Wild Rovers (1971, directed by Blake Edwards)

Posted on May 16, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

In Montana, Walter Buckman (Karl Malden) runs his ranch with an iron hand, warning his neighbor, Hansen (Sam Gilman) not to even think of allowing his sheep to graze on his land. Walter has two sons, hot-headed John (Tom Skerritt) and the laid back and good-natured Paul (Joe Don Baker). When Walter learns that two of his ranch hands — aging Ross Bodine (William Holden) and young Frank Post (Ryan O’Neal) — have robbed a bank and are heading down to Mexico, he sends John and Paul to bring them back. Walter is a big believer in the law and he’s not going to allow any of his people to get away with breaking it.

Ross is a veteran cowboy, who only robbed the bank after Walter withheld his pay to cover the damage of a saloon fight between Ross and Hansen’s men. Frank is the wilder of the two. He looks up to Ross and Ross is protective of Frank, even if he has a hard time admitting it. Ross and Frank are heading down to Mexico so Ross can retire in peace. Instead of going straight to Mexico, though, they make the mistake of stopping by a small town so Frank can play a little poker and visit the town’s brothel.

Wild Rovers was Blake Edwards’s attempt to make an epic, revisionist western and he includes plenty of shots of the sun setting over the mountains as well as several violent shoot-outs that are shot in Peckinpah-style slow motion. Unfortunately, the story itself isn’t really strong enough to support Edwards’s ambitions and all of the shots of the countryside, while nice to look at, don’t really add up too much. Wild Rovers was also a troubled production, with MGM slashing Edwards’s original three-hour film down to 106 minutes and advertising it with a poster featuring O’Neal hugging Edwards from behind, making the film look like a buddy comedy in the style of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (or an early version of Brokeback Mountain) as opposed to a violent and elegiac western. (In 1986, a director’s cut was released, which ran for 136 minutes.) If you only know Blake Edwards from his Pink Panther movies, the grim and tragedy-filled Wild Rovers will come as a surprise.

One thing that Wild Rovers does have going for it is a good cast. William Holden and an energetic Ryan O’Neal are a solid team and Karl Malden, Tom Skerritt, Rachel Roberts, James Olson, and Moses Gunn all give good performances too. This movie also provides Joe Don Baker with a sympathetic role and he’s very likable as the laid back Paul Buckman. It’s not the type of role that Baker often got to play and it’s obvious that a lot of scenes between John and Paul were cut from the film but, in the truncated version, Joe Don Baker’s Paul Buckman becomes the moral center of the film’s story.

Wild Rovers was a disappointment at the box office, one of many that Edwards suffered in the 70s before he and Peter Sellers brought back Inspector Clouseau.

Duel In The Sun (1946, directed by King Vidor)

Posted on May 15, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

After her father is executed for killing her mother and her mother’s lover, “half-breed” Pearl Chavez (Jennifer Jones) is sent to live with her father’s second cousin, Laura Beth McCanles (Lillian Gish). Laura is the wife of rancher, politician, and all-around racist Senator Jackson McCanles (Lionel Barrymore). Worried that Pearl’s beauty and uninhibited manner will get her into trouble, Laura arranges for Pearl to meet with a minister known as The Sinkller (Walter Huston) who instructs Pearl on how to be a “good” girl.

Wanting to make Pearl bad and his, Lewton “Lewt” McCanles (Gregory Peck) becomes obsessed with Pearl and is soon forcing himself on her on a regular basis. When the good McCanles brother, Jesse (Joseph Cotten), leaves the ranch despite being in love with Pearl, Pearl tries to find a good husband in the form of Sam Pierce (Charles Bickford). Lewt responds by gunning Sam down and then goes on the run. It all leads to an overwrought duel in the sun as the two doomed lovers take aim at each other.

Duel In The Sun is credited to veteran director King Vidor and there are a few shots of the western landscape that do feel typical of Vidor’s work. However, Duel In The Sun’s true auteur was its producer, David O. Selznick. Still looking to recapture his earlier success with Gone With The Wind and eager to make his future wife, Jennifer Jones, into an even bigger star than she was, Selznick obsessed over every detail of Duel In The Sun, pushing Vidor and a host of other directors (including Josef von Sternberg, William Dieterle, William Cameron Menzies, Otto Brower, and Sidney Franklin) to make the film more steamy, more melodramatic, more violent, and more visually epic. Reportedly, while Video was trying to shoot the film’s titular duel, he had to call cut several times when Selznick ran into the scene with a water bottle to spray more “sweat” onto Jones and Peck. Today, the stiff Peck seems miscast as the black sheep of the family, the reserved Jones is even more miscast as a mestiza, and the plot is clearly too simplistic to carry the film’s epic ambitions. A few impressive shots aside, Duel In The Sun is just boring, In the 40s, though, the film’s relative openness about sex generated enough controversy to make Duel In The Sun into a box office hit. It was one of the two top-grossing westerns of the 40s, beating out Red River, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, The Ox-Bow Incident, and several other films that were actually good.

Unlike Jones, Peck, and even usually reliable stalwart like Lionel Barrymore and Walter Huston, Joseph Cotten at least emerges from this film with his dignity intact. Playing the good brother, Cotten gets to underplay while everyone else is overplaying and it turns out to be the right approach for him. Surviving Duel In The Sun was no easy feat but Cotten pulled it off.

Scenes That I Love: Joseph Cotten In The Third Man

Posted on May 15, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

Imagine being Holly Martins. You’re in Vienna, investigating the death of your best friend, getting chased by an angry mob and threatened by British intelligence, and suddenly you’re reminded that you, an author of dime-store novels, agreed to give a lecture on post-war literature.

That’s what happens in this scene that I love (featuring Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins) from The Third Man.

4 Shots From 4 Films: Special Joseph Cotten Edition

Posted on May 15, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

The Third Man (1949, directed by Carol Reed)

4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!

As you can probably guess from my pen name and my profile pic, Joseph Cotten is one of my favorite actors. Cotten may be best known for his association with Orson Welles but he worked with several great directors over the years. Along with playing Jedediah Leland in Welles’s Citizen Kane, he starred in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt and Carol Reed’s The Third Man. Even while his film career was flourishing, Cotten continued to appear on the Broadway stage and, during the early days of television, he frequently appeared on anthology series, the majority of which were broadcast live.

In honor of Cotten’s birthday, here are four shots from four of his best films.

4 Shots From 4 Films

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, directed by Orson Welles)

Shadow of a Doubt (1943, directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Portrait of Jennie (1948, directed by William Dieterle)

The Third Man (1949, directed by Carol Reed)

Music Video of the Day: Yankee Rose by David Lee Roth (1986, directed by Peter Angelus and David Lee Roth)

Posted on May 15, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

You might not guess it from the music video but Yankee Rose was actually David Lee Roth’s tribute to the Statue of Liberty, which was going through major renovations for the 100th anniversary of its dedication when this song was released.

(Check out Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins if you want a close-up look at what was happening to the Statue at the time.)

Of course, Roth knew what sold on MTV so the music video doesn’t feature the Statue. Instead, it features Roth’s trademark humor, showmanship, and sexual innuendo. In typical Roth fashion, it also starts out with a comedy sketch that would probably get the video taken down if it were released today. Perhaps more than any other frontman, Roth is someone who truly epitomizes an era.

Roth directed this video, along with Peter Angelus. Angelus also plays the sleazy playboy who appears at the start of the video.

Enjoy!

Hold ‘Em Yale (1935, directed by Sidney Lanfield)

Posted on May 14, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

Georgie, the Chaser (Cesar Romero) is a con artist who works for a low-level gangster named Sunshine Joe (William Frawley). When Georgie reads about an heiress named Clarice van Cleve (Patricia Ellis) who impulsively falls in love with any man wearing a uniform, Georgie pretends to be a member of the Foreign Legion and tracks her down. Georgie thinks that Clarice’s father will pay him off, just as he’s paid off all of her other suitors. Instead, Clarice’s father disinherits her and Clarice ends up living at Georgie’s place, along with his other criminal associates (Andy Devine, Warren Hymer, and George E. Stone).

Georgie reacts by getting out of town, leaving Clarice behind with his good-natured gang. However, even the gang gets tired of Clarice insisting that they dress up for dinner and that they all get a good night’s sleep. After Sunshine Joe cheats them out of their money, the remaining criminals head to the Yale-Harvard football game, hoping to win some bets and to set Clarice up with the player that her father wants her to marry, studious benchwarmer Hector Wilmot (Buster Crabbe).

Just a little over an hour long, Hold ‘Em Yale is actually a pretty amusing movie. It was based on a short story by Damon Runyon and all of the characters are familiar Runyon types, streetwise but good-natured criminals who enjoy drinking and gambling and the film gets a lot of laughs out of their reactions to Clarice’s attempts to civilize them. Patricia Ellis is great as the ditzy Clarice and this film provides a chance to see Buster Crabbe playing a character who isn’t a natural-born athlete for once. It’s a minor film but worth watching for the cast and the snappy dialogue. Who would have guessed a good movie could be built around Ivy League football?

Jungle Siren (1942, directed by Sam Newfield)

Posted on May 13, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

Captain Gary Hart (Buster Crabbe) and his sidekick, Sgt. Mike Jenkins (Paul Bryar), are sent to the jungles of Africa, where Nazi infiltrators are encouraging Chief Selangi (Jess Lee Brooks) to side with the Third Reich and allow them to set up a base. In their effort to stop the Nazis, Hart and Jenkins are aided by Kuhlaya (Ann Corio), a woman whose parents were killed by Selangi and who now lives in the jungle with a chimpanzee and a doctor (Milton Kibbee) who serves as her protector. Kuhlaya carries a bow and arrow, which she used to battle the Nazis. Hart and Jenkins have actual guns and probably could have ended the Nazi plot early just by using them as soon as they arrived but then the movie couldn’t be stretched to 68 minutes.

This is a pretty bad Poverty Row film, memorable just for Crabbe’s typically earnest and athletic performance and the presence of Ann Corio, who was a famous stripper in the 40s who tried to transition into films after Mayor La Guardia ordered the closure of New York’s burlesque houses. Corio had legs for miles but she was a terrible actress. At one point, Mike Jenkins says that if he keeps exercising, “I’ll have a physique like Buster Crabbe!” That’s about as clever as this slow-moving film gets.

As is typical of jungle films that were made in the 40s, the “tribesmen” are pretty much treated as if they’re interchangeable and the only one who is given a personality is the evil Selangi. Several of them are killed over the course of the movie, not because they were doing anything wrong but just because they were in the wrong place. (The most egregious example is an innocent native who ends up with one of Kuhlaya’s arrows in his back because he was unfortunate enough to step in front of Selangi at the last moment.) No one, our heroes included, really seems to care about them or their future. Even by the standards of the era, Jungle Siren feels extremely condescending and prejudiced in its portrayal of the natives. The idea that the Nazis, with their Aryan obsession, would ever team up with Chief Selangi is just one of the film’s problems.

Director Sam Newfield was responsible for some entertaining and cheap westerns. I’ve reviewed a few of them. He should have stayed out the jungle.

I Come In Peace (1990, directed by Craig R. Baxley)

Posted on May 12, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

“I come in peace.”

“And you go in pieces.”

How have I not reviewed this one yet?

Dolph Lundgren is Jack Crain, a Houston cop who teams up with FBI agent Larry Smith (Brian Benben) to investigate who is killing criminals in H-town. The killer is a drug dealer but not your everyday drug dealer. He’s an alien named Talec (Matthias Hues) and he’s figured out how to say “I come in peace,” but the rest of the English language is beyond him. “I come in peace,” turns out to be the scariest phrase you can hear when you’re being pursued by a white-haired, intergalactic mass murderer. His targets include Jesse Vint and Michael J. Pollard. This terminator wannabe is after character actors!

On the second-tier action stars of the 90s, Lundgren was the one who could actually act. Van Damme could actually do all the acrobatic stunts his characters did but he couldn’t show emotion like Lundgren. Steven Seagal seemed like he could handle himself in a fight but he lacked Lundgren’s self-aware humor. Lundgren plays Jack as almost being a parody of the type of hard-boiled cop who is always getting yelled at by the commissioner for wasting the city’s money. Brian Benben is remembered, by some, as the star of HBO’s Dream On, the sitcom that convinced a generation of young men that there’s nothing women love more than obscure pop cultural obsessions. Benben is actually pretty funny in I Come In Peace. He’s the everyman who can’t believe he’s having to deal with an intergalactic drug dealer. Good heroes need a good villain and Matthias Hues is just right as the drug dealing alien who literally doesn’t know what he’s saying.

If you want to see a Terminator rip-off with nonstop action, a memorable villain, frequently (and intentionally) funny dialogue, an Al Leong cameo, and Dolph Lundgren as a hero who pushes people around just because he feels like it, I Come In Peace is the movie for you!

Prisoner of War (1954, directed by Andrew Marton)

Posted on May 11, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

The setting is the Korean War. After getting information that American POWs are being tortured and brainwashed in North Korean prisoner-of-war camps, Major Hale (Harry Morgan) assigns Webb Sloane (Ronald Reagan) to go undercover. After parachuting behind enemy lines, Webb spots a group of POWs being marched through the snow and joins the group. From the minute that Webb joins the march, he begins to observe war crimes. The death march itself, with the POWs being forced to move in freezing weather, is itself a war crime. At the POW camp, Webb discovers the presence of an arrogant Soviet interrogator (Oscar Homolka) and a routine designed to break the POWs down until their ready to betray their native country. Some POWS, like Captain Stanton (Steve Forrest), refuse to break. Others, like cowardly Jesse Treadman (Dewey Martin), break all too quickly. Webb sends the information back to Hale and eventually tries to make his escape.

It’s not terrible. That the North Koreans and, later, the North Vietnamese tortured their POWs and forced some of them to denounce America is a matter of the historical record and, for a 1954 film, Prisoner of War doesn’t shy away from the brutality of the torture that POWs were often subjected too. Of all of Reagan’s film, Prisoner of War had the strongest anti-communist message, though Reagan himself feels miscast as a hard-boiled secret agent. (Reagan’s affability comes through even in a film set in a POW camp.) Sending someone undercover into a prisoner of war camp and then hoping that they’ll find a way to escape doesn’t sound like the most efficient way to determine if the Geneva Convention is being violated.

The film features a dog who is found by one of the POWs. Don’t get attached.

Street Fighter (1994, directed by Stephen E. de Souza)

Posted on May 10, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

What does the M. stand for in M. Bison?

Originally, it was supposed to stand for Mike but my theory is that it stands for Marvelous because how else can you describe Raul Julia’s performance as the villain of Street Fighter? Julia was dying of stomach cancer when he played Bison, a condition reflected by his gaunt appearance. But Julia still obviously threw himself into every scene, delivering every melodramatic line as if it was the most important piece of dialogue that he had ever been trusted with delivering. As a film, Street Fighter is an overedited mess that features one of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s worst performances. Raul Julia saves it, though. He gets some of the worst lines and transforms them into the best lines through sheer determination. That man could have read the phone book and made it interesting.

Jean-Claude Van Damme is Col. Guile in this early video game adaptation. This isn’t one of Van Damme’s better performances. He doesn’t really play the Guile from the game. Instead, he’s just Van Damme with a blue beret and an American flag on his bicep. Far better are Damian Chapa as Ken and Bryon Mann as Ryu, even though neither gets to do as much as a fan of the game would want them to. Ming-Na Wen is a promising Chun Li but, instead of focusing on her fighting skill, the movie gets bogged down in trying to set her up for a sequel that would never come. Are you a fan of Cammy? Don’t get excited because all Kylie Minogue does is ask Guile if he’s okay. I did like Wes Studi as Sagat and Gregg Rainwater and Peter Tuiasosopo as T. Hawk and Honda but it still feels like only Raul Julia gives a performance that can compete with the video game version of his character.

There were four editors credited for Street Fighter and maybe that explains why the fights are a mess and the plot is impossible to follow. It’s a video game adaptation and I don’t demand much but I would like to know who is winning each fight. The film’s visual scheme, meant to duplicate the look of the game, showed some promise but the editing gave the movie a frantic feel that made it difficult to really appreciate the production design.

There’s never really been a good Street Fighter film but I still think it could happen with the right cast and crew. If Mortal Kombat could (eventually) be turned into a decent movie, why not Street Fighter? I still don’t think anyone will ever top Raul Julia as M. Bison, though. Raul Julia made you believe in Pax Bisonica!