The Million Dollar Duck (Disney, 1971)

Another sort of science fiction movie dealing with financial issues. Dean Jones as a struggling research professor. He exposes a duck in his lab to electricity and it starts laying eggs with yolks made of gold. The movie was made in 1971. It didn't become legal for Americans to own gold until 1974. Joe Flynn as a belligerent neighbor who works for the Treasury Department who causes trouble for them. 

They keep losing the duck and scrambling to get it back. It's worth a fortune but they let the kid run around with it.

This was the first of three movies Gene Siskel walked out on over the years.

With Tony Roberts a year before Play It Again, Sam. Lee Harcourt Montgomery's first movie, just one year before Ben. With James Gregory and Frank Cady.

Story by Ted Key, the cartoonist who did the newspaper gag panel Hazel.

Government officials force their way into the house looking for the duck. The kid rides off with it in the basket of his bicycle like a proto-E.T.

Dean Jones is nearly killed several times in the final chase. Lee Montgomery jumps off a moving truck and is nearly killed trying to cross a ladder used as a bridge between two high buildings while holding a duck. He would rather die a horrible death than lose his pet. 

Free on Movieland.Tv.

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

You know all those 1950's paranoid cold war science fiction movies about Communists from outer space? Well, this was about a capitalist from outer space, in this case getting patents on advanced alien technology and making a fortune.

It was different from They Live, the John Carpenter movie about parasitic alien capitalists. The Man Who Fell to Earth had a 1920's vision of capitalism, where the head of the corporation personally invents (or appears to in this case) his company's products, like self-developing photographic film which would have been pretty good in the days before digital photography.

David Bowie as the space alien. He did seem weird and alien. A costume designer said he was so thin that they dressed him in clothes from the boy's department. 

Buck Henry as the alien's lawyer. It wasn't obvious to me watching the movie, but I heard years ago, probably when Vitto Russo spoke at the university here, that his character was gay. It was 1974 and people involved in the production didn't understand it. WHY was he gay? The director explained that he just happened to be gay. It wasn't a big plot thing.

A surprising amount of sex and nudity, like a serious, arty version of one of those nudie science fiction movies. It has a professor (Rip Torn) who sleeps with his students. He drives a Rambler Rebel which was several years old at that point. It's always weirdly refreshing to see AMC's in old movies. 

It was prophetic in its way. The wealthy alien capitalist, like Bezos and Musk today, ends up building a private space craft.

Directed by Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, Don't Look Now).

Available on The Criterion Channel and free on Movieland.Tv, Freevee, and Hoopla among others. 

Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)

Polanski's first feature after Knife in the Water. 

Carol (Catherine Deneuve) is a manicurist who lives with her sister in a large apartment in London. She has a young fellow pursuing her who she can't get rid of. You'd think he'd show some sensitivity to this since he becomes rather upset by a couple of gay guys showing an interest in him. Carol may have had a fear of sex, but we all have our phobias.

When her sister goes off to Italy for a few days with her wealthy boyfriend, Carol is left alone in the apartment. She misses work and suffers frightening hallucinations. Cracks appear in the walls, she hears footsteps in the hallway at night and worse.

There are a couple of sexual assaults. It's interesting to see London in 1965. The guy trying to get a date with Carol drives a Triumph TR4. Her sister's boyfriend has a Jaguar Mark II. Carol works in a large bustling beauty salon. If Polanski's English had been better, he might have seen a problem with an employee referring to the boss as a "bitch" in front of a customer, but maybe I'm the one who doesn't understand how Londoners talked back then.

The food looked terrible, especially the poor rabbit curled up on a platter.

Free on Amazon Prime, the Roku Channel, Plex and elsewhere.

Death and the Maiden (Roman Polanski, 1994)

Sigourney Weaver as a activist under the country's former dictatorship who had been tortured by the regime. Her husband (Stuart Wilson) gets a ride home with their neighbor (Ben Kingsley) and she realizes that he was the one who tortured her while she was blindfolded. She ties him up, tries to get a confession out of him so she can put him on trial in their living room over the objections of her lawyer husband.

It's a little like an episode of Law & Order. Whatever ambiguity there is in the episode, whether someone is guilty or innocent or whatever question there is about their motives, everything is made clear in the end.

It's interesting, at least to me, how many of Polanski's movies are set in single locations with a handful of characters. This is common in low budget movies. In this case the movie was based on a play. They don't say what country it's set in, but the playwright was Chilean.

Free on Amazon Prime, Tubi and the Roku Channel.

Trump

Four years will go by quickly enough. For some people it will. But, when Trump is gone, whoever comes next won't reverse anything he's done. Maybe the war in Ukraine will end which would save vast numbers of lives, and he's said the Zionists should wrap up their genocide in Gaza. Maybe NATO will fall apart. Europe has never been attacked, yet they've been in one war after another. Trump could actually be a net gain for humanity.

The Republican Party is now Fascist and they won't be going back. The Democrats have had this strategy for years to be as right-wing as possible. As long as they're ever so slightly better than the Republicans, liberals and leftists will have no choice but to vote for them, and if they're right-wing enough, Republicans will vote for them, too. If that worked, they would have won every election since Carter ran for reelection against Reagan. But every time the Democrats shift further to the right, Republicans do the same. And now we're a Fascist country.

On the morning of January 6th, 2021, I was walking out to my car to drive to work. For some reason, I was wondering how the U.S. would continue attacking elections in other countries. Every time a foreign election didn't go the way the U.S. wanted, it would claim election fraud. Wouldn't people notice that they sound exactly like Trump?

A couple hours later, my boss told us the capitol was being attacked by a mob of Republicans claiming the election was stolen from poor Trump.

Right now, the Biden regime is claiming that the election in the Republic of Georgia was fraudulent even though the results were perfectly in line with polls. 

I understand people who want to leave the country.

Last time Trump got elected, we were sitting around the dining table with my aunt and uncle. My brother-in-law asked how they felt when Trump won. I think he just wanted them to talk about their happy surprise when their guy won, but my aunt started talking about "brown people" moving into their suburb. I didn't know who she was talking about, but I googled it later and the place now has a large South Asian population which, Wikipedia said, was unnerving to the white elderly. If I'd known that, I would have urged her to try the Indian restaurants. It was before COVID so she could probably find a lunch buffet. She started talking about someone she knew who worked in a school in Japan, and the students there all looked Japanese. She wondered what would be wrong with America being racially uniform.

Freebie and the Bean (1974)

James Caan and Alan Arkin in the title roles. We never hear their real names. A couple of very violent San Francisco detectives who keep beating information out of people. An action-comedy that wasn't really funny. Their incessant banter wears thin and most of the "jokes" were just car accidents. Does show the danger car chases pose to innocent by-standers which you didn't really get watching Bullitt.

Detectives Freebie and Bean are after a wealthy hoodlum running a hijacking ring. They find themselves protecting him when they learn there's a contract out on him. 

I watched this on HBO when I was kid, and I for one liked the transvestite hitman (Christopher Morley who passed away this year). Kung Fu was still on the air but I had grown weary of David Carradine's fake martial arts. I liked how Morely effortlessly battered James Caan with karate in a women's restroom. It ends with Caan shooting him more times than necessary which was taken as a violently anti-trans thing, which it was, but that didn't occur to me when I was 13.

With Loretta Swit and Valerie Harper just as they got big on TV.

Free on Movieland.Tv. For $3.99 elsewhere.

Cronenberg's The Fly (1986)

Eccentric scientist Jeff Goldblum is prone to motion sickness. Hates vehicles. So he invents teleportation. But when he tests it on himself a fly gets in there with him. The machine doesn't know what to do, so it combines his DNA with that of the fly.

When I was a young fellow watching this in the theater, I thought it was a good thing he didn't have a tapeworm, but what about eyebrow mites?  

I had a friend who insisted we see the movie again and again, but he refused look at some of the gross special effects. He'd cower in his seat looking away and covering his eyes. Jeff Goldblum slowly turns into a giant fly and flies vomit on things they eat.

Cronenberg denied it, but people at the time thought it was an AIDS allegory.

And then there was the OLD movie, The Fly (1958). A guy invents a teleporter. He gets in, doesn't notice there's a fly with him, and when he comes out he's half-man, half-fly. I took a class in junior high school called "Monsters" where we studied horror fiction. It was before home video, so the class was going to rent a 16mm horror film to watch. We each had to pitch in 50 cents. The teacher read us our choices so we could vote on which one to rent. He read a brief description of The Fly, and because it had a teleporter, he sneered, "That sounds like Star Trek." I had never seen the movie, but I'd seen promos for it on local TV, so I knew it was nothing like Star Trek. In my outrage, I voted for The Fly, but thanks to the teacher's comment only one other kid did, too. He probably liked Star Trek.

Available for Halloween on The Criterion Channel. I wasn't sure if I wanted to watch it after seeing it so many times 38 years ago. I remembered it pretty well, but it was okay seeing it again. The special effects my friend couldn't bear to watch weren't that awful.

Let's Kill Uncle (William Castle, 1956) Horror High (Larry N. Stouffer, 1973)

William Castle directed. Orphaned tween Barnaby (Pat Conti) has an overactive imagination and no one believes him when he thinks his uncle wants to murder him for his $5 million inheritance. He and his girl friend set out to bump off the uncle. 

The little fellow was fourteen or fifteen when he starred in this, but looked twelve. If he and his uncle had made realistic attempts on each other's lives it might have been better. There's a large shark in the murky water of the swimming pool. Piranhas would have been more plausible.

Horror High

Was inspired to watch Pat Conti in Horror High, his last acting credit made seven years later, about an abused, bullied high school science nerd who comes up with a formula that turns him into a Jekyll and Hyde. I could certainly understand the gym teacher as villain, and even the English teacher, but why the janitor? The teachers threaten his future, telling him they'll flunk him so he can't graduate and get into college. Filmed in Texas. Made today, it would be an allegory for school shootings.

Let's Kill Uncle is free on Movieland.Tv. I should quit watching that channel.

Horror High is free on Fawsome. 

The Fearless Vampire Killers aka Dance of the Vampires (Roman Polanski, 1967)

I don't know how much snow Romania really gets. I don't remember any verbal jokes in it. It was almost all visual. A Jewish vampire doesn't react when someone tries to ward him off with a crucifix, which may have inspired a similar joke in Love at First Bite, and there's a gag involving ballroom dancing and a mirror Mel Brooks may have picked up on for Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Scenes of the guys walking around on snow covered rooftops made me think of the scene in Frantic where Harrison finds walking on a rooftop more challenging than he expected.

Jack MacGowran and Roman Polanski venture into the vampire's castle to rescue Sharon Tate.

Free on Movieland.Tv and Cinema Box which seem to be identical streaming channels. Available on Amazon Prime and AppleTV if you don't mind paying. 

Race with the Devil (1975)

Roger Ebert wrote in a review of Albert Brooks' Lost in America:

Every time I see a Winnebago motor home, I have the same fantasy as the hero of “Lost in America.” In my dream, I quit my job, sell everything I own, buy the Winnebago and hit the open road. Where do I go? Look for me in the weather reports. I’ll be parked by the side of a mountain stream, listening to Mozart on Compact Discs. All I’ll need is a wok and a paperback.

I always think about how awful it would be, lumbering around in one of those things, cars lined up behind you waiting for a passing lane. I would dream of driving something easy to park, eating in restaurants and staying in motels which would be cheaper than buying one of those behemoths. Although I would also dream of a car with a TV and a bathroom.  

In Race with the Devil, two couples go on vacation in a giant motorhome. The pull off the road, park in a secluded spot in the Texas wilderness where they witness Satanists sacrifice a naked girl. Now the devil worshipers are trying to chase them down and they're everywhere. They stop at an RV park and the other people stare at them menacingly. When they go out to eat, the satanists kill their dog and plant rattle snakes in their cupboards.

Peter Fonda and Warren Oates with their wives, Loretta Swit and Lara Parker are going from San Antonio to Colorado. Hicks can be scary, but it's hard to picture them as part of a huge network of devil worshippers. 

Johnny Nobody (1961)

A Catholic priest (Nigel Patrick who also directed) in an Irish village is called to calm things down when an atheist writer (William Bendix) upsets a small mob of Catholics. I thought the priest might tell the mob that the writer was entitled to his opinion or that physically attacking someone for not sharing your religion was against the law. Instead, the priest berates the writer and assures his parishioners that God will take care of him. 

Just then, a man (Aldo Ray) walks up and shoots the blasphemer. The priest asks him who he is and what he did that for. The man doesn't know his own name, but an unseen force told him that he must kill this guy. The villagers think it's a miracle.

Since Aldo Ray can't remember his name, the press dubs him "Johnny Nobody". The judge at his trial decides that's a good enough name since they don't know what else to call him.

The priest is called to testify. The defense attorney asks him if he believes that the murder was the direct intervention of God Almighty.

The prosecution objects. It's Friday afternoon and the judge says he will rule on the objection Monday morning.

The priest wracks his conscience. How would he answer the question? How can he be a priest and not believe that God sends amnesiacs to gun down unbelievers? 

It was more murder mystery than religious drama with an idiotic plot, murdering a guy on the assumption that Irish Catholics will believe anything and refuse to convict.

Contrast the priest in this movie with the vicar in Straw Dogs (1971) who has fun arguing religion and science with Dustin Hoffman, or the bishop in Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) when a peasant woman tells him:

"Father? I want to tell you something."

"Then tell me, my child."

"I really don't like Jesus Christ. Even as a little girl I hated him."

"Such a good, gentle God? How is it possible?"

"Want to know why?"

"Let me tend to this sick man first, then we'll talk."

Seemed like a nice fellow. Not that he was above shooting people.

Free on Movieland.Tv.

Gator Bait (1973)

Another swamp girl movie. A sheriff, his deputy son and a family of degenerate swamp dwellers hunt for the elusive swamp girl (Claudia Jennings) who the deputy falsely blames for killing the swamp family's son/brother. The swamp brothers seem intent on raping her. One was sexually assaulting his own sister when the sheriff came to tell them of his brother's demise.

They attempt to rape but then murder the swamp girl's sister (Janit Baldwin). The swamp girl's younger brother (Tracy Sebastian) runs to get her and the two of them set out for revenge. 

I assume this was a movie aimed at an exclusively Southern audience. I heard this about Burt Reynolds' movie White Lightning and such movies as Walking Tall, that any money they got from non-Southern audiences was icing on the cake. Is this how Southerners see themselves? Are cruel Southern stereotypes their self-image?

Free on Movieland.Tv.

Here is an article about the makers of the movie. Claims he got some interesting advice from Walt Disney.

The Monolith Monsters (1957)

They used to show this now and then on a local TV station and I loved it. I remember finding it strangely frightening. A meteor lands in the desert. It explodes into little pieces. When you add water, each little chunk grows into a giant monolith which then falls over, shatters, and become even more monoliths. It's easier to do a special effect monolith than a convincing space monster, so it had that going for it.

Watching it again for the first time in 45 years, it was slower than I remembered, and I didn't remember the horrible health effects of coming into contact with them. A little girl has to be placed in an iron lung. 

Starring Grant Williams, Les Tremayne and Lola Albright, with Troy Donahue and Paul Peterson as Bobby the paperboy.

Tha Dam Busters (U.K., 1955)

British engineer invents bombs that will bounce along the surface of water to destroy Nazi dams during World War Two. I'd seen film of these long ago on the old British documentary series World at War.  Turns out it's not that easy to blow up a dam, although that would probably depend on the dam.

The British seem so polite and civilized until the dog, the squadron mascot, shows up. The dog was black so the Brits called it by a deeply offensive racial slur. They couldn't have used that word in a Hollywood movie back then. According to IMDb, the RAF guys would give the dog beer in real life, then it would urinate on their legs. The dog was hit by a car and killed, which happened in the movie. But in reality, the driver swerved to miss him, wrecked the car and injured its occupants. That dog was the REAL hero.

With Richard Todd, Michael Redgrave and Robert Shaw in there somewhere. Available on Movieland.Tv. 

The California Kid (Made-for-TV 1974) Vic Morrow, Martin Sheen

Made-for-TV movies weren't all true crime stories and diseases-of-the week back then.

I watched the world television premiere of this movie in 1974. I must have been 11. I thought it was weird that they had a two-door police car. 

Martin Sheen arrives driving a hotrod in a speedtrap town where the local police chief (Vic Morrow) murders speeders by running them off the road. One victim was played by Martin Sheen's brother, Joe Esteves. Sheen comes looking for revenge. 

The plot was a little thin, but it was all right. They destroy several cars that seem extremely old now but weren't over 20-years-old at the time. I didn't entirely understand the duel at the end.

Free on Movieland.Tv.

With Nick Nolte and Stuart Margolin.

Swamp Girl (1971)

Not that offensive. Rated GP in its day. Seven people were killed if I counted right, they kept referring to the Black character using a terrible racial slur, and it had this swamp doctor who pregnant women kept going to. The doctor would promise to put their baby girls up for adoption, then sell them into white slavery, but this was explained in a dialog scene. Most of the movie was dialog. I assume the Georgia accents were authentic. The doctor and the child traffickers were killed with a hatchet before the story began. Shot in the Okefenokee swamp. The place didn't look quite the way I would have pictured it.

Free on Movieland.Tv.

The Big Bus (1976)

I must have been 13 when I saw this in a theater. I went to it alone. I think I got all the jokes. I just didn't think they were funny, and seeing it again after all these years, I still don't.

Disaster movie spoof about a very large nuclear powered bus. Oil companies target it on its maiden voyage across the United States.

Joe Bologna, Stockard Channing, Ruth Gordon, Larry Hagman, John Beck, Rene Auberjonois, Ned Beatty, Bob Dishy, Jose Ferrer, Richard Mulligan, Sally Kellerman, Stuart Margolin, and Howard Hessman among others.

Free on Movieland.Tv. I was surprised to find it was available on a couple of other streaming channels. I haven't seen this thing available anywhere in years.

The Culpepper Cattle Co. (1972)

I had seen the box for this movie in video stores over the years but never checked it out. I assumed it was a comedy based on the alliterative title. I may have related it to The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County. Stars teen actor Gary Grimes.

Grimes first starred in Summer of '42 as a kid who does nothing but talk about sex and goes to bed with a war widow. The Culpepper Cattle Co. was his second starring role as a teen who desperately wants to be a cowboy. He gets hired to go on a cattle drive, serving as their "Little Mary" which is what they call the cook's assistant.

The movie went for gritty realism, but I like to think it was grittier than it was realistic. Cowboys keep getting into gunfights with cattle rustlers, horse thieves, and, in the end, a greedy land baron extorting money from them because their cattle was on his land. It turns out that a religious commune has also stopped on land he considers to be his and he plans to murder them---that's what they do to squatters there. The commune members refuse to leave but also refuse to fight. This leads to the final confrontation.

Free on Movieland.Tv.

New Adventures of Old Christine, psychoanalysis

Pluto started showing The New Adventures of Old Christine, so I started watching that a lot. Binge watching doesn't work that well. Sit com characters tend to be one note and they get old really fast. I can't remember if I watched this show when it was still on or if I only started watching it in syndication. I remember the kid being the center of the show, the reason Christine is in constant contact with her ex-husband and his girlfriend, with her brother and with the mean moms at his high-priced private school, but the kid does almost nothing on the show. He's there for about a minute in each episode then he runs off to his room.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the daughter of a French billionaire in real life. I don't know how I should feel about her playing a less well-off mother constantly being put down by the wealthy mothers at her son's school. 

More of a sex comedy than I remembered.

Also, I've been reading Hollywood on the Couch by Stephen Farber and Marc Green. "A candid look at the overheated love affair between psychiatrists and moviemakers." Psychoanalysis was really really big among celebrities. Woody Allen was pretty average in that regard although he may have stuck with it longer than most.

It made me wonder if that was my problem. If rich successful celebrities go for psychoanalysis, it must be good. It's shocking how many actors, writers, directors and producers are named in the book, and a little disturbing that this private medical information was public knowledge. I started thinking maybe I should go for psychoanalysis. It's expensive, outdated, and I don't like the idea of "transference". To quote Wikipedia:

In a therapy context, transference refers to redirection of a patient's feelings for a significant person to the therapist. Transference is often manifested as an erotic attraction towards a therapist, but can be seen in many other forms such as rage, hatred, mistrust, parentification, extreme dependence, or even placing the therapist in a god-like or guru status.

And I realized that I was no better than people who think Scientology must be helpful because Tom Cruise is in it.  

Bad Girls Do Cry (1954/1965)

The director.

I'm getting worse and worse. I watched a 1954 film, Bad Girls Do Cry, directed by Sid Melton (Green Acres' Alf Monroe). It wasn't released until 1965. A sex movie with no sex or nudity. We do see a woman changing her clothes a couple of times but she wears proper undergarments.

A tall blond lady moves to the big city. She gets a job as a waitress. Someone suggests she go for a modeling job, and she does, but she's attacked, drugged and forced into prostitution. I don't know how that made her a "bad girl" and she never showed any strong emotion. The movie made it seem less upsetting than you'd probably imagine.

Filmed without sound and dubbed. A lot of scenes without dialogue or with someone talking on a phone, or we hear them talking in the next room. In a couple scenes, two people are talking but they never show the person speaking. They keep cutting to a close-up of the other person listening thoughtfully. The opposite of "Dragnet editing".

There were only nine characters which is fine. I didn't notice while watching, but according to IMDb, only one character has a name.

Free on Tubi.

The Day the Clown Cried interview

An interview with French film writer Jean-Michel Frodon who has seen The Day the Clown Cried and gives a more positive view of the film.

I always found it strange that people laughed about the children dying at the end of the movie. Realistically, how else could it have ended? Frodon says in the interview:

"One of the shocking things to me about Schindler’s List is that it was made to be as much of a crowd-pleaser as possible, with several tricks, one of them being addressing the evocation of the slaughtering of 6 million persons through the survival of a few of them. This is for me a very clever maneuver."

Read it here on the Vanity Fair website:

The French Film Critic Who Saw Jerry Lewis’s Infamous Holocaust Movie—and Loved It | Vanity Fair 

The Day the Clown Cried getting a second chance at life

I thought the script to The Day the Clown Cried had been available online for years, but K. Jam Media founder Kia Jam has reportedly gotten hold of the original version before Jerry Lewis started revising it. He managed to find the people who owned the rights to it and is trying to find a director to make the movie. 

If it gets made, it won't be the Jerry Lewis version, but it's all we're going to get.

Read about it here:

‘The Day The Clown Cried' Script Resurrected: Turned Into Famed Unreleased Jerry Lewis Holocaust Tale, Funded ‘Clown' Script Might Finally See The Light Of Day (msn.com)

Samurai Rebellion (Masaki Koybayashi, 1967)

Toshiro Mifune as a samurai working for a feudal lord in 18th century Japan. The lord has a tiff with his main concubine (Yoko Tsukasa), a young woman with whom he has had a child. He wants to throw her out so he orders that Toshiro Mifune's son (Go Kato) marry her. Mifune, his wife and son are all against it, but, in the end, they do what the lord orders, and it turns out okay. The son and his new wife get along great. 

 

But after the death of the lord's legitimate son, the child he had with the concubine is his only heir, so he wants the young lady to return to him. He orders this, and Mifune and his son refuse to go along with it. The lord has the girl abducted. Mifune and his son prepare to fight it out even though they wouldn't last long.

    

Toshiro Mifune was called The John Wayne of Japan, and, like John Wayne, he acted way too cheerful about going into mortal combat. Like a lot of westerns, it starts as a historical drama before turning into an action film.

With Tatsuya Nakadai.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

Law vs Billy the Kid (1954)

The guy playing Billy the Kid (Scott Brady) was about 30, but people looked older in 1954. He was awfully well-groomed. I don't think I've seen anyone in real life with his hair parted that neatly. I didn't know they had Vitalis back then.

Watching the documentary about the recently discovered photo of Billy the Kid playing croquet, I learned things I didn't know about him, like he worked for an English guy, hence the croquet. This movie was historically accurate in that regard. Billy works for an English guy who is murdered by local law enforcement. Billy the Kid was a terribly loyal employee who evens the score.

The movie opted for clarity over realism. Everything is brightly lit and explained in dialogue. Directed by William Castle, later known for his gimmicky horror movies.

Only actor I recognized in it was Alan Hale, Jr.

Had things you don't expect in a western. They put up Christmas decorations in the jail and Billy goes into a Mexican restaurant over-decorated with colorful rugs hanging on the walls.

Free on Tubi.

Inferno (1953) Robert Ryan, Rhonda Fleming, William Lundigan

Wealthy alcoholic Robert Ryan has fallen off his horse and broken his leg in the desert. His wife and her lover, William Lundigan, have hurried away to get help. In fact they've left him there to die. They report him missing, but direct searchers to the car they left stuck in a ditch. Can Robert Ryan save himself, making his way through the desert with a broken leg? I didn't know how I'd feel about Robert Ryan's voice over, but I got used to it quickly.

Filmed in 3D, not that that does us any good now.

I know people who just love the desert. I don't know why. I don't like being anywhere without ambulance service. 

There was an episode of Gilligan's Island where the Skipper tells Gilligan they can stave off thirst by sucking on pebbles. If this movie is to be believed, this is a real thing. I don't know if you can really get water from a cactus.

Available on the Criterion Channel, part of their Vacation Noir collection.

I Shot Jesse James (Samuel Fuller, 1949)

Samuel Fuller's directorial debut, made in 1949, 67 years after the actual events. Fuller saw Jesse James as a psychopathic killer who committed war crimes during the Civil War. It was about time someone killed him.

John Ireland and Tommy Noonan played brothers Bob and Charles Ford in the movie and were half-brothers in real life. A predecessor to The Long Riders (1980) in which Stacey and James Keach played Jesse and Frank James, David, Kieth and Robert Carradine played the Younger brothers and Randy and Dennis Quaid played the Miller brothers, whoever they were.

I saw I Shot Jesse James at the university when I was in high school, about 45 years ago. The scene that always stood out to me was the one where Jesse James is taking a bath in the barn. Bob Ford is standing behind him with a gun thinking about shooting him. Jesse James says, "Well, go ahead, Bob. What are you waiting for? There's m' back." Almost as if he has a sixth sense. Then he reaches back with a brush and says, "Here. Scrub it."

Available on the Criterion Channel. 

Rimfire (1949)

I was expecting something more like Scooby Doo. A Secret Service agent in 1869 travels to a small town looking for stolen government gold. The thieves would have some trouble disposing of it because the gold bars are marked as U.S. government property which means they'd have to be melted down. An itinerant gambler comes to town, is falsely accused of cheating, tried and executed. Then his ghost apparently starts killing people, shooting them somehow. And, at the scene of one such murder, a .45 caliber rimfire shell casing is left behind, which doesn't really make sense since he shot him with a revolver and there was no reason to reload right there on the spot, but what do I know.

With Jason Robards, Sr, long before his son's career took off and Victor Kilian who looked old even in 1949. He played Mary Hartman's grandfather on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and was the old guy who lost his wallet full of money on The Brady Bunch.

A disappointment even for an old western. Maybe it had an important lesson about capital punishment but they didn't dwell on it. No one was really concerned that they executed an innocent man even when they thought his ghost was killing people.

Free on Tubi.

Mame (1974)

I knew it was bad. I saw it once long ago. I don't go for musicals anyway. Lucille Ball was miscast.

Orphaned preteen Patrick (Kirby Furlong) goes to live with his colorful wealthy bohemian Auntie Mame (Lucille Ball), in 1920s New York. 

I  remember Furlong from old episodes of Adam-12, Canon, and  Emergency. I sat up last night and watched him in his last role in a 1980 made-for-TV movie, Off the Minnesota Strip, available on YouTube, about a girl who returns home after time as a runaway teenage prostitute. They left in the old commercials and local news updates. Peter Sellers had been admitted to the hospital.  

Kirby Furlong went on to become a professional musician and has worked on movie soundtracks. The poor actress who played Agnes Gooch (Jane Connell) later rented the movie at a video store. A helpful employee warned her it was terrible and suggested she get Auntie Mame (1958) instead. 

The critical reaction to the film made Lucille Ball swear off movies. She looked great in soft focus and years of heavy smoking gave her singing voice the quality Auntie Mame's might have had. 

I don't know about Mame, but if you want to watch Off the Minnesota Strip, a good second feature might be Strangers with Candy, either the TV show or the movie, a spoof of Afterschool Specials starring Amy Sedaris as a teen runaway who returns home in her 40's after years of crime, depravity and prison, to take up where she left off, going back to high school and coping with teen problems. With Steven Colbert, and the movie has Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Now that I think about it, if you want to make Mame a double feature, you might watch it with Harold and Maude.

J.D. Vance: The power of film criticism

Cinema, or at least movie criticism, has played a role in the presidential election. From Counterpunch.com:

+ According to one of Vance’s friends from Yale, Jamil Jivani, the tipping point that flipped Vance from a relatively sedate Never Trumper into one of the most fanatical MAGA-trons on the Hill was the hostile reaction to Ron Howard’s treacly film of Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy. Jivani described the mocking reviews as “the last straw.” Blame it on Will Menaker: “Hillbilly Elegy: Mawmaw and Peepaw use hill people wisdom to help huge, fat pussy get an internship at The Heritage Foundation.”

+ Before JD Vance’s conversion to MAGA, this is what he had to say about Trump…

“Might be America’s Hitler”

“I’m a never Trump guy”

“Never liked him”

“Terrible candidate”

“Idiot if you voted for him”

“Might be a cynical asshole”

“Cultural heroin”

“Noxious and reprehensible”

+ Of course, none of these aspersions bother Trump. Vance has surrendered, bent the knee and kissed Trump’s feet. And Trump will parade him around like a captured warlord, until he tires of him and begins subjecting him to ridicule and humiliation.

Richard Simmons, R.I.P.

Richard Simmons has died, one day after his 76th birthday. Long ago, he wrote a memoir which included a chapter on his becoming an Italian movie star. He was terribly overweight at the time, living in Italy. He was hired to play a meatball in a series of Italian TV commercials, then, I don't think he mentioned the name of the movie, but he appeared in Felini Satyricon (1969). I've seen it a couple of times. I knew he was in it but didn't spot him. That's him in the movie in the photo above. I just looked for it on streaming video but it's unavailable.

Yellowstone

They're now showing Yellowstone, Kevin Costner's modern day western soap opera, free on Pluto. I watched some of it and it was awful, most of it either boring or absurdly violent. Maybe that sounds good to some people. It had a nude sex scene. 

According to the internet, and I found examples of this on YouTube, the family brands their ranch employees like cattle and they have a spot where they dump the bodies of people they murder. In an episode I watched, a female family member is being tortured for some reason. A male relative bursts in with a gun, shoots the men and rescues her. In the next scene, the men's naked corpses are hanging outside the ranch house. And the show is aimed at aging men who think this is quality television.

It's making me question my admiration for Breaking Bad.

According to Wikipedia, it was pitched as The Godfather in Montana, so they aren't supposed to be normal people. I should have looked into it before I tried watching.

A Fistful of Dollars remake in the works

I see they're doing a remake of A Fistful of Dollars, which was already remade as Last Man Standing with Bruce Willis. A Fistful of Dollars was itself an unauthorized remake of Yojimbo. Fans are demanding that Scott Eastwood be cast in his father's role.

I didn't like A Fistful of Dollars. There were too many things that didn't translate at all from the samurai film to a western. Maybe they'll correct that stuff in this remake.

A Fistful of Dollars never stated the year it took place. There was a grave marker that had the year 1873 etched into it and the revolvers they used were first manufactured in the 1870's, but the rifles all came from the 1890s. It's common in westerns to use 1890's model Winchester rifles as stand-ins for 1873 Winchesters, but the Mexican Army soldiers were using Mauser rifles from the 1890s, plus they wore uniforms that came from around 1910. I got most of this information from a website where gun nuts identify movie firearms.

If the original movie was set in 1910 and was made 60 years ago, they could make a sequel with the original cast set in 1970. A few of the actors are still alive. There's Clint Eastwood, of course, at 94. Marianne Koch is apparently still alive although she gave up acting, went to medical school and became a doctor. The little kid in it is still kicking. There are others who are still living, but the characters they played were killed in the first movie.  

Of course, there were also smugglers in A Fistful of Dollars buying guns in Mexico to sell to Indians in the United States which I don't think was an issue in the 20th century. So after sixty years, a sequel would likely be set in the 1930's.

Kevin Costner's Horizon which I haven't seen

I'm repeating myself, but it was three years ago that I mentioned this so I guess it's okay.

I may have misunderstood it, but I once read that Pudovkin made Storm Over Asia because he happened to be in Mongolia or someplace that looked like Mongolia. There were some reasonably good films of the late Roger Corman made only because he had a few days before he had to tear down a set. 

And yet there are independent low budget film people who insist that you shouldn't make a movie just to make a movie. You should only make movies about which you are deeply passionate. Well, tell that to poor Kevin Costner. Tell it to John Travolta who fought for years to make Battlefield Earth. 

After Waterworld and The Postman, Costner knew things like this could end in disaster. 

Psychologists used to think compulsive gamblers were unconsciously trying to punish themselves by losing all their money, but research has shown that they usually started out winning. The poor wretches keep trying to recreate their early success. It's a shame Cosner didn't make Waterworld first and then followed it up with Dances with Wolves. He'd be about $38 million richer.

I am reminded of what someone said about Russ Meyer. You'd watch his movies and think that if he just had some money to work with he'd have been a great filmmaker.

If Costner had made an obviously cheap but overlong western, didn't work too hard at it and pleaded poverty---that it would have been better but he had to pay for it all himself---people would have...well, I don't know what people would have done, but he would have saved money.

He should have made thirty-eight $1 million movies instead of blowing the whole thing on one film.

Many years ago, the pioneering zero-budget filmmaker Jon Jost spoke at the University of Oregon. They had shown his movies over a number of weeks and he was there for the final film. The student group that arranged it quickly pulled together some more money and Jost did a filmmaking seminar and a filmmaking workshop, but no one was sure which was which. I was working so I went to the shorter one. We were crowded into a small room. One of the older students ran to 7 Eleven to get beer.

This was the mid-'80s and Jost said that if he were just starting out in film, he'd film on Video 8. This was long before digital video or even Hi8. He said to shoot everything in sequence, do all the editing in camera and when you're done, push eject and there's your finished movie, a $10 video cassette. One film student muttered something about a tape-to-film transfer. Jost said, no just show it on video. The film students were aghast at the idea of making a movie that couldn't be shown in a theater.

If it's your first movie, it won't be any good anyway, Jost assured them.

"It won't be any good anyway." I've lived by those words ever since.

The Perfect Hand (2023)

I read a review of this on Once Upon a Time in a Western website. It sounded promising and it was. A low budget western. I don't think there was ever more than one horse on screen at a time, so it may have been the same one. I wasn't paying attention to the animal. Writer/director/star Michael Fredianelli has 51 other writing credits on IMDb which is probably why this came out so well. A complex, coherent plot.

In no particular order, it has a treasure map, a magician/preacher/conman, serial killers hiding their victims in barns, incest, a man having his hand broken leaving him disabled, unable to shoot or write poetry, a duel where two guys try to outdraw each other, murderous henchmen, a suicide, corporal punishment, a gunfight with an adolescent.

An hour and 53 minutes.

Free on Tubi.

Ezra Miller kaput

Thank God that's over. Gun-loving recidivist criminal Ezra Miller's career finally appears to be finished and it's about time. I still want to know what happened to that woman and her children who disappeared after staying at his gun-littered marijuana farm.

Next time he strangles someone, he could go to jail.

His career lasted fifteen years which is actually pretty good. He must still be a millionaire. 

He reportedly went back to using masculine pronouns so I can stop feeling like a jerk for mis-gendering him.

Brats

Yeah, I watched it on Hulu. I recognized the name Andrew McCarthy but I really don't know who he was/is. The whole Brat Pack thing was after my time. I was in my twenties when they started making their teen movies and they didn't interest me. I did see Ferris Beuller's Day Off but it made no sense to me. In high school, I skipped classes all the time for no reason---I had a friend who got in his car one morning to drive to school but drove seven hours to Boise, Idaho, instead and no one cared especially. My mother skipped school in the 1940's and it was of no concern to anyone.

It never occurred to me that the term "Brat Pack" was derogatory or upsetting to the callous young millionaires who were part of it. Maybe it should have been obvious to me, but I wouldn't have cared.

I read an article in a radical film journal at the time about the way young people were portrayed in cinema. It's been almost forty years, but if I remember correctly, they were described as foul-mouthed ass-grabbing saints. The grown-ups were the villains. It wasn't just these Brat Pack movies. There was Stand By Me where the tweens were pure of heart and the high schoolers had already become cruel monsters. Luckily, the 12-year-olds had a handgun. 

Billy the Kid, New Evidence

About the guy who bought a photo of Billy the Kid playing croquet, one of only two pictures of the young fellow known to exist. The documentary from National Geographic focuses on efforts to authenticate the picture. We know how it ended so there wasn't much suspense. I mostly felt sorry for the poor wretch who sold the photo for $2.

The doc had recreations of Billy the Kid's "crimes". Seems like he was right to kill at least some of those people. It might have been better if they used clips from Hollywood movies about him.

Billy the Kid was no Paul Newman. I never noticed he was wearing a sweater.