Seijun Suzuki's Man with a Shotgun, 1961

There were movies like Yojimbo that seemed to be inspired by American westerns, but this took it further. A man with a shotgun claiming to be a hunter wanders into an isolated corrupt town in the mountains in then-present day Japan. The owner of the mill, the town's largest employer, is harboring criminals who harass residents and act as his bodyguards. The town has a sheriff who is just a guy who wants to find who raped and murdered his wife. 

There's a bar where the men hang out. There are fights where all they do is punch each other in the face and break chairs over their heads without injuring or killing each other. They'll occasionally throw in a Judo thing.

There was a scene in the saloon where there was music and dancing, but there were only a few women so it was mostly men dancing together.

It was kind of repetitive. There's a lot of debate over who'll be the new sheriff. A double-barreled shotgun wasn't the best weapon for this situation, but they wore better shoes, not like American westerns where the men limp around in high heeled boots.

I liked Kurosawa's High and Low where the detectives were armed with little .32 automatics and the head detective had a tiny .25 automatic, the sort of gun American ladies carry in their handbags. The big, stupid-looking guns in American westerns always bothered me. But in this movie, the sheriff walked around with a rifle. 

Available on the Criterion Channel until the end of the month.  

Disney's The Cat from Outer Space (1978)

I read long ago about a short film made for small children called "Vacation on Mars". It sounded like it was just shots of ducks walking around in front of large postcard photos as backdrops. The ducks were supposed to be Martians. 

We only see one of them, but in this movie, the space aliens look like cats. 

Stars Ken Berry and Sandy Duncan. Has both McLean Stevenson and Harry Morgan from M*A*S*H*. Hans Conried, Roddy McDowall. Alan Young (Wilbur from Mr Ed) and the voice of Ronnie Schell as The Cat from Outer Space.

The critic for Variety wrote: "... it's a good cast of veterans and nothing to tax them beyond their abilities."

Roddy McDowall was working for a supervillain who gave more thought to the cause of humanity than Berry did. He and Sandy Duncan and McLean Stevenson set out to help the cat get back to his own people without a thought.

Written by cartoonist and writer Ted Key. Director Norman Tokar.

Rather long at an hour and forty-four minutes. It was still shorter than That Darn Cat! which was almost two hours. Were all Disney movies this long? Was it so parents would have a decent length of time away from their children? I feel hurt if it was.

Had some aerial stunts in the end that didn't look very safe.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

Disney's That Darn Cat! (1965)

Kind of a grim story. I guess it was a comedy. It was based on a crime novella. The FBI is looking for two bank robbers who stole a vast sum of money and abducted a bank teller who they plan to murder. One of the crooks, Frank Gorshin, likes cats and lets a Siamese cat into the apartment. Their hostage puts her wristwatch around the cat's neck and sends it on its way. This is what prompts cat owner Hayley Mills to call the FBI who sent agent Dean Jones to look into it. They decide to tail the cat hoping to follow it to the kidnappers' apartment.

Dean Jones is allergic to cats and sneezes convincingly, not something every actor can do. At one point he holds his nose to keep from sneezing which can blow your ear drums out. How many children were injured imitating what they saw in this movie?

Hayley Mills and Dorothy Provine as sisters who speak with different accents. Elsa Lanchester in a mixed marriage with American William Demarest. With Ed Wynn. 

Bobby Darin sang the theme song.

There was some suspense over the fate of the hostage (Grayson Hall) although you knew nobody was going to die. The two sisters have terrible boyfriends (Tom Lowell and Roddy McDowall) who keep forcing their ways into the girls' house. 

I don't know how I would have reacted to this as a kid. I liked TV violence, but I wanted realistic violence. This movie had a slapstick sequence where Dean Jones follows the cat in foot into a drive-in movie theater. The theater manager and an employee suffered what might have been serious injuries chasing him and the cat, violence that might have been saved for kidnappers and would-be murderers.

Directed by Robert Stevenson who died in 1986. He directed several Disney movies including The Absent-Minded Professor, the first movie Paul Schrader saw when he was seventeen. The Schrader family was in a hyper-conservative Calvinist church which didn't approve of movies. I don't know if Stevenson knew that Schrader said he was "very unimpressed" by it. 

Available on The Criterion Channel along with other cat movies including Disney's The Cat from Outer Space.

I guess they couldn't get Harry & Tonto.

Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956)

It was better than I remembered. The less you know about the space aliens in a movie, the more plausible they are, something Ed Wood got horribly wrong. In this movie, they provided some explanation for what the aliens were doing. They were almost invincible but had limitations. Seeing the aliens walking out of their flying saucers from a distance was creepy.

Ray Harryhausen did the special effects and hated it. Stop motion animation of buildings being destroyed was too much work. It ends with the aliens attacking Washington, D.C.  

Inspired by the "nonfiction" book Flying Saucers from Outer Space by Donald Keyhoe, so it almost had a serious purpose. He was head of The National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, a relatively respectable UFO group. In the '50s, when the movie was made, the group dismissed people who claimed to have contact with aliens, so I don't know how Keyhoe felt about the movie.

Starring Hugh Marlowe and Joan Taylor.

Free on Tubi.

No Blade of Grass (1970)

A global pandemic originating in China wipes out the world's grass including grains such as wheat and barley. Facing mass starvation, the Chinese nerve gas cities and it looks like the British are planning the same thing, so a guy and his family flee London into the countryside heading for his brother's farm. 

Like Lord of the Flies with middle aged English people, except the kids in Lord of the Flies didn't instantly drop their civilized facade. 

The film seemed to have some seriousness of purpose at the beginning. They show documentary footage of starving African children. But it degenerates into an exploitation film. The mother and daughter are raped by motorcycle gang members and there are episodes of gun violence. They gather a larger and larger group of armed English people.

They're not the brightest people in the world, but I was surprised that a large motorcycle gang would fight to the last man for no apparent reward. Maybe it was like the auto race in On the Beach where drivers, knowing they were doomed, killed themselves recklessly until the last surviving driver won by default.

It reminded me of Panic in the Year Zero in how quickly the middle class family turns feral when they survive a nuclear war. Both movies are available now on The Criterion Channel's Postapocalyptic Sci-Fi collection.

The Owl and the Pussycat (1970) George Segal, Barbra Steisand

It was kind of a standard Barbra Streisand thing, her annoying George Segal and others. 

George Segal is a struggling writer in New York living in a tiny apartment. He's able to peer into the window of his neighbor, Barbra Streisand, in the same building, sees her being paid for sex and immediately reports her to the landlord. She's immediately kicked out of her apartment and come to Segal's apartment to yell at him. She assumes he's gay for some reason. 

Barbra Streisand annoys Segal and others into the night. I guess there are people who like that sort of thing. Like What's Up, Doc, but with loud talking instead of slapstick.

With Robert Klein and with Allen Garfield who died of COVID in 2020, poor guy.

Written by Buck Henry,

Free on Tubi. 

Lady in the Lake (1947)

It's all in subjective shot, seen through the eyes of Philip Marlowe as he tries to find a missing woman. We never see him except when he looks in a mirror. I suppose it made it hard for them to edit scenes since everything's a continuous shot, the camera moving slowly. Sometimes his hand comes into the frame. The gimmick just didn't work very well. It didn't make it realistic. Robert Montgomery's performance, mostly voice-over, was one-note.

A Christmas Noir on the Criterion Channel. The story begins a couple of days before the holiday and ends Xmas morning.

I liked the Southern gigolo. But the whole thing was people looking directly into the camera as they talk to the detective. In one scene, he stares at a closed door as he talks on the phone. The bits of violence don't work very well.

Robert Mongomery, Audrey Totter, Lloyd Nolan.

An hour and forty-five minutes.