For this week’s selection I returned to one of my favorite genres, Swashbucklers, specifically pirates.
The first film on my list was The Black Swan a story loosely based on actual history with the aftermath of the former pirate, Sir Henry Morgan becoming the governor of Jamaica.
I’m embarrassed to admit that all I knew about Henry Morgan was the brand of Rum though I did know about the mass pardon he provided to all pirates in the Caribbean provided they quit.
Black Swan begins at that point with one of Morgan’s former allies Captain James Warring played by Tyrone Power who is sent to hunt down one of the pirates who refused to surrender, Captain of the titular Black Swan, Billy Leech (played by a nearly unrecognizable George Sanders) While doing this he also woo’s the beautiful Lady Margaret Denby (played by Maureen O’Hara.)
This was mostly a fun film with a great cast. My only real problem with it is it dates badly. Perhaps it’s my own fault being too PC, but the change in cultural values is glaring. The most obvious being that in this case, “Romance” seems to mean “stalking and harassing the love interest until she gives in.”
The next film on the list, The Princess & the Pirate, Is a Bob Hope comedy with Hope as a cowardly actor who is thrown together with a beautiful princess played by Virginia Mayo when the ship they are traveling in is attacked by the dreaded pirate, The Hook. They escape with the help of one of the pirate’s crewmen who gives them a treasure map and hilarity ensues.
For the most part the plot’s just a vehicle for Hope to chew up screen time. When he’s not spewing hilariously anachronistic jokes, he’s doing some great physical bits like hiding under furniture that the villain happens to be sitting on and a great mirror bit with the Hook, and finishing with a great in-joke cameo!
A lot of my fellow Science Fiction geek friends have been recommending the new HBO series, Westworldto me. So I figured before I go check it out I might as well watch the original. Based on this I decided that this week’s selection theme would be Androids.
So back to Micheal Crichton’s directoral debut, Westworld which tells the simple story (so simple that he recycled a bit of it for Jurassic Park) of Delos an expensive luxury resort in the near future that features three different worlds, Roman World, Medieval World and Westworld. All of these settings are “manned” by lifelike androids with whom you can live out your every fantasy.
In the first half of the movie we follow the point of view of two friends visiting. We follow them as we watch them as they participate in every cliche westerns have to offer from getting into a bar fight, mingling with ladies of negotioble affection in the town brothel, breaking out of prison and winning a shootout with a sinister gunslinger played by Yul Bryner.
As the film goes along we gradually are shown scenes “below stairs” where technicians are noticing an increasing number of systems failures. Soon this escalates to androids killing guests and our heroes running for their life to escape the gunslinger.
I found myself enjoying this more than I expected. My biggest problem came from my tendency to nitpick. While the technicians talk about the failure cascade’s it’s never completely clear why this is happening. A virus is used as an analogy, but since the concept of a computer virus was just starting out in the seventies, I’m not sure if this would have even occurred to Crichton. Theres a scene where the thought of closing down the park to deal with the problem is nixed as a way to use corporate hubris as an antagonist. We’re dealing with a setting where the guests come in on scheduled visits and it should be easy to have scheduled maintainance cycles along with the nightly repair periods that the film shows in loving detail. And even if we’re assuming everything’s working you’d think there would be a few more precautions regarding safety precautions, like emergency shutdowns or at least have a hatchet so you can escape the control room that seals up completely when there’s a power outage. Finally why would you give a gunslinger robot advanced tracking hardware let alone live rounds in the first place.
But Yul Bryner rocks so I forgive much.
Pretty much all I knew about The Stepford Wives, based on the Ira Levin novel of the same name, was that it had become the nickname for the cartoon nineteen fifties creepily submissive housewife. Naturally I was curious about the rest of it.
Joanna (Katharine Ross) and her hu Husband Walter (Peter Masterson)move with their two daughters from New York to the Connecticut suburb of Stepford. All seems nice at first it’s one of those nice traditional neighborhoods where you don’t have to lock your doors. As things go along we find that things might be a little too traditional with a lot of the woman being so straight-laced about their roles as housewives who are obedient to their husbands that it starts to get creepy. But this is nothing compared to the local mens’ group that Walter is invited to join.
Things get creepier as Joanna and her friend, fellow recent transplant Bobbie, played with wonderful high on life glee by Paula Prentiss, try to put together a women’s group. The only person interested is a fellow recent arrival. But soon she changes her mind as does Bobbi who suddenly becomes another happy home maker.
Joanna’s increasingly worried that she’s next and it turns out she’s right. The Men’s group was replacing the woman with lifelike robots.
This film was well done but for the most part I couldn’t get into it. The first half came off as a dry art film though the feeling of low key paranoia was well done. As for the sci-fi bits the movie’s more interested in the robots as a metaphor than anything else. And any questions about them like if this small group of men can create robots like this why don’t they mass produce them and make a fortune? Are frankly irrelevant.
The main point of my selection was courtroom drama, but as I viewed them I found them to be wonderfully similar to each other. Both featured lawyers stuck in their personal limb who are given a case provides them with a chance to start again, and most notably featuring two of Hollywood’s best loved actors.
The first film on the List, Otto Preminger’sAnatomy of a Murder features Jimmy Stewart as Paul Beilger a Michigan based attorney who has been in semi retirement for the last two years spending most of his time fishing and listening to Jazz Albums.
He is recruited to defend an abusive Army lieutenant Frederick “Manny” Manion (Ben Gazzar) awho had murdered his wife’s rapist. Manson has admitted he’s done it but believes he’s justified. Beilger takes the case beginning an uphill battle. To make matters worse he’s up against ace assistant attorney general, Claude Dancer, played brilliantly by George C Scott in his second film role.
I loved every minute of this film. I always like the films where Stewart doesn’t play Stewart. In this case he plays almost a parody of himself. At first glance Beilger comes off as another one of Stewart’s golly gee american pie types but at the same time he’s not at all like that. He has an ammoral streak doing whatever it takes to win a case and is a huge Jazz fan (nothing wrong with that of course but still suspect in the fifties and makes for useful shorthand)
There isn’t a single bad performance in this film along with Stewart, George C Scott is brilliant. The camerawork is amazing and following up with Beilger’s love of Jazz, we have a terrific soundtrack by Duke Ellington(as well as a fun little cameo.)
The next film on my list was Sidney Lumet’sThe Verdict with a script by David Mamet. Paul Newman play’s Frank Galven a washed up and alcoholic attorney who hasn’t won case in four years and now is left trolling funerals.
A friend gives him what should be an easy case. A malpractice suit in a hospital run by the Boston Archdiocese where a lucrative settlement is in the bag. But something about the case leads him to actually care about it and he chooses to fight for the clients (whether the clients want him to do it at all.)
However he is completely outclassed against the Archdioceses law team led by Ed Concannon played brilliantly by James Mason who is able to preasure just about any witness Galven needs (as well as the Judge)
This is a great performance from Newman. He makes this whole story as a study of redemption starting in a drunken pit, gradually regaining his passion.
As people may guess from the Rhapsodies annual Christmas story, Santa Claus has always been the favorite part of Christmas. When I was growing up I took great pleasure in deluding myself over his existence. (Technically I still do but it’s harder to fool myself these days.) I love all of the little details people have come up with over the years trying to explain all of the things that makes the myth believable.
I’ve watched most of the Christmas movies featuring Santa Claus but there were still a few remaining so I decided to finish my holiday selection I decided to go with one of the best and one of the worst (but still entertaining.) of the jolly old elf.
For our good film we have one of the first fully digital efforts from one of my favorite animation studios, Aardman Animation, with their second fully digital film, Arthur Christmas.
Ever wonder how Santa Claus delivers all those toys in one night? How he gets down the chimney, how old is he really? Well it turns out it’s done with a giant sleigh the size of a small city and an army of paramilitary elves who can leave toys at a speed of eight seconds a house. Santa himself is mostly a figurehead who delivers a single ceremonial present in each city. And Santa’s a dynasty with the Santa Claus we know and love being the twentieth one.
But he’s getting old and tired and it is assumed that the mantle of Santa shall be passed down to his oldest son, Steve who has been pretty much running the operation for years. But he has a younger son Arthur who loves Christmas dearly… but because he’s a bit of a goofball he’s left working in the mailroom.
However when a single child is missed do due to a slight snafu it’s up to Arthur to deliver the last present with the help of his grandfather, the previous Santa, and Bryony an elf from the wrapping department who takes her job way too seriously.
This is a great film both technically and artistically the attention to detail is amazing. You can spend hours watching this thing on freeze frame just to catch all of the details that Aardman sneaks into this.
On the other side of our coin we have Santa Claus Conquers the Martians a film I’ve seen just the tiniest bits of over the years which I was simultaneously didn’t want to risk seeing.
The film tells about Martian children intercepting earth television and becoming listless because they never were able to experience being children. To deal with that. The Adult martians travel to the North Pole to kidnap Santa and bring Christmas to Mars. However other Martians worry that Santa is a corrupting influence and try to kill him.
Make no mistake this is a very bad film. It has a shoestring budget , stupid script, and Santa Claus comes off as mildly psychotic.But at the same time it’s strangely charming and as a mostly forgettable film aimed at little children it actually works in a brain dead kind of way.
Since the holidays are upon us I decided to go with Christmas movies or in this case christmas-ish films since in both of their cases to call them Christmas films is a bit of a stretch. With one taking place at Christmas and the other one while technically a Christmas isn’t much of one.
My first film Billy Wilder’sThe Apartment was one of those films I knew about for years, but despite being a Billy Wilder fan, had never gotten around to seeing it. (To be perfectly hones I think I used to get it mixed up with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger)
Jack Lemmon plays a CC (Buddy Boy) Baxter An office drone working at an insurance firm. His life isn’t really going anywhere with the only thing resembling a private life is an infatuation with a cute elevator operator played by Shirley MacLaine, who he is completely not stalking (he just happened to find out her dress by chance) As a sideline he lends out his apartment to several of his managers on evenings for their extramarital affairs. In this capacity he is taken for granted and it’s beginning to stretch him thin (having to make several phone calls to have one night to sleep when he catches a cold when he’s accidentally locked out for a night.
Just as it seems like things can’t get any worse an even bigger boss played by Fred McMurray outbids the rest of the higher ups for the use of the apartment. Things get even worse when CC finds out his current fling is the elevator operator.
This was a fun and cynical film.
My next film was Capra’sMeet John Doe. Tells the story of Ann Mitchell a columnist (played by Barbara Stanwyck) who has just been downsized by her paper. In a fit of pique she finishes her last column with a quote from a bogus letter by an unemployed “John Doe” who plans to commit suicide on christmas eve as a protest against an unjust society.
Much to everybody’s surprise the column becomes a media sensation. Ann is rehired to continue the facade as well as hire a “real” John Doe, a hobo named Long John Willoughby (played by Garry Cooper.) The success continues creating a John Doe movement based around being a better neighbor… Gradually Willoughby begins to believe the hype that has been written for him. When he discovers that the movement has been funded by a newspaper executive as a road to the White House things go badly.
I had mixed feelings about this film. It’s very much up to Capra’s standards in both art and craft but at the time it’s very much a movie with an agenda and gets very preachy several times. Still the be a better neighbor part is a very good message even if it’s frequently heavy handed.
But Cooper and Mitchell give a performance that makes it work.
My favorite part is when a group of people coming to Willoughby with the story of how they made friends with neighbors who they never knew, or even liked for a long time simply by talking to them.
The first film on my list was The Black Swan a story loosely based on actual history with the aftermath of the former pirate, Sir Henry Morgan becoming the governor of Jamaica.
The next film on the list, The Princess & the Pirate, Is a Bob Hope comedy with Hope as a cowardly actor who is thrown together with a beautiful princess played by Virginia Mayo when the ship they are traveling in is attacked by the dreaded pirate, The Hook. They escape with the help of one of the pirate’s crewmen who gives them a treasure map and hilarity ensues.
