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Catherine-Yronwode
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Black Tuesday (1954)
Bang Bang Bang Bang
This is not film noir and it is nor much of a crime drama, either It is just a waste of time for a large cast of fine B-movie character actors, most of them miscast.
Milburn Stone is an unfriendly Catholic priest, Vic Perrin is an alcoholic doctor, Lee Aaakers (the unappealing "Rusty" from the soul-less 1950s version of Rin-Tin-Tin) is a fat kid with a loud mouth, Frank Ferguson is a spineless police inspector, and Jack Kelly (Bart Maverick) is a cowardly newspaper reporter. The large cast of character actors, all wearing suits and fedoras, also includes William Schallert, Ray Bennett, Franklyn Farnum, and Simon Scott, most of whom had better small parts in TV series like "Perry Mason," "Bonanza," and "The Twilight Zone." There is a whole lot of hostage-taking, but everyone swaps clothes and ends up dressed about the same and because there is very little dialogue and few facial closeups, when the shooting starts, which it does early on, i could not tell tell the actors apart and there are so many fatalities, it was impossible to know or care who lived or or how they died.
As for the ostensible leads, well, Peter Graves is a psycho and Edward G. Robinson is way too old to reprise his role as Rocco.
Jean Parker (better known as Elizabeth March in "Little Women") is the only decent actor in the bunch. Everyone else is on a kill rampage or they get killed shortly after mouthing a variation on the same repetitious monologue about wanting to live as long as they can.
If you want to see lots of killing, watch Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" -- at least you will get to know the characters before they get shot up.
This one is a loser. I gave it three stars rather than one only because there as a bit of cool 1950s documentary-style B-Unit footage of cars, semi-trailer trucks, ambulances, and firemen with ladders interspersed throughout.
Spoiler: Pretty much everyone ends up dead.
The Houston Story (1956)
A Sub-Par Screen Play and a Formulaic Plot
I wanted to like this film because it stars Barbara Hale, but, frankly, the script is so dumb that it was not worth watching, and i don't know why they had her sing, but she is not good at it, with her gravelly vocal fry.
Character motivation is non-existent. The mobsters are flat, cut-out characters. Reads as if it were written by a child. The directing is lame, too -- meaningless chase scenes, badly staged fights, ultra spare sets ... it is just lame.
The weirdest thing, though, in this movie there is an unusual lamp on a table in an office of a crook which is made to look like a twin kerosene lamps with cranberry-glass shades. Now, you my find it hard to believe, but just last night we saw the lamp in the office of a different crook in another film also directed by William Castle. That film was "Johnny Stool Piegon", starring Dan Duryea and Shelley Winters, from 1949 ( a much better movie than this one, by the way).
Life is stranger than fiction. In "Johnny Stool Piegon," the twin-lamp is used in a story set primarily in Reno, and in "The Houston Story," the twin-lamp appears in the one and only scene in which the Houston-based characters mention the city of Reno.
And that lamp may have been the best thing in this film.
Love from a Stranger (1937)
A Faster! Faster! Rathbone
I simply cannot praise this film too much. It is based on a wonderful Agatha Christie story, was made into a stage play, and is here enacted by a pair of superbly trained stage actors and a small crowd of supporting players who bring the plot to fervid life.
Basil Rathbone is the hands-down star here, a suave world traveller with a poetic turn of mind who slowly reveals his true mania ("Faster! Faster!"). He starts out slowly, but his increasingly frightening turns of thought break through, and each psychotic moment is verbalized in a hallucinatory cascade of jumbled phrases and chaotic twitches that inexorably lead toward the "ecstasy" of death, and then subside in an abrupt return to stiff, upper-class courtesy and normality.
Ann Harding, as the gentle care-taker for her hypochondriac aunt who becomes a mad-man's would-be victim, stands toe-to-toe against the raging storm in Rathbone's mind. Her tough bravery and inventiveness are especially haunting because the facade of strength is impossible for her to maintain, and although she must gamble her life on her mental powers exceeding those of her opponent, her courage keeps slipping away, and must be re-asserted by successively desperate acts of will.
For those who love the stage as well as older films, the flawless script and heated enactment of the terrifying final twenty minutes of this drama will leave you in awe,. Hopefully it will also provide you with a taste of the tremendous storytelling possibilities that can be found in the concept of radical female heroism, so fresh and new in its time, and still rare enough in our own era.
The Sun Sets at Dawn (1950)
A Silent Film Set in 1950
This is an unusual film in many ways, but most striking to me is that the director, Paul Sloane, a silent film auteur who had made the transition to sound and then inexplicably vanished from the industry for more than a decade, suddenly reappeared to write and direct what is essentially a silent movie (with conventional 1950-era sound), starring quite a cast of silent era actors.
Almost everything in this movie is antique -- the large cast of older men as reporters, the elderly "Pops" who runs the diner, the frozen-in-amber look of the sets for the warden's home and his office in the prison -- and this elegiac effect is heightened by the continual references to times gone by and the display of worn-out and bypassed items, such as the out-of-date Post Office "Wanted" posters that Pops has learned to love. Even the direction of the unknown young "Girl" is reminiscent of Murnau's direction of Janet Gaynor in 1927's "Sunrise."
If you look up the bios of the actors, you will see that at least half of them were over 50 and some were in their late 60s. Did Paul Sloane just come out of hibernation, hire all of his old colleagues and have one last go at it? I don' think we will ever know -- but for whatever reason he did it, the film is very satisfying if you think of it as a "silent film with sound."
I rated it an 8, which i rarely do for "B" films, because although it was filmed with minimal sets and although i tend to downgrade films that feature boyishly handsome priests called "Padre," (sorry, just a quirk of mine), this movie is unique, like a carton of mint-condition New-Old-Stock porcelain dolls found in the sealed-off back room of a diner on a sound stage somewhere in Post-War Los Angeles.
Don't be afraid to try it. Just love it for what it is.
Whirlpool (1950)
One of the Ten Worst Movies I Have Ever Watched
I simply cannot believe how slow, dull, boring, senseless, dismally set-bound, and stupid this movie is. Here we have Jose Ferrar, an astrologer-hypnotist who never commits astrology but has a cool Steve Ditko wall display of multiple masks over his bed, vacant-faced kleptomaniac Gene Tierney, who never blinks but has a large wall-display of white plaster roosters; Richard Conte, a hard-as-nails psychiatrist married to Klepto Gene; Barbara O'Neil in a Bride of Frankenstein hairdo; and Charles Bickford as the chief detective, grieving the loss of his wife. These elements do not jell. Tierney shows off her fabulous Oleg Cassini New Look Dresses, the plot drags, there are inexplicable pauses in every conversation, and the only star-power radiates from Constance Collier in a brief turn as a society hostess. Good actors wasted. Cars on back stage lots. The worst Ben Hecht screenplay i have ever seen enacted. One star.
Mister 880 (1950)
Sweet Movie, Well Played
Okay, i'll admit i watched this on Youtube because it was free, and the first thing that LEAPED out at me was Skipper the dog -- i took one look at this animal and said to my husband, "I will bet you five dollars that Frank Inn trained that dog." By that time the dog was showing major dog-acting talent and he said, "I won't take that bet." The dog looks just like a larger version of Higgins, the dog that played Benji, also trained by Frank Inn, but it was not just the look, it was the way the dog was trained to be cued by the actors that shouted "I am a Frank Inn dog."
And then we saw Herb Vigran -- a guy who has been in practically every movie and TV show for which Frank Inn trained animals, from Petticoat Junction to Hawmps! Major AHA moment there. So we stopped the film and looked it up. Bingo. Frank Inn trained Skipper. Case solved!
Meanwhile., back at the movie, Secret Service agent Burt Lancaster is snooping around and falling in love with the lovely United Nations translator Dorothy McGuire. What a delightful couple they are -- and she is so witty and smart -- a great role for this under-appreciated actress. Will Lancaster let his monomaniacal desire to catch Mister 880, the counterfeiter, ruin his chances at love? Will McGuire solve the crime before he does? This is a cute and touching story, with Edmund Gwenn in the title role, displaying both his native proper English, and a flawless German accent as well.
Judo Jymnastics (1947)
Cheerful Martial Arts Documentary
It's quick, breezy, and cheerful, with a sound track you can hum along to!
Mary Parker and Lou Leonard demonstrate some tough judo moves, at about half-speed, carefully choreographed, carefully avoiding setting off the censors with any no-no kicks to the groin -- although the idea is there. Obviously a lot of planning went into their work-out, and if they had performed it at full-speed and with full force, i have no doubt that Mr. Leonard would have suffered some serous damage.
I liked every part of this cute film. It delivers exactly what it promises. One cannot ask for anything more from a movie. I watched it three times in a row. That's more times than i watched Das Boot in a row, but fewer times than i watched Casablanca in a row, so a rating of "10" seems well deserved.
The Singing Brakeman (1929)
Two Directors, Two Versions -- Watch BOTH!
As others have noted, this short film was made TWICE on the same set. The rough version with poor sound quality was directed by Jasper Ewing Brady. The cleaner version, with better sound quality and, frankly, better cinematic direction, was directed by Basil Smith.
If you watch one, you MUST watch the other! They are both currently on Youtube. Line up the two frames side-by side on your screen and get past the opening credits (the Brady version has a longer intro credit, with the Columbia gal at the beginning) and set them to where the jazz band music stops and the short begins. Run one or two lines from each version, back and forth. The result is MIND-BLOWING! First, we see what a huge difference good direction makes. There is better framing of each shot, and better use of the two women bit-players, especially the one brewing the coffee and cleaning up the kitchen, who can be seen standing in the screen door and also smiling and laughing in the Smith version and is almost absent in the Brady version. (And boy, she really does crack a happy smile at the line, "I'm gonna shoot poor Thelma, just to see her jump and fall!") But most importantly, we see Jimmie Rodgers, the finely-honed stage performer, producing two almost -- but not quite! -- identical performances. Watch his moves, his ad libs, his extended bars and grace note additions. Notice his habit of looking at his left hand, his way of singing out of the side of his mouth. I cannot begin to tell you how much sheer INFORMATION about the man is packed into the fact that there are TWO VERSIONS of this film!!! Being able to watch and compare the two entirely different takes of this under-ten-minute short, which happens to contain two of my favourite Jimmie Rodgers compositions ("Waiting for a Train" and "Blue Yodel No. 1 - T For Texas") has made this day, November 12, 2011, one of the most exciting days of my 64-year-old life! I am not kidding! It simply does not get much more musically exciting than this. Thank you, Youtube! Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jimmie Rodgers! And thank you, Misters Brady and Smith!