Sudden Terror aka Eyewitness (UK 1970) Mark Lester, Susan George

Filmed in Malta but I'm not sure if it was set there. A boy-who-cried-wolf story. Mark Lester as Ziggy. He has an over-active imagination. His sister (Susan George) and his grandfather (Lionel Jeffries) don't believe him when he sees a couple of cops assassinate a visiting head of state. The killers see him, too, and are trying to find him so they can murder him.

The kid's grandfather is one of those retired British Army officers who dresses for dinner in his ridiculous dress uniform. Do guys like that exist? Still, I liked it when he karate kicks a cop down the stairs and shoots him with his own gun. I don't know why I like seeing the elderly kill people. 

So many innocent by-standers die in this thing, including one child, it would have been less of a loss to humanity if they had just killed Ziggy. But Mark Lester was a surprisingly big star back then. 

Free on Moveland.Tv. Doesn't seem to be available anywhere else.

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968)

Peter Sellers plays square attorney Harold Fine. We see him driving around a parking garage in his huge Lincoln Continental. It had to have been murder trying to park that thing, but I don't think that was the point. 

I don't know if this is common knowledge anymore, but Alice B. Toklas was Gertrude Stein's girlfriend for years. In 1954, she published the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, as much memoir as recipe book. It included a recipe for hashish fudge. In the movie, a hippie girl makes cannabis brownies which Sellers unwittingly serves his fiancee (Joyce Van Patten) and his parents when they drop in on him.

At their wedding, Harold panics and leaves Joyce Van Patten at the altar. He becomes a hippie but wisely keeps his Lincoln. He has ridiculous-looking long hair like in What's New, Pussycat.

In one scene, Sellers laughs uncontrollably when a conservative-looking man comes into a hippie clothing store and buys a dress for himself, but that was while Sellers' character was still a square. Although, once he becomes a hippie, he tells his new girlfriend not to hitchhike, or to only take rides from women, and, he adds, "make sure she's not a dyke".  An odd line in a movie where they keep playing the theme song with the line, "I love you Alice B. Toklas/and so did Gertrude Stein."

Free on Movieland.Tv or a channel called "Classico". $2.99 on other channels.

They Might Be Giants (1971) George C. Scott, Joanne Woodward

They used to show this on TV when I was a kid. I never understood it. George C. Scott as a judge whose wife died a year earlier. Since then, he believed he was Sherlock Holmes. He has no memory of anything that happened more than a year ago. There's no sense that his wife's death was especially tragic or that he was distraught over it, but that may just be because he has no memory of it.

Other characters include a mental patient who won't speak because he wants to be Rudoph Valentino in a silent movie. Jack Gilford imagines himself as The Scarlet Pimpernel. I guess the idea was that debilitating mental illness was a harmless escape from reality.

Nothing in it was funny.

Joanne Woodward as psychiatrist Dr. Watson. 

With Rue McClanahan just a year before Maude. Al Lewis five years after The Munsters. 

Part of the problem might have been that Sherlock Holmes was a detective. He sets nothing in motion. All he does is follow clues left by other people and there's nothing for him to investigate, although his brother is trying to get rid of him in order to take control of his fortune, but the judge is oblivious to it.

Joanne Woodward committed a number of what must have been ethical violations, like when she invites George C. Scott over for dinner.

Free on Movieland.Tv. 

A better movie along vaguely similar lines might be Gumshoe with Albert Finney as a neurotic who likes acting like a hardboiled detective. He also has a conflict with his brother. And it turns out there was an actual crime to be solved.  Free on a channel called Momentu, for $3.99 elsewhere.

Family Portrait (Lucy Kerr, 2023)

Realistically, how distressed should you be if you can't find your mother during a family gathering? She hadn't been gone long. No reason to think anything happened. It might not seem ominous if it weren't in a movie.

In Texas, a wealthy extended family gathers for a Christmas portrait. We see them milling around with Santa hats. They get word that a young relative has died unexpectedly, then their elderly mother can't be found. Only one of her daughters is concerned. She has a flight to catch with her Polish boyfriend and wants to get the photo taken but no one else is worried.

You probably don't see that many arthouse films set in Texas. 

Free on Tubi. 

Spielberg's Minority Report (2002)

A couple of critics pointed out the hypocrisy of this film. We see how intrusive advertising has become in the future in a movie that was full of product placements. The villain used the death of Tom Cruise's son to manipulate him in a movie that uses that death to manipulate the audience. 

I thought it was a little weird that the movie opens with Tom Cruise stopping a man from murdering his wife when he catches her in bed with another man. In The Fabelmans, it was Spielberg's mother's adultery that caused his parents' divorce. Was Spielberg saying something about his parents? Probably not, although Spielberg has never shut up about their divorce and has now made a whole movie about it.  

With the help of three psychics kept floating in a pool of water, police prevent future murders but then take the would-be murderers away and freeze them. Their children can't even visit them in prison. Isn't that as disruptive to society as the murders they prevent? Instead of raiding the house and dragging the husband away, couldn't they have raided the place a few minutes earlier and told the wife to cheese it because her husband was coming? Maybe they could have gotten the couple into counseling or told the husband what his wife was up to and gotten him a lawyer or told his wife her husband might kill her and gotten her into divorce court.

I read the Secret Service/FBI report on school shootings. They emphasized that the goal was to prevent shootings, not make arrests. They even listed kids who had apparently planned mass murders who went on to live happy, productive lives.

With some drawn out chase scenes with special effects/stunts. I haven't seen any superhero movies but I imagine that's what they're like. In one chase, Tom Cruise knocks some workers off a scaffolding, presumably to their deaths. Maybe this thing would have interested me if I believed in psychics. 

Kurosawa's High and Low (1963)

Kingo Gondo, a shoe company executive, has mortgaged his house and borrowed all he could to buy a controlling interest in his company. His son is running around the house playing cowboy with the chauffeur's son. The kids run off somewhere. Gondo get a phone call. His son has been kidnapped. The caller tells him to get together a large ransom. Gondo tells his wife they'll pay whatever they have to.

Then...then the son walks in. He asks where his friend went. He can't find him anywhere.

When he realizes it was the chauffeur's son who got snatched, Gondo calls the police. The kidnapper calls again. They discovered their mistake but demand the ransom anyway. Gondo will be financially ruined if he pays.

A police procedural. Long but gripping. Like Dragnet directed by David Lean. 

Starring Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, with Kyoko Kagawa. 

Based on the novel King's Ransom by Ed McBain. 

I came across a copy of the novel years ago. I was surprised at how closely the movie followed the storyline. Gordon King in the book became Kingo Gondo. He was a shoe company executive who wanted to produce sturdy but stylish shoes,

One improvement Kurosawa made on the book was that we don't see the kidnappers until the police find out who they are. 

One detectives drives a Toyota. It's summer and they wear short sleeved shirts, untucked to conceal their little .32 automatics. One carries his gun in his pocket. The Inspector, Tatsuya Nakadai, has a tiny .25 automatic. It's a nice change from American cop movies.

Go For Broke! (1951) Japanese-Americans killing Nazis

Van Johnson stars as lieutenant assigned to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team made up mostly of Japanese-American volunteers. We see one of the men mailing food and other supplies to his family in an internment camp. Another mentions family members in the U.S. threatened with lynching. 

Some of the actors had been in the regiment themselves. I don't know how they felt about it. Men get killed unexpectedly but it wasn't a big gore fest like Saving Private Ryan. 

The movie was fairly successful in its day. You'd think it would have taught Hollywood the advantages of not using white actors to play Asian characters. 

Four years before Bad Day at Black Rock. There was a 1945 radio drama from just after World War Two dealing with anti-Japanese racism in the U.S.

The movie is public domain. I saw it on Pub-D-Hub but it's probably available elsewhere.