Continuing my quest to watch all these movies sitting in my DVR (so I can record more movies!), here are six more capsule reviews for you Dear Readers:
FIFTH AVENUE GIRL (RKO 1939; D: Gregory LaCava) – A minor but entertaining bit of screwball froth revolving around rich old Walter Connolly , who’s got problems galore: his wife (the criminally underrated Veree Teasdale) is cheating on him, his son (Tim Holt in a rare comedy role) is a polo-playing twit, his daughter (Kathryn Adams) in love with the socialism-spouting chauffer (James Ellison ), and his business is facing bankruptcy because of labor union troubles. On top of all that, no one remembers his birthday! The downcast Connolly wanders around Central Park, where he meets jobless, penniless, and practically homeless Ginger Rogers, and soon life on 5th Avenue gets turned upside-down! Ellison’s in rare form as the proletariat Marxist driver,
As the 1947 film, Roses Are Red, begins, Robert A. Thorne (Don Castle) has just been elected to the office of district attorney.
Now, being the horror fan that I am, the thing that I immediately noticed was that the new district attorney had the exact same name as the character played by Gregory Peck in The Omen. However, Roses Are Red has nothing to do with the son of Satan or the end of the world. Instead, it’s just a briskly paced tale of swapped identity.
Robert A. Thorne is not just a brilliant lawyer. He’s also an example of that rare breed, an honest politician. He ran on a platform of reform and that’s what he’s intending to pursue now that he’s been elected. As he tells his girlfriend, journalist Martha McCormick (Peggy Knudsen), cleaning up this country isn’t going to be easy but he’s determined to do it. And the first step is going to be taking down the local mob boss, Jim Locke (Edward Keane).
The wheelchair-bound Jim Locke is a man who prefers to stay in the safety of his penthouse, where he can feed his fish and give orders to his subordinates, all of whom have names like Duke (Charles McGraw), Knuckle (Jeff Chandler), Buster (Paul Guilfoyle), and Ace (Douglas Fowley). However, his man on the police force, Lt. Rocky Wall (Joe Sawyer), has warned him that this new district attorney might not respond to usual combination of bribes and intimidation. That’s not good news because there are men who might be willing to testify against Locke in return for a shorter prison sentence.
However, things start to look up when none other than Robert A. Thorne shows up at Locke’s penthouse and says that the honesty bit was all a sham and that he wants to be on Locke’s payroll. However, Locke soon figures out that he’s not talking to Thorne. Instead, he’s talking to Don Carney (also played by Don Castle), a career criminal who has recently been released from prison and who just happens to look exactly like Robert Thorne!
Locke and Don come up with a plan that seems foolproof. What if Knuckle kidnaps Thorne and holds him hostage for a few days? During that time, Don can study Thorne and learn how to perfectly imitate all of his movements and expressions. Once the two men are absolutely indistinguishable, Knuckle will murder Thorne and then Don will take his place.
Knuckle manages to kidnap Thorne with absolutely no trouble. The police, under the prodding of Lt. Wall, announce that Thorne has obviously run off to avoid dealing with the local gangsters. Don starts the process of studying Thorne but it turns out that the district attorney has a few tricks of his own….
With a running time of only 67 minutes, Roses are Red doesn’t waste any time jumping into its somewhat implausible plot. Fortunately, the film is so short and quickly paced that most viewers won’t really have time to worry about whether or not the film’s plot actually makes any sense. This is an entertaining, low-budget film noir, featuring a host of memorable performances and all of the hard-boiled dialogue that you could hope for. Don Castle does a good job playing both the sleazy Don Carney and the upright Robert A. Thorne. History nerds like me will immediately notice that, with his mustache and his slicked back hair, Castle bears a distinct resemblance to former Manhattan D.A. and two-time presidential candidate, Thomas E. Dewey.
All in all, Roses are Red is an enjoyable film for fans of old school gangster noir. Check it out below:
The iconic, bloodcurdling scream of little Sandy Descher heralds the arrival of THEM!, the first and best of the 50’s “Big Bug” atomic thrillers. Warner Brothers had one of their biggest hits of 1954 with this sci-fi shocker, putting it up there with Cukor’s A STAR IS BORN, Hitchcock’s DIAL M FOR MURDER, and Wellman’s THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY as their highest-grossing films of the year. Not bad company for director Gordon Douglas , previously known for his work with Our Gang and Laurel & Hardy! THEM! was also Oscar nominated that year for its special effects (and should’ve been for Bronislaw Kaper’s terrific score).
The movie begins with the look and feel of a noir mystery courtesy of DP Sidney Hickox’s (DARK PASSAGE, THE BIG SLEEP , WHITE HEAT) brooding shadows and sandstorm-battered landscape. New Mexico policemen Ben Peterson and Ed Blackburn come across a little girl wandering…
Why? Well, first off, we all know that February is the most romantic month of the year. February is Valentine’s Day, romantic movies, flowers, lingerie, and chocolate. February is also the month when, in a lead up to the Oscars, TCM devotes a good deal of its programming to showing Oscar nominees of the past.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, one of my dreams is to watch and review every single film that has ever been nominated for best picture. Now, realistically, I’ll never be able to accomplish this goal because the 1929 Best Picture nominee The Patriot is currently a lost film. But, even if it does mean that I’ll only be able to see 510 out of the 511 nominated films, it’s still a dream that I’m pursuing and, with the help of TCM and the month of February, it’s a dream that’ll come true.
Take, for instance, Battleground. This 1949 Best Picture nominee (it lost All The King’s Men) recently aired on TCM. I’m not exactly a fan of war films but, since it was a best picture nominee, I still made sure to DVR and watch it.
Set during the final days of World War II, Battleground follows one platoon of soldiers as they fight and attempt to survive the Battle of the Bulge. The platoon is made up of the type of characters that we usually expect to find in a WWII film but, fortunately, they’re played by an ensemble of likable actors who all bring their familiar characters to life. There’s Jim Layton (Marshall Thompson), the newest member of the platoon who nobody wants to run the risk of getting close to. There’s Holley (Van Johnson), the cheerful soldier who is unexpectedly thrust into a position of leadership that he might not be right for. Roderiques (Ricardo Montalban) is from Los Angeles and is amazed by the sight of snow. “Pops” Stazak (George Murphy) is the type of older soldier who you would totally expect to be nicknamed “Pops.” Bettis (Richard Jaeckel) is scared of combat. Kippton (Douglas Fowley) spends nearly the entire film looking for his lost teeth. And finally, of course, there’s the hard-boiled but warm-hearted Sgt. Kinnie (James Whitmore).
In some ways, Battleground is a very conventional film and it’s easy to wonder how it ended up getting nominated for best film of the year. (Among the eligible films that were not nominated: The Bicycle Thief, Champion, The Fountainhead, On The Town, Sands of Iwo Jima, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, They Live By Night, and White Heat.) However, the film’s nomination makes a bit more sense when you consider that it was released just four years after the end of World War II. It was a film that appealed both to the veterans who were able to relate to the film’s story and to the patriotic spirit of a country that had just defeated the greatest evil of the 20th Century.
Battleground did not exactly make me a fan of war movies but it’s still a well-made and effective film. As opposed to a lot of other war films, Battleground never makes war look like fun. For the most part, the emphasis is less on strategy and combat and more on the soldiers who are simply trying to survive from day-to-day. The end result is a film that serves as a moving tribute to the soldiers who fought in World War II.
During my sophomore year of college, I was acquainted with a bearded sociology major who would tell anyone that he met that he was a communist. He also insisted that he was a revolutionary in the tradition of Che Guevara though, for the most part, he never seemed to do much more than hang out in the lobby of Bruce Hall and yell at the top of his lungs. When he wasn’t attacking George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, he was busy quoting Karl Marx and telling people about how communism would fix all of America’s problems. He would also get very upset if you called him a socialist. “No,” he would say, “I’m a communist and I’m proud of it!”
I have to admit that I usually went out of my way to avoid him and I would cringe whenever I would hear him shouting my name and inviting me to come sit down next to him so he could attempt to give me my daily indoctrination while he stared at my breasts. I could never summon up much enthusiasm for his ideology or his idolization of Hugo Chavez. It all sounded rather dreary and boring to me.
I recently found myself thinking about those days in Bruce Hall lobby after I watched the 1952 anti-communist melodrama, Big Jim McLain.
Produced by and starring John Wayne, Big Jim McLain was made at the height of the red scare. Produced in full cooperation with the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, Big Jim McLain was meant to be an answer to all those weak-willed liberal types who claimed that the committee was going too far in its hunt for communist subversives.
Big Jim McLain starts out with a thunderstorm. While stock footage of lightning illuminates the screen, a medley of patriotic songs play on the soundtrack and a somber-voiced narrator quotes The Devil Vs. Daniel Webster.
Suddenly, the scene changes. We’re in Washington D.C. and we’re watching a meeting of the House Un-American Activities Committee. A shifty little man with a beard is being interrogated by the members of the committee. They ask him if he’s ever been a communist. He takes the fifth amendment. He’s asked if he would ever take up arms against the United States. Again, he pleads the fifth.
The camera pans back to reveal two remarkably tall men listening to the man’s testimony. They both share the same look of disgust, a look that leaves no doubt how they feel about this sleazy little subversive and his constitutional rights. They are Big Jim McLain (John Wayne) and his partner, Mal Baxter (James Arness) and they fight communists.
Suddenly, we hear the familiar sound of John Wayne’s determined drawl on the soundtrack and we realize that Big Jim McLain was using multiple voice-overs long before Terrence Malick even made his first film.
Wayne, speaking in character as Big Jim, explains that he and Mal have spent the last few months proving that the witness is a communist. And now, they have no choice but to watch as he hides behind the constitution. We’re told that this communist will be able to return to his position of teaching economics at an unnamed “north eastern college.”
That opening scene pretty much tells you everything that you need to know about the ideological outlook of Big Jim McLain. The government is looking out for our best interests, outsiders are dangerous, and good men know the importance of following orders.
HUAC sends Big Jim and Mal to “the territory of Hawaii,” where they hand out a lot of subpoenas, conduct a smattering of illegal wiretaps, and try to figure out who is actually in charge of the local communist party. Along the way, Big Jim meets and romances a naive secretary named Nancy (played by Nancy Olson). Nancy just happens to work for a communist doctor but we know that she’s okay because she’s the widow of a serviceman.
Big Jim McLain is a real curiosity piece, a true product of its time. Perhaps not surprisingly, the film really does feel like a time capsule. Full of simplistic characters and nonstop speech-making from John Wayne, it’s easy to laugh at and dismiss a film like this.
Then again, the main idea behind Big Jim McLain seems to be that the government is justified in doing anything to fight its enemies and that anyone who openly questions or disagrees our leaders most be either evil or mentally incompetent. Just how much has our culture changed since then? How different is anti-communist crusader Big Jim McLain from those who today continually assure us that we have nothing to fear from the NSA? One gets the feeling that if this film were made today, Big Jim would be hunting down Edward Snowden and directing drone strikes against America’s enemies.
Perhaps for obvious reasons, Big Jim McLain is a fairly obscure film. I first found out about it from reading J. Hoberman’s Army of Phantoms. Oddly enough, within a day or two of my reading about it, Big Jim McLain turned up on TCM. It’s not a very good film but, in the best exploitation tradition, it is a document of its time and therefore, worth seeing as a piece of history.
As for the communist of Bruce Hall, he ended up dropping out at the end of the semester and, apparently, he later turned up in New York doing the whole Occupy Wall Street thing. I’ve been told that he was recently spotted in Austin, still wearing his Che Guevara t-shirt.
One thing’s for sure.
Big Jim McLain would have taken him out with one solidly placed right hook.
Through the Shattered Lens 