As a way to clear my pallete of the dark nature of last week’s topic I chose a theme that I like to call “Sexy Western Comedy”. That is to say western comedies with a sex symbol as the lead. This way, I figured, I could get a good laugh and briefly ease my sad bachelor syndrome. Well, it sounded like a good idea at the time. .
The first film on my list was Melven Frank’s The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox, starring Goldie Hawn and George Segal. Segal plays the Dirtwater Fox an incompetent gambler who succeeds in robbing some gangsters, after helping them with a bank robbery. He hightails it to San Francisco where he meets up with a popular dance hall girl called the Duchess. While still trying to avoid the gangsters on their trail they try to go to Salt Lake City with a band of Mormons… Hilarity ensues.
The best thing I can say about this film is, Meh. My opinions go down hill from there. In its defense there were a few adequate musical numbers, just as long as you remembered Goldies singing badly on purpose for comic effect. But other than that everyone’s so stupid it’s difficult to regard it even as parody.
The next film on my list, Elliot Silverstein’s Cat Ballou, as a pair of baladeers played by Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye tell us, is the story of Catherine “Cat’ Ballou. A young woman who has just returned from school to her home town of Wolf City, Wyoming, to become a school teacher. Once she returns she discovers a railway company is after her father’s land. She tries to get help but al she can get are a pair of incompetent cattle rustlers played by Michael Callan and Dwayne Hickman, and a washed out drunk gun fighter played by Lee Marvin.
However when her father is killed all Cat has left is revenge.
This film was… okay. It was amusing when it wasn’t being a heavy-handed sermon about the death of an era (that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the Shootist did it better.) For the most part, Lee Marvin stole the show doing a parody of himself. In my opinion, the best part of the film was George Orrison, Marvin’s stuntman who did an absolutely amazing display of drunken horse riding.
This week I watched a pair of thrillers involving people going undercover to infiltrate the mob… and perhaps vice versa.
The first film on my list Mike Newell’sDonnie Brasco tells the story of Joseph D. Pistone, (Johnny Depp), an FBI agent who goes undercover as a jewel thief named Donnie Brasco. Soon he befriends a long time mafia soldier Benjamin “Lefty” Ruggiero (Al Pacino). Lefty teaches him the way of the mafia and soon Donnie is climbing the criminal ladder. Can Donnie make it through this all with his life intact? Especially when his superiors in the FBI keep screwing things up with their own agenda?
As interesting as the tension of whether Brasco’s cover will survive or not, what really makes this film work is the friendship between Donnie and Lefty, and Donnie’s reluctance to let Lefty get caught when the shoe finally drops. But what was absolutely the best part of this film was Al Pacino as Lefty, playing him as a man who is frustrated that despite being a good soldier, has never made it anywhere in the mob hierarch, gets no respect and is now frustrated that the man he introduced into the life is doing better at it than he is.
The next film on my list, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed tells the story of violent Boston mobster, Frank Costello (Jack Nicolson) who grooms young man from the neighborhood, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) to attend police academy and become his mole in the Massachusetts state police.
Meanwhile, the police department arranges that Billy Costigan Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio)A young man from a disreputable Southie background to go to prison on trumped up charges, so that he’ll have a criminal record and street crew when he gets out… Perfect for infiltrating Costello’s organization.
Soon, both organizations find out the possibility that they have been compromised. So now it’s the job of the mole to hunt down the mole… So who’s going to succeed first?
A remake of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’sInfernal Affairs, this is a dark, cynical and violent film that is certainly up to Scorsese’s usual standards. While I definitely need to see Infernal Affairs I’ve seen enough Hong Kong action thrillers to suspect that Scorsese was making an effort to emulate many of the pacing and editing techniques used in many of such films. I especially liked how he parallels Colin and Billy throughout the film and Damon and DiCaprio have enough of a superficial resemblance, you get a serious doppelgänger vibe between the two of them throughout the film.
Finally, Jack Nicolson’s performance was a pleasure. So many of his roles are just him playing Jack it’s a pleasure to see the ocasisional times he shows off his range.
This week’s selection is kind of embarrassing since it’s something that is very easy for me as a sheltered male WASP to be oblivious to. The casting of white actors to play characters of various ethnicities has been one of the more shameful legacies in the history of Hollywood. It’s not just that it was taking away working actors who fit the role, it ended perpetrating many of the racist stereotypes going around at the time. So this week I scraped the barrel and tried to find the best of a bad lot and watch what I am assured are the least offensive of films featuring whitewashed Asian Detectives.
The first film on my list, Norman Foster’s Thank You Mr. Moto, features Peter Lorre as the title character. Mr. Moto is a Japanese Detective based in Peiping (a transliteration of Beijing I hadn’t seen before.) Reading between the lines one can easily assume he’s an imperial agent, though since this film was done before Pearl Harbor the possibility never comes up. He is searching for a group of scrolls when put together eligibly make up a map showing the location of the treasure of Ghengis Khan. But he must be careful, since he is hardly the only one going after the prize.
The first time I ever heard of Mr. Moto was when I saw a picture of one of the films showing a picture of Peter Lore in his makeup. Even knowing that it was a product of it’s time, it had me shaking my head over what I regarded as a blemish on the career of one of my favorite character actors. The second time I encountered the character was a warner brothers cartoon featuring Porky Pig as Mr. Moto. Since it was a broad parody it had Porky acting exactly as I imagined what the character must be.
To my surprise, the real Mr. Moto was nothing like that. In fact, I can say without hyperbole it’s probably the most badass role I’ver seen Lorre play. Moto is intelligent, tough and surprisingly ruthless. The rest of the movie isn’t quite enough of a vehicle for him but still a fun ride.
In the next film Lewis Seiler’s Charlie Chan in Paris, Charlie Chan arrives in Paris supposedly for a vacation, but in reality to investigate a case of bank fraud. Getting mixed up in the social scene in the process. In the mean time suspects are dropping like flies.
While Charlie Chan had been played by Asian actors in the past, His creator, Earl Derr Biggers, aparently liked the performance of the Swedish Warner Oland the best. I admit he’s not bad, and to my untrained eyes he nearly pulls his off. In a way, he comes off almost like an Asian Hercule Poirot playing up the stereotype so that people underestimate him. But even if I use that excuse to rationalize it, it still comes off as problematic. Especially since the way a lot of the people who don’t know him “underestimate” him by talking cartoon pidgin at him. Once one got past all of that the film was mostly uninspired and made no effort to emerge us in the setting, (all the gendarmes had American accents) though I enjoyed the contrast between Chan and his fully assimilated son, Lee played by Keye Luke.
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Now that the holiday is over, I thought I’d try and get as far away from that sort of thing as possible. In this case, I thought I’d try spy thrillers featuring the Mossad.
For better or for worse, whether it’s because they are perceived as the first line of defense in the “War on Terrorism”, or as hunters of Nazi war criminals, I think our media has a tendency to romanticize the Mossad. So I thought it would be informative to see what Isreal’s film industry thought of them.
The first film on my list, Eytan Fox’s Walkon Water (original Hebrew title: ???? ?? ????; English transliteration: Lalekhet Al HaMayim) tells the story Eyal, a Mossad agent (Lior Ashkenazi) After a successful hit on an alleged terrorist in Istanbul, he comes home to discover his wife had committed suicide. Still recovering from this he is assigned to investigate a German tourist named Axel Himmelman, (Knut Berger) who has traveled to Israel to visit his sister, Pia who is now (Caroline Peters) living in a kibbutz. The siblings are the grandchildren of a war criminal who had fled to Argentina after the war but has now disappeared. Eyal’s superior’s suspect that the siblings may have a lead on where he has gone to.
As the weeks of Axel’s visit continues, Eyal finds himself annoyed by Axel’s idealism. But gradually finds himself drawn to him.
While well done, I’m afraid I was mostly not the target audience, so my main reaction was meh. Still, it was an interesting perspective on the wonderfully complicated mess that is the state of modern Israel. While there were several arguments for and against, since our main point of view character who is extremely biased and extremely bitter we are given a very skewed view.
The next film on my list, Assaf Bernstein ’s Ha-Hov, aka HaChov, The Debt tells of Rachel (Gila Almago) a former Mossad agent who, thirty years ago was part of a team responsible for hunting down and killing Nazi war criminal Dieter Vogel (a.k.a. the Surgeon of Birkenau) and is now is resting on her laurels with a successful signing tour of her memoirs. However, when one of her associates form the mission reappears with newly acquired data of a man in a nursing home in Kiev claiming to be the surgeon. Now they have to go to Kiev, before anyone else finds out about this, investigate and, if he turns out to be who he says he is, finish the job.
Thus we follow on her mission while also viewing the original mission and through flashbacks find out what went wrong in the first place.
I’m not sure what I thought of this film. It was tense and well paced and very depressing, but like the other film I’m afraid I really wasn’t it’s target audience. Still, I liked how the flashbacks worked with two sets of casts to play our principal characters for both the past and pressent, and how our heroes, in their present, question their deeds and if anything they did was the right thing.
One of the many things I find funny about all of the culture warriors and their precious war on Christmas is that they do the most brutal attack of all by ending Christmas on the 25th… It’s twelve days, people! This has become increasingly obvious to me while doing these holiday marathons for a couple of years is that in a lot of these classics the story may start in Christmas Eve, they go through the entire twelve days with the climax of the story on New Year’s.
Because of this, I decided to continue my Christmas marathon just a little longer, focussing on the end of the holiday season ending on New Years… And to keep things interesting stick to musicals.
Holiday Inn tells the story of Jim Hardy (Bing Crosby), Ted Hanover (Fred Astaire), and Lila Dixon (Virginia Dale) a popular song and dance team working the broadway circuit. Jim is planning to retire from show business and go with his fiancé, Lila to start a farm in Connecticut. Unfortunately, Lila has no interest in the plan and also loves Ted, and ends the engagement.
Tim moves to the farm anyway and discovers that he’s terrible at it. As a way to recoup his losss he turns the failing farm into “the Holiday Inn” a venue that is only open on holidays, with a new dance partner, Linda Mason (Marjorie Reynolds)
I can’t say I really liked this film. Make no mistake the music’s great and the talent of our performers are top notch, and the songs are great. For example, the original version of White Christmas is in this film and it’s a lot better than the version in the movie that bears its name. However, that’s pretty much all there is to it. Holiday Inn is pretty much just a jukebox musical of Irving Berlin holiday-centric songs.
It doesn’t help that it has aged extremely badly. The worst example being the minstrel number “Abraham” for Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. I’m embarrassed to say, since I still have at least one foot still stuck in my white bubble, I caught myself rationalizing with myself saying things like; “It’s a product of its time”, “It’s a good song and it shows off Crosby’s Bass range”, (in story excuse) maybe Jim couldn’t find enough black performers’… and then Linda comes on stage dressed like the most offensive rag doll you ever saw.
Debbie Reynolds plays Polly Parrish a flighty and overenthusiastic clerk working in the Millinery Department at J.B. Merlin & Son’s department store. She’s fired in the middle of the Christmas rush. On the way home, she sees someone leave a baby at the door of an orphanage. The Baby is about to fall off the steps, so she rushes to save it. It’s at this point the door of the orphanage opens where everyone sees the baby in Polly’s arms.
Now everybody believes Polly is the mother no matter what she says. She essentially gets blackmailed into keeping the child when the orphanage guilt trips Dan Miller (Eddie Fisher), the Son in J.B. Merlin & Son’s, into giving her her job back with a raise attached, and soon hilarity ensues.
I wish I’d known about Bachelor Mother when I was picking out this film because I suspect I would have liked it a lot better. Once again, the songs are good even though the way they’re squeezed into the narrative are pretty forced. Otherwise, it mostly didn’t impress me.
Like Holiday Inn, this film dates itself badly. In this case, it drags down the entire plot most notably how no one ever believes Polly, no one even bothers to corroborate her story one way or other, just assuming this is something all “young mothers” say to escape their responsibility. Heck even the people who’ve known her for over a year and might notice things like… you know… the absence of a pregnancy, don’t believe her.
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For anyone who is wondering what the “real” Ariane has been unto since the extremely interesting party in October. She’s been biding her time and planning to make her move on her Brian. There’s no way it could go wrong… She has inside help.
And in answer to her question… Yes, Tara is having her on.
