John Huston's HEAVEN KNOWS, MR ALLISON (1957), Deborah Kerr, Robert Mitchum

Released six years after The African Queen. Had similar elements. The romance, such as it was, was probably more plausible. There was no unreasonable cheerfulness. Essentially had only two speaking roles.

During World War Two, Marine Robert Mitchum, after floating for days on rubber raft, lands on an island. There's an abandoned village and in a church, is nun Deborah Kerr, the only person on the island. She's only been there a few days herself.

Things are fine until the Japanese land and set up a weather station. The two have to hide in a cave.

Mr Allison falls in love with Sister Angela and doesn't see the point of her remaining a nun since they're isolated on an island, although I suppose it makes more sense for her to remain a nun than for him to still be a Marine.

They compare being a Marine with being a nun. The main similarity was probably the haircut. 

Filmed in Trinidad and Tobago. Local Asians played the Japanese and the Marines were provided by the U.S. military.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

Woody Allen's A RAINY DAY IN NEW YORK (2019)

Woody Allen directing the kids.

People made fun of Woody Allen for naming his main character "Gatsby Welles". In fairness, Gatsby was played by Timothee (pronounced Teem-o-tay) Chalamet, so it was a lateral move for the actor name-wise.

Match Point (2005), about a tennis pro who murders his way into an innocent, unsuspecting family of wealthy British aristocrats, showed that Allen had come to identify with the rich. A Rainy Day in New York has confirmed it. Everyone in this thing was extremely rich. Even the prostitute charges a fortune.

Gatsby's girlfriend, Ashleigh Enright (Elle Fanning), needs to go to Manhattan to interview high brow movie director Liev Schreiber for the college paper. Gatsby goes along for a weekend in the city. Wants them to stay at the Carlyle because they have a piano player who sings "those old Broadway tunes". The boy is a rebel who smokes and gambles, pooh-poohs education and has the interests and enthusiasms of an 80-year-old.

Ashleigh is the only one you can get behind. She spends the day trying to help save the director who's unhappy with the movie he's making and goes off on a bender while Gatsby runs into an ex-classmate and appears briefly in his student film. This brings him into contact with an ex-girlfriend's sassy little sister (Selena Gomez).

Woody Allen has an Asian daughter in real life. He didn't do it for Moses or Soon-yi, but you'd think he'd diversify the cast at least for her sake. The movie is all-white. There's a scene where Ashleigh identifies Kurosawa as European, although she admits he was technically Japanese.

There are a number of scenes in the movie with what they used to call "Dragnet editing". In conversations, they cut to a close-up of whoever's speaking with (almost) no reaction shots. It worked quite well. Woody Allen has vindicated Jack Webb and it's about time.

In one such scene, Gatsby's mother tells him he's old enough to know about her past. It comes as a shock to him. It might reflect something in Allen's family---his children, all adults, finding out about his past, and I'm talking about the stuff that actually happened, not the false accusations.

Available on Amazon Prime.

Nagisa Oshima's THE CEREMONY (Japan, 1971)

Told in flashback. A Japanese mother and son return to Japan from Manchuria after World War Two. The mother hopes to live without contact with her late husband's family but they are essentially captured by them when they come back.

After that, over the years, the boy learns more and more about the wealthy degenerate fascist family each time they gather for a wedding or a funeral.

The first is a ceremony on the first anniversary of his father's suicide. He learns that his grandfather is probably his father and his father was most likely his half-brother. All the incest in the family makes it difficult to know exactly how everyone is related. At one point, he realizes that the girl he's in love with is his half-sister.

That girl's father was a low level war criminal imprisoned in China. Most of the men in the family SHOULD have been locked up but got away with it and are eventually allowed to re-enter government.

It might make a good double feature with The Thick-Walled Room (Japan, 1956) about low level Japanese war criminals in Sugamo prison which was mentioned by name in The Ceremony. It has some of the same elements, complaints that mainly low level war criminals were imprisoned while the worst went free. The Thick-Walled Room went into politics a little more---one of the prisoner's Communist brother visits and talks about protests against the Korean war and the rearmament of Japan. In The Ceremony, the boy's Communist uncle was portrayed as a buffoon, which may have been fair considering his bourgeois origins.

Both films are available on The Criterion Channel.

STRANGER FROM VENUS (1954)

Odd low budget made-in-UK version of The Day the Earth Stood Still. It even had Patricia Neal. 

A man appears at a British inn. He doesn't have any money but he can work. He doesn't have a name and says he's never paid taxes. The local doctor sits down and casually takes his pulse. He doesn't have one.

He performs a few faith healings and reads minds. The entire country knows that he's there but all he does is hang around the inn.

I didn't realize American cars were so popular in England. The steering wheels are on the left. The appearance of the a flying saucer causes Patricia Neal to wreck her convertible. The alien heals her and she staggers to the inn. Some British in an even bigger sedan stops later when they see the wrecked car.

Directed by Burt Balaban, cousin of Bob Balaban. With Austrian actor Helmut Dantine in the title role. He played a refugee in  Casablanca and, a couple decades later, was in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and The Killer Elite.

Available on Pub-D-Hub.

John Wayne and his soulmate Woody Allen

I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them, if that's what you're asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves. 

--John Wayne, Playboy interview

I feel that the Arabs were not very nice in the beginning, and that was a big problem. The Jews had just come out of a terrible war where they were exterminated by the millions and persecuted all over Europe, and they were given this tiny, tiny piece of land in the desert. If the Arabs had just said, “Look, we know what you guys have been through, take this little piece of land and we’ll all be friends and help you,” and the Jews came in peace, but they didn’t. They were not nice about it, and it led to problems. 

--Woody Allen, Daily Beast interview 

Crystal Moselle's WOLFPACK (2015)

It's not unusual for kids with camcorders to recreate movies they've seen. This is why it's extremely important that children watch something other than superhero and action movies. George and Mike Kuchar, for example, watched Douglas Sirk melodramas.

Wolfpack is a documentary about the Angulo brothers. Their mother was an American hippie, their father an abusive Peruvian. They were isolated for years in their New York City apartment. It must have been low income housing since they said that their father didn't work. They were "home schooled". Never allowed outside. Their isolation was what distinguished them from other kids with camcorders.

We see them re-enacting scenes from Reservoir Dogs. I don't know how or why they happened to own suits and ties. Then we see them doing a Batman movie with homemade costumes.

Some have expressed doubts as to how factual the documentary was. The filmmakers weren't able to dig deeper and talk to anyone else about them. The family had control over how they were portrayed. I don't know what to make of it, but I find it comforting to think it may not have been entirely true.

Available on Tubi and Pluto on streaming video.

SLASHED DREAMS aka SUNBURST (1975)

After Satan's Mistress, I wanted to watch other films of James Polakof. 

This one had Rudy Vallee who was only in his 70's at the time. He appears briefly as a shopkeep who warns the couple not to go in the woods. He thoughtfully hands them a knife to defend themselves but then wants $15 for it ($75 in today's money). Back then, you could probably buy a pretty good gun for that.

Vallee was a huge star at one time. My father didn't like him because he asked him for an autograph when he was eight and Vallee ignored him. 

Vallee was a crooner. Crooning is where you sing in an evenly modulated voice, with no feeling or emotion. But you couldn't really do it without a microphone, so it was a new thing in the 1920's. Before that, singers had to bellow out their songs to be heard over the band. Crooning created a false sense of intimacy with the audience.

Vallee croons for his customers who smile and applaud enthusiastically as if they had any clue who he was. He was apparently playing himself since he tells them he was the first major star on radio.

The couple ignores Vallee's sensible advice and goes into the woods. A couple of mountain men menace them while they're swimming naked. Later, the men come back and rape the poor girl and knock out her boyfriend. The next day, they're comforted by Robert Englund, their hippie pacifist friend who now lives in the woods.

They enjoy limited vengeance.

The movie is available on more than one streaming channel. I watched it on Pub-D-Hub. You can probably fast forward to the halfway mark and not miss anything. (Well. You'd miss Rudy Vallee.)

They drive a Volkwagen Thing, Volkswagen's updated version of their Nazi Kübelwagen.

SATAN'S MISTRESS aka DEMON RAGE aka FURY OF THE SUCCUBUS (1982)

This is embarrassing. I saw this DVD on Amazon for six dollars, free shipping. If I saw it at the grocery store, I'd probably buy it on impulse at that price, so, yeah, I ordered it.

Picture quality wasn't great, but it didn't bother me. 

Housewife Lana Wood is molested by an incubus, a demon that goes around having sex with women. They mistakenly call it a "succubus" in an alternate title. According to Wikipedia, a succubus is a lady demon that does the same thing with men.

Lana Wood is Natalie Wood's sister. She played "Plenty O'Toole" in Diamonds are Forever. 

Also starred Britt Ekland, "Goodnight" from The Man with the Golden Gun. 

In spite of having two Bond Girls, they felt a need to cast John Carradine as a priest who explains why lonely demons go around doing this.

A lot of topless shots of Lana Wood. No other nudity that I saw, but I wasn't paying attention. The movie wasn't very good, but was passable.

They unwisely kept a guillotine in the basement.

Directed by James Polakof. His career as writer-director-producer spanned nine years which seems pretty good for someone working independently.

Bruce Willis: The new John Carradine

That's what I call acting.

I never paid attention to Bruce Willis. I think I saw a Die Hard movie and I saw him in a Chinese World War Two movie. He was an extra in the Verdict, and I've seen Moonrise Kingdom and Pulp Fiction. And he did a voice in Beavis and Butt-Head do America which I've seen. 

According to Roger Friedman on Showbiz 411:

Bruce Willis is in the middle of a run of D movies, unprecedented in film history. Dozens and dozens of shlock films made for video and countries and planets where no discernible language is necessary.

Today they announced a new one called “Corrective Measures,” which has been placed with a streaming service you’ve never heard of, called Tubi. It’s a free service owned by Fox Entertainment. Michael Rooker, who’s pretty good right now in “Suicide Squad,” will star. Bruce will lend his name and likeness and appear in a few scenes shot over the course of a day. [emphasis added]

Corrective Measures will be available in 2022.

If this is his thing now, good for him. The world is full of people who would love having his career even in its depleted state. Especially in its depleted state. 

Look on Cameo. You might find other celebrities willing to work on a movie for one day for a modest fee.

In The Heat of the Night, the series

I just had an episode on. It didn't seem especially warm out. Virgil Tibbs wears a suit.

It should have been like Gilligan's Island. Every week Virgil Tibbs tries to leave Sparta and return to Philadelphia but every week there's another crime and his chief back home tells him to stay and help. And he should have been smarter than everyone else.

The show did fine as it was, of course, and now it's long gone. Even if I were helping, it'd be too late.

The police weren't physically intimidating in the movie. Sidney Poitier could have plausibly beaten up any of them except for Rod Steiger and even there, he could outrun him.

Why were police wearing cowboy hats? They wore regular police hats in the movie.

It should have been more like Kurosawa's High and Low, the detectives dressed for the heat in light, short sleeve shirts, untucked to conceal their .32 automatics. The captain had a .25 automatic.

Needed more Southern rural degenerates. And a conniving aristocrat they suspect in every murder. The girl in the movie who likes walking around the house naked in the middle of the night could be a regular character.

High Noon (1952)

I don't believe for a second that John Wayne was smart enough to recognize this movie as an attack on McCarthyism. He praised the film when he accepted Gary Cooper's Oscar for him. I think someone told him later that it was an allegory and he started calling it "un-American". 

Grace Kelly involving herself in the action was the movie's most uplifting moment, but that was one of things that got the McCarthyites' panties into the biggest wad.

Gary Cooper had better reason to stay and fight than I remembered. The age difference between him and Grace Kelly was more pronounced than I realized. I wrote on here recently that Cooper leaves town in the end with an untreated gunshot wound, which was technically correct, but I see now that it was far less serious than I remembered. The bullet just grazed him. I would go to the emergency room if it happened to me, but his shirt bore the brunt of it.

Lloyd Bridges shouldn't have started a fist fight with Gary Cooper just before the big finale, just when he needed to be at the top of his game. Van Heflin did the same thing to Alan Ladd in Shane a year later. There's probably some logic there, something to do with pacing or something.

Permanent Vacation, Jim Jarmusch, 1980

An early effort. All form, no content. And no form.

It really wasn't very good. Nothing happened. Seventy-five minutes.

Then, in the closing credits, it says he had an "assistant director". For what?