Panique (France, 1946)

Based on the same book as Monsieur Hire, about an alleged misanthrope, an astrologer by trade, which surprised me, in a small French town. A commentary on French conduct under Nazi occupation. When a woman is found murdered, suspicion falls on the misanthrope who doesn't seem like that bad a guy. Not friendly, but he doesn't go around saying rude things like most movie misanthropes.

It's not a mystery. We don't see the murder but everything is spelled out in dialogue.

The things that stood out to me were that the real killer (male) was clearly wearing lipstick. It was black & white. Maybe that was his natural appearance. And amusement park rides---bumper cars and a rollercoaster---were enjoyed only by adults. 

There was an early scene when a woman and her boyfriend go to another fortune teller who does a pretty good cold reading. She correctly guesses that the woman was institutionalized, but not that she was in prison, but doesn't do well predicting future events.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

The Octogon (Chuck Norris, 1980)

In a world of choices, for one man there is no choice. He must face---THE OCTOGON.

A relatively early Chuck Norris effort, an actual karate movie, before he just walked around shooting people. Plot involved mercenaries, terrorists and guys who like killing terrorists. A woman decides a karate expert would be the perfect person to destroy a mercenary/terrorist training camp run by Japanese martial artists.

I saw it in a movie theater with a friend who was an avid reader of Soldier of Fortune magazine. He started repeating lines from the movie, like I hadn't seen it with him a few days earlier. We were in the same high school. I knew he didn't fight terrorism.

Thinking back, it's strange that he identified with Lee Van Cleef rather than Chuck Norris. Although Van Cleef had better lines.

Saw the movie again later at the university. It was before home video had taken over. Student groups would show movies on the weekends. Some of the classrooms had projection booths.

The college kids laughed at the scene where Chuck Norris says, "That's an insult to both of us. It makes me stupid. And you a whore," and at the high speed chase. The bad guys pull their car across the road blocking Chuck Norris, so he backs up and goes around as the terrorists watch helplessly.

It was all right, though.

Lance Kerwin, RIP

Teachers at my junior high school often complained about the state of television. In Lance Kerwin's show,  James at 16, the title character has unprotected sex. The writers wanted to show him buying condoms but the network refused to show teenagers planning to have sex.

Kerwin died yesterday at age 62.

He had a more troubled life than I would have imagined, struggling with drug use until the 1990's.

I, Tonya (2017)

Poor Tonya Harding. Abused child turned battered wife whose idiot husband ended her skating career by arranging an assault on ice-skating rival Nancy Kerrigan.

Nancy Kerrigan went on to win a silver medal in the Olympics; she was criticized for not being a better sport about a Ukrainian teen beating her out for the gold medal and was later attacked on Dateline NBC after they picked her up on microphone expressing embarrassment at having to wear her silver medal while playing a princess in a Disneyland parade. There was a terrible backlash against the poor girl. I don't know how Tonya Harding is regarded these days.

The movie was okay. An antidote to Portlandia.

Alec Baldwin to be charged with involuntary manslaughter

They're reporting that Alec Baldwin is to be charged with involuntary manslaughter. Maybe he SHOULD have assumed that the prop revolver he was handed was loaded. What do I know.

Both Baldwin and the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, will be charged with involuntary manslaughter. Assistant director David Halls will plead guilty to Negligent Use of a Deadly Weapon.

I thought John Landis should have been put away for murdering three people, two of them small children, on the set of The Twilight Zone, so I may be horribly wrong to be on Alec Baldwin's side here, but it's hard to imagine an actor being handed a prop gun and asking, "Say, this isn't loaded with live ammunition, is it?"

 

SAG-AFTRA came to Baldwin's defense:

“The prosecutor’s contention that an actor has a duty to ensure the functional and mechanical operation of a firearm on a production set is wrong and uninformed. An actor’s job is not to be a firearms or weapons expert. Firearms are provided for their use under the guidance of multiple expert professionals directly responsible for the safe and accurate operation of that firearm.  In addition, the employer is always responsible for providing a safe work environment at all times, including hiring and supervising the work of professionals trained in weapons. 

“The Industry Standards for safety with firearms and use of blank ammunition are ​clearly laid out ​in Safety Bulletin 1, provided by the​ Joint​ Industry-Wide Labor Management Safety Commission. The guidelines require an experienced, qualified armorer to be put in charge of all handling, use, and safekeeping of firearms on set. These duties include ‘inspecting the firearm and barrel before and after every firing sequence,’ and ‘checking all firearms before each use.’  

“The guidelines do not make it the performer’s responsibility to check any firearm. Performers ​train to perform, and they are not required or expected to be experts on guns or experienced in their use. The industry assigns that responsibility to qualified professionals who oversee their use and handling in every aspect.  Anyone issued a firearm on set must be ​given training and guidance in its safe handlin​g and use, ​ but all activity with firearms on a set must be under the careful supervision and control of the professional armorer and the employer.” 

It would have been so safe and easy and more pleasant for everyone involved to add muzzle flashes digitally. It's not like the movie would have been that good anyway.

It's the Communists

I read a quote somewhere in the 1970's when I was in high school. A French guy noted that "You can say anything in America as long as you start and finish by saying 'I hate Communism'."

Well, those Communists are at it again. This from the London Telegraph:

Maybe she has a point. I don't know. In Texas, physical education was shown to be driving students from school.

At least she doesn't blame Vladimir Putin.

Madness!

 

How does this make sense?

It remains impossible (unless you have access to editions circulated by Russian pirates) for anyone in the US to watch Roman Polanski’s 2019 film on the Dreyfus Affair. It’s crazy that you can stream every other Polanski film but not An Officer and a Spy, which, if it’s at all faithful to the Robert Harris novel (and by some accounts it’s one of the best historical dramas ever filmed), speaks directly to our current crisis, though perhaps not as articulately as the campaign to expunge it.

Saint Jack (Peter Bogdanovich, 1979)

I had seen this movie over thirty years ago. It was a bit seedier than I remembered, Ben Gazerra in the title role playing an American pimp operating in Singapore. It seems so odd to me now that it was produced by Roger Corman and I was surprised to see Hugh Hefner and George Lazenby's names in the credits. Lazenby is Australian but played an American Congressman. The director, Bogdanovich, plays a CIA agent out to get dirt on the Congressman. 

I wished I could be like Jack Flowers, walking around greeting the countless people he knew. I wouldn't want to be a pimp. Wouldn't want to be menaced by murderous Chinese rivals. 

Watching it again, I still wouldn't mind being amiable, or at least glib.

A scene that stood out to me was when he sees some American soldiers on leave. "Yankee go home," he says. He briefly chats with them, asks where they're from, tells them about a practice among local sex workers and gets rid of them by telling them he doesn't want to hold them up.

I hadn't seen the movie in decades. but I was in an elevator at the hospital with a couple of guys I took to be Mormon missionaries. They wear name tags. I thought for a moment about trying to channel Saint Jack and asking where they were from. "Hello, boys." But I had worries of my own. I later saw a security guard either showing them where they needed to go or escorting them from the building. 

52 Pick-Up (John Frankenheimer, 1986)

The title had two meanings, one of which I think was that thing kids used to do. They hold a deck of cards and say, "You want to play 52 Pick-Up?" and you'd say okay, and they throw them on the floor and tell you to pick them up. If someone had a light 1952 truck, it could have had a triple meaning.

Violent psychopathic criminals including an amateur pornographer and a small pornographic business owner, devise an elaborate scheme which didn't really make sense to blackmail Roy Scheider. Some flaws in their plan were pointed out in the movie.

I think it was an '80's thing. The violence was overly sadistic. The movie was seedy and unpleasant. The Breaking Bad-like ending might have been good, but they took it too far to be plausible. 

Roy Scheider as regular rich guy who's surprisingly good at fighting people. Private gun ownership isn't usually a factor in movies like this, not that it did him any good. With Clarence Williams III, Ann-Margret and I didn't recognize him, but Doug McClure was in a supporting role.

Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963)

This used to be the only Hitchcock movie you'd see on TV. They'd show Psycho once in a great while and they started showing Strangers on a Train at some point. We'd sit and watch The Birds. My sister had an unexplained dislike for Tippi Hedren even though she was adventurous and Nancy Drew-like in the movie. She took a small motorboat across the bay for one thing. I'd have never done that. 

Watching it again after all these years, it was better than I remembered. Dead bodies are so common in movies it's only now that I'm a bit shocked at the image of Suzanne Pleshette lying dead in front of her house.

Mel Brooks, History of the World Part Two

Looking at Internet Movie Database, it seems strange that Mel Brooks' peak as a director came from movies released over a period of just four years.  

His first two movies, The Producers and The Twelve Chairs didn't do well. I liked The Twelve Chairs, based on the comedic Soviet novel by Ilf and Petrov. It never made sense to me that the theater audience in The Producers thought "Springtime for Hitler" was funny.

Then he had a string of movies, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie and High Anxiety that I thought were great. Siskel & Ebert were critical of High Anxiety because it had references to Alfred Hitchcock movies like Spellbound which had been out of circulation for years. They were jokes no one would get.

History of the World Part I kind of killed it. I only saw a few minutes of it on TV, so I don't know, but it did very poorly.

Brooks made a comeback with Spaceballs, but then there was the disaster of Robin Hood: Men in Tights. I liked Dracula: Dead and Loving It.

Now The History of the World Part II, an eight-episode series, will appear on Hulu.

I read in an old Guinness Book of World Records thing about movies that The Black Bird, a comedic sequel to The Maltese Falcon, had the longest gap between original movie and sequel at 34 years. It's been 41 or 42 years since History of the World Part I. But a series isn't really a sequel.

I was a young fellow working as a dishwasher in an alcoholism treatment center when The History of the World Part I came out. The cook there was excited about it. I suppose she saw it, but never mentioned it again. 

Night of the Blood Beast (1958)

I remember seeing this in an ad in Famous Monsters of Filmland or some such thing. They were selling abbreviated Super 8 versions of feature films. I'd seen very few of them and I was 12 so I'd already blown my disposable income on the magazine and even if I could have bought one, I didn't own a movie projector.

But I wanted this one. Night of the Blood Beast. I thought I liked science fiction and the description said it had a rocket ship and a guy in space and a space monster, but it turns out most of it takes place after the ship crashed on Earth in a field somewhere.

Directed by Bernard L. Kowalski and produced by Roger Corman's brother, Gene. But it had a couple of Roger Corman trademarks, like the Freudian symbolism. It takes place in a base the main feature of which is a huge radio tower and it ends in a cave.

And it really wasn't very good. How is one blood beast in a cave going to take over the world? Shouldn't scientists have had wanted to study it instead of setting it on fire?

Available on Pub-D-Hub, and other public domain channels I'm sure.