Category Archives: Film Review

Film Review: Underground (dir by Vincent Sherman)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

1941’s Underground tells the story of two brothers on opposite sides in Nazi Germany.

Kurt Franken (Jeffrey Lynn) is a patriotic German who believes that the country got a raw deal at the end of World War I and who is a strong supporter of the Nazis.  He served in the army, fighting on the front.  When he returns home to Berlin, he’s missing an arm.  Whenever his friends and his family say that they’re sorry that he lost his arm, he replies that he was happy to make the sacrifice for his country.  When someone starts to mourn for his son who was killed in the fighting, Kurt accuses the man of being a traitor for doubting the wisdom of the government.  Kurt is a true believer, just the type to be recruited by the SS and tasked with helping to investigate who is behind a series of anti-Nazi radio broadcasts.  Kurt believes that, if the government says it, it must be right.  Laws must be obeyed and orders followed without question.  Kurt, in other words, is a very familiar type.

What Kurt doesn’t realize is that the man behind the broadcasts is his own brother, Eric (Phillip Dorn).  As Kurt investigates, he falls in love with Sylvia (Kaaren Verne) without realizing that she is also a part of the resistance.  While Kurt tries to discover who is behind the underground radio station, Eric and his fellow resistance members attempt to stay one step ahead of the Gestapo.

For a film made in 1941, the film’s doesn’t flinch from showing the brutality of the Gestapo.  Like all authoritarian dictatorships, The Third Reich is determined to quash any and all signs of dissent and they investigate the underground radio station with a ruthlessness that even takes Kurt by surprise.  Witnessing first hand the brutality and sadism of the government for which he gave his arm, Kurt starts to doubt his previous beliefs.  But will Kurt’s doubts come in time to save the lives of Eric and his fellow resistance members?

Made at a time when the United States was still officially neutral in the violent conflict that was sweeping the rest of the world and released just a few months before the U.S. officially declared war on the Axis Powers, Underground is a powerful look at life under a dictatorship.  Shot in a noir style, the film’s black-and-white imagery perfectly captures the harshness of life in Germany while the shadows in the background perfectly capture the paranoia of knowing that saying the wrong word could lead to arrest, torture, and death.  The film’s final minutes involve a guillotine sitting ominously in the background, a reminder that Nazi Germany was not the first authoritarian regime and that it would not be the last.

The film is well-acted, with Jeffrey Lynn epitomizing the otherwise intelligent people who allow themselves to get caught up in the madness of the majority.  His discovery of the truth about Germany was obviously meant to mirror the awakening of the Americans who previously supported a policy of neutrality.  By the end of the film, both Karl Franken and the audience understand that the time for neutrality has passed.

Marshal of Heldorado (1950, directed by Thomas Carr)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Heldorado, Arizona is a frontier town with a problem.  The Tullivers, led by Mike (Tom Tyler), keep robbing the bank and running off anyone who agrees to be the town’s marshal.

The Colonel (Raymond Hatton) and the Mayor (Fuzzy Knight) are at their wits end until a bison hunter named Lucky (Russell Hayden) comes riding into town in search of work.  They hire Lucky to be their new marshal, paying him $200 a week and allowing him three free drinks a day.

They also give Lucky a cabin to stay in but when Shamrock Ellison (James Ellison), a dandy from up north, rides into town on a donkey, Lucky decides to rent him the cabin.  When Ellison arrives at the cabin, he finds two Tulliver brothers looking for the stolen money that they hid in the fireplace.  The brothers try to shoot Ellison but accidentally end up shooting themselves instead.

When Ellison says that he wants to keep a low profile, Lucky takes credit for killing the two Tullivers.  When Mike shows up looking for revenge, Lucky has a change of heart and gives all the credit for Ellison.  Lucky makes Ellison his deputy but what he doesn’t know is that Ellison is actually a government agent who has been sent to Heldorado to clean the town up.

This B-western does a good job of mixing comedy with action.  It was one of many films that Ellison and Hayden made together and Hayden’s bluster plays off well against Ellison’s more serious performance.  Much of the humor comes from Ellison having to keep the other townspeople from realizing that he’s a crack shot who knows how ride a horse as well as anyone in town.  As well, Fuzzy Knight has his moments as the always drinking mayor.  The action scenes are well-choreographed and there’s even a suspenseful scene where Ellison gets a shave from a barber who is actually a relative of the Tullivers.  As always, the beautiful Julia Adams is a welcome addition to the cast as the Colonel’s daughter, who falls for Ellison.  For fans of the genre, there’s plenty of entertainment to be found in this brisk, 50-minute western.

Retro Television Review: The Hunted Lady (dir by Richard Lang)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay.  Today’s film is 1977’s The Hunted Lady!  It  can be viewed on YouTube.

Detective Susan Reilly (Donna Mills) reluctantly teams up with a chauvinistic cop named Sgt. Arizzio (Alan Feinstein) to investigate a United States senator who has presidential ambitions.  Arizzio believes that the senator is being back by the Mafia and that it would be disastrous for the country if a mob-connected politician ended up in the White House.  (Being mob-connected didn’t seem to hurt John F. Kennedy but still….)

Now, Detective Reilly and Sgt. Arizzio working together to take down a corrupt senator sounds like an intriguing premise for a movie, right?  Well, oddly enough, that’s not what this movie is actually about.  Instead, it’s about Susan going on the run after she’s framed for Arizzio’s murder.  She escapes from police custody with the help of her father.  Though she’s still recovering from being shot earlier in the film, Susan makes her way to Reno and attempts to hide out from both the cops and the Mafia assassin that has been sent to kill her.

Susan hiding out in Reno.  Hmmm …. sound like an intriguing premise for a movie, right?  Well, don’t get to attached to Susan pretending to be a professional gambler because it turns out that bullet wound was more serious than she realized and she ends up passing out from blood loss.  When she awakens, she’s in a free clinic that is run by Dr. Arthur Sills (Robert Reed).  Dr. Sills doesn’t ask Susan too many questions about her past and even hires Susan on as a nurse.  Susan and Dr. Sills fall in love and try to clear the name of a Native American who has been accused of blowing stuff up.

Doing some research, I was not surprised to discover that The Hunted Lady was originally developed as a possible television show.  The show would have played out like a combination of Charlie’s Angels and The Fugitive, with Susan moving from town to town and getting involved with a new set of guest stars each week.  With both the police and the mob trying to track her down, Susan would try to clear her name while also helping out strangers.  Unfortunately, The Hunted Lady wasn’t exactly a hit in the ratings and Susan’s further adventures went untold.

The main problem with The Hunted Lady is an obvious one.  The idea of the Mafia trying to install one of their guys in the White House is considerably more intriguing that Susan falling in love with Dr. Sills while working at a free clinic.  The whole time that Susan was helping the doctor’s patients, I was thinking, “But what about the senator?”  Donna Mills was surprisingly convincing as a tough cop but she had next to no chemistry with Robert Reed.  If anything, Reed looked annoyed at just having to be there.

Anyway, here’s hoping that Susan cleared her name eventually.  You can only run for so long.

Diner (1982, directed by Barry Levinson)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Which member of the Diner gang would you be?

I think that is the question that everyone, or at least every guy, asks themselves after watching Barry Levinson’s debut film.  Most would probably want to say that they’re Boogie (Mickey Rourke), because he’s cool, all the ladies love him, and he makes creative use of a popcorn box at the movies.  Some would probably say that they want to be Fenwick (Kevin Bacon) because he’s smart and sarcastic.  No one wants to be Billy (Tim Daly) or Eddie (Steve Guttenberg), even though we would all want to be their friend.

The truth is that most of us would probably be Shrevie (Daniel Stern), the just-married one who is discovering that being an adult means working an unglamorous job and discovering the rest of the world doesn’t care about your taste in music.  The luckiest of us might be Modell (Paul Reiser), the funny one who doesn’t get a story but who makes a lot of jokes.

Diner was one of the first great hang-out movies.  There is no plot, at least not in the traditional sense.  Instead, it’s about a group of long-time friends who live in Baltimore in 1959.  They grew up together.  They went to high school together.  They’ve been hanging out at the same diner for as long as they can all remember.  And now, they’re at the point in their lives where the world expects them to act like adults and accept all the responsibility that goes along with that.  It’s a film that celebrates their friendship while also acknowledging that some of them are using that friendship as an excuse to not grow up.  They escape into trivia and movies, with one minor character reciting Sweet Smell of Success by memory.  Fenwick drinks.  Boogie gambles.  Even Billy, who doesn’t even live in Baltimore anymore, reverts to his old ways as soon as he returns for Eddie’s wedding and ends up sucker punching someone because of an old high school incident.

The preparations for Eddie’s wedding gives the film what structure it has.  Eddie is marrying the unseen Elyse, assuming she can pass his demanding quiz about the Baltimore Colts.  (That may sound unfair but if you’re from Baltimore, you’ll understand.)  While Eddie gets ready for his wedding, Shrevie’s marriage to Beth (Ellen Barkin) seems to be falling apart and she finds herself tempted to cheat with Boogie, who has his own problems with a local bookie.  Meanwhile, Billy learns that his girlfriend (Kathryn Dowling) is pregnant.

The film is about friendship and the friendships between the men feel real.  Levinson held off on shooting the largely improvised diner scenes until the end of the film, by which time all of the actors had developed their own idiosyncratic relationships with each other.  The heart of Diner is to be found in scenes like the one where Modell tries to ask for someone else’s sandwich without actually coming out and asking for it.  The dialogue in that scene and so many others has the ring of age-old friendship.  Though the film makes it easy to see why Mickey Rourke and Kevin Bacon become movie stars while Tim Daly has spent most of his career on television, the entire cast is still perfect in their roles.  It’s about as strong as an ensemble as you could ever hope to see.  They become the characters and watching the movie, it’s impossible not to see yourself and your friends in their performances.

Barry Levinson has gone on to direct many more films but for me, Diner will always be the best.

 

Film Review: The Man In The Glass Booth (dir by Arthur Hiller)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Who is Arthur Goldman?

That’s the question at the heart of the 1975 film, The Man In The Glass Booth.

When we first meet Arthur Goldman (Maximilian Schell), he is a wealthy businessman who lives in a Manhattan high-rise and who appears to rarely leave the safety of his penthouse.  He is waited on by two assistants, Jack (Henry Brown) and Charlie (Lawrence Pressman), both of whom he talks to and treats as if they are members of his own family.  His most frequent visitor is his psychiatrist, Dr. Weissburger (Robert H. Harris), who frequently stops by and asks Arthur if he’s been taking his medication.

Arthur Goldman is a man who loves to talk.  Indeed, the first hour of the film feels almost like a nonstop monologue on the part of Goldman, with just occasional interjections from the other characters.  Goldman was born in Germany.  He talks about how, when he was young, he and his family were sent to a concentration camp and it was there that he witnessed the murder of his father by the camp’s sadistic commandant, Dorff.  Dorff is one of the many Nazis who disappeared to South America at the end of the war.

When Goldman spots a car that always seems to be parked across the street from his building, he becomes paranoid.  He says that he’s being watched and even suggests that Dorff has come to capture him.  Instead, it turns out that Mossad come for him.  As the agents explain it to Charlie, dental records prove that Arthur Goldman is actually Commandant Dorff.  Goldman/Dorff is taken back to Israel to stand trial for his crimes.

Are Arthur Goldman and Dorff the same man?  Once in Israel, Goldman tells anyone who will listen that he is Dorff and that he feels no guilt for his actions.  He insists on being allowed to wear his SS uniform during the trial.  Because of threats to his safety, a booth made of bullet-proof glass has been placed in the courtroom.  As the trial commences, The Man in the Glass Booth continues to rant and rave and declare his guilt.  However, the prosecutor (Lois Nettleton) comes to doubt that the man is who he says he is.

The Man In The Glass Booth is based on a novel and play by Robert Shaw.  (The same year that The Man In The Glass Booth was released, Shaw played Quint in Jaws.)  The film was produced as a part of an experiment called American Film Theatre, in which well-known plays would be adapted to film and then would be shown at 500 participating movie theaters in America.  Each production would only be shown four times at each theater and subscriptions were sold for an entire “season” of films.  It sounds like an interesting experiment and the type of thing that I would have enjoyed if I had been around back then.  Today, of course, these productions would have just premiered on a streaming service.

The Man In The Glass Booth is a film that very much feels like a filmed play.  There are only three locations — Goldman’s penthouse, his cell, and the courtroom where he is put on trial.  The three act structure is very easy to spot.  Maximilian Schell’s performance is also very theatrical.  In fact, it’s so theatrical that, for the first hour or so, I found myself wishing that he would just stop talking for a few second or two.  He was so dramatic and so flamboyant and so intentionally over-the-top that he became somewhat exhausting.  But, during the second hour, I came to see that all of that “overacting” was actually setting up the film’s final act.  Schell talks so much that, when he finally does find himself unable to explain himself, it’s a shocking moment and one that perfectly captures not just the evil of the Nazis and the Holocaust but also how the legacy of that evil lives on after the fall of the Third Reich and the deaths of the majority of the Holocaust’s perpetrators.  At that moment, I realized that The Man In The Glass Booth never stopped speaking because silence would force him to confront the horrors of the past and the trauma, guilt, and uncertainty lurking in his subconscious.  Maximilian Schell was nominated for an Oscar for his performance here and, by the end of the film, I totally understood why.

The Man In The Glass Booth requires some patience.  Actually, it requires a lot of patience.  However, those who stick with it will discover an intelligent and thought-provoking film about not only the horror of the past but also how those in the present deal with and rationalize those horrors.  Though the film is a bit too stagey for its own good, it’s also one that sticks with you even after the curtain falls and the end credits roll.

Four Fast Guns (1960, directed by William J. Hole, Jr.)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Outlaw Tom Sabin (James Craig) rides into Purgatory, a frontier town that is so dangerous that even the welcome sign warns that those entering should say goodbye to God.

The townspeople take one look Tom and hire him to clean up the town.  The town is controlled by a ruthless saloon owner named Hoag (Paul Richards).  Hoag is a self-styled intellectual and a dangerous man but he is considered to be untouchable because he is crippled and no one wants to be known as the person who shot a man in a wheelchair.  Instead, they would rather hire a stranger to do it for them but Tom has more honor than they originally realized.

Hoag summons three gunmen to kill Tom.  Two of the gunmen prove to be no match for Tom but then he meets the third and is shocked to discover that it’s his own brother, Johnny Naco (Brett Halsey).

Four Fast Guns is a better-than-average B-western.  What sets it apart from other films about strangers being hired to clean up a town is that the characters are portrayed with more depth than usual.  The towns people are not innocent victims but instead want to pay Tom to take the risks and do the dirty work that they’re not willing to do.  Tom is not a cut-and-dried hero and the gunmen who are hired to kill him are not portrayed as being one-dimensional villains.  Johnny Naco may be a killer but he also has a code of honor.  He may be willing to kill his own brother but he’s not willing to see him humiliated.  The wheelchair-bound Hoag is himself a more interesting bad guy than usually shows up in movies like this.  He’s the type of bad guy who quotes Dickens and Whitman while waiting for his hired guns to do their job.  Hoag feels that his cultured background sets him above the rest of the town’s rabble but he ultimately proves himself to be just as petty as those that he looks down on.

Four Fast Guns feels like a forerunner to the morally ambiguous Spaghetti westerns and films like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.  It is essential viewing for fans of the genre.

I Watched “The Man From From Left Field” (1993, dir. by Burt Reynolds)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

A group of boys from the wrong side of the tracks want to start a little league baseball team but they have to find a coach.  Luckily, right before the deadline, they find a homeless drifter (Burt Reynolds) sleeping in the dugout.  The drifter doesn’t know his name or anything about his past but he does know a lot about baseball.  The team names him Jack Robinson (after Jackie Robinson) and he teaches them how to play baseball and they find a barn for him to sleep in.  Jack dates one the player’s mom (Reba McIntire) and helps the kids with their homelives before a near-tragedy causes him to remember who he used to be.

I like most baseball movies but this one sent a pretty bad message.  If you’re looking for a coach for your baseball team, don’t just give the job to the first drifter who shows up.  The kids were lucky that the drifter turned out to be someone with baseball experience instead of a cannibal.  Jack was a good coach and I appreciated his emphasis on the fundamentals but I also thought it was strange that none of the parents were worried about a total stranger wanting to spend all of his time with their children.  Except for Reba McIntire, the acting was pretty forgettable but all of the kids looked like they knew what they were doing in the baseball scenes so that was a plus.  This movie never scored but it did get a few base hits.

Film Review: Against Their Will (dir by Denis Malleval)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 2012 French film, Against Their Will, tells the story of two Alsatian teenagers during the Nazi occupation of France.

Lisette (Louise Herrero) is blonde and praised, by the Nazis, for her Aryan appearance.  She appears to always have a positive attitude no matter what is going on.  Lisette’s father is a collaborationist with the Nazis and Lisette publicly defends the German occupiers while privately disdaining them and the war.  Her fiancé, Henri, has been conscripted into the army and has been sent to the Russian front.  He writes her letters but, because he is now required to write only in German and not in the French that he and Lisette grew up with, Lisette cannot read them.

Alice (Flore Bonaventura) is dark-haired and therefore considered to be inferior to Lisette.  This is despite the fact that Alice is fiercely intelligent and has been trained as a nurse.  Alice’s father is a doctor who has been sent to a prison camp as punishment for treating a wounded British soldier.  Alice is rebellious and, unlike Lisette, she has no compunctions about telling the Nazis exactly how she feels about them.  When she is ordered to salute the Nazi flag, she lifts on arm in a stiff salute while using her other hand to extend her middle finger.

Lisette and Alice are amongst the many teenagers who are taken from their families and sent to a German indoctrination camp, where the strict and cruel Trudl (Julia Thrunau) tries to brainwash them.  Lisette and Alice become unlikely friends as they are sent from the camp to work in a munitions factory and finally to serve in the Lebensborn, which was Germany’s eugenics program.  While Alice works in the maternity ward, Lisette’s Aryan appearance attracts the attention of a cruel SS officer.

Against Their Will starts out strong, showing how even the most intelligent and independent of people can be forced to do things that go against their beliefs, whether as a result of brainwashing or just plain fear.  The scenes in the indoctrination camp and later in the munitions factory show how the Nazi government treated both people in both Germany and the occupied territories as cannon fodder in their war with the Allies.  Even during an air raid, Alice is ordered to continue working and, even though one mistake could lead to an explosion that would kill both them and several of their co-workers, Alice and Lisette are continually told to speed up when it comes to making the shells that will later be dropped on the Allies.

The film loses its way during the final third, largely because French girls — even ones from the German-influenced Alsace region of France — would never have been sent to the Lebensborn, which was meant to be exclusively for the breeding of “pure” Germans.  By suggesting otherwise, the film unintentionally downplays the nationalism and the racism at the heart of the Nazi ideology.  The film’s framing device — in which one of the women tells her story to her granddaughter — also feels a bit awkward and the film also makes a bit too much use of the stereotype of the good German, the one Nazi who is not quite as cruel as the others.

The first half of the film is a strong portrayal of life under an occupation, with both of the lead actresses giving good performances as two women who deal with their circumstances in very different ways.  It’s just a shame that the film’s conclusion doesn’t live up to what came before it.

Idaho Kid (1936, directed by Robert F. Hill)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

When the wife of rancher Clint Hollister (Earl Dwire) died in childbirth, Clint was so distraught that he rejected his son, Todd.  Todd was raised by a rival rancher, John Endicott (Lafe McKee).  Hollister resented Endicott for taking his son and a feud developed between the two families.  Hoping the end the feud, 15 year-old Todd ran away from home and made a new life for himself as a frontier scout named Idaho.

15 years later, Idaho (Rex Bell) returns home with his sidekick, a reformed outlaw known as The Kid (David Sharpe).  Neither Hollister nor Endicott recognize Idaho and, without revealing his identity, Idaho tries to stop their feud.  Hollister’s men want to keep the feud going and they manipulate Hollister into challenging his own son to a duel.

Idaho Kid is one of the better B-westerns that Rex Bell made between 1928 and 1936.  Though the film has its share of action scenes, Idaho Kid‘s intelligent script puts more emphasis on character development than most B-westerns, with Hollister especially being portrayed as a complex character as opposed to just a stock western villain.  Rex Bell always seemed authentic whenever he was riding a horse or shooting a gun.  Idaho Kid shows that he could also play more than just a standard western hero.

Though he was being pushed for stardom by Fox Film, Rex Bell voluntarily retired from the film industry in 1936 and instead pursued a career in politics.  He was the Lieutenant Governor of Nevada when he died of a heart attack in 1962.

 

Film Review: Hitler — Dead or Alive (dir by Nick Grinde)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1942 film, Hitler — Dead or Alive, opens with two reporters visiting a prominent industrialist named Samuel Thornton (Russell Hicks).  They are curious about a statue of three men that stands outside of Thornton’s mansion.  Thornton proceeds to tell them the story of the three men.

In 1939, shortly after the Nazis invaded Poland and with the United States still pursuing a policy of neutrality, Thornton independently offered a million dollars to anyone who could bring Adolf Hitler to justice, dead or alive.  Accepting the offer were three ex-cons who had just been released from Alcatraz, Steve Maschick (Ward Bond), Hans “The Dutch” Havermann (Warren Hymer), and Joe “The Book” Conway (Paul Fix).  (As you may have guessed “The Book” is the intellectual of the group and yes, he wears glasses.)  After Thornton makes clear to them that they’re going to have to make sure that they either capture or kill the real Hitler and not one of his many doubles, the three men join the Royal Canadian Air Force and, along with ace pilot Johnny Stevens (Bruce Edwards), they head for Germany.

Made for an obviously low-budget, this B-movie is a bit of a curiosity.  It starts out as a comedy, with the three cooks cracking jokes about going straight and a lengthy sequence in which they try to work up the courage to parachute into Germany.  Even after they get caught by the Gestapo and sent to a prison camp, much of the film is played for laughs.  It’s not until they escape from the prison and Johnny sacrifices his life while shooting it out with the Nazis that the film starts to take a more serious turn.  Steve, who starts out the film only caring about the money, comes to realize that there are more important things than just finding a quick payday.

Steve, Hans, and Joe end up at the mansion of Else von Brandt (Dorothy Tree), a secret member of the German resistance who is so trusted by the Nazis that Hitler himself (played by Bobby Watson) will be stopping by for a visit.  By this point, Steve explains that he no longer cares about the money.  As far as he’s concerned, he’s now working for free.  After learning about all of the people who have been killed by Hitler, Steve is determined to stop him, even if it means sacrificing his own life.

There are still moments of humor to the found in the latter half of the film.  When Steve, Hans, and Joe confront Hitler, one of the first things that they do is shave off his mustache.  But the film’s conclusion is ultimately a very serious one and features one particular act of violence that I imagine stunned audiences in 1942.  Having told the story of the three men and their mission to get Hitler, Samuel Thornton ends the film by saying that it doesn’t matter whether Germany is being led by Hitler or Hitler’s double.  What matters is eradicating all of the Nazis from the Earth.  In the end, the message of the film is a simple one.  It’s okay to laugh.  It’s okay to joke.  But, in the end, everyone must do their part.

Hitler — Dead or Alive was made for an obviously low-budget and there are a few scenes, especially in the beginning, where the pace feels a bit off.  Just as with Beast of Berlin, the film’s version of a German prison camp feels like it could have been lifted from a dozen American crime films.  But Ward Bond is a strong hero and he delivers his lines with conviction, especially when he discusses why nothing is more important than stopping Hitler.  He gets good support from both Paul Fix and Warren Hymer.  The film may start out as a comedy but it’s anti-Hitler message comes through loud and clear.  Seriously, how can you not appreciate a film about defeating the Nazis?