Frankenstein's Daughter (1958)

Descendant of the original Dr Frankenstein calls himself "Dr Frank" and sets out to replicate his ancestor's work. Set in what was then the present day. His two "monsters" just look like a terribly homely girl and a man (it was supposed to be a woman) who's been in a horrible accident. It was awfully insensitive for people to scream hysterically when they saw them. In one scene, cops start shooting at the poor girl.

About what you'd expect. Harold Lloyd, Jr, was in it, but I don't know which one he was. 

Free on Tubi.

Strange Fascination (Hugo Haas, 1952)

I thought it'd be a revenge story. A young woman has her dance performance disrupted by a concert pianist (Hugo Haas) who comes into the bar hoping to order food. She sets out to get even. She goes to HIS performance, comes in late, noisily rustles her program, talks to her friend and pretends to cough. It doesn't bother him but members of the audience tell her to knock it off and she soon finds herself enthralled by his music. They start seeing each other. She hides out in his apartment to avoid her dance partner and soon they are married. 

It turns out that concert pianists don't make that much money. He damages his own career when he leaves a gig to make sure his wife isn't with another man. A victim of his own jealousy and general sexism, he won't let his wife get a job although she could make pretty good money as a dancer or a clothing model.

Produced, directed, written by and starring Czech director Hugo Haas who came to the U.S. to escape the Nazis. In the movie, his character moves to the U.S. because a wealthy woman sponsors him thinking he'll hit it big there. Turned out not to be that great, but I don't know what Europe was like at that point.

According to Wikipedia:

Haas's first American film was bankrolled out of his own pocket for $85,000. The financial success of Pickup led to the creation of the independent Hugo Haas Productions, which he used to produce 12 of his 14 American films from 1951 to 1959. Independent studios were not atypical at this time, but Haas' operating procedures were. He financed his own films, and the budgets were minuscule compared to most Hollywood fare. While his films' budgets usually ran from $80,000 to $100,000, the average cost for a Hollywood picture in 1955 was $1.5 million. His ventures were risky; he did not secure distribution deals with larger studios until after the movies were made, sometimes delaying their release for months or even years. While Hollywood studios practiced division of labor, with well defined and distinct roles for workers, Haas was described as a "one-man production team," having financed, produced, written, and directed all of his Hugo Hass productions, and having acted in all but one

Insuring your hands for $100,000 isn't like buying fire insurance. You can't defraud the company without doing something horrible to yourself.

Available on the Criterion channel.

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.