Law of the Border (Turkey, 1966)

The title makes it sound like a B western.

Set in what was then the present day. There's a village on the Turkish border. The people there survive by herding sheep and smuggling. Both enterprises are threatened when the government wants to open a school. It means taking kids away from their work and having a teacher living there and becoming hip to their criminal activities.

People ride horses and living conditions are primitive, but there's a military officer who rides around in a Jeep and there's a rich guy who rides around in the back of a 1960's Mercury. Everyone else is dirt poor. Their revolvers, rifles and semi-automatic shotguns are all they have that are of any value.

Mine fields separate them from whatever country is on the other side. One guy has a big Army surplus metal detector.

It seemed like a realistic movie, so the running gun fights came as a surprise.

Only one print of the film survived the 1980 military coup in Turkey. It was badly scratched, full of splices and had deteriorated, but they restored it as best they could. All other copies were destroyed.

Black and white, 77 minutes. Available on the Criterion Channel.

Norman Mailer's Wild 90 (1968) --Problem solved!

I tried to watch Wild 90 some time back but I turned it off because I truly couldn't understand a word they said.

For some reason, I clicked on it again on The Criterion Channel. I had forgotten I had the "Caption Mode" set to "Always On" and there it was! All the idiotic improvised dialog in subtitles!

Made in 1968 for $1,500 (two hundred less than a new Volkswagen at the time), filmed in a space D. A. Pennebaker rented but wasn't using. Pennebaker did the filming.

As I understand it, Norman Mailer and some actors who were in a play based on something he wrote would hang around in a bar pretending to be in the Mafia. Mailer realized this would make a terrific movie.

Anyone could do it today on video and couldn't possible do any worse.

Here's some of the dialog I would never have understood before:

"Twenty-one days between my head."

"Between your ears."

"Twenty-one days."

"You got a lot of muscle between your ears."

"Let me look in your ear! I want to see what you heard. Yeah! Yeah! You know what you heard? You heard you're full of shit, you. You gonna leave, hmm?"

"We're leavin' together. Right, baby? Huh?"

"Let me see that."

"WHAAAAA---HA HA HA HA!"

"Waaah, ha ha ha! Neither of you two are very well-coordinated, baby."

It goes on for ninety minutes. Hence the title.

The Way of the West (1934)

The hero is a government agent trying to end attacks against sheep herders by cattlemen. I didn't really catch anyone's name in it and didn't recognize the actors, but I don't think it matters. The hero smiled too much but he did beat up some men who were roughing up a child. The kid played by Bobby Nelson was eleven or twelve. It was refreshing to see a child threatening men with a gun although these movies were aimed at boys and you don't want to encourage that sort of thing.

The star suggests he get a smaller gun, something better suited to a child. Which seems sensible.

1934. IMDb says it's 55 minutes, but the version I saw was 48 minutes.

Seemed a little more crudely made than other B westerns which is good. It gives you the feeling that it could have been made by the characters in the movie.

But it wasn't crude enough. The hero is dressed too neatly in stupid-looking western-wear. The boy sees his father murdered but cheers right up.

Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959)

There was an excellent Soviet movie called The Last Inch, (Последний дюйм) made in 1958, based on an American  short story by James Aldridge. An American bush pilot lives in the middle east with his 12-year-old son. He's a widower and he wants to send his son to live with his late wife's parents in the U.S.

Desperate for work, the man takes a job doing underwater photography. He and his son fly to an island. The father goes into the water and is bitten by a shark. The kid drags his father to the plane. He can't call for help on the radio, so the movie has both a shark attack and a child flying an airplane, but it needed the subplot of the father wanting to send the kid to his grandparents, the kid not wanting to go and the strain this causes in their relationship. Actually, I'm not sure which is the plot and which is the subplot.

Attack of the Giant Leeches is about giant leeches kidnapping and killing people. It sounds stupid, but if that were really happening it would be so shocking and horrible that nothing else would matter.

But the movie was set in the South in a leech-infested swamp. There's an overweight fellow (Bruno VeSota) married to a vivacious Baby Doll-like vixen (Playboy centerfold Yvette Vickers) who runs around with other men.

I liked the lurid subplot, maybe because the giant leaches were so unconvincing. The husband gets out a shotgun and threatens his wife and one of her boyfriends which he shouldn't have done because, when the two are abducted by giant leeches, cops think he murdered them.

Regular leeches would have been bad enough for a horror movie.

Black and white, 62 minutes. Filmed in eight days. Produced by Roger Corman's brother, Gene.

Ozu's Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Nagaya shinshiroku) 1947.

I've only seen a few movies by Ozu.

A widow, Otane, is forced to take in a young boy who was separated from his father. The kid doesn't really speak, but his mother is dead and it appears that his father has abandoned him. Otane doesn't want him and resents having him foisted on her.

The people in the movie are horrible. There's one nice guy who brings the kid home, but he's renting a room from another guy who won't let the child stay. There's no discussion of taking him anywhere, like there's no one in authority whose job it is to care for homeless children, and there may not have been in postwar Japan.

The women does finally develop some affection for the kid.

The boy wetting his futon doesn't help. They show the futon hanging outside to dry, and, to me, it looked like an American flag. It had plaid instead of stripes, but it had a corner that was a darker color with a pattern of what weren't really stars. They were under occupation so you have to admire them slipping that past the U.S. censors, a Japanese kid going to the bathroom on Old Glory.

The thing looked as much like an American flag as the flags on the doors of the U.S. embassy did in Kurosawa's Sanshiro Sugata 2.

I'd seen Ozu's silent, Little Rascals-like I was Born, But… (1932) and the thing that struck me was how soft Japanese children were. The kids--they were all boys--would burst out crying at the drop of a hat. I had always assumed it was American children who were weak and spoiled.

There was an interview on public radio with a man who had been a prisoner in Guantanamo. He was Afghan but was a British Royal Subject which is why he was released. The host asked him what he thought of Americans after being around the U.S. troops. He didn't want to answer, but the host pressed him, and he started by saying that he wasn't talking about ALL Americans---we aren't all this way----and I thought it was going to be really bad. But then he said that Americans are like little girls. They're afraid of spiders, they're afraid of snakes, they're afraid to get their clothes dirty, they run to the nurse if they get a cut.

I would have thought that Afghan girls were made of tougher stuff.

In this movie, Otane talks to her friend and laments how hard life had become for Japanese children, how callous adults had become and how different it had been for them in their day. 

Over 60 Palestinian children were just slaughtered by God's Chosen People using American weapons. This means that at least twice that many were wounded, many with burns or amputations. Entire families were wiped out. And the bulk of Americans--at least those in government--and Jews in the U.S. and Israel seem to have the idea that Palestinian children must be used to it by now. 

That kid was right to pee on the flag.

Charles Grodin, RIP

Charles Grodin always seemed like he should be very pleasant and I imagine he was in real life, but he usually played terrible people. In one of his memoirs, it sounded like he was hurt that the audience cheered when King Kong stepped on him, but he was playing the villain. I never really found his talk show appearances amusing. But watching his comedies, I thought I could spot the bits he improvised.

James Nguyen's Julie and Jack (2003)

I had watched Alex Cox's Repo Chick (2009) to see a relatively low budget movie filmed entirely in front of a green screen, and I thought it worked pretty well most of the time. They used model railroads as background.

Then I watched Julie and Jack, from the director of Birdemic, a romance filmed mostly in front of green screen which didn't work especially well although I'm not sure if you should blame the green screen for that.

The attempted naturalistic dialog didn't work. I thought it might have been better with less editing---if they had filmed the dialog scenes in single takes so you'd get used to the obviously fake background rather than being distracted anew every time they cut to another shot.

My favorite scene in Birdemic was where the couple was walking down the beach.

"Oh, look! A dead seagull," the girl says.

"Don't touch it!" her date says stopping her as she reaches for the dead bird.

I didn't have a favorite scene in Julie and Jack.

The Rifftrax version of Birdemic is available on demand on Pluto; Julie and Jack isn't available on demand but they show it from time to time on its Live TV channel.

Again from The Onion

Palestinian Family Who Lost Home In Airstrike Takes Comfort In Knowing This All Very Complicated

GAZA, PALESTINE—Attempting to find some solace in an otherwise trying situation, the Al-Natshehs, a Palestinian family who lost their home in an airstrike, took comfort Wednesday in knowing that this was all very complicated. “You know, having your longtime family home demolished by an Israeli missile is a tough pill to swallow, but at the end of the day, you gotta realize there’s two sides to every story,” said Rabia Al-Natsheh, the matriarch of the family, adding that, despite the fact that her 5-year-old son was killed in the attack while her husband suffered third-degree burns, she ultimately found peace of mind in knowing that it’s a very nuanced issue that can be pretty complex when you look at it. “Sure, we have experienced incredible hardship and been forced to the brink of destitution, but then again, it’s not a black-and-white thing. It’s honestly a relief knowing that the loss of our home is simply a part of a long, inscrutable series of events, the root causes of which are too difficult for anyone to objectively assess.” Al-Natsheh added that she was grateful to have plenty of time to read multiple different perspectives on the subject at her new refugee camp.

The Hot Rock (1972, Peter Yates, director)

An early action/comedy/crime movie. I must have been nine or ten when I saw this in a theater with my brother and his friends. It was the first time I heard an adult refer to urination as "peeing". It wasn't much of a revelation, I guess.

Robert Redford, George Segal, Paul Sand and Ron Leibman are hired by a UN Ambassador from an African Country (Moses Gunn) to steal a large diamond from a museum. Paul Sand swallows the diamond when he's captured by guards. If they want it, they'll have to break him out of prison, the first of a series of complications.

 

There's a frightening scene where one of them flies a helicopter for the first time. There's some violence but only police and security guards get hurt, and not badly. It doesn't dwell on the planning or preparation which keeps it moving along. It's never explained how they happened to know a hypnotist.

Charlotte Rae is barely recognizable as Leibman's mother, with Christopher Guest in it somewhere as a cop.
 

The best role I've seen Zero Mostel in as Paul Sand's father and attorney.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

From The Onion

IDF Soldier Recounts Harrowing, Heroic War Story Of Killing 8-Month-Old Child

JERUSALEM—Describing the terrifying yet valiant experience to his fellow battalion members, Israel Defense Forces soldier Yossi Saadon recounted Tuesday his harrowing, heroic war story of killing an 8-month-old Palestinian child during a violent attack against protesters. “It was a heart-pounding experience—there was smoke and gunfire all around me, and I made a split-second decision to hurl that canister of tear gas at the encroaching infant cradled in her father’s arms,” said Saadon to the group of awed soldiers, describing the chills that went up and down his spine as he realized that all he had was his M16 assault rifle and some tear gas to defend himself against the unarmed Palestinian family standing only dozens of yards away. “I could see the whites of the baby’s eyes and hear her terrifying cries, and I knew it was either her or me. And this wasn’t some newborn infant, you know? This was a baby who could probably sit up independently. I was scared, but I acted quickly to throw that tear gas at her and her older sister. And who knows how many lives I saved when I shot the women trying to help her?” At press time, Saadon’s battalion commander informed him that he was submitting his name for the Medal of Valor, the IDF’s highest honor.

Buffalo Rider (1976)

I've written about this before. When I started high school, I was sitting in a packed classroom full of other sophomores. It was the history of Western Civilization, but it was being taught by the drama teacher. At one point, he told us that he had been in a movie over the summer. There were so many of us and we didn't know the guy, so we showed no interest at all in what he must have regarded as a major event in his life.

I felt bad about our lack of response, but it was clearly for the best. If any of us had gone to see that movie, he'd have never lived it down. I finally saw the Rifftrax version and it was just terrible. Never brag about your movie until you've seen it.

People keep saying that ANYBODY can make a movie today! Digital video is so cheap! But this thing shows that the 1970's was the golden age of any bum off the street making a movie. There was nothing in this thing that any human being would ever want to watch, yet it got a theatrical release.  

It had footage of buffalo being killed, a fight between two bears, a mountain lion trying to kill a raccoon by holding it under water, a raccoon being swept down a river, a buffalo nearly drowning trying to cross a river.

There was some human suffering, too, but it was off-camera. The "actor" in the title role got his foot caught in a stirrup and was dragged a few hundred yards with a broken ankle.

The lowest level of art appreciation is where you judge a work according to the difficulty the artist had producing it. I don't think the makers of this thing had any coherent thoughts about this, but on a sub-verbal level, I think that's probably what they had in mind as they filmed it.

There's an abbreviated version of the movie on YouTube called "Guy on a Buffalo" with musical accompaniment by a band from Austin or somewhere. 

The full movie is available on a Roku channel, but I'm not recommending it.

James Franco washed up? Even Seth Rogen dumps him

From a Showbiz 411 article, "The Astonishing Collapse of James Franco's Career Cemented Now by Former Pal Seth Rogen in U.K. Interview":

This is BIG news. Franco, who was already on the outs with a lot of people when he made “The Disaster Artist,” still had Rogen in his corner. They’d met during “Freaks and Geeks,” and Franco had revived their friendship as a way to keep a revenue stream alive while he made his weird, costly, indie films that flopped.

...

Now Rogen tells the Sunday London Times their relationship kaput. Rogen says: “I don’t know if I can define [our personal relationship] right now during this interview. I can say it, um, you know, it has changed many things in our relationship and our dynamic.”

“What I can say is that I despise abuse and harassment and I would never cover or conceal the actions of someone doing it, or knowingly put someone in a situation where they were around someone like that,” Rogen said.

He added, “However, I do look back at a joke I made on Saturday Night Live in 2014 and I very much regret making that joke. It was a terrible joke, honestly. And I also look back to that interview in 2018 where I comment that I would keep working with James, and the truth is that I have not and I do not plan to right now.” In the SNL episode, Franco DMs a 17-year-old British schoolgirl and asks for her number.

...

What pushed Rogen was an accusation from actress Charlayne Yi that she tried to leave “The Disaster Artist” during the shoot because of mistreatment. She says she was offered a bribe to stay, and that Rogen was in on it.

...

“The Disaster Artist,” on which Rogen served a producer, was the breaking point. In the intervening years between this film and “The Interview,” Franco had gone full throttle into giving acting classes, getting college degrees,and making movies no one wanted to see. He was fully immersed in his own myth. He’d disappeared right up his own ass. (Let’s not forget when he “remade” episodes of the sitcom “Three’s Company’ and showed them on video screens at Sundance.)

So now Rogen is gone. Apatow, who takes very public positions in favor of women’s rights in Hollywood, has to be out, too. Where does that leave Franco? He’s still dealing with a lawsuit. And even if he settles with all his accusers, how he’ll resume his career is a mystery.

The Clockmaker of St Paul (1974, France)

Bertrand Taverier's first feature film. 

I saw a movie back in the '70's. I have no idea what it was and I never saw it again. But it had a watch-maker who sits very quietly working on his watches. He seemed very calm but it was the 1940's and they gave him a lobotomy in the end.

So I don't know what cruel stereotypes I had of clockmakers, but I was surprised that the guy in this movie seemed perfectly normal. It starts with him hanging around with friends. It was 1974 and they reveal that just over half the French population supported the death penalty, which meant decapitation by guillotine.

The clockmaker, Michel, was played by pudgy, middle-aged, normal-looking Philippe Noiret. He looked tougher than Dick Van Patten, not as tough as Ed Asner. But, in one scene, a couple of vigilantes break the windows of his shop and he and his friend chase them down and beat them up. He knocks the one he's working over into the river.

Michel's son didn't come home. In the morning, police show up. The young fellow is wanted for murder and is on the run.

Michel slowly realizes how little he knew about his son. He had a girlfriend he'd never met. The father was a widower and the kid had a nanny for years who was dismissed when he was twelve, and the father is surprised to learn his son was still in contact with her.

The father hangs around with the detective who assures him that they only torture Algerians and hippies. Oh, they might hit his son in the head with a phone book a few times to get him talking, but that's hardly worth mentioning.

Filmed in Lyons which looks beautiful. If it weren't for the cops and the young adult murderers it would be a nice place.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

The Big Gundown (1966)

 

American Communist Dalton Trumbo wrote a "psychological western" while Italian Communists made political westerns. In The Big Gundown a railroad tycoon wants  bounty hunter Lee Van Cleef to run for Senate, but first he must chase down a Mexican peon accused of raping and murdering a child.

The movie has polygamous Mormon pioneers, an isolated ranch owned by a widow who lives alone with brutal, barely human ranch hands; there's a monastery where the hungry, fleeing Cuchilla eats communion wafers like potato chips. There's a monocled aristocratic German with an ornate European revolver. Van Cleef keeps catching up with Cuchilla and he keeps escaping. 

And it turns out that Mexican authorities are after Cuchillo, too, because was a Juarez supporter.

Far better than most spaghetti westerns and more serious than anything Leone made.

Directed by Sergio Sollima, with Tomas Milian, Walter Barnes and Nieves Navarro.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Robert Aldrich's The Last Sunset (1961) Kirk Douglas, Rock Hudson

A psychological western.

Rock Hudson as a sheriff named Dana Stribling who goes to Mexico looking for a man named O'Malley who dresses in black with a bright colored scarf and has a "hole" in his chin.

I don't know how Kirk Douglas felt about that description.

Stribling catches up with O'Malley but can't arrest him in Mexico, so they both go to work driving a herd of cattle to Texas. O'Malley and the sixteen-year-old daughter of an old flame fall in love and plan to marry which turns out to be far more perverse than you're thinking.

It was pretty good, I guess. I didn't like the ending. 

Rock Hudson's laid back performance made Kirk Douglas look like he was working way too hard.

I couldn't tell, but the script by Dalton Trumbo reportedly needed work, but Trumbo had already moved on to other things trying to reestablish his career. He had fled to Mexico himself during the blacklist.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Love in the Afternoon aka Chloe in the Afternoon (1972)

The title is kind of a misnomer because I didn't get the impression they especially liked each other. French guy (Bernard Verley) works in a small office in Paris. He starts hanging around during lunch with Chloe (Zouzou), the ex-girlfriend of a friend who he hasn't seen in years. His wife is pregnant and they already have a baby. It's an Eric Rohmer movie so they converse a lot.

It looked good. They tended to film in medium long shot. Two or three butt shots.

The guy shops for turtlenecks. The salespeople were different in Paris. One seemed slightly impatient. The guy didn't like the blue turtleneck so the salesman says buy the green one then. A young woman talks him into getting a plaid shirt which didn't look very good. 

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Johnny Crawford, 1946-2021

Johnny Crawford died April 29th at age 75.

I've been watching a lot of The Rifleman lately. He was adorable playing Chuck Conners' son. 

About 25 years ago, Johnny Crawford was singing at a wedding in Bend, Oregon, and I knew a guitar player who passed on the gig. It would have meant a three hour drive each way and they didn't cover motel. I told him he should have jumped at it anyway. I have paid for his motel myself.