Tag Archives: Michael McGreevey

I Watched The Strongest Man In The World (1975, Dir. by Vincent McEveety)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

Dexter Riley (Kurt Russell) is back, again!  He still hasn’t graduated from Medfield College and Medfield is still on the verge of going broke.  Dean Higgins (Joe Flynn) discovers that the reason Medfield can never get out of the red is because the science class and students like Dexter are spending so much money on their experiments.  The Dean fires the science professor and threatens to expel Dexter!  But when Dexter’s latest experiment develops a type of milk that gives the drinker super strength, the Dean might have to change his mind.

A cereal company wants to buy the supermilk, which would get Medfield out of the hole.  But a rival cereal company just wants to steal the formula for the milk so they hire disgraced businessman and gangster A.J. Arno (Cesar Romero) to once again try to thwart the best laid plans of Medfield College.  Meanwhile, Dexter competes in a contest to prove that the supermilk has truly made him into the strongest man in the world.

The plot of the last Dexter Riley movie somehow manages to be even dumber than the first two and it was high time for Dexter to graduate and get on with his life but The Strongest Man In The World did make me laugh a few times.  Because this entry in the series involved super strength instead of invisibility or merging with a computer, it allowed for more physical comedy and it felt less dates than the other two movies.  The action is pretty much nonstop, as Dexter gets into one scrape after another and the cast is likable even if they all were getting a little old to still be playing college students.  Like the other Dexter Riley films, The Strongest Man In The World is too innocent and good-natured not to enjoy on some level.

I guess Dexter finally graduated after this movie.  Both he and Kurt Russell went on to better things.

I Watched Now You See Him, Now You Don’t (1972, Dir. by Robert Butler)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

Dexter Riley (Kurt Russell) is back and just in time because Medfield College is on the verge of getting closed down again.

In The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, buying a computer was supposed to be the solution to all of Medfield’s financial problems.  I guess it didn’t work because Medfield is broke again and corrupt businessman A.J. Arnoe (Cesar Romero) is planning on canceling the school’s mortgage so that he can turn it into a casino.

There is some hope.  Dexter has accidentally created an invisibility spray.  Not only does it tun anything that it touches invisible but it also washes away with water so there’s no risk of disappearing forever.  Dexter and his friend Schuyler (Michael McGreevey) know that they can win the science fair with their invention but the science fair doesn’t want to allow small schools like Medfield to compete unless they really have something big to offer.  Dexter tells the Dean (Joe Flynn) that he has a sure winner but Dexter also refuses to reveal what it is because he doesn’t want word to leak before for the science fair.  The Dean decides to raise the money to pay off the mortgage by becoming a golfer, as one does.  Schulyer works as the Dean’s caddy while Dexter uses the invisibility spray to help the Dean cheat.  That’s a good message for a young audience, Disney!  But when Arno finds out about the spray, he wants to steal it so he can rob a bank.

This was even dumber than The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes but it was also hard to dislike it.  The comedy was too gentle, Kurt Russell and the rest of the cast were too likable, and the special effects were too amusingly cheap in that retro Disney way for it to matter that the movie didn’t make any sense.  When a bunch of college kids learn the secret of invisibility and use it to cheat at golf, you know you’re watching a Disney film.

I Watched The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969, Dir. by Robert Butler)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

Medfield College has a problem.  No one takes the college seriously.  Maybe if the college could win the big college quiz show, people would finally stop laughing at Medfield but the students are not academically talented.  Professor Quigley (William Schallert) thinks that the college needs to finally buy a new-fangled device called a computer.  The Dean (Joe Flynn) says that there’s no way any college can afford something as expensive as that!  Luckily, businessman and gangster A.J. Arno (Cesar Romero) is willing to donate one of his computers.  It takes several students to move the computer into the lab because the computer is huge.

Medfield finally has a computer but are the students smart enough to win that quiz show?  Popular jock Dexter Riley (Kurt Russell) happens to be in the lab during a freak thunderstorm.  When both he and the computer get struck by lightning at the same time, it leads to Dexter becoming a human computer.  He suddenly knows everything.  He can speak any language and solve any equation.  He can answer any question/  Whenever anyone shines a light into Dexter’s ear, they see circuit boards.  No one really cares that none of this makes sense.  Medfield is going to win that quiz show for sure!  But first, Dexter is going to have to escape from Arno, who fears Dexter now knows all the details about his gambling ring.

Watching this Disney film was a real eye-opener for me.  Computers are such a part of my everyday life that it was strange seeing a college making such a big deal about getting one.  The computer that Medfield got looked more like the type of computer that NASA used to go to the moon than the ones that were in my high school computer lab.  I was worried that no one seemed to care that Dexter had a circuit board in his head.  Not even Dexter seemed to care.  It was also funny to me that all he had to do was get struck by lightning while standing near a computer and suddenly, he knew how to speak every language and solve every problem.  I use a computer everyday and I can still only speak English and Spanish.  I feel like I’m getting cheated.

The whole movie was absolutely ludicrous but I did enjoy watching this movie.  It was too sweet, innocent, and good-natured not to enjoy.  There was nothing realistic about the movie but it was nice to imagine a world where everyone gets along, the bad guys are all too buffoonish to really be dangerous, and a serious knock on the head leads to thing returning to normal instead of permanent brain damage.  Kurt Russell was only 18 when he made The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes but he could already carry a movie.

Retro Television Review: If Tomorrow Comes (dir by George McCowan)

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 1971’s If Tomorrow Comes!  It  can be viewed on YouTube.

If Tomorrow Comes tells the story of a forbidden marriage.

In 1941, Eileen Phillips (Patty Duke) meets David Tayanaka (Frank Liu) and the two of them quickly fall in love.  David asks Eileen to marry him and Eileen says yes, even though they both know that it won’t be easy.  Eileen’s father (James Whitmore) and her brother, Harlan (Michael McGreevey), are both prejudiced against the Japanese and David’s parents (played by Mako and Buelah Quo) would both rather than David marry someone of Japanese descent.  Eileen and David decide to elope first and tell their parents afterwards.

On December 7th, Eileen sneaks out of the house and joins David at his church.  They are married by Father Miller (John McLiam), who agrees to keep their secret.  Eileen and David then drive over to the church attended by Eileen’s family but no sooner have they arrived than the local sheriff (Pat Hingle) pulls up and announces that the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor.  The sheriff instructs everyone to return home and to listen to their radios.  David slips his wedding ring off his finger.  Telling the parents will have to wait.

Eileen’s father and brother are convinced that every Japanese person in town, even though the majority of them were born in America and have never even been to Japan, is a subversive.  David and his family are harassed by government agents like the oily Coslow (Bert Remsen).  One morning, they discover that all of their farm animals have been killed and someone has written “REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR” with their blood.  When Franklin D. Roosevelt orders the internment of the Japanese, David’s father is among those taken away.  When Harlan continues to harass David, it eventually leads to not just one but two tragedies.

If Tomorrow Comes is a real tear-jerker, one that features a great performance from Frank Liu and a good one from Patty Duke.  Though it may seem a tad implausible that David and Eileen would get married just an hour before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor (and considering the attack occurred on a Sunday morning, I’m a little curious how they found a priest who was free to secretly marry them), the film does a good job of showing how fear can lead to otherwise good people doing terrible things.  One of the film’s strongest moments comes as David’s father is taken away to an internment camp and the Japanese prisoners try to prove their loyalty by spontaneously singing America, The Beautiful.  It’s a moment that reminds us of the danger of letting our fear destroy our humanity.

It’s a film that still feels relevant today, with its portrayal of heavy-handed government agents searching for subversives and ignoring the Constitution in order to save it.  When David visited his father at the internment camp, I thought about how, at the heigh of the COVID pandemic, it was not unusual to see people demanding that the unmasked and the unvaccinated by interned away from the rest of the world.  If Tomorrow Comes is a love story and a melodrama and tear-jerker but, above all else, it’s a warning about the destructive power of fear and prejudice.

A Movie A Day #244: Death of a Gunfighter (1969, directed by Allen Smithee)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

At the turn of the 20th century, the mayor and the business community of Cottonwood Springs, Texas are determined to bring their small town into the modern era.  The Mayor (Larry Gates) has even purchased one of those newfangled automobiles that have been taking the country by storm.  However, the marshal of Cottonwood Spings, Frank Patch (Richard Widmark), is considered to be an embarrassing relic of the past.  Patch has served as marshal for 20 years but now, his old west style of justice is seen as being detrimental to the town’s development.  When Patch shoots a drunk in self-defense, the town leaders use it as an excuse to demand Patch’s resignation.  When Patch refuses to quit and points out that he knows all of the secrets of what everyone did before they became respectable, the business community responds by bringing in their own gunfighters to kill the old marshal.

Death of a Gunfighter is historically significant because it was the very first film to ever be credited to Allen Smithee.  The movie was actually started by TV director Robert Totten and, after Widmark demanded that Totten be fired, completed by the legendary Don Siegel.  Since Totten worked for 25 days on the film while Siegel was only on set for 9, Siegel refused to take credit for the film.  When Widmark protested against Totten receiving credit, the Director’s Guild of America compromised by allowing the film to be credited to the fictitious Allen Smithee.

In the years after the release of Death of a Gunfighter, the Allen (or, more often, Alan) Smithee name would be used for films on which the director felt that he had not been allowed to exercise creative control over the final product.  The Smithee credit became associated with bad films like The O.J. Simpson Story and Let’s Get Harry which makes it ironic that Death of a Gunfighter is not bad at all.  It’s an elegiac and intelligent film about the death of the old west and the coming of the modern era.  It also features not only one of Richard Widmark’s best performances but an interracial love story between the marshal and a brothel madame played by Lena Horne.  The supporting cast is full of familiar western actors, with Royal Dano, Harry Carey, Jr., Larry Gates, Dub Taylor, and Kent Smith all making an impression.  Even the great John Saxon has a small role.  Though it may be best known for its “director,” Death of a Gunfighter is a film that will be enjoyed by any good western fan.