex-wife, daughter of the white-shoe firm's senior partner, even though she assisted in Frank's betrayal. The Charlotte Rampling temptress is hired partly because of a fleeting resemblance to Frank's ex-wife.

The David Mamet script is a gem, relentlessly plotted, but its depiction of Boston is pure science-fiction and fantasy. Mamet offers the peculiar notion that everybody in Boston, with the exception of one Jewish doctor, is an Irish Catholic; moreover at least half of them are Irish-born and speak in rich brogues. So here we have the half-Jewish Newman and the half-Jewish Warden both playing Boston-Irish lawyers, though without any Boston intonation or accent, and the Irish-Irish veteran actor Milo O'Shea playing the capricious judge while looking like the late Tom Snyder in a pageboy haircut, and talking like a bookie from Cork City.

Then we get English actor James Mason as Concannon, attorney for the defense ('Prince-of-F**ing-Darkness,' according to Jack Warden's Mickey Morrisey), and he talks just like...James Mason! And not James Mason in Odd Man Out, either. An upper-class Dubliner, perhaps. Are you licensed to practice here, Mr. Concannon?

All-American actress and theater royalty Lindsay Crouse would be a perfectly believable Irish colleen, were it not for the broad stage-Irish that she speaks for no discernible reason.

Nobody, but nobody, talks with any sort of Boston accent. Even straightforward American accents are thin on the ground. Charlotte Rampling makes a good try but comes across as an English girl who did part of her growing up in Connecticut.

As if to emphasize the strange version of Irishry imposed on the production by Mamet--a brilliantly imaginative East-European Jew who is more at home writing scripts about grunting, potty-mouthed Hollywood agents than he is trying to conjure up a sense of old-line Americana--the movie set is a dank procession of dark-wood pubs, frosted-glass partitions, and elegant but dimly lit Beacon Hill townhouses: a set that could serve equally well for James Joyce's Dublin or A. Conan Doyle's London. I applaud this brilliant fantasy as an aesthetic experiment, but I found it extremely distracting when I first saw the film in its theatrical release. It is as though you go to see a film set in Manhattan, and a parade of cowboys and indians periodically streams down Fifth Avenue, and no one ever explains why.

The Boy with Green Hair (1948)

Political correctness avant la lettre

[8/10 · 7 January 2007]

I have bumped up my rating because this is such a rare and strange movie, so typical of Hollywood in the postwar Dore Schary era.

The beauty of this film is unsurpassed. It is like a movie musical with very few songs but an operatic background. If you haven't seen the full thing on DVD, you may not know a few sequences that were always cut in TV broadcast. For example, the fantasy sequence in which Pat O'Brien recalls how he sang for the king.

Musical? Fantasy? Humanistic postwar plea for tolerance? Why did anyone make this film? Those are side questions. It should be enjoyed for its visuals and hallucinogenic sidetrips.

What is this movie all about? The loneliness of childhood, the pathos of war orphans, the cruelty of schoolchildren, or the need for universal pacifism? Actually none of the above, but it tries to push each button for sentimental effect.

A shaven-headed runaway boy tells police investigators how he lost his hair. He is an orphan, living with a singing waiter he calls Gramps, though they are not related. One day his hair turns green. A group of war-poster orphans comes to life and tells him it is his duty to tell the world that war is bad for children and therefore there must be no more war. But the intolerance of society forced him to shave his head...which is where we came in.

It is unlikely that this war-is-bad message would have found much traction in, say, 1943. No doubt the greenheaded boy's message then would have been that war is a very good thing indeed, because it meant helping Comrade Stalin defeat the Nasties.

The Sandy Becker Show (1955– )

Unusually handsome, bright, and charming

[9/10 · 3 January 2007]

George Sandford Becker was a very different sort of kiddy-show host. He played radio's "Young Doctor Malone" as well as providing voiceovers for countless television ads and Saturday morning cartoon characters. Unlike most voice artists and kiddy hosts he was really good-looking, young and stylish. Very bright and culturally aware, too, with a manic humor and talent for mimicry that would have fit in very well in the 70s-90s of Robin Williams and Dennis Miller. Sandy was too subtle and sophisticated for the 50s-60s. Ah me, most of his work is lost, beyond those cartoons and commercials, and a few video and kinescope snippets of him clowning around for the cameramen.

King Leonardo and His Short Subjects (1960– )

Limited animation in its heyday

[9/10 · 5 November 2006]

I am glad they have compiled "King Leonardo and His Short Subjects" (a pun I never got till now), but Confound it! Where is Twinkles the Elephant? Brought to you by Twinkles cereal, the only cereal in the storybook package?

And why do they have to give it its lame syndication title, "The King and Odie"?

There are many things to like about this series, among them the recurring adventures of Tooter Turtle. An extremely formulaic cartoon, beginning with Tooter wishing to be a knight in shining armor (or whatever), then having his dream turn into a nightmare, and calling Mr. Lizard the Wizard to bring him back. "Mr. Wizard! I don't want to be a whatsit anymore." (Tooter now spins into a sketchy swirl motif, a la the poster for Hitchcock's 'Vertigo'.) "Dreedle draddle, dreezle drone, Time for this one to come home. Ach, Tooter, vill you never learn?"

The Tooter Turtle set-up was the same as many syndicated live-action films of the time (Funny Mann, A Day with Doodles) and I seem to recall a 1960 'Twilight Zone' episode, starring Buster Keaton, that used the same device. It was also very similar to the contemporaneous 'Peabody's Improbable History' segment from Jay Ward/Bill Scott's 'Rocky and His Friends.' With this many iterations, you have to wonder if it wasn't some sort of sociological propaganda, instructing people to be happy with what they've got and not to dream too hard.

Lost in America (1985)

You actually feel compassion for Albert Brooks

[9/10 · 23 June 2006]

Peppy dialogue and workmanlike direction are all very well and good, but they are not what distinguish this movie. This movie plays out a familiar nightmare that many people barely avoid--what if you were stuck out in the sticks and had no resources and no one around to understand your jokes? Wisely Brooks did not try to milk this idea for the whole length of the movie, but instead left it as a second-act problem. He resolves the problem quickly and easily because otherwise this black comedy would be disturbingly close to tragedy.

One thing I like about this movie is that its last scene is on my block.

The basic pitch is the same as Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying--has anyone else noticed?

Prick Up Your Ears (1987)

Orton in Bennettland; or, Character Actors' Heaven

[10/10 · 10 June 2006]

This is NOT a serious depiction of the life and death of Joe Orton, even though the script is based on John Lahr's painstakingly researched biography. It's a good-looking film, with the ring of authenticity (e.g., set locations in the Underground and in public toilets). The script has a good "feel" for 1950s and 60s sensibility. And of course Gary Oldman LOOKS exactly like Joe Orton.

Nevertheless...it's all very tongue-in-cheek. It's Joe Orton's career as reimagined by Alan Bennett, author of 'A Private Function' (aka The Pig Movie), 'The Madness of George III,' 'History Boys,' 'Talking Heads,' et cet, et cet.

Bennett's specialty is drawing comic-grotesque miniatures--self-important little drudges and provincial dreamers. Here he gives himself free rein, turning the dutiful biographer John Lahr into a chatterboxy little elf played by Wallace Shawn. Kenneth Halliwell, Orton's longtime companion, muse, and eventual murder, was in real life a handsome, slightly built depressive; in this movie he becomes an enormous overbearing whinger (one of the best roles Alfred Molina has ever done).

Some of the most memorable characters are on only for a flash: Madame So-and-so, the acting and elocution teacher in Leicester; the local council representative who grandly calls on Orton's mother and declares that the boy must follow an acting career; the terrified book editor at Faber & Faber who turns down Orton and Halliwell's campy novel; Lahr's English mother-in-law, trying to put her feeble shorthand knowledge to good use as she deciphers Orton's youthful diary entries about 'having a good w*nk.'

Not everyone will appreciate the humor, to state the obvious. But if you like it at all, you'll like a lot and and want to keep it around for repeated viewings.

Peck's Bad Girl (1959– )

Ahead of its time, a deconstructed sitcom

[9/10 · 31 May 2006]

For a program that disappeared nearly as fast as it was mounted, Peck's Bad Girl has remarkable staying power in the memories of those who caught some of its few episodes. It is best described as a deconstructionist parody of family-life sitcoms of the 1950s (Bachelor Father, Father Knows Best, etc.). The script would set up a routine situation (Torey adopting a stray cat, parents taking separate vacation), and quickly blow it up to absurd proportions.

At points in the narrative, Torey Peck (Patty McCormick, she of the blond fringe and pigtails, a few years on from the Coppertone billboard and 'The Bad Seed') would stand against a blackout background and give droll Hitchcockian commentary on the proceedings.

None of this was totally original conceptually; the Burns and Allen show also featured absurdist plots with running commentary by a principal (George would watch the latest scene on the TV in his den and then tell you what he thought); Dwayne Hickman in Dobie Gillis also gave frequent commentary, away from the action and in front of Rodin's Thinker; the cartoon show Rocky and His Friends consisted of nothing but endless parodies and knowing winks. What distinguished Peck's Bad Girl was that it didn't shout 'sitcom' at you. Its presentation was closer to that of a soap opera. Someone tuning into it for the first time might not immediately realize it was a comedy. All good excuses for the show not surviving. It also occurs to me that the notion of a child narrator of 11 or 12--and a highly stylized female child at that--may have been off-putting to a lot of people.

Big Time Operators (1957)

An allegory about mid-century film-making

[9/10 · 15 May 2006]

A delightful and unpretentious comedy where all the players, and the director too, seem to be having a lot of fun.

From the first reel (or whatever--I first saw it on VHS) there was something markedly different about this movie, I mean different from other British comedies of the era. It seemed somehow very American, I thought. No, that wasn't it at all (I pondered further), it's just that the young leads aren't draped with the usual over-stylization that afflicts most British comedies of the time. And this, to my American eyes, makes them seem normal, i.e., American.

It was routine in British movies to make all the characters broad caricatures of one sort or another, so that within the first ten seconds of an individual's appearance you could slot him or her neatly according to class, age, and region. This convention gave us some wonderful character actors (Nigel Bruce, Dame May Witty, Wilfred Hyde-White, Stanley Holloway) and enabled some English directors to develop a quick and cozy rapport with the audience (think of how Hitchcock characters are instantly comprehensible if not always sympathetic). But it also means that leading parts without a funny persona are rare birds indeed. And a clown can may cry but he can never be deep.

This movie might be understood as just such a critique of such film-making conventions. Two normal middle-class kids, without any class pretensions or funny accents, find themselves in a tumbledown cinema, surrounded by a repertory company of grotesques. Such monsters are funny in small doses, but if there are too many of them the business can't prosper or be profound. At best it will be merely an amusing shop of curiosities.

That Certain Summer (1972 TV Movie)

Preposterous! (No real spoilers here, but discussion of plot elements.)

[7/10 · 12 May 2006]

I saw it when it was first broadcast--and some of it again when rerun a year or two later. It made me very squidgy. The principals and producers weren't really comfortable with the material and it showed. The only thread of the story that was credible was Hope Lange's distress at having her son (or adopted son?) suddenly find out about his father's (or adoptive father's?) live-in boyfriend.

Scott Jacoby was horrendously miscast. The only way Hope Lange and Hal Holbrook could have had this ugly, obnoxious kid was to have taken in the child of some (unrelated) friends. Perhaps the other couple got killed in an auto accident--who knows? Anyway, it would make sense for Hal and Hope not to have had any kids of their own, so this created a whole new backstory that was not explicitly dealt with in the script. Here they were stuck with this pushy brat, and bending over backwards to be nice to him and smooth over his ruffled feelings, and they always got bupkis for their trouble.

The pivotal scene was Martin Sheen bringing out the birthday cake ('but it's noawt moy boitday!' kvetches the brat) and then Sheen has to swallow endless abuse and innuendo from the little creep, who (let's face it) knew the score from the moment he saw his 'father' living in the same house with this other guy. This is another example of disjuncture between the actual script and the story as portrayed: the Scott Jacoby character is an up-to-date, crudely aware little wiseguy, but the director and adult actors are going around pretending he's this delicate flower who's had a sheltered life. I imagine that the kid was a past-master at subtle psychological blackmail. This new 'revelation' just gives him more ammunition. His poor adoptive parents!

And the moral is: Don't adopt a kid who's obviously not yours. You'll get no thanks!

Beulah (1950–1953)

Beulah was way ahead of its time--7 reasons why!

[9 March 2006]

I am charmed and impressed by the arguments of F. Gwynplaine McIntyre, above. (Also charmed by the clever pseudonym--a fan of both Victor Hugo *and* The Munsters, eh?) But honestly...isn't "racist" a little rough and anachronistic when describing an early 50s sitcom? "Racisme" was a obscurantist cant word invented by Stalinists in Paris circa 1946, and it didn't hit the English-speaking world till about 1970.

And even if we translate the word the way Gwynplaine presumably intends--as a stand-in for "prejudiced" or "biased"--the argument is preposterous. Beulah and her ilk were not cringing, shuffling darkies at all. They were proud and capable Negro folk, and in fact much of the routine humor of the series came out of the juxtaposition between their honestly and adeptness, and that of the white folks who lived in parallel. Every time the man of the house got sick, the doctor came over and prescribed a diet of milktoast. You never saw the colored people having to eat milktoast. When the boy in the series wanted help or advice he didn't go to Mr. Milktoast, no, he went to that Negro boxing coach over the fence, the one who dispensed wisdom out the side of his sassy satchel-mouth; or he went to one of Beulah's friends.

Really, it was precisely the same setup as the TV show 'Hazel' a few years later; though of course Hazel was a white American maid and the cast of characters wasn't nearly as colorful (pun not intended--though it brings up a good point: where were all the black people circa 1958-1965?)

The Plot Against Harry (1989)

Funny, cruel, mean-spirited

[9/10 · 19 December 2005]

If Diane Arbus made a comedy from a script by Ernest Lehman and Cliffford Odets, the result would LOOK a lot like The Plot Against Harry. This is an icy-hearted comedy with scarcely a normal-looking human being in sight. Nearly everyone is some sort of New York Jewish grotesque. And yet there are dribs and drabs of sympathetic characterization throughout, as well as a fascinating and broad sociological survey of a range of urban types. We move easily from gangster-limo to garmento fashion-show, to a heart-charity telethon where an impossibly bland crooner entertains on the improbably shoddy set of a TV studio. By the end, you're rooting for Harry, a small-time hood with the personality of a pickled whitefish. This movie is one of my all-time favorites.

Hot Spell (1958)

Very 50s, Very Shirley Booth

[8/10 · 19 December 2005]

I don't know whether it's Shirley Booth's uniquely pathetic acting persona, or simple typecasting, but I always mix this movie up with her other dramas from the 50s, particularly Come Back, Little Sheba. Similarly, I repeatedly misremember this movie as a scenario by William Inge. It is 50s drama at its dankest and Inge-iest, the story of a sad family who live in a frame house in nowheresville, with a Shirley Booth mother who fears losing her husband, feels guilty about not having been a showpiece of a wife, and most of all yearns for a golden past that is probably imaginary. I wonder whether the whole thing isn't really just a recombinant pastiche of TV-playhouse clichés from the early and mid -50s: not only derivative of William Inge but with a generous dose of Paddy Chayefsky and some Tennessee Williams thrown in for good measure. The people who made this film were manufacturing a product to satisfy what they perceived as a popular taste. But I wonder if anyone could have enjoyed it or recommended it to their friends. More likely they felt depressed and unclean and eager to forget the whole thing.

M-U-S-H (1975– )

I don't remember it as very good.

[25 November 2005]

I saw most airings of 'Uncle Croc's Block' in 75-76, so saw quite a few M-U-S-H episodes. My impression was that it was a very lame, off-brand cartoon. In fact, I thought the quality of the Filmation cartoons on 'Uncle Croc' was the main reason the show didn't last. They were derivative and formulaic, smudged carbon copies of assembly-line 1960s animation (think 'Tennessee Tuxedo" or "Hector Heathcote"). Right before and after the show you could see 'Schoolhouse Rock', a truly catchy and innovative series. 'Uncle Croc' itself was a hilarious, forward-thinking comedy show in the tradition of Soupy Sales and Doodles Weaver. There was great Saturday-morning stuff going on in the mid-70s, but the people who made M-U-S-H didn't get the memo.

Does M-U-S-H look good as a standalone item when viewed today? Maybe it does. I'd like to take a look and see.

Victim (1961)

Not about homosexuality but rather fear and hypocrisy

[10/10 · 31 July 2005]

I have re-rated this from 9 to 10. As a big fan of both Dirk Bogarde and Basil Dearden, I held back from giving a top rating based merely on my own positive prejudices in favor of the principals. I love this movie for its overall setting, its location glimpses of Soho and Chelsea, but mainly because it just stands up so well. I leave my earlier review intact:

Criticisms of the movie tend to revolve around the supposed sensationalism of the topic (at the time), but to me this seems beside the point. Homosexuality per se was not a particularly sensational topic to filmmakers in Soho or to much of the sophisticated public. The real subject, it seems to me, is the fearfulness and hypocrisy of people who should have known better. Melville Farr (the Bogarde character) is the prime example. He spends much of the movie sniffily looking down his nose at queers. He avoids Jack Barrett (more because he regards Barrett as an obvious queer than because they nearly had an affair); is rude to Eddie Stone, Barrett's friend; tells the police inspector "I had FORMED that impression," when the inspector says of Barrett, "You knew of course he was a homosexual"; treats Henry the barber condescendingly; and is even contemptuous to the self-acknowledged upper-class homosexuals who corner him in the photographer's studio.

Farr is a striver who doesn't quite know who he really is, and would prefer not to know. A much more admirable character is the police inspector, a man who's seen it all. He has plenty of sympathy for the tragic Jack Barrett (the Peter McEnery character), and regards the law against homosexuals as a disgrace--"the blackmailers' charter." When he offers this opinion at the end of the movie, Farr says to him, "Is that how you feel about it?" the police inspector responds stoically, "I don't have feelings, sir: I'm a policeman."

If you like Victim, you should also check out Basil Dearden's previous movie, League of Gentlemen, a "caper film" though it has a similar ambiance and touches on many of the same subjects.

The League of Gentlemen (1960)

Marvelous social document

[28 May 2004]

What a wonderful short review from Stewart Naunton, above! I thought this was just a sleeper movie that only I appreciated.

The gentlemen in question are men who were very good in the War but not very successful or appreciated between wars. What is more appropriate than that they extract a long-deserved payment by plotting and executing this intricate caper?

This is a movie with a deep moral message. The robbers are in the right, and it is a real shame that these heroes, for heroes they are, have to get nabbed at the end of the film. By rights they should not only have got away with their caper, they should have taken back their country from the small minds and souls that had commandeered it.

"You Never Had It So Good," was Macmillan's slogan in '59, but these ex-officers seem to have missed out on the fun everyone else is having. They have been shabbily treated by their country and you just have to root for them as they recover their talents and daring.

The movie makes a good companion piece for Basil Dearden's 1961 film 'Victim', which is thematically dissimilar but very much the same in appearance and feel.

Love, Honor and Obey (2000)

An under-appreciated comic gem

[10/10 · 8 July 2001]

This film opened in London in April 2000 and was roundly panned as inept and self-indulgent. The 'Time Out' reviewer professed annoyance at the script's instant-classic nonsense line: 'Don't mac me off like a two-bob,' a imaginary bit of Sarf London street jargon. But the film's Jabberwocky dialogue is an essential part of its charm. It's a takeoff on cockney gangster films (Raymond Creed, head wideboy, is loosely modeled on Reg Kray, and is even mistakenly called 'Kray' in the DVD subtitling) and the violence is about as fearsome as that of a Roadrunner cartoon.

The best bits are tasteless and edgy, and certainly not everyone's cup of tea. A pathetic fat little hanger-on (Fat Alan) is forever being stabbed, clubbed, and tortured, or force-fed microdot LSD and made to eat dogfood. Another whingy gang member is chronically impotent and always being offered 'helpful' sexual advice from his colleague, who explains at one point how erections are caused by the penis bone being thrust forward from the spinal column during a state of sexual excitement.