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Reviews
Corruption (1933)
Typical, but with a profane send-off
Here is a typical indie city crime drama of the early 30s with an assortment of "name" players doing a paycheck job with a fairly dull script. There is a mystery killer plot tied in, with a fairly inventive gimmick to his method of killing. The print is better than many an Alpha release, although, annoyingly, someone has dubbed in extra sound effects. They occur during the two scenes in Mischa Auer's laboratory, and I assume Alpha Video is the culprit, since similar predations occur on other 30s releases by this company. Auer has test tubes bubbling, and someone has dubbed in what sounds like the largest witch's cauldron ever. The bubbling and popping is so loud as to make the dialog hard to hear in spots. The film's real claim to fame, I feel, occurs in the last 20 seconds as the corrupt Gorman stalks out of Preston Foster's office. He is flipped off by the wiseacre reporter (Charles Delaney) in a full middle-finger salute. I replayed this to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. Apparently this gesture was contemporaneous to '33 -- but perhaps its translation into words wasn't universally agreed upon. Unless I misapprehended the finger he used, this moment deserves mention in a social history of 20th Century America, or at least a history of rude gestures.
Potomok Chingis-Khana (1928)
Overcooked Borscht
I've read about this film for years, and seeing it once is enough. It's like many D.W.Griffith films in that respect -- renowned for some aspect of editing or framing, but dull in the narrative. Individual shots in "Storm" are impressive, particularly landscapes and shots of men against landscapes. But the story and the politics are good for just a snort of laughter (as just one example, the British are shown seizing the peasants' cattle while, at the time of the film's release, Stalin was doing the same thing to the kulaks.) And some of Pudovkin's montage technique is primitive. Every time he returns to the big battle (which goes on as the British bigwigs are visiting a Buddhist shrine) he repeats the same two images of cattle charging to the right and the left. When the viewer can accurately predict what a director is about to put on the screen, it's monotonous. As are the politics...."Capitalists baaaaad!! Peasants gooooood!!!"
Gun Girls (1957)
Hotsy Totsy 50s Babes
Understand that my 8 is based on delectably bad elements: 1- Another blase performance by the wonderful Timothy Farrell, who, like Lyle Talbot and Cameron Mitchell in their cheese decades, tells you that you're in Bad Movie Territory. Farrell is always chain smoking in crummy little office or apartments sets in his movies, always playing the wise guy and telling other characters to shut up. 2- Multiple scenes of the "girls" changing blouses so they can strip down to Playtex bras for the 1957 teen boy audience. 3- Towards the end, as the cops chase the girl gang down the highway, there must have been a funding shortfall in the production. There's a cut from the chase to a newspaper headline, something like "GIRL GANG HEADS FOR MOUNTAINS"; then you're back to real time and the girls are still on the lam, then a second headline about the girls driving off the side of the mountain -- as if the late editions were being published during the high-speed chase!! Good black 'n' white cheese from the Eisenhower years. And ooooh those vixens!!!
The Fisher King (1991)
Lyrical scene in Grand Central
I really wanted to love this movie, but in the end, it goes on too long, gets into too many cubbyholes of plot, and tilts toward "Patch Adams" good-vibes in the last few minutes. It does have a great performance by Jeff Bridges -- one of the all-around top leading men who has only begun to get his due. Robin Williams is, to my taste, too schticky -- but I've never been won over by his verbal pyrotechnics. ("Tempo, people, tempo!!" etc, etc.) This film will always be worth revisiting for the scene in which hundreds of Grand Central commuters fall into a ballroom dance, to mirror the romantic spell that Williams falls into as he stalks Amanda Plummer (a sappy part of the plot, but it's supposed to be True Love.) The dance scene draws you in without fanfare. At first, you see one couple waltzing at the edge of the frame; in moments, the entire concourse is one swirling crowd of dancers; there is just enough of the dance to resolve its meaning, and then the crowd falls out of it, as if they have emerged from a dream. Absolutely wonderful.
Ingeborg Holm (1913)
Stunning for a pre-war silent
Here is a 1913 feature with a true dramatic arc, one that holds the attention and shows a spatial awareness of the celluloid frame. The plot, which concerns a long-suffering mother whose children are taken from her, is its weakest feature -- there were plenty of these manipulative stories, up through "Sarah and Son" and "Stella Dallas," and you have to accept the archaic, treacly nature of the material to enjoy the film. It benefits greatly from a clear print, in which all the faces and settings are in good focus (outside of some intermittent nitrate decay.) The lead actress, Hilda Borgstrom, is a honey blonde with a convincing technique and lovely features -- she looks something like Blanche Sweet. Victor Sjostrom tells the story in extended medium and long shots, as you would expect in a 1913 film -- most film makers were still thinking of their sets as theater stages, and the power of cinematic story-telling through editing was still being theorized. But Sjostrom's use of foreground and background compensate for the static camera placement. In his most dramatic use of foreground/background, early in the film, we see Ingeborg's husband thrash and die in his sickbed, while, through an open door in the back of the room, we can see Ingeborg bustling happily around her house. Thus, while the shot lingers at one setting, we know before she does that her husband is dead and that she will soon face life's troubles without him. This film is far more coherent and structured than most films of the early feature era -- if you have a liking for silent melodrama, this is out on a Kino disc which pairs it with "A Man There Was", directed 4 years later by Sjostrom with a more flexible technique. Both are important early films if not masterworks.
Shotgun Stories (2007)
Too Low-Key
Here is a good film where the director makes artistic choices, shapes the material, and never goes for the sensational. The acting is very natural and the setting is interesting (small-town Arkansas.) But, having seen it two weeks ago, I've already forgotten most of the narrative. In too many scenes, the dialogue is just too ordinary and the antagonism between the characters is too plateaued. The basic plot is a blood feud between two sets of half-brothers. Outside of the feud, their lives seem to center on tapedecks, burgers, and boozing. You get the parched quality of small-town Ozarks life, but that doesn't necessarily lend to dramatic form. The scars on lead character Son's back could have been a recurring motif (and meant more); in the director's commentary you learn why that plan was abandoned. A good film which lacks the extra fire that makes you want to return to it.
The Happiest Millionaire (1967)
Mousterpiece of Awfulness
This laughably bad musical gets 2 stars just because it's fun to watch in the "What were they thinking?" mode. It's impossibly long. On DVD, in the road show version, it is the death and burial of 172 minutes of your life. Every 5 minutes, another horrible song, usually in the bad music hall style of 60s variety shows. For the beau you get the #1 Macy's mannequin of 60s TV, John Davidson, here named ANGIE DUKE!! (Again, what were they thinking? Angie Duke, a name to be archived for a denim-thonged cutie on the Dukes of Hazzard?) For cheery butler, you get Tommy Steele, grinning insanely and kicking up his heels -- very much like the Lawrence Welk vocalists who smile, smile, smile, smile as they sing. Number after number, all done in an exaggerated, high-stepping, head-tossing style. As I watched it, I dreaded any line of dialogue that might result in another inane song. And by the way, what child wants to sit through this many charmless easy listenin' ditties just to see a few scenes with runaway alligators? In 172 minutes, there's almost no story. Fred MacMurray (pretty good, but he can't do much with a part that has him saying, "Blast!" in every scene) is a Philadelphia millionaire who raises alligators and conducts musical Bible lessons with local marine recruits. His daughter gets engaged to a young New Yorker with an equally boring family. That's pretty much it. A few mysteries: Why did they include the 2 sons(Eddie Hodges and Paul Peterson)? After an early scene where they scare off their sister's suitor (and, of course, perform a cheery, exaggerated song), they vanish. Why were voice doubles used for MacMurray and Greer Garson toward the end? I guess the DVD included a restored scene with a damaged soundtrack. The MacMurray double was notably "off." Good cast in a long, charmless, cheerless stinker.
Polk County Pot Plane (1977)
Lower than low rent
Boy, this one is realllllllllllly a chore to sit through. I am glad I read up on the film here, though, because when I watched it I thought Oosh's brother was "Doosh." It sure sounds like that on the soundtrack. I'm kind of sorry he wasn't; Oosh and Doosh are perfect names for these two. The film: if there is any way at all to shoot car chases imaginatively, this crew didn't find it. Long, lame set-ups to gags: a house is being hauled down the road with a drunk hillbilly asleep inside, on a dirty pallet. Cut to the weed haulers and the cop cars. Cut back to the hillbilly, who twitches in his sleep. Cut back to the weed haulers. Cut back to the hillbilly. Gee, I wonder if the weed haulers will crash through the house, and the drunk hillbilly will wake up to find the house in pieces? He's bound to have a really funny reaction to that. Look, they crashed through the house and the hillbilly woke up. Other things to love: the drug kingpin who wears a little businessman's hat inside his house -- the pot plane ballad, sung over the freeze-framed plane at the end -- the pilot telling Oosh and Doosh (sorry, that's his ideal name), "Now, I'm going to get to the meat of the coconut!" as he lays out his big scheme.
The Big Cube (1968)
Mae West?? No, it's Lana Turner!!
TCM ran this at 2 a.m. last night on their Underground series. It's a berserk moral fable about LSD and bratty stepchildren. Retired stage star Adriana Roman (Lana Turner) tangles with her stepdaughter, Lisa (Karin Mossberg) and Lisa's sleazy boyfriend, Johnny (George Chakiris), who comes up with the plan to dose Mommy. Chakiris is in full-blown career hell here, especially in his fadeout, lying crucifixion-style on the floor of a torn-up apartment with a pet ant in his pocket. Because the other posters have covered the plot twists ably, I'll skip around to...KARIN MOSSBERG, who lisps through the picture like she has a bon-bon stuck to her palate. When she confronts her father in the early scenes, he answers her thick Heinie accent in Paul Harvey midwestern. Truly wonderful. The real fun in watching this film is deciding how aware the cast was -- or far along they were, before they knew -- that they were stuck on a toilet raft that wasn't going to sell any tickets anywhere. Which brings us to Lana Turner, who didn't age well. Was she a boozehound -- or was it bad genes? Here, four years after her frumpy turn as Madame X, she's thinner, bonier, with the Lenin's Tomb look of late Mae West. She looks a lot like the 1969 Mae, although they had a 30-year age difference. Her acting is foggy and schoolgirlish. Best line of dialog comes about 5 minutes in, when Richard Egan approaches Lisa at her stepmom's wedding.
Egan: Lisa, did you study acting? Lisa:No.
That could be described as the one searing moment of truth in this expose of our times.
Heir to an Execution (2004)
Very conflicting
The film is compelling -- especially when the Rosenbergs' sons revisit their old family apartment -- the same kitchen sink is in place. However, there is no real settling of the central question of guilt. The family has had to question whether Julius and Ethel were "totally innocent," as they died claiming. Soviet documents made public in the 1990s list Julius as a spy with a code name. His friend Abe Osherfoff, interviewed in the extras, says that he knows Julius passed on aircraft technology to the Soviets. I am unclear as to whether Ivy Meeropol thinks then it is a proved fact that Julius committed treason. The family position seems to be, yes, Julius was probably a spy, but, no, Ethel wasn't, and no, they never gave away atomic secrets and shouldn't have been executed. Of course, all this is muddied by the witch-hunt hysteria of the times. The questions I am left with: What should have been their punishment? How can the family be sure that Julius never passed on atomic bomb specs? As devoted to the socialist dream as he was, would Julius have hesitated to pass on such information? Granting that David Greenglass's testimony was the only incriminating evidence against Ethel (and thus I agree that she was unfairly convicted) is it likely that she knew nothing of Julius's espionage? Was their silence to the end attributable to the zealotry of their politics? (I think it was, and I find it unsettling that their present-day defenders don't put this into the discussion. Julius was trying to help Stalin's regime -- is there anything noble about that?) Because they refused to talk to the FBI, even on the day of their deaths, we'll never know the whole story.
The Young Graduates (1971)
Mindy the Minx
90 minutes of Mindy...Mindy is a tease to boyfriend Bill...Mindy prances at the high school dance...Mindy hitchhikes to Big Sur, shoplifts a loaf of "shepherd's bread," Mindy nearly gets gang-raped... Ah, the pleasures of Crown International drive-in features. You must remember that these films were never designed to be watched start to finish on DVD players. They were made as 90 minutes of ambiance so the teens of the 70s would have a soundtrack as they got it on in their Pintos and Citations. The lack of pacing and structure didn't matter to the original audience -- they probably only tuned in when the T & A on screen matched what they were up to, out in the parking lot. The film is really irritating when watched as a story. It's a lot more fun to talk about it than watch it. My favorite inanities: 1) Bill and his friend accompany the teacher to find Mindy. With no luggage or change of underwear, they spend 2 nights sharing a motel room with the teacher, just like in real life. 2)After being abducted and nearly raped by depraved bikers, and after their innocent friend "Pan" is savagely beaten, Mindy and her girlfriend find an unattended motorcycle on the road. Mindy immediately brightens up and chirps, "I'm going' to Big Sur!!" But again, it's a lot more fun to talk/read about than sit through.
Night Life of the Gods (1935)
Not the undiscovered classic you'd wish for
First, the long post by wmorrow explains why everyone complains about the blurry print that's out there. (Great post, by the way.) It has the dark, smeary look of bad VCR work -- but it looks as if the print that was copied was pretty good. For one thing, the soundtrack is OK, and in brightly-lit closeups you can tell that a better transfer would reveal a decent image. I have longed to see this film since I saw it in the Henry Armetta entry of a clucky old film fan book called Immortals of the Screen. The film turns out to be oddball without being especially funny. Very broad acting, an attempt to portray a madcap family with a butler who blandly countenances every bizarre event, with elements of fantasy and science fiction. The gods don't appear until the final third of the picture -- and then they simply harass people in a swimming pool and at a fish market (instead of, say, changing the news or defying natural law...I don't know what I expected them to do, but they behave like the Ritz Brothers.) This film hasn't become a cult item because there wasn't enough comic inspiration in the first place. It also lacks a central charismatic star performance -- the cast of Night Life consists of some very skilled character actors and some "B leads." Who knows -- with a better print and a festival audience, this film might - MIGHT - have some impact.
Say It with Songs (1929)
Bad for 1929, even
The 4 reviews that precede mine are fair. This film really is for buffs only. I wouldn't have missed it, but it's poorly done at all the important levels. And Jolson really is a ham here. At times he makes fluffs in his lines, as if he just barely had them memorized. I was surprised at how shoddy the film was, in writing and in set design. The courtroom scene has a stark set which looks like the kind of empty sets that Monogram used in the 40s. The songs are subpar for Jolson, with lame lyrics that have you guessing ahead to each rhymed line ending. Two really cheesy scenes gave me the most entertainment. First, in the prison, the (unseen) orchestra starts playing and Jolson sings verse after verse of "Why Can't You?" to his fellow cons. The burden of the lyric is, if caged birds can sing, why can't you? Picture this in a modern prison -- he'd be lucky not to get shanked before the bridge. Second, and even more deranged, he is told by the first attending doctor that his son, who has just been hit by a truck, has spine damage. In the next scene, Jolie carries his son to another doctor for treatment! They had some tough spines in '29. The big message of "Say It With Songs" was in the box office -- Warners learned that all-talkers did not guarantee profits.
The Guy from Harlem (1977)
You got 2 questions, I got 1 answer.
Is this the worst film ever? No, because it's funny!! It is as out there as Mad TV's "Dolemite," the blaxpoitation spoof. It actually helps that Mill Creek's print has scratches, blotches, and frame jumps. "Guy" is the epic saga of private eye Al Connors, who guards African first ladies and fights Big Daddy. You get... CLASSIC 70s DECOR AND POLYESTER: dark rust shag carpets, the world's ugliest motel painting, molded blue plastic receptionists' desks, men in the kind of print suits that 5-year-old boys wear to weddings, and lovely rotary dial phones that inflate the run time. FLUFFED DIALOG (although there may have been no script; the scenes play like the amateur cast was told to hit the plot points in their own words.) There are strange pauses, especially in Steve Gallon's scenes, where the actors search for their next topic. DOWN HOME ACCENTS: Mrs. Ashanti: Tell me, where are you from? Al: Harlem. Mrs. Ashanti: Oh, wow, I spent six month in Harlem. OR...Secretary: Can I have your name and the nature of your business? Harry De Bauld: Sweetie, I got an answer for bofe of those questions. You got 2 questions, I got one answer: NONE O' YO' DAMN BIDNESS!! ACTION SCENES... staged the way 3rd graders play commando. Yes, it's mostly dialog scenes in blowsy color. But watch it for Wanda DeBauld and her kidnapper yelling "Eat s___!" back and forth. Watch Al's secretary, earth's slowest typist. Watch Harry (Steve Gallon) bellow his lines three times louder than the other actors. Dig the wah-wah guitar behind all the fight scenes. Make a guess at production costs: $2000, including the motel rooms?? Bad Movie Heaven.
The Lucifer Complex (1978)
Le Bad Cinema
WARNING, SPOILERS. Despite lurid elements, such as Nazi cloning and a bull-dyke prison matron, this one is cold beans, snuffed out by dawdling pace and crummy acting. The opening 20 min. is the framing device: an apocalypse survivor with his own techno cave watches blurry video of past wars and rock festivals while he philosophizes in a monotone on Man's History. Eventually, and it's a mighty long eventually, we realize he's watching "Lucifer Complex." Then it's Robert Vaughn Vs. the Nazis. Vaughn uncovers a compound where chubby "Uberfuhrer Frobe" (!) is creating a master race, most of whom seem to be women cast from the checkout line at a Piggly Wiggly. Johnny Quest-type caper music with plenty of bongos plays over the action. This is Career Hell for Vaughn, Keenan Wynn, and Aldo Ray (who is barely given "Uh-huh" to speak.) Whatever they were paid, it wasn't enough. Filmmaker incompetence provides enough laughs to get you through its 91 minutes: ... underpopulated action scenes, with the same 5 or 6 Nazis getting shot or punched out, over and over ...Middle-aged Vaughn taking out younger opponents with catlike karate chops ... the shag-blonde shooting Nazis, then spitting on them ...Vaughn fires a tank shell at Nazi HQ, and all it does is blow out a window and start a fire ...Adolph Hitler shows up, but he looks more like Mr. Whipple than Der Fuhrer. Pic is like an old stick of gum you find at the back of your suitcase. It's crummy but you stay with it. Anyway, I did.
The Women (2008)
Paging Rosalind Russell...
First, I should say that I've seen the '39 version at least 100 times; know all the dialog, and have read the '36 play, which is different from the '39 and contains nuggets of gold of its own. This version is as flat as a Lifetime movie on adultery. There's a reason you haven't seen an expensive campaign of TV ads for it. According to Entertainment Weekly, Bening hated the catty tone of the original and how the women spent the whole time going to war on each other. GUESS WHAT??! That was Booth's intent. It was a slick, theatrical take on gossip, adultery, and back-biting among a set of well-heeled Manhattan socialites. The crowd that made this new version had no intention of honoring the original source material. They pick at it weirdly, putting in half a scene here and half a scene there that come from the first version. Bette Midler (who is in just a few scenes and acts the old Countess part in a broad, grinning style) doesn't have any context in this version. She mentions going after "Buck," which is a key element in the original -- then he's never mentioned again. This movie is so dull that I'm not going to over-analyze it, but here are a few things that I found unbelievable: > Mary Haines bragging to her domestic staff: "I can suck the nails out of a board!" Right. Great writing. Norma Shearer could've done a line reading on that & gotten an Oscar nom, right? > A COMPASSIONATE Sylvia Fowler!!!??? Annette Bening got what she wanted, and the movie just sort of withers away. Claire Booth used Sylvia as the comic engine that swept through the play. As portrayed immortally by Rosalind Russell, she was an ignorant, spiteful woman who rattled off reams of petty, ridiculous, irresistible dialog that is still classic and quotable. She wasn't above biting Paulette Godard's ankle. The 2008 filmmakers decided that this character had to die. In killing her off, they killed the movie.
The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (1955)
College Knowledge
This one isn't a wonderful golden turkey; it's just a dim low-budget turkey shot on a beach and a couple of indoor sets. It does have one wonderful line of dialogue, though -- Prof. King to Ted Baxter, as the web of suspicion grows around the (mostly unseen) oceanography institute: "Do you think that that knowledge came from my college?" Ed Wood could have written that line. Delirious. It's also fun, when watching this kind of movie, to imagine where it played in '55 and how its original audience reacted. It think it was a co-feature at drive-ins, but just picture this gray, thrill-deprived pic playing at some old nabe with dowdy carpeting and old theater chairs, to a discontented teenage audience who would've found out in 10-15 minutes just what their 50 cents had bought.