Woody Allen's Shadows & Fog (1991)

I saw it about 34 years ago when it first came out on VHS. I was disappointed. It could be lowered expectations at work, but I enjoyed watching it a second time.

Set somewhere in central Europe, apparently in the 1920s or '30s. A Nazi allegory. Allen joins other Jews trying to find a murderer prowling the city.

I took it as an arthouse film--it's in black & white--but John Baxter, in his biography of Allen, mentioned its failure as a horror movie which I found strange.

The Criterion Channel is featuring the films of Jodie Foster and included this movie. She has a small role as a prostitute, the weakest part of the movie. The prostitutes cheerfully chattering away about their work wasn't good, but it was shorter than I remembered.

Mia Farrow as a sword swallower in a circus who flees after she catches boyfriend clown John Malkovitch making out with Madonna. Farrow wanders around through the night with Allen. 

I didn't remember Fred Gwynne being in it. John Malkovitch, Donald Pleasance, Lilly Tomlin, David Ogden Stiers, Kathy Bates, Madonna, John Cusack and Kurtwood Smith among others. 

With music by Kurt Weill, mostly Threepenny Opera.

Henry Aldrich Haunts a House (1943), Vigilante Force (1976)

Available on YouTube. 72 minutes. Part of the Henry Aldrich series of comedies starring Jimmy Lydon.

Jimmy Lydon walked with a limp in this movie from a birth defect that was corrected in infancy. He was 20-years-old, it was 1943 and this was presumably what kept him out of World War Two. 

Henry wears a suit and tie to high school, but his father was mad at him for not getting into a fist fight when a school bully pushes him around. I don't know if this was a common attitude at the time. Maybe it was meant to be a subtle pro-war message. Lydon was one of the few movie teenagers to be taller than his movie parents.

Henry Aldrich has taken an interest in chemistry and has been hanging around with a chemistry professor who's come up with a formula to give people three times normal human strength. Henry drinks more of it than you're supposed to, walks home in the rain but is disoriented and staggers into a haunted mansion which is a front for a criminal enterprise.

Not really funny. Henry believes that, in his drugged state, he murdered his principal which should have been pretty good.

Free on YouTube.

I made it a double feature and watched Vigilante Force (1976) with 53-year-old Jimmy Lydon in a supporting role. But his role was pretty minor, I didn't quite recognize him and the movie wasn't very good. It might have been worth watching if Jimmy had killed anyone. 

Jan-Michael Vincent gets his Vietnam vet brother Kris Kristofferson to form a vigilante force to fight the rowdy oil workers who are terrorizing the town. It turns out that vigilantism is bad as Kris Kristofferson becomes power hungry. He forces banker David Doyle to give him a large cash loan, then has him run over with a car. 

With Bernadette Peters and Victoria Principal.

Produced by Roger Corman's brother, Gene. Free on Tubi. 

Patricia Highsmith's Cry of the Owl (BBC Radio 4)

Produced for British radio in 2002. The British still make radio shows, dramas, comedies, mysteries and so forth. Maybe it's because you have to pay a tax to watch TV there. 

Based on Patricia Highsmith's 1962 novel. A divorcee with a history of psychiatric problems becomes obsessed with a local woman who lives outside town. He prowls outside her house at night spying on her. She spots him. This doesn't seem wise but she invites him in. Over time, he becomes less and less obsessed with her while she's increasingly obsessed with him. Her now-ex-fiance is stalking both of them and his imbittered ex-wife is out to get him. The peeping tom is the most normal one in the story.

Adapted by Shaun McKenna, starring John Sharian, Joanne McQuinn and Adrian Lester.

Four half-hour episodes. Free on Internet Archive and on YouTube.

You can compare and contrast it with the 2009 movie with the same name. I haven't seen it, but it's apparently available on Prime if nowhere else. There was also Claude Chabrol's 1987 Le Cri du hibou if you can find it.

"Stupid human!" --DeepSeek A.I.

Well, I posted that thing several days ago. I removed it. I had turned to A.I. for information on a school movie I had seen 45 years ago, a Civil War movie in which a hippie playing a Confederate soldier has a nude scene, rather odd for a school movie. 

DeepSeek gave me detailed information about it. Some of it didn't sound quite right. The titles for the film that it gave me didn't make sense and the guy it named as director only made documentaries. The rest of the information sounded plausible enough and I didn't question it.

Then, today, I read something about Jimmy Lydon (1923 to 2022). He had been a child actor starting in the 1930s, starred in the Henry Aldrich series in the 1940s, he worked a lot in television starting in 1949. He went on to help create the TV series 77 Sunset Strip and M*A*S*H*. According to IMDb, he had overcame a birth defect. 

Out of curiosity, I asked Co-Pilot what his birth defect was. It said it didn't know.

I asked DeepSeek and it described a severe disability that he obviously didn't have. It went into some detail explaining how they concealed it in movies. 

I asked Co-Pilot again and it now said that he had had two club feet which had been corrected with surgery. I googled it and this was confirmed in an interview Lydon gave somewhere.

But what was DeepSeek thinking? I could go back and ask it, but I'm afraid to make it mad.

Just Pals (1920) John Ford

Silent, directed by John Ford. A child hobo (Georgie Stone) is pulled off a train and roughed up by a railroad employee. I don't think a child should be climbing around between boxcars on a moving train, so I have some sympathy for the railroad worker, but local ne'er-do-well Buck Jones rushes to the little fellow's defense and the railroad guy easily knocks him down as well.

A western comedy-drama about a very nice homeless man who befriends a homeless child. He does make the kid go to school. I thought female schoolteachers were barred from dating back then, but the teacher (Helen Ferguson) has a boyfriend who convinces her to embezzle school funds. When the kid is injured falling off a train, the doctor's wife thinks he's the missing child whose rich father offered a large reward for his return and Buck Jones and Georgie are separated

According to the intertitles, the kid says "hell" and "damn". Even in silent film, foul-mouthed children were cute. 

50 minutes. Free on Tubi and YouTube. $3.99 on AppleTV and PrimeVideo. 

Buck Jones died at 50 of injuries sustained in the horrible Coconut Grove fire in 1942. Georgie Stone's last film was made in 1923 when he was thirteen or fourteen. He died in 2010 when he was 100-years-old. Helen Ferguson gave up acting in 1933 and became a successful publicist. She retired in 1967 and died in 1977.

The Devil on Wheels (1947)

Early hot rod movie. Teens drive like idiots and one kid's father isn't much better, driving too fast in his big giant Buick, passing on the right. At one point, the kids break into the morgue to see if an unidentified hot rod fatality was a friend of theirs. They're almost caught by a night watchman who calls the police as they speed away. As they're fleeing police, Darryl Hickman causes an accident that kills his best friend and nearly kills his mother.

In the epilogue, the mother drives slowly and carefully while the father tells her to speed up and pass the other cars. They were driving to reform school to pick up their son who just finished his sentence for manslaughter.

The kids could have been a force for good in the world if they were shown installing makeshift seatbelts in their horrible cars.

From PRC, the most impoverished of the poverty row studios.

According to IMDb, it was the first movie to show its female leads in bikini tops and there's early use of the word "groovy".

67 minutes. Free on Tubi.