The Captive City (1952), dir. Robert Wise; starring John Forsythe, Joan Camden
Part of the Noir Alley presentations from Turner Cable Movies, introduced by Eddie Muller. Muller explained this isn't really film noir -- there are some trappings of noir, though I'd agree -- but it is the first movie in the 1950s shifting the focus of crime movies away from the personal and more toward the social. This comes in the wake of the United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce led by Senator Estus Kefauver, who liked the movie enough to provide a filmed statement that runs after the movie.
When a private detective is murdered, an integrous small city newspaper editor becoming aware of the effects of a local bookmaking operation taken over by organized crime. Slowly he pieces together the corruption under the city's administration and business leaders he'd been unaware of during his five years as a resident and has to decide what to do about it.
Forsythe's first starring role, this is a nicely done, fairly straight-forward crime movie, based (loosely, I imagine) on Newsweek articles by one of the screenwriters. Early use location shooting rather than studio back lots for crime movies. Not great, but as watchable as every other movie I've seen from Wise.
I too, watched this film, and began wondering just what elements must be present for a film to be 'NOIR'?
True, there are obvious things lacking, such as a femme fatale, a mastermind plotting a heist, etc. But the little guy, a editorial writer/1/2 owner of the local newspaper, trying to find out the whys and wherefores of the town's corruption. His being opposed by just about everyone whom he trusts, etc. Is this not noir?
Anyway, one thing I noted Muller not commenting about, is the police corruption, and that such a topic would be rather unpopular. Who wants to even imagine your local cop is on the take? But on this, Muller is silent.
Damn, I hate February! No Noir Alley! August, too! Just one more NOIR ALLEY this month, and then nothing until March. & this is leap year!
Noir is a style as much as content, and there are only a few scenes in the movie that seemed noir-ish, like the P.I. just before being run over, or the reporter in his office late at night.
True, there are obvious things lacking, such as a femme fatale,
A fair amount of noir without femme fatales -- Phantom Lady and Laura for instance.
a mastermind plotting a heist, etc. But the little guy, a editorial writer/1/2 owner of the local newspaper, trying to find out the whys and wherefores of the town's corruption. His being opposed by just about everyone whom he trusts, etc. Is this not noir?
Anyway, one thing I noted Muller not commenting about, is the police corruption, and that such a topic would be rather unpopular. Who wants to even imagine your local cop is on the take? But on this, Muller is silent.
I saw Bad Boys For Life on opening day but just now getting around to talk about it. I should start by saying Bad Boys was fun but not my favorite movie. However, Bad Boys 2 is one of my favorite movies of all time! It's Michael Bay at his best, using plot and character development as a minimal necessary means to string together jokes, explosions, car chases, and moments that make you go "awww yeah!"
Bad Boys For Life (not directed by Michael Bay) is everything I wanted from Bad Boys 2 plus a self aware acknowledgment of how long it's been since Mike and Marcus were on the silver screen together. It has the perfect balance of car chases and action with great banter between the characters plus the new element of them getting older which they bring about in hilarious ways. There are also a couple heart wrenching parts that I don't want to spoil.
One last note is that they did a great job with the villain. In Bad Boys 2 we had a villain in Johnny Tapia who was fun to watch on screen but at the same time you also couldn't wait to see him get what's coming to him. Bad Boys For Life gives us the same thing with Isabel Aretas, played by Kate del Castillo (Pilar from Weeds). She is intense and kinda scary. Great on screen and just like Tapia, you can't wait for Mike and Marcus to take her down!
Derek Jacobi is a hippie-ish aristocrat living in a gigantic Stately Home, on a huge estate which serves as a tourist attraction, containing a wild animal park with lions, hippos, giraffes, zebras, and so on. He paints weird murals all over the interior walls of his house. He's married, but also has a live-in mistress, which his wife tolerates.
Everything I've just said also applies to the real-life aristocrat Alexander Thynne, 7th Marquess of Bath, who wrote the novel on which this film is based. The house and estate in the film is his, and his wife plays the mistress. (The Marquess is said to have had 70 "wifelets," some of whom lived on the estate and gave him children, but the movie settles for one.)
I'll assume the rest of what happens is fictional. A German woman arrives to be the new nanny for the aristocrat's children. The real star of the film is Oliver Reed, who plays a butler with a really odd accent. He's clearly the real boss of the place, often openly insolent to the Lord and Lady of the place. More than one character has visions/nightmares/hallucinations, filmed through a red filter, of Reed conducting some kind of Satanic ritual/human sacrifice. The children suffer injury at the hands of adults, but, as with everything else in this movie, it's not clear exactly what happened. Reed abuses the nanny, both masters and servants get stoned on drugs and booze, and other stuff happens. The whole thing is like a Harold Pinter play mixed with just a touch of a Hammer horror film. A real oddity.
What an absolute, raging dumpster fire of a movie. Its sad to see them have an opportunity to revive a beloved series and to watch them botch it so badly in so many ways.
If anyone from Hollywood is reading - the next time someone suggests dropping gravity bombs in space as if that's an intelligent idea, just fire them on the spot.
An example of the idealistic-new-teacher-arrives-at-tough-school genre. It plays out the way you'd expect. Our hero is thrown to the worst bunch of kids in the school. Although they're in their teens, some can't even read or write. They come from poverty-stricken homes. (One boy has only one pair of trousers, so he has to wear a long coat over his underwear while they're being mended.) They're a rowdy bunch, some of the boys already in trouble with the police, some of the girls precociously seductive. Our hero tries to interest them in their learning, has some success, but also resorts to caning hands when he needs to. A full riot breaks out when the most sadistic teacher at the school savagely beats a boy. Despite all this bad stuff, there's the usual hopeful ending. It's a pretty good film, a British Asphalt Jungle or a grittier To Sir With Love.
I find myself thinking 1917 should have been plotted for an earlier war. I know that a lot of communication during that war was done by telephone and telegraph. A runner with that important of a message doesn't ring true. --- But maybe there was a reason for the runner given in the movie?
When I was a child I met an old guy in Mildura who had laid telephone lines for the Australian Army on the front in WWI. This was the standard means of communication and the problem was that the lines kept breaking or being blown up. i suppose radio technology was not sufficiently practical in 1917. Without a line, a runner was necessary.
His published memoir, which I tracked down years later, is absolutely harrowing.
Comedy/drama dealing with a bunch of ordinary blokes serving at a searchlight/gunnery unit somewhere in England during World War Two. Based on a play, so a lot of it takes place inside the building that serves as their barracks. They're no heroes, not being above stealing eggs from local farmers or running off base to visit girls. The plot is very episodic, ranging from a guy who wants to go to cooking school to a fellow whose adult son dies in action. Towards the end, when Nazi planes finally show up, it becomes a real war movie. Not bad, although it's odd to see Benny Hill and Tommy Steele in this kind of thing.
Low budget combination of The Thing From Another World, It! The Terror From Beyond Space, and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Navy Guy arrives at civilian undersea station to check out the thing they found on sonar. It turns out to be an underwater flying saucer. They go inside the thing via its convenient hatch, find a cylindrical object, and bring the object inside the station. The cylinder grows, and eventually our movie's Monster pops out, a guy in a rubber Fish-Man costume, notable for having a pale blue body and bright orange fins. The rest of the film is a cat-and-mouse game between Monster and humans. The models used to represent the station and the flying saucer are laughably cheap. Most of the movie takes place on small sets. The interior of the flying saucer shows some economical imagination. The cylinder comes out of a triangular door, encased in a triangular block of ice. There's a female scientist to fall into the arms of the hero, and a female diver/photographer to scream and show off her legs in tiny shorts. Cheap but enjoyable kiddie matinee thrills.
Castle of Evil (1966)
Made by the same director as the above film, both completed in the space of two weeks. Although this one is structured like an old-fashioned whodunit, the very first scene reveals the villainess. She pays an undertaker to take care of a body, he knows the guy wasn't yet completely dead, he demands more money to keep quiet, she poisons him and turns his body into a skeleton inside a glass chamber using some kind of gas. Cut to what would normally be our cast of suspects, if it hadn't been for this scene. Six folks arrive at the island which holds the Castle of Evil. (Where the heck is this thing supposed to be? It's someplace conquered by Spain in the old days, but there's reference to voodoo. There's also something about silver mines stolen from the "natives.") Anyway, it seems that the evil guy who lived in the Castle has died, and these six folks all had motive and opportunity to kill him through some kind of accident involving phosphorus, so half of his face melted away before he died much later. We see the grotesquely deformed corpse in its open coffin, and we get the usual reading of the will that tells us that his riches will go to those who don't die before it's collected, contingent on finding how who killed him. Of course, folks get murdered one by one. Since this movie hates suspense, we quickly find out that the villainess is the murderer, and that she is using a robot duplicate of the dead man, which he programmed with his own mind inside its computer brain, to kill the others off so she can get the loot. Things don't work out well. It's an odd mixture of Gothic Horror and Mad Science, and is a lot less interesting than that should make it.
What an absolute, raging dumpster fire of a movie. Its sad to see them have an opportunity to revive a beloved series and to watch them botch it so badly in so many ways.
If anyone from Hollywood is reading - the next time someone suggests dropping gravity bombs in space as if that's an intelligent idea, just fire them on the spot.
I watched a Korean movie called The Villainess last night. Extremely violent revenge flick, but quite well done. I need to rewatch it as there were some bits that I didn’t get.
Starter for 10 (2006). Set in Bristol in the mid-80s James McAvoy plays a student with a mission of getting on University Challenge. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed this film. The cast is immense, including a pre-Sherlock Benedict Cumberbatch and Mark Gatiss. It's a difficult film to classify but it's very enjoyable and should enjoy a wider audience and reputation.
The Curse of La Llorona (2019) dir. Michael Chaves; starring Linda Cardellini, Raymond Cruz
An offshoot of The Conjuring franchise, I think. Well-produced but mainly this feels by the numbers and never generates suspense. Cardellini is sympathetic as a mother protecting her children, but she's the only one with even minimal character development. Cruz is fine as a sort of Hispanic Van Helsing, but like the rest of the cast he's been dropped in a character slot with no support from script or direction to make the character something more. Not the worst movie I've seen, but I'll probably have forgotten everything about it in a week or so because there's so little there.
Not really a parody of The Blue Lagoon, although it's got some folks on a tropical island. Our helpful narrator fills us in on our back story. It seems that, a couple of years ago, a guy wrongfully accused of a crime and several women were on this island. The women got rescued, he stayed behind because he didn't want to go to jail. Now they come back, to tell him the real criminal got caught. Complicating matters is a Science Guy showing up, looking for a treasure. In actuality, however, he's there with a hidden film crew, and some actors to play "natives," to make a documentary about the accused man's story. Lots of nice scenery and pretty music to make up for the silly, trivial plot.
The Ribald Tales of Canterbury (1985)
Although the film gives credit to the "novel" (sic) by Geoffrey Chaucer, the only thing they have in common is some folks telling stories on their way to Canterbury. It's a pretty small party, consisting only of the Hostess, a Carpenter, a Knight, a Monk, a Miller, and the Lady (sic) of Bath. Even with so few characters, we only get four stories. The Knight tells how he found out that an Abbott was something other than an Abbott; the Carpenter tells how a Miller was prevented from cheating his customers; the Lady of Bath tells how she schemed to win back her ancestral lands from those who absconded with them; and the Hostess tells of a Gypsy who bargained with the Devil for a magic violin. The whole thing looks like a Renaissance Faire (sic), with costumes a lot more colorful and pretty than anything folks really wore back then. The music ranges from pseudo-Medieval to electronic, but isn't bad. At least one person is really British, and the others make no effort to hide their American accents.
And I better not say anything else about these films and the very specific genre to which they both belong.
Farewell, My Lovely (1975) dir. Dick Richards; starring Robert Mitchum, Charlotte Rampling, John Ireland
Staying home with a cold has some perks, like watching a movie I haven't seen in over 40 years. Mitchum was 58 when he made this -- according to Ben Mankiewicz, who introduced it on Turner Cable Movies, Richard Burton was originally slated to star as Philip Marlowe, the thought of which curdles my imagination -- and it was part of a productive decade for an aging star. Honestly, he comes across as too old for the role already -- and more so in the sequel, The Big Sleep, remake, a couple of years later, though I'm relying on memory for that -- but a lot is made up for with his delivery of some Chandlerian lines. And it's fun to watch some old pros like Mitchum and Ireland trade lines, and a new guy like Harry Dean Stanton making a claim to his place; there are also good appearances by Walter McGinn (sadly, he died two years after this) and Sylvia Miles, while Sylvester Stallone shows up without lines but does get to shoot someone. And Charlotte Rampling. Wow. If ever anyone caught essence-of-Bacall in a movie without being Bacall, it's Rampling in this one.
On the down side: At times the camera feels a static, almost like '70s made-for-TV movies, though the actors fill in adequately most of the time; the score is appropriate throughout with the exception of one stretch where it sounds like music for a different action/adventure movie; and because it was the '70s, Chandler's psychiatric facility is now a brothel, giving an excuse for some topless young women.
If you're interested in Chandler on screen, Murder, My Sweet, also based on this novel, is the better movie, but this one has a few things to recommend it.
The Sound of Fury / Try and Get Me (1950) NOIR ALLEY & a TCM premiere, as I recall. Nice to see something I never saw before! Muuler had much to say about this one, & the actual incident it was based upon! I would never have imagined such could happen in the mid 20th century America.
Anyway, Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy) has a wife (Kathleen Ryan), 1 boy, & anther child on the way. He lives in a low middle class neighborhood, and has just lost his job. Frustrated, he goes bowling, where he meets Jerry Slocum (Lloyd Bridges), who cajoles him into robbing a few gas stations. Now, he has money, and feels confident he can tell his wife a lie about working the night shift at some factory.
But Slocum wants to move into the big time, so they kidnap a man; Tyler, is thinking a simple pay and release deal, and is more than just surprised when Slocum beats the guy to death, and stashes the corpse in what appears to be a quarry's pond. Tyler is nearly out of his mind with grief. He simply cannot deal with this. The two of them pick up a pair of women, and go out drinking. Tyler goes home with his date, and in a drunken-sleep deprived stupor, confesses to the crime when the woman comments on the lead story in the newspaper.
Gil Stanton (Richard Carlson) is the writer for a so-called yellow journalism newspaper, and his emotion charged rhetoric throws fuel on the masses fire of rage. BTW, there are more close-ups of newspaper headlines in this film than I have seen in any two or even three other crime films! Cooler heads prevail on him, and he begins to soften his rhetoric, but the editor likes the old way.
Eventually, they recover the corpse, arrest Slocum, and the mob demands instant gratification at the jail. I could hardly believe they overcame the police, tear gas and all, stormed the jail dragged the two guys out, and hanged them (as implied by the crowds' shouts). Even more surprised when Muller said this actually occurred in California. The guy at the jail called the governor and wanted the national guard. He refused, & even praised the mob after the lynching.
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