A Kiss Before Dying (1956)

Good-looking college boy Bud Corliss (Robert Wagner) got wealthy coed Dorothy Kingship (Joanne Woodward) pregnant. She won't get her inheritance now, so Wagner murders her, makes it look like a suicide and he appears to have gotten away with it until her sister (Virginia Leith) becomes suspicious.

With Jeffrey Hunter as a pipe-smoking tutor who also helps out his uncle who is chief of police. 

Ends at the Kingship family's massive open pit mine. Bud marvels that the giant trucks cost $50,000 each.

Directed by Gerd Oswald. Scenes tend to be shot in long takes, an early shot lasting three and a half minutes. Based on Ira Levin's first novel.

I was thinking that, with abortion bans and possible future bans on contraception, storylines like this might become plausible again. I'm not sure how DNA testing would affect it. But there was already a remake in 1991 that wasn't well-received.

Available on The Criterion channel. It's being featured with other color films noirs.

Extraordinary: The Stan Romanek Story

If it had just been a guy trying to look sincere as he spoke into the camera about being abducted by space aliens, you might have thought that at least HE believed what he was saying, but with all his blatantly phony video footage, there was just nothing to take seriously. 

I stopped paying attention by then, but the movie discussed Romanek's child pornography conviction. He says the government planted it on him. Why, he's the father of nine hybrid alien children himself!

Free on Pluto. The streaming video channel. Not the planet. To my knowledge.

Tony Dow, R.I.P.

Tony Dow died today at age 77. He reportedly had no interest in acting when he went with a friend who was auditioning for Leave it to Beaver. As long as he was there, he decided to audition, too.

...Dow recalled learning over a hamburger and malt that he was offered the part after auditioning on a whim.

“There went my life,” he said. 

Reminded me of something similar Jean-Pierre Leaud said about being cast in 400 Blows. His life was never the same.

Dow worked pretty steadily over the years as an actor and director.

Leave it to Beaver had an edge to it. In one episode, Ward tells the boys to go outside, hang around the park, play mumbley peg.

"They'll arrest you if you have a knife," Wally says. 

A few years later, a science teacher was taking some students on a trip to Mexico. Wally told his parents they'd have to sign a waiver in case he was killed. Another time, Wally says it's "creepy" when his gym teacher walks through the locker room.

It was film noir compared to The Brady Bunch.

Gila! (Jim Wynorski, 2012)

In The Giant Gila Monster (1959) there was a local drunk called "Old Man Harris" (Shug Fisher). The hot rodders all wanted to buy his old Model A Ford. 

I checked IMDb and did some math and found that Old Man Harris was ten years younger than me, and his antique car was newer than mine. I was more amused than hurt.

I finally got to see Jim Wynorski's 2012 remake. Set in the '50's. There's a homage to American Graffiti. There are two rival hot rodders, one in a yellow Ford coupe, the other in a black Bel Air. 

In the original, the monster was a real gila monster walking around a miniature set. It never appeared in the same shot with people. In this one, it was computer generated and we see it eat people. The rich guy wasn't as loathsome and the poor girl wasn't in danger of being made a ward of the state. There was less subplot and they scaled back the class conflict.

The movie was ahead of its time gun-wise. They appeared to use airsoft or prop guns with muzzle flashes added digitally, which they're doing a lot more of now after the accidental shooting on the set of Rust.

Available free on Tubi.

Hope Gap (2019)

A petit-bourgeois British couple splits after 29 years of marriage. 

 

The husband (Bill Nighy) knows not to argue with his wife (Annette Bening). He goes along with whatever she says, but that just makes her more angry, even a little violent.

The husband's a teacher, the wife a dilettante gathering poems in a file. They live in a pretty nice place on the coast.

I thought it’d be like all those other movies about a wife whose husband dumps her for a sleeker model. It was a little like them in that Annette Bening's character feels terribly wronged and is oblivious to anything she might possibly have done wrong. Like slapping him.

The guy seems pretty old, but he can work Wikipedia and knew how to change his cell phone number.

Directed by William Nicholson, based on his play about his parents’ divorce when he was in his late 20’s. The movie focuses more than you'd expect on the son (Josh O'Connor) who's not as helpful as he thinks.

Some critics seemed to attack it for being just a regular divorce with no crazy plot twists. The British complained about Annette Bening’s inconsistent English accent. I didn’t notice it.

Чтобы выжить (To Survive) aka Red Mob (Russia, 1992)

A violent action film released a year after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Well-made as Soviet movies were. It must have cost a fortune. They destroyed seventeen helicopters and forty-two cars for our entertainment. I hope nobody got killed.

Oleg is a hero of the Afghan War who operates a survivalist camp in the desert near the Afghan border. Terrorists abduct his tween son to force the man to lead a caravan smuggling weapons into Afghanistan. The goal is to set off a series of attacks and provocations to set the stage for a coup in the Soviet Union.

We see men climb from the back of a speeding truck into a hovering helicopter. A Soviet base is massacred, their arsenal stolen and it ends with a harrowing helicopter battle. The helicopters aren't armed, so guys hang out the doors with assault rifles and grenade launchers.

The bad guys in this thing tend to use American, German and Israeli guns. And the kid wears an American Little League cap.

Oleg's not the nicest guy in the world. He wants to save his son, but he keeps it in perspective.

Beautifully dubbed in English. Free on Tubi, or you can pay to see it on Amazon.

In an exotic hat. Here the kid makes his escape.

Netflix

News of the decline of Netflix made me think back to its heyday, when they were mailing out DVD's. My niece disapproved of me signing up with them because they were killing off Blockbuster and Hollywood video. She was too young to remember those two chains driving the local mom & pop video stores out of business, and if she did remember that, she was still too young to remember the art house and second-run theaters being wrecked by local video stores. 

I assumed Netflix was a big mailorder version of Blockbuster, stocking a limited selection of mainstream movies.

But one day, I was at work. I was a warehouse boy. The company mostly sold stickers and one of them had retro artwork showing a woman on a settee being served a drink by a chimpanzee in a tuxedo. I told a co-worker it reminded of a movie I saw years earlier about the unhappy wife of an English diplomat in France who began an affair with a chimp at the zoo. I couldn't remember the title.

He wandered off to the computer. Came back and told me it was Max, Mon Amour starring Charlotte Rampling. It was available on DVD through Netflix.

I signed up for it. Saw movies I had heard of but had never seen---Soviet and East German westerns among others. And there were things I never knew existed. I didn't watch any, but it turns out there's something called "nunsploitation"---exploitation films about nuns. I watched Japanese gangster movies, a couple of them about murderous gangs of Japanese schoolgirls.

I stayed on Netflix far longer than I should have---had their streaming service which got worse and worse. It would sit there. I'd never watch it then remember I had it and looked and found nothing I wanted to see. Finally canceled it  and never regretted it.

But I just paid ten bucks and subscribed to their DVD-only thing. Their selection is way down. But I'll give it a month and see how it goes.

The Out of Towners (1970)

I don't know if this was Neil Simon's experience, that New Yorkers were polite and helpful and it was those from out of town who were rude and demanding. 

Jack Lemmon and his wife (Sandy Dennis) from Twin Oaks, Ohio, head for the big city where he's going to interview for a promotion.

Standard plot where people are trying to get from point A to point B, have a time limit and must overcome obstacles. The New York airports are fogged in. They land in Boston and race to catch a crowded commuter train to New York. Johnny Brown who died in March this year played a waiter in the dining car. They reach New York hours late. The hotel didn't hold their reservation. I won't give it all away. They're chased by a horse. Jack Lemmon keeps threatening to sue.

Billie Dee Williams works at the airport lost and found. Anne Meara as a purse snatching victim. Ron Carey as a cab driver.

I've seen it both ways. I knew a guy who lost a job interview because he was late due to circumstances beyond his control, and I know another guy who drove hundreds of miles through a snow storm to get to a gig that had been cancelled due to weather. Calling ahead wouldn't have hurt anything in either case.

The Gunfighter (Gregory Peck, 1950)

How many guys were there named Ringo back then?

Gregory Peck plays gunfighter Jimmy Ringo. He comes to town hoping to see his estranged wife and son. Everyone knows who he is. A crowd gathers outside the saloon hoping to catch a glimpse of him.

The sheriff who was a former crony points out that this is what he always wanted, to be famous---to be a known as the fastest gun in the West.

I don't know if the people involved in the production saw it as an allegory for Hollywood stardom, but it seems like it must have crossed Gregory Peck's mind. It reminded me of the time Woody Harrelson was walking barefoot around the local Saturday Market---local craftsmen selling their wares---and a large crowd followed him everywhere he went. He was shorter and balder than I thought and had weird toes.

The plot may have hit close to home for 20-year-old former child actor Skip Homeier. He played a young fellow so desperate for fame that he wanted to shoot it out with Ringo.

Jimmy Ringo was like celebrities who complain about Paparazzi but hang around places where they're bound to be spotted. Like Woody Allen who didn't want to be noticed but rode around in a yellow, chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce. Gregory Peck is tormented but he insists on hanging around in saloons everywhere he goes. 

He should have been like Gabby Hayes whose car once broke down in Coquille, Oregon. He asked the mechanic not to tell anyone he was there and sat in a back room while the car was being worked on. 

Bad Day at Black Rock, correction

I said a while back that the fight scene between Spencer Tracy and Ernest Borgnine seemed less plausible each time I saw it. I watched the movie again and listened to the director's commentary. Director John Sturges said that Tracy felt the same way---didn't think it was realistic.

Sturges made a call and got a Jiu-Jitsu instructor from the Marine Corps to look at the scene. He watched it. Thought it was implausible because, if it was done right, Spencer Tracy would have killed Ernest Borgnine with the first judo chop.

Another Christopher Forbes movie

I started wondering about "movie ranches". The Spahn Ranch might be the best known since that was where the Manson Family camped out. 

I watched another terrible Christopher Forbes western on Tubi. David Carradine got top billing although he appeared only briefly, following in his father's footsteps. It was advertised as his last appearance in a western. I looked the movie up because a website listed it as Forbes' least-liked movie.

I'm afraid I'm writing the same thing over and over.

It was unwatchable like the rest of Forbes' movies, confused and pointless. I knew vaguely what it was supposed to be about from the description. A former Civil War sniper goes West.

There's no way to convey how truly awful it was, but user reviews on IMDb try to point out the flaws, like they're trying to give constructive criticism. The sound was bad, the acting was bad, some of the sets weren't very good. Like if they corrected these things the movie would have been passable. None of those things bothered me in the movie.

But it got distribution. The DVDs are sold in Wal-Mart and it's on streaming video. Some said that film students should watch it to see what not to do, but it would be more helpful to figure out how this abomination was commercially viable.

It looks like they rented costumes, had real guns, filmed on real western movie sets, and they had horses which not all extremely cheap westerns do. That's all it takes.

 

Niagara (1953) Marilyn Monroe, Joseph Cotton, Jean Peters

The only movie I ever found Marilyn Monroe believable in. 

Ray and Polly Cutler (Max Showalter and Jean Peters) come to Niagara Falls on a delayed honeymoon. They arrive at their motel and find that a Mr and Mrs Loomis (Joseph Cotton and Marilyn Monroe) haven't checked out of the cabin they reserved. Mrs Loomis hints that her husband is having some issues and tells them the name of the military psychiatric hospital he had been in. The Cutlers cheerfully check into a less desirable cabin.

Turns out Marilyn is seeing another man and they've hatched a cunning plan to bump off Joseph Cotton. They never explain why. Both want out of their terrible marriage and they don't mention any large sums of money being involved.

I was rooting for Joseph Cotton, but nothing goes well for anyone.

The scenery was impressive. We get to see the tourist stuff there--the boat tours and so forth. 

If you're ever in Canada and the cops are after you and they're checking everyone at the border, don't be in such a hurry to get back to the States. The cops will be after you there, too. Head north. They'll never look for you there.

Available on the Criterion channel. They're showcasing technicolor film noir.

Death Wish (dir, Michael Winner, 1974)

Charles Bronson plays a mild mannered architect, a conscientious objector during the Korean War who's really good at shooting people. He becomes a folk hero, a Sergeant York for the '70's. After his wife is murdered and his daughter raped, he starts killing muggers. The first couple of them were justifiable homicide, but then he starts murdering them as they try to run away. His daughter was catatonic and getting worse, but he was giddy after the first killings.

Less disturbing now than it was in its day. Movies are more violent and mass shootings and police murders are the problem, not subway vigilantes. 

Produced by Dino De Laurentiis. Not as cartoonish as the Israeli-made sequels from the '80's and '90's.

With Hope Lange, Vincent Gardenia. Stuart Margolin. Christopher Guest as Patrolman Reilly. He played a cop in The Hot Rock, too. Must have been his thing back then.

Introducing Jeff Goldblum in the role of Freak #1. With Olympia Dukakis and The Munsters' Al Lewis uncredited as a security guard.

Ten years after this movie premiered, Bernard Goetz shot some delinquents on a New York subway. Experienced muggers said it was because they ran when they saw the gun---seasoned muggers would have taken it away from him. Goetz went to prison for eight months, poor devil, although he might have avoided that if he hadn't blathered to police without a lawyer.

 

Larry Storch, R.I.P.

I don't think my family watched F Troop, but I somehow knew who Larry Storch was. Recognized him as a guest star on Gilligan's Island and later he was in a live action Saturday Morning TV show, The Ghost Busters, which predated the movie Ghostbusters. And I remember him from an episode of All in the Family. Carroll O'Connor was only 49, but his old friend Larry Storch comes to town and urges him to act young. 

He went to high school with Don Adams and was shipmates with Tony Curtis in the Navy.

He was in things I saw but don't remember him from, Airport 1975 and The Great Race among them. I wondered how he felt about Kelly Bundy attending the Larry Storch School of Acting on Married with Children, but he appeared in an episode so he must have been okay with it.

Larry Storch died in his sleep yesterday in his home in Manhattan at age 99.

Poor Cow (Ken Loach, 1967)

Most movies about poor and working class British youth make the place look like a hellhole. And in some ways it does here, too, but it seems like the poor girl in this thing would have a pretty good life if she hadn't gotten pregnant and married an abusive criminal. Once he goes to prison, she gets mixed up with another one just like him. Everything would be fine if she could relax and live alone.

Made up of disjointed scenes, some of them linked by intertitles. We see her working in a pub, she visits her boyfriend in the slam, she wisely consults a divorce lawyer. At one point she becomes a model, but it turns out to be for those things where several amateur photographers cluster around and photograph a semi-naked lady all at once.

Free on Movieland Tv.

Woody Allen to make French language film in Paris

Woody Allen has talked before in interviews  about retiring from filmmaking. I shouldn't have fallen for it this time, but he is a few years older, he's had to take it easy for a while because of the pandemic and there is the issue of his movies getting limited theatrical release.  

But he has plans now to make something “in the same vein as ‘Match Point,’ a sort of poisonous romantic thriller," to be filmed in Paris, in French with a local cast and a $10 million budget. 

Those movies worked out well, Match Point and Cassandra's Dream. Those were his only thrillers. Except maybe for Casino Royale. 

Devil Times Five aka Peopletoys aka The Horrible House on the Hill (1974)

Quentin Tarantino praised 11-year-old Leif Garrett's performance in The Devil Times Five. I had tried to watch the movie several times over the years and never made it very far. It was never as interesting as it seemed like it should have been. Five dangerously deranged children escape when the van they're riding in crashes in the snow. Naturally, they start killing middle aged people on a ski trip staying in a house in the mountains. One of the victims is played by Garrett's mother, Carolyn Stellar. One of the other children is played by his sister, Dawn Lyn.

The bulk of the movie was filmed before Garrett appeared in Macon County Line. That movie was set in the 'fifties so the poor little fellow had his long hair cruelly hacked off. THEN he had to go back to film additional scenes for Devil Times Five. They show him in a scene with short dark hair killing somebody, then he puts on a bad blond wig implying that he was wearing a wig in the scenes of him with long hair. He appears in drag a couple of times and sort of flirts with Sorrel Brooke (Boss Hogg from The Dukes of Hazzard). He has a stunt, falling off a ladder.

"My face!" he cried. "Look what you've done to my beautiful face!"

One kid thinks he's a soldier, Garrett's character thinks he's a movie star, one of the girls thinks she's a nun.

The first director on this film reportedly botched the job which is why they had to bring everyone back. Bizarre content can sometimes save a middling production.

Free on Tubi as The Horrible House on the Hill.

Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, 1951)

It was the opposite of Inherit the Wind or Footloose. They were also about towns that have only one church, but in those movies the church exerts an almost totalitarian control over the community.

In Diary of a Country Priest, the young priest arrives at his first parish. The community is presumably all-Catholic, but he has no influence over anyone. Even the children preparing for their confirmation don't respect him. His health is bad. He has chronic stomach trouble and often feels weak which doesn't help. Another priest warns him that nobody ever likes priests and advises him to crack down on his parishioners.

He seems like a nice guy, but in his position, he has little to say to anyone, no comfort to give except to argue the Catholic line. 

Here and there, he finds out people are saying terrible or at least unkind things about him. He writes and writes in his diary in lieu of having anyone to talk to which provides the movie's narration. 

There was only one professional actor in the film. The rest were non-actors. Bresson preferred non-emotive acting. Reportedly, he would do repeated takes and wear the actors down to the point that they were mindlessly going through the motions. There must have been an easier way. Like just telling them what he wanted them to do.

Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958)

I came across the old Jump Cut film journal online and read an article on the films of Ray Harryhausen, the special effects guy known for stop-motion animation.

From the article:

The problem is and always has been that Ray Harryhausen’s movies are invariably made for the wrong reason. They are made to exploit one man’s unique—almost freakish—talent for creating unusual visual effects. Every other consideration in production comes second to that, including such overwhelmingly more important things as story and direction. True, a Harryhausen-Schneer production is always polished and tastefully presented But the flashy exterior and the razzle dazzle of the special effects cannot possibly support the weight of a two-hour motion picture, and the results are almost always unbalanced and dismal. The viewer quickly finds her/himself impatiently waiting for the next animated sequence, since the uncanny manipulation of Harryhausen’s lifelike puppets is more lively than regular action in his pictures. In fact, the animated special effects are always the highlights—the only highlights—of any Harryhausen film. One cannot help but sense that the remaining footage in his movies is as flaccid as it always is because producer Schneer intentionally hires directors who are uninventive enough not to interfere with the often extreme directorial control which Harryhausen must wield in order to pull off some of his carefully synchronized effects.

The writer noted that the movies were aimed at the young, so the audience replaced itself in the few years it took them to make another movie. In the days before home video, they always seemed fresh and original to their target audience.

In The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, I felt bad that they killed a giant newly hatched baby bird and that Sinbad stuck a burning torch in a giant cyclops' eye so they could steal his treasure. At one point, they threw a lamp into molten lava and I think they thought the poor genie was still in there.

The REAL monster in these movies was Sinbad.

The kid above is the genie pictured here with a tiny princess.

Free on Movieland Tv.