Frank Perry's MAN ON A SWING (1974) Cliff Robertson, Joel Grey

It's like the old commercials for psychic hotlines. They showed the psychics talking to callers but only telling them things they already knew.

In Man on a Swing, a "clairvoyant" (Joel Grey) calls the police. He knows details of a murder that were never made public. Police aren't idiots. They know something's not right, and the guy acts like a jackass.

At one point they have psychologists question the clairvoyant confronting him with serious problems in what he's saying, that he's doesn't have a normal reaction to his horrible visions. Police chief Cliff Robertson is annoyed that the guy is using a murder to get attention for himself.

Based on a real case.

Might make a double feature with The Boston Strangler. Boston cops had a psychic to contend with and were initially impressed.

The psychic in The Boston Strangler was Peter Hurkos. Born in Holland. He used his accent to his advantage. He once appeared on a radio talk show and did psychic readings for people who called in.

"I see---DOOK!" he said.

"That's right!" the caller enthused. "My dog is right here with me!"

Free on The Criterion Channel or $2.99 on Amazon Prime.

 

Small Sacrifices, TV miniseries, 1989

My mother wanted to see this again, a TV miniseries about a local murder case. I found it on eBay, but it looked like someone made their own DVDs from a VHS tape. If they did, it's the only version available.

Farrah Fawcett  plays Diane Downs, a postal worker who delivered mail to the school where my mother worked. 

Downs' story was that she was that she had recently moved to Oregon. She was driving with her three children on a country road at night, "sightseeing" in the dark. A shaggy haired stranger waved her down. She naturally stopped and got out of the car. He demanded the keys. She refused so he leaned into the car and shot the three children. She still refused so he shot her in the arm. So she pretended to throw the keys away and having thus distracted him, she jumped in the car and drove away.

Downs claims to have driven as fast as she could to the hospital. Other drivers said she was blocking traffic, going around ten miles per hour.

When they reached the hospital, her seven-year-old daughter was dead. Her 3-year-old son was left paraplegic and her 8-year-old daughter suffered a stroke. 

Downs had been stalking a married man played by Ryan O'Neal. She offered to murder his wife so they could be together. He didn't want to be a father to her children which was her reason for trying to murder them. 

I found the scenes of the children in the emergency room and later the daughter testifying in court difficult to watch. 

There were scenes of Diane Downs at home with her parents. The scenes added nothing and had no basis in fact.

A friend and I attended the trial one morning. I saw some of the testimony that was dramatized in the miniseries. The defense attorney asked a detective if he had planted any of the evidence. The detective was indignant but the actor in the mini-series overplayed it. Downs' father later self-published a book his daughter wrote in prison. She characterized the detective's response very differently, that he hung his head in shame and mumbled his denial.

Doris Wishman's DOUBLE AGENT '73 (1974)

I kept wondering if you could get away with making anything this bad today.

It was Doris Wishman's Double Agent 73, starring Israeli stripper Liliana Wilczkowska aka "Chesty Morgan". She cashed in on her medical condition. She suffered from breast hypertrophy and had a 73 inch chest. 

I averted my eyes through a lot of it.

Chesty Morgan plays Jane, a secret agent. She has a camera implanted in one breast so she has to take her top off every time she wants to photograph documents or take a picture of a man she's killed. And, if she doesn't return to CIA headquarter in time, the camera will explode.

Sequel to Deadly Weapons. Both are available on the Criterion Channel. Yes,  the CRITERION CHANNEL!

Reportedly made for $50,000, more than a quarter million dollars today. Don't ask me where the money went.

John Huston's HEAVEN KNOWS, MR ALLISON (1957), Deborah Kerr, Robert Mitchum

Released six years after The African Queen. Had similar elements. The romance, such as it was, was probably more plausible. There was no unreasonable cheerfulness. Essentially had only two speaking roles.

During World War Two, Marine Robert Mitchum, after floating for days on rubber raft, lands on an island. There's an abandoned village and in a church, is nun Deborah Kerr, the only person on the island. She's only been there a few days herself.

Things are fine until the Japanese land and set up a weather station. The two have to hide in a cave.

Mr Allison falls in love with Sister Angela and doesn't see the point of her remaining a nun since they're isolated on an island, although I suppose it makes more sense for her to remain a nun than for him to still be a Marine.

They compare being a Marine with being a nun. The main similarity was probably the haircut. 

Filmed in Trinidad and Tobago. Local Asians played the Japanese and the Marines were provided by the U.S. military.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

Woody Allen's A RAINY DAY IN NEW YORK (2019)

Woody Allen directing the kids.

People made fun of Woody Allen for naming his main character "Gatsby Welles". In fairness, Gatsby was played by Timothee (pronounced Teem-o-tay) Chalamet, so it was a lateral move for the actor name-wise.

Match Point (2005), about a tennis pro who murders his way into an innocent, unsuspecting family of wealthy British aristocrats, showed that Allen had come to identify with the rich. A Rainy Day in New York has confirmed it. Everyone in this thing was extremely rich. Even the prostitute charges a fortune.

Gatsby's girlfriend, Ashleigh Enright (Elle Fanning), needs to go to Manhattan to interview high brow movie director Liev Schreiber for the college paper. Gatsby goes along for a weekend in the city. Wants them to stay at the Carlyle because they have a piano player who sings "those old Broadway tunes". The boy is a rebel who smokes and gambles, pooh-poohs education and has the interests and enthusiasms of an 80-year-old.

Ashleigh is the only one you can get behind. She spends the day trying to help save the director who's unhappy with the movie he's making and goes off on a bender while Gatsby runs into an ex-classmate and appears briefly in his student film. This brings him into contact with an ex-girlfriend's sassy little sister (Selena Gomez).

Woody Allen has an Asian daughter in real life. He didn't do it for Moses or Soon-yi, but you'd think he'd diversify the cast at least for her sake. The movie is all-white. There's a scene where Ashleigh identifies Kurosawa as European, although she admits he was technically Japanese.

There are a number of scenes in the movie with what they used to call "Dragnet editing". In conversations, they cut to a close-up of whoever's speaking with (almost) no reaction shots. It worked quite well. Woody Allen has vindicated Jack Webb and it's about time.

In one such scene, Gatsby's mother tells him he's old enough to know about her past. It comes as a shock to him. It might reflect something in Allen's family---his children, all adults, finding out about his past, and I'm talking about the stuff that actually happened, not the false accusations.

Available on Amazon Prime.

Nagisa Oshima's THE CEREMONY (Japan, 1971)

Told in flashback. A Japanese mother and son return to Japan from Manchuria after World War Two. The mother hopes to live without contact with her late husband's family but they are essentially captured by them when they come back.

After that, over the years, the boy learns more and more about the wealthy degenerate fascist family each time they gather for a wedding or a funeral.

The first is a ceremony on the first anniversary of his father's suicide. He learns that his grandfather is probably his father and his father was most likely his half-brother. All the incest in the family makes it difficult to know exactly how everyone is related. At one point, he realizes that the girl he's in love with is his half-sister.

That girl's father was a low level war criminal imprisoned in China. Most of the men in the family SHOULD have been locked up but got away with it and are eventually allowed to re-enter government.

It might make a good double feature with The Thick-Walled Room (Japan, 1956) about low level Japanese war criminals in Sugamo prison which was mentioned by name in The Ceremony. It has some of the same elements, complaints that mainly low level war criminals were imprisoned while the worst went free. The Thick-Walled Room went into politics a little more---one of the prisoner's Communist brother visits and talks about protests against the Korean war and the rearmament of Japan. In The Ceremony, the boy's Communist uncle was portrayed as a buffoon, which may have been fair considering his bourgeois origins.

Both films are available on The Criterion Channel.

STRANGER FROM VENUS (1954)

Odd low budget made-in-UK version of The Day the Earth Stood Still. It even had Patricia Neal. 

A man appears at a British inn. He doesn't have any money but he can work. He doesn't have a name and says he's never paid taxes. The local doctor sits down and casually takes his pulse. He doesn't have one.

He performs a few faith healings and reads minds. The entire country knows that he's there but all he does is hang around the inn.

I didn't realize American cars were so popular in England. The steering wheels are on the left. The appearance of the a flying saucer causes Patricia Neal to wreck her convertible. The alien heals her and she staggers to the inn. Some British in an even bigger sedan stops later when they see the wrecked car.

Directed by Burt Balaban, cousin of Bob Balaban. With Austrian actor Helmut Dantine in the title role. He played a refugee in  Casablanca and, a couple decades later, was in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and The Killer Elite.

Available on Pub-D-Hub.