Violent Saturday (Richard Fleischer, 1955)

A local TV station used to show it once or twice a year in the ‘70’s. A widescreen color soap opera set in Amish country.

Four criminals show up in town intent on robbing the bank, one played by Lee Marvin as a sadistic hay fever sufferer.

Ernest Borgnine as head of an Amish household. The Amish are nice. He insists that a criminal checking out his farm drink a refreshing glass of buttermilk. I've never tried buttermilk. I don't think I'd like an overbearing Amish guy forcing it on me.

A library employee (Sylvia Sidney) struggles to pay off her loan to the bank. The bank president (Tommy Noonan) is a mild-mannered degenerate who watches a local nurse (Virginia Leith) at night through her window. The nurse tries to help the mine owner’s wealthy son (Richard Egan) whose marriage is on the rocks. 

And Victor Mature whose job with the mining company kept him out of the draft. His preteen son is secretly ashamed of him and gets into a fight with a kid whose father spent the war killing Nazis.

It all comes to a head Saturday morning. Banks were open on Saturday back then.

I’m a little surprised they squeezed all this into 90 minutes.

The bank robbers abduct Victor Mature so they can use his car in the hold up. He’s left tied up in a barn with the Amish family. 

That’s when it gets REALLY violent. Like Peyton Place directed by Sam Peckinpah.

Free on Movieland TV.

Woody Allen may quit filmmaking

Woody Allen told Alec Baldwin in a live interview yesterday that he may quit filmmaking after his next movie. His movies now get a brief theatrical release then go to home video. He says that he likes the idea of theaters full of people watching his films. People seeing them on TV isn’t the same.

“When I used to do a film it’d go into a movie house all across the country. Now you do a movie and you get a couple weeks in a movie house. Maybe six weeks or four weeks and then it goes right to streaming or pay-per-view…It’s not the same…It’s not as enjoyable to me.”

Allen is like Steven Spielberg. Neither one has gone to a movie in forty or fifty years, but they talk about importance of the theatrical movie-going experience. They also get a cut of the box office. Allen made a fortune from Midnight in Paris and getting a percentage of the gross made Spielberg a billionaire.

On the other hand, Allen may just be like the rest of us. I had a few weeks off work during the pandemic and it was the closest thing to a vacation I've had in about fifteen years. It was nice.

Allen said, “I thought: ‘Gee, I like it under the bed. I don’t have go out and I don’t have to make a film and be cold in the winter and hot in the summer and making decisions all day.’”

He's had a taste of retirement. You'd think it would help him understand people who'd rather watch movies at home.

New York judge gives Paul Haggis a trial date

So NOW they give Paul Haggis a court date! He's being sued in New York by a publicist he "allegedly" raped in her apartment in 2013 after a premiere. She filed suit in 2017. Haggis wanted to speed up the trial because the delays due to COVID were costing him money and he couldn't go on with his career until it was settled. 

I know I said that thing about Scientology, but Haggis claims this is an extortion attempt. His former "church" is a more plausible villain than a rape victim. You'd think a screenwriter would realize this.

But only now, with Haggis under house arrest in Italy where he's accused of raping yet another woman, do they give him a trial date in New York (October 11th).

I don't know if Haggis is a rapist or if women with whom he's had consensual sex keep accusing him for some reason. Either way, he should do something different. Even if he's innocent, is sleeping with strangers really that great? An Oscar-winning millionaire can't find a girlfriend?

Enter the Dragon (1973)

It was great, but you'd find yourself having to rationalize Bruce Lee beating and killing all these young fellows who don’t stand a chance against him. After you’ve seen it a few times, you stop thinking about it. Realistically, he had to or there would have been more and more of them and they’d eventually overwhelm and murder him. And they were terrible criminals selling drugs and enslaved women to an elite clientele around the world.

Watching it on Movieland Tv. They're showing an older version that has a couple of scenes that are cut or shortened in the versions you see now.

Aloha Bobby and Rose (1975)

"With the music of Elton John" they said on the ads for this movie. And it did have his music, but you heard the same stuff on the radio for free whether you wanted to or not. 

Made for $600 thousand.

Bobby and Rose go on a date. Bobby (Paul Le Mat) is a jackass. He jabs a convenience store clerk in the back with a Slim Jim and tells him to put his hands up. Demands to know how much money he has. Threatens to murder him and thinks it's a joke. The owner comes out of the back with a shotgun and yells at his son to call the police. Rose inexplicably hits the poor man over the head with a bottle. He fires the gun and kills his son as he falls.

This is half an hour into the movie.  Bobby and Rose become fugitives. Bobby bore the brunt of it, but Rose seems like the real villain here.

It wasn't bad. Low budget realism. There are no gunfights. Just these two being afraid of police.

I saw this at a drive-in 47 years ago. My cousin wanted to see it and my sister went with her, so I went along. I remember some of it well, some it not at all. I don't know if I fell asleep or got distracted by something in the car. I remembered very little between the killing and the conclusion.

    

The music seemed random. They spread "Bennie and the Jets" out in short chunks throughout the movie which might have made it seem like there was more of it than there was.

With Edward James Olmos in the role of "Chicano #1".  It would have been so easy to give him a name.

Free on Movieland Tv. 

I'm watching a lot of that channel.

Ukrainian-related show business news

The release of Guy Ritchie's $150 million spy comedy, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, has been delayed, reportedly until they can change the nationality of the Ukrainian gangsters in the movie.

In Goldfinger, the American Mafia conspired with Auric Goldfinger to rob Fort Knox. Didn't Christopher Lee kill one of them in The Man with the Golden Gun? Has Cosa Nostra become so ineffectual that they have to use the Ukrainian Mafia as movie villains? 

And in the Ukraine itself, it turns out that Zelensky appointed one of his friends from high school as head of Ukrainian intelligence. 

Ivan Bakanov served as Zelensky's manager during his early days as a comedian. Zelensky made him First Deputy Director of The Security Service of Ukraine (Служба безпеки України, SBU) in May, 2019; he became head of the SBU three months later in August, 2019. 

Politico reports that Zelensky intends to dismiss Bakanov. There have been mass desertions from the spy agency since Russia entered the war and Zelensky blames him. Doesn't blame himself for appointing a show business crony.

Thinking back to my old friends from high school----no, there are none who I would give a position of any responsibility. Maybe one, but he wouldn't do it.

Them (France, Romania, 2006)

Real estate must be dirt cheap in Romania. A French teacher working in a school there lives with her husband in a huge villa in the county. One night, their home is invaded by unseen forces. The phones don’t work and whatever they are, they’ve already driven off in the couple's car.

To make a horror movie, just show people being afraid and hint at what they’re afraid of. The location sets this film apart. Much of it has only two characters.

Might reflect some unease western Europeans have with their eastern EU partners. They better get used to it. They may be awash with Ukrainians soon.  

77 minutes. Directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud.

On the Criterion Channel, leaving at the end of the month.

Von Richthofen and Brown (Roger Corman, 1971)

A big budget movie directed by Roger Corman. The footage of the planes was impressive and must have been dangerous to film. I don't know how many World War One aircraft they could pull together now--they'd just use CGI anyway. 

You have to feel for the poor wretches in the war, but the Kaiser was no Hitler. There was a British suffragette at the time who supported the war effort because she thought Germans were slightly more sexist than the British. Herman Goring was in the Red Baron's squadron, but he just made the other Germans seem like regular guys. The British, German and Russian royal families were all cousins. Did it matter who won the war?

Corman was ahead of his time in the foreign accent department. In Hollywood movies, American actors playing Germans speaking German would speak English with a German accent. Corman thought this was stupid and had them speak normally, but studio executives saw the movie and ordered that the German dialogue be re-dubbed. 

Free on Movieland Tv.

Kid Vengeance (1977)

Filmed in Israel with an American director and stars. Kid Vengeance, aka Vengeance stars Leif Garrett who must have been about fourteen.

In the Old West, a tween sees his mother raped, both parents murdered and his sister abducted. He tries to free her and get the gang of Mexicans who did it.

This sort of racialized violence seems to be more pronounced in Israeli movies. Look at another Golan-Globus production, Lone Wolf McQuade where Mexicans were apparently stand-ins for Palestinians. We were supposed to rejoice at Chuck Norris’s brutality in that movie.

And here’s a warning---they kill a rabbit and a cow on screen. You’d think that that---and the rape and the murders of course---would be a problem in a movie that I would imagine appealed largely to tween girls. It was rated R, but I don’t know how many Clint Eastwood or John Wayne fans would flock to a Leif Garrett movie.

Lee Van Cleef looks like a hippie. With Jim Brown.

I guess it’s a good idea. You know how they used to have John Carradine appear briefly in low budget horror movies so they’d have a recognizable name to put on the poster? You could probably get a child star even cheaper.

Filmed around the same time as God's Gun. 

Free on Tubi and some other streaming channels.

You'll Like My Mother, 1972

Seems to be a remake of Die, Die, My Darling although it's based on an unrelated novel. About a young widow visiting her mother-in-law who turns out to be deranged. Even the poster looks the same with a pair of scissors used as a weapon.

I saw Die, Die, My Darling on TV when I was about five. My mother had to explain that the little dots on a man's face were bullet holes. I saw Tallulah Bankhead shooting him, but bullet holes in a guy's face weren't something you usually saw on TV in those days. You don't really see them now, either.

Patty Duke stars as a pregnant widow whose husband died in Vietnam. 

From Bing Crosby Productions which makes you wonder about that guy. They also produced the Walking Tall movies, Willard, Ben and The Reincarnation of Peter Proud. And Hogan's Heroes. 

Italians arrest Paul Haggis

I know little about the guy. I didn't like Crash and I hated the partial episode I saw of Walker Texas Ranger. If he's guilty, to hell with him. 

Paul Haggis has been arrested for sexual assault in Italy.

If it turns out he did it, I'll feel like a monster for writing this, but I can't help wondering if his accusers have some connection to Scientology. Of course, since he was a Scientologist himself for years, there was something horribly wrong with him.

From Variety:

According to multiple Italian press reports and a note from the public prosecutor of the nearby city of Brindisi, Haggis is charged with forcing a young “foreign” – meaning non-Italian – woman to undergo sexual intercourse over the course of two days in Ostuni, while he was scheduled to hold several master classes at the Allora Fest, a new film event being launched by Los Angeles-based Italian journalist Silvia Bizio and Spanish art critic Sol Costales Doulton that is set to run in Ostuni from June 21 to June 26.

 Read the whole thing here.

Ukraine getting creamed

Russian soldier distributing food.

Ukraine is in terrible shape. Their heavy weapons have largely been destroyed, they're "drafting" men into the Army by dragging them in off the street and they're sending them into combat lightly armed, ordered to engage tanks in hand-to-hand combat and being charged with "desertion" if they survive. (This is how Ukrainian paratroopers described it.)

The Ukrainian parliament introduced a bill to allow officers to summarily execute "deserters".

Poroshenko told the German press that Ukraine never intended to adhere to the Minsk accords. They only negotiated the agreements to "buy time". Russia won't trust them in negotiations.

"We had achieved everything we wanted," he said. "Our goal was to first stop the threat or at least to delay the war; to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces." 

Of course, Russia was preparing, too. As a result, U.S. and EU sanctions have hurt the West far more than they have Russia.

If Ukraine were a member of NATO, they would have the third largest army in the alliance after the U.S. and Turkey. The U.S. has been arming them for years. The U.S. started training the Ukrainian army, including the Nazi Azov battalion, under the Obama regime. Ukraine is armed mostly with Soviet weapons but they've been upgraded and perform as well as NATO weapons.

Ukraine is not a weak country. They've been fighting for eight years in Donbass. They're probably better suited to fight the war than any NATO country. But Russia attacked with a smaller force than anyone thought they would need and the Russians are creaming them.

I could be wrong, obviously, but we'll see. Hope it ends soon in any case.

Macon County Line, (Max Baer, Jr, 1974)

I read that David Carradine appeared in Death Race 2000 so people would stop thinking of him as Kwai Chang Caine. I guess it worked. 

Macon County Line may have been Max Baer, Jr's, attempt to put Jethro Bodine behind him. He was producer and was credited with writing the story and co-writing the script along with the director. 

Baer plays a deputy in Macon County. He's a weirdly doting right-wing father. He buys a huge 12 gauge shotgun for his 10-year-old son (Leif Garrett) as a reward for getting a promotion at military school. He patiently explains to the little fellow that he shouldn't play with Black children. 

The movie focuses on two horrible young men. They're brothers played by real life brothers Alan and Jesse Vint who have a couple of weeks before going into the Air Force. Set in 1954. They drive around in a 1949 Buick Town and Country. It's only five years old but needs a new fuel pump. They don't have money for one. When the deputy threatens to arrest them for vagrancy, they try to make it out of the county before the car quits.

I'll try not to give too much away, but Max Baer goes on the warpath when he comes home with his son and finds that his wife has been horribly murdered.

A huge hit in its day. 

It might make a double feature with Night of the Shooting Stars (Italy, 1982) with its adoring Fascist father and son. 

Free on Movieland Tv.

Joe Kidd (1972)

It was more than thirty years ago, I was looking at a radical film journal, maybe Jump Cut, [I think it was CineAction!] which had an article on Spaghetti Westerns. Nearly all of them were made by Italian Communists.

There was a still from one movie. It was a guy who looked like a movie cowboy, unshaven and dirty in a cowboy outfit, his back to a wall hiding from something around the corner. But he was holding a World War One era .32 automatic. For some reason, I found that appealing. I've seen westerns all my life and never liked them. Everyone having the same big, stupid-looking gun was one reason.

So, in Joe Kidd, Clint Eastwood brandishes a Mauser semi-automatic pistol first made in 1896.

The movie had a slow built-up. They could have gotten to the point faster, but that may be just me. My attention span, or at least my patience, has dwindled. It was 90 minutes. It wasn't over long.

Watching people get shot with a different kind of gun was less of a thrill than I thought it would be, but they made good use of it. 

 

Robert Duvall as a rich guy. He and his friends/henchmen are armed with what were then the most advanced firearms--rifles with a longer range and the Mauser pistol--when they go out to murder local Hispanics demanding their ancestral land back.

Available on Movieland Tv.

 

The Hunting Party

Reminded me a little of The Hunting Party which came out a year earlier, the British answer to the Spaghetti Western----a US-British co-production filmed in Spain. They should have filmed in the UK. I've seen British farming towns in movies that would have been interesting in a western.

Rich guy Gene Hackman provides his friends with really long-range rifles with telescopic sights for a hunting trip. When his wife (Candice Bergen) is kidnapped by a British-led gang of illiterates who think she can teach them to read, they go after them instead, picking them off from far enough away that they can't shoot back. 

That movie was just awful. 

Mosby's Marauders (Disney, 1967)

Kurt Russell was fifteen or sixteen. He plays a cute Confederate child soldier ordered to man a remote outpost on a river along with another kid. A sergeant and lieutenant have come to check on them. The sergeant browbeats Russell while the lieutenant has taken a liking to him. Before they ride away, the man gazes at him and says he'll come back to see him later. When he's alone.

Russell and the other child soldier wrestle over a gun when the lieutenant suddenly re-appears. They accidentally shoot him. Knowing they'll be executed, the other kid runs away. Russell crosses the river and joins some Union soldiers he befriended. They take him as a prisoner but he's freed by and joins a gang of traitorous Confederate marauders.

The children in this thing fight in a war, face execution for desertion and for shooting an officer who it sounded like was coming for some immoral purpose, and the kids love smoking. And this was made for The Wonderful World of Disney. 

With James MacArthur and Peggy Lipton. All white cast. Free on Movieland Tv.

I thought Disney was the only studio in Hollywood that was on the United States' side in the Civil War, but I guess I was wrong. As I understand it, during the silent era, Hollywood found that every time they made a pro-Union movie, they'd get angry letters from backward Southerners who were convinced that the South won the war.

You know, on The Beverly Hillbillies, how no one could convince Granny that the North won the war? That was apparently a real thing.

Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1973)

I saw this at the university when I was in high school and thought the opening titles were a little sedate for a Hitchcock movie. It was a long helicopter shot of London, a little like the opening shot of the model town in The Lady Vanishes. 

Hitchcock's second-to-last film. After a period of decline in the '60's, this was his vindication. Hitchcock for the '70's, a murder movie with a man falsely accused, circumstances conspiring to make him look really, really guilty. There were no obvious process shots. And there was nudity, although, horribly, it was mostly women who were dead or being murdered.

 

As he told Truffaut, his cameos in his movies had become a burden. Hitchcock had to get it out of the way quickly so the audience would quit looking for him and just watch the movie. He's easy to spot in the opening crowd scene. 

 

There's a necktie killer loose in London. As in his other movies, there are no unnecessary scenes. Everything contributes to the plot. And it gets moving very quickly.

Jason Mann four years ago

Look for him at the 29 second mark.

I caught a glimpse of Jason Mann in a trailer for a movie called Aleksi (2018), filmed in what used to be Yugoslavia. His hair was slightly longer. He spoke only English. He plays a guy named Christian. I don't know how he happened to be in it.

He was director of photography on a movie, All Against All, made in Slovenia. He also acted in a movie made in New York, so he hasn't abandoned America completely.

I have mixed feelings about the poor wretch. I don't blame him for the failure of the movie he made for Project Greenlight. It looked horrifying, them racing to finish the script so they could start filming. How could it be any good? They could have at least brought in a comedy writer.

I've said this before. He cited Pasolini and Bunuel as his influences, but they were both Communists. They had definite points of view. Mann went out of his way to avoid saying whether the senator in his movie was a Republican or a Democrat. It was an apolitical film about a politician.

But I don't know what other movies had to say that was so brilliant.

They kept talking about the great opportunity of being handed three million bucks to make a movie, but it was a made-for-TV movie. He had to meet HBO's specifications.

For three million dollars, you can make a huge, epic, truly independent film or you can make a middling made-for-TV movie. HBO demanded the latter.

I don't think Mann has taken full advantage of being America's most recognized-yet-reviled director. It's not what he hoped for, but nobody gets to pick their career.

He was in another film, American Thief, playing a cyber security guy, available for two bucks on Amazon Prime.

Zelensky's kind of a jerk

Hungary has finally pointed out the obvious. That the Zelensky regime is really ungrateful. 

“I can’t recall when a leader of a country in need of help would dare to speak out against anyone in a fashion like President Zelensky did, not only against Hungary, but even against the German Chancellor,”  Speaker of the Hungarian parliament Lazlo Kover said in a TV interview.

Zelensky's been barking orders at Germany and everyone else.

“[The] German government cynically refuses to supply us even with old Leopard-1 tanks and Marder IFVs,” [Ukrainian ambassador] Melnik stated in a social media post, branding such behavior a “disgrace that would go down in history.”

Melnik later attacked the German chancellor for acting like "an offended liverwurst", which is probably a grave insult there.

Meanwhile, Der Spiegel reports that Germany won't send tanks to Ukraine because they don't trust Zelensky. For "historical reasons", they can't have German tanks rolling into Russia, and they don't trust the Zelensky regime to not try sending them. Ukraine has gotten tanks only from Poland and the Czech Republic, none from the US, UK or Germany.

All this might explain Sean Penn's affinity for Zelensky.

Penn has kind of shut up about Ukraine. He said he considered joining the Azov battalion, which would have been a real help to them, a 61-year-old movie star. Has he ever even been in a war movie? Good thing he didn't join, though, since he lost interest so quickly.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)

I remember seeing this in a drive-in theater. It must have been 1969, so I was six. The only thing I remember is the scene of the girls threatening to murder another girl as they hang her over a railing. I slept through the rest of it in the back of the old Volkswagen bus. My brother, who might have been ten, saw the nude scene.

Maggie Smith plays an eccentric Fascist schoolteacher in Scotland in the 1930's who is, not surprisingly, an unwholesome influence on her students.

It actually made British (albeit Scottish) schools look a lot better than they do in most movies. There was only one scene of potentially fatal bullying mentioned above, there was no punishment of any kind. Of course it was a girl's school. The only thing that was worse than in other movies was Miss Brodie manipulating students to sleep with a male teacher.

The teachers who see themselves as college graduates with a pretty good job are fine. It's the art teacher who sees himself as a painter and Miss Brodie who sees herself as---something---who are a danger to the kids.

Johnny Depp was already in serious decline

"Now that the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial is over, it’s time to get a grip on reality."

Amanda Heard didn't do it. Johnny Depp's sad decline started before she did anything.

From Roger Friedman's Showbiz411:

Maybe you’ve forgotten “The Lone Ranger,” a spectacular failure in which he played Tonto. How about “Mortdecai”? Or “Black Mass”? Surely you remember “Transcendence”? ($23 million total). Or “Richard Says Goodbye”? ($325K– not sure it was ever released.)

Even “Alice Through the Looking Glass” was a bust in this country– $77 million, although it did well abroad where English comprehension wasn’t an issue. Then there’s “London Fields,” the movie that brought him together with Heard. When it was finally released after many swipes at re-cutting, the film was seen by no one.

Depp has had four flops just since 2019 including the most recent, “Minimata,” which made $610K abroad, has no domestic box office. The others were worse.

As for the “Pirates” movies, they declined in box office successively over the years. The last one, in 2017, was a big hit internationally but made $172 million here....

He's too old. 58. James Stewart was ten years younger than Depp is now when Hitchcock blamed his aging appearance for the failure of Vertigo.

Art Carney and Lilly Tomlin at the same age Johnny Depp and Amanda Heard are now. (This is true.)

Depp wins

I’m still neutral, or at least indifferent. I don’t know why the jury believed the version of events from someone who was drunk or high when they happened. I don’t think Johnny Depp has been vindicated considering the things other celebrities have gotten away with when everyone knew they were guilty. Didn’t he already lose a libel suit in England? His conduct as an actor seemed to be the main thing wrecking his career. He doesn't bother learning his lines anymore.

I hoped he would end up like fellow spendthrift Nicolas Cage, taking every role he could to pay his debts, but Cage wasn’t a drunk or a horrible person.