1955 - STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND, the shame of James Stewart and Anthony Mann

The actor James Stewart was a patriotic guy, so the chance to pay tribute to the United States Air Force's Strategic Air Command must have been irresistible. The director of Strategic Air Command, Anthony Mann should have known better.

This is a 1950's feature length recruiting film for the Air Force. What you get here are over 2 hours of watching bombers with hydrogen bombs in them flying around the world. The idea of the United States Air Force in the 1950's was to keep a permanent fleet of flying bombers loaded with atomic weapons in the air at all times in case we went to war with someone, i.e. Russia or "the other guy" as they are referred to in this film.

 
This movie is so loaded to appeal to the Republican conservative base, you could probably dust it off and run it at a Tea Party rally.   James Stewart plays a star baseball player called back to duty to serve in the Strategic Air Command thus giving up a lucrative career as a baseball star.   Along with Stewart is his whiny virginal wife June Allyson who is such a pain in the ass it's a puzzlement how they ever got together in the first place.


June Allyson is such a sexless actor that when she announces she's pregnant, it's kind of a wonder how that exactly how that would have happened. Later in the movie when she is 9 months pregnant she still looks like a virgin. Anyway June's role in the film is to complain about Stewart being back in the Air Force or squeeze oranges for his fresh orange juice.  She just doesn't get that he is flying around saving the United States from godless Communism.  After a while you start hoping someone will drop an A bomb on her to end her constant bitching.
In fact the entire film is pitched around the premise that people who don't willingly give up their nice civilian careers and join the United States Air Force to fly around in planes with atomic weapons in them are unpatriotic ingrates.


This was the final film collaboration between Anthony Mann and James Stewart. It's amazing that the liberal Mann and the conservative Stewart stayed together as long as they did. I would certainly rate their film collaborations higher than that of Hitchcock and Stewart. It's regrettable that this film with was a piece of right wing propaganda.

Stewart and Mann were scheduled to film one more western together called Night Passage. Stewart was to play a railroad agent/detective. Stewart decided that he wanted the character to be an accordion playing railroad agent/detective. Anthony Mann finally had enough and ended their working relationship.

So what do you get out of watching Strategic Air Command?  Well they filmed it in Vista Vision so the aerial shots of the big bombers still look pretty cool even on my TV screen. The only reason to even watch this is to see the B-36 which is one big mother of a bomber, it must have looked pretty cool on the big screen. Anthony Mann's professionalism as a filmmaker pretty much keeps this movie from hitting rock bottom.

 

It's a little unfair to rip on Stewart too much for this movie. Compared to me he was an actual military hero. He took part in the United States Air Force's worst raid into Germany during World War II which resulted in the deaths of 650 Air Force personnel, a major screw up. The guy certainly put his money where his mouth was unlike a lot of Hollywood stars during World War II.  It's just unfortunate Stewart associated himself with this piece of junk.


He does look good in a uniform since he actually knew how to wear one.

112 patriotic minutes.

1946 - DRESSED TO KILL, Basil Rathbone IS Sherlock Holmes Nigel Bruce IS Dr. Watson

The final final film in the amazing 14 film series (made in 7 years) of Sherlock Holmes films filmed during the 1940's.  These films were mostly set during World War II with Holmes fighting the Nazi's or some bizarre modern day master criminal.

We saw this at our local revival theater which also ran the last chapter of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, which was pretty lame although watching those guys fly around in their phallic spaceships is clearly a sight to see. 

In Dressed to Kill, after Dr. Watson's friend "Stinky" is killed.  Sherlock Holmes must figure out the secret to three music boxes which will lead him to some stolen treasury plates some counterfeiters are after. The mystery is a little obvious and Holmes makes some pretty big leaps of deduction during the film but this is a good little 76 minute time killer.

If Rathbone and Bruce may not have exactly been like the characters in the Conan Doyle books they are still very good as these classic characters. Dressed to Kill is your basic old movie mystery with clues dished out along the way and the detective puzzling the whole thing out.  In many ways it's more entertaining than that Robert Downey ADD mess of a film. 

Apparently 14 films was finally enough for Basil Rathbone although Nigel Bruce wanted to continue the series.  Research into this film revealed that Rathbone and Bruce also starred in a 200 episode radio series The New Adventures of Sherlock Homes that also ran between 1939 and 1946. 

Pretty incredible stuff.

2009 - L'ENFER D'HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT, unfinished film about jealousy features blue lipstick and a slinky.

L'Enfer is a French documentary about the making and abandoning of Henri Georges Clouzot's 1964 film L'Enfer a film about a marriage that is destroyed by jealousy. L'Enfer falls into the category of "what might have been." This category includes films like Orson Welles's Don Quixote and The Other Side of the Wind, a Howard Hawks World War 2 propaganda film that was abandoned after about a week of shooting and Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Actually when you get right down to it just about any Orson Welles film after Chimes at Midnight is an unfinished film and there are a lot of them in his case.

Clouzot was considered an extremely important international director by the early 1960's. He had the reputation as the French Hitchcock although you could make the argument that Hitchcock was much more influenced by Clouzot than Clouzot ever was influenced by Hitchcock. About the only place Clouzot didn't get any love was from the French New Wave critics led by Truffaut and Goddard. They had always felt that his his style was to rigid and formalistic compared to their anything goes way of film making. This seemed to be a strange criticism to me as they all worshiped Hitchcock who was if anything just as meticulous in his film making technique as Clouzot. Determined to prove them wrong and working with almost unlimited budget Clouzot started what was to be his major artistic statement.

After carefully preparing his story with detailed sketches and storyboards, Clouzot hired some of the best French technicians behind the camera and most importantly in front of the camera, the actress Romy Schneider. Clouzot than took his actors and film crew into the studio to shoot a series of elaborate lighting, camera and makeup effects
.

Clearly Clouzot was infatuated with Romy Schneider, posing her in odd lighting combinations and trying out elaborate makeup effects, these tests apparently went on for weeks. How was he going to work this into his film?

After weeks of these preparations, Clouzot and crew went on location at a lake resort in France for four weeks of shooting before returning to the studio. Apparently everything started to fall to pieces. Filming was expected to go quickly and the necessity of wrapping up the location work was hastened because the lake was emptied every year to power a hydroelectric dam downstream.

Clouzot's visual scheme was to do a Wizard of Oz type of thing, filming the story of the husband's jealousy of his wife in black and white while intercutting it with fantasies or hallucinations of her in a type of erotic color combination.

On location Clouzot became obsessed with every part of the film making process. He supervised every detail of the crew's set preparations, he endlessly shot take after take, throwing out his careful schedule. Always a demanding director especially when it came to working with his actors, he pissed off his lead actor Serge Reggiani who called him a "nutcase" and ended up walking off of the set. Clouzot attempted to keep the film going while recasting the role of the husband. The whole mess finally came to an end when Clouzot suffered a heart attack while filming on the lake.

So would L'Enfer have been any good? I have no idea. Certainly the color tests and the striking treatment of Romy Schneider are extremely interesting to look at. The black and white footage shot on location is actually very stunning as is the lake resort setting. It seems to me that the actual story appears to be rather melodramatic and trite. Could this have explained Clouzot's odd behavior on location? When he started the actual filming of the picture did he see some weaknesses in the story that caused him to doubt himself? Could Clouzot have pulled it off? All that survives of this film are these very entertaining and bizarre color tests of Romy Schneider along with some interesting on location photography. And just exactly what in the hell was Clouzot going to do with that slinky

1974 - TRUCK TURNER, incredibly entertaining exploitation film

Musician Isaac Hayes is bounty hunter Truck Turner who is caught in the middle of a pimp war in LA.

This low budget film is  incredibly well directed by Jonathan Kaplan who mixes humor with lots of gun play and action.  Hayes would never be confused for Laurence Olivier, but he has a commanding presence and it's fun to see him beat the crap out of white racists.  Hayes also has a real big gun. 

The actor Yaphet Kotto, is in the film as a pimp trying to kill Truck Turner, and his performance is  intense.  Apparently nobody told him he was in a film about black pimps shooting it out all over Los Angeles.  Kotto has an excellent death scene in a hospital shootout which is definitely a highlight of the film.

Critics have noted that the hospital shootout clearly influenced John Woo's hospital shootout in Hard Boiled.  

Truck Turner is an outstanding example of very talented people working on a small budget in a somewhat disreputable genre and succeeding in making a very good film.

91 minutes.

1973 - SOYLENT GREEN is people yeah ok

Soylent Green is one of those fondly remembered science fiction films from the 1970's that is thought better of than it actually is as a film.  Charlton Heston is the cop in the future investigating a mysterious murder of a corporate executive who is involved in the manufacturing a popular food source called soylent green.

Heston plays his usual stoic character as a rather unlikable guy.  Contrary to popular belief Heston wasn't afraid to play unlikable characters and his police detective of the future is actually pretty corrupt.  In his final role, Heston's research assistant is played by Edward G Robinson.  Robinson and Heston actually have pretty good chemistry together in this film.  It's probably even better chemistry than Heston has with his leading lady.

The director Richard Fleischer was always a competent technician for the most part.  Fleischer was pretty much a traffic cop when it came to making films.  He worked a lot of years at Twentieth Century Fox handling some of their big projects like Tora Tora Tora,  Dr. Doolittle and Che.  He directed Disney's big fantasy film 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.  Name a genre and this guy probably worked in it.

Soylent Green is from the period of film history when science fiction films were considered to be a second class genre to work in.  With the exception of 2001: A Space Odyssey,  nobody thought very highly of these films.  Soylent Green is about overcrowding and ecological disaster but nobody making this film was going to be doing a real serious film on these subjects.  This film was mostly a detective thriller with a science fiction setting that was put together by old style Hollywood actors and technicians.

Probably the most interesting things on the DVD are the special features.   The short "making of" documentary shot during the filming shows a production shot on the backlot of MGM.  It's a good example of conventional early 1970's film making.  The other special feature is a tribute to Edward G Robinson that Heston hosted during the filming of Soylent Green.   This was Robinson's 101 and last feature film, he was apparently a very sick man during the filming and died shortly after he completed his part.  Heston seems very sincere emceeing the tribute to Robinson and Robinson himself seems genuinely moved during what is probably a staged publicity event for the making of the film.  

As a film Soylent Green is OK if no great shakes as a science fiction story.  Soylent Green now looks like an interesting relic made by people in the 1970's trying to imagine what an ecological disaster would look like in the 21st century.  That's probably the most interesting thing about the film.  Not the actual film itself.

97 minutes, written by  Stanley R. Greenberg.

1961 - GOLD OF THE SEVEN SAINTS, modest western, nice photography, decent script

Howard Hawks was supposed to follow up Rio Bravo with this film, he supervised the script which was written by one of his favorite writers Leigh Brackett.  Hawks apparently lost interest in the project and wanted to film  Hatari instead.  Warner Brothers didn't want to make Hatari, Hawks left, and Warners filmed Gold Of The Seven Saints with one of their studio directors Gordon Douglas and two of their TV actors Clint Walker and Roger Moore.

Gold of the Seven Saints is nothing special for the most part.  The story was filmed on location in and around Monument Valley,  Arizona, the photographer Joe Biroc did a nice job with the black and white Cinemascope image.  Monument Valley looks like the desert hell hole it probably is. 

Gold Of The Seven Saints is about two trappers who strike it rich  and are then chased throughout the desert by various groups who want their gold.  The story is laid out in a way that has a certain precision and logic to it. The acting is not to bad.   Clint Walker looks like a trapper.   Roger Moore has some sort of bizarre Irish accent and for a pretty boy he does pretty well with his part as well.

It's hard to know why Howard Hawks lost interest in this project.  Hawks could usually take material like this an redeem ii by adding humor to the story and getting good performances out of the actors.  Maybe Hawks didn't think the story was special enough to warrant his involvement.

A quick ninety minutes for people who enjoy westerns.  You could do a lot worse than Gold Of The Seven Saints but you could really do a lot better.

1955 - THE PHENIX CITY STORY, trying not to overpraise this very entertaining film

The Phenix City Story, is supposedly based on a true story.  It's about a town controlled by organized crime.  The director of this film is Phil Karlson.  Karlson will never be confused with Stanley Kubrick that's for sure.  He was the mastermind behind a couple of the Dean Martin Matt Helm films, and the original Walking Tall.

Subtlety was not exactly his metier.  Karlson took this story and kept it moving at top speed with enough action and nasty violence for a 1950's film that even got my jaded attention.

For what is basically a cheap 50's B movie, Karlson had the inspired idea to shoot the  film on location in Phenix City, Alabama, using the local yokels in small speaking parts.  It really added to the authenticity of the film.

 

There is an extremely strange 15 minute news documentary short at the beginning of the film.   A newsman wanders around the town interviewing the local citizens about crime in the city.  Clearly the idea was to bring some sort of gravitas to the film but don't kid yourself this is basically an action packed and very enjoyable pulpy film.

1946 - CANYON PASSAGE making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, part 2.

The previous post on Wichita, looked at the director Jacques Tourneur's attempt to take a minor western film and bring some visual flair to it with somewhat disappointing results.

Canyon Passage was Tourneur's first shot at a western and his first color film.   Tourneur was very lucky to be associated with two talented individuals, the producer Walter Wanger and the writer Ernest Haycox.  The differences in these two western films are pretty amazing.

Walter Wanger was an independent producer who was known for making quality films without being associated with any particular studio.  Wanger would prepare a script, assemble the production team, hire the director and most importantly leave everyone alone to make the film.   Wanger worked with some pretty strong willed directors like Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and Fritz Lang.

The author of Canyon Passage was Ernest Haycox, he was a quality writer of westerns and is mostly remembered as the guy who wrote the story for Stagecoach.  With support like that behind the camera, Jacques Tourneur couldn't miss with this western.

Tourneur brought his amazing visual sense to this film using color and composition.  Tourneur is now known as a director who knew how to achieve interesting 3D depth of field effects by placing props in certain parts of the camera frame.  Canyon Passage has many examples of this.  The scene below with Dana Andrews and Ward Bond has a bottle carefully placed in the frame.  Attention is also given to lighting the set and the actors, it does create an interesting look. 

A very good high quality western,  Canyon Passage has lots of beautiful on location filming, the film also has the legendary composer/performer Hoagy Carmichael in a small role.  Carmichael's actually pretty good and he sings "Ole Buttermilk Sky."

1925-MGM STUDIO TOUR, Hollywood's home movies

Somebody got the bright idea to film a home movie about the back lot of MGM studios.  This thirty minute silent film frequently airs on TCM when they have a half an hour of time to fill before the next movie.  It's fascinating.

The viewer really gets an amazing view of how a major Hollywood studio created films.  Each department at MGM had a fully staffed group of technicians from carpenters to musicians to production managers to you name it.  The department heads stand in front of the camera and smile for the cameraman they look very uncomfortable getting their picture taken.  It's like watching an amateur home movie photographed by your parents.

MGM even had their own power substation on the lot, pretty incredible.  MGM was known as the movie factory, they were a well oiled machine in many ways.  They were able to take a story create a budget and marshal the resources of the studio to bring it to the screen.

A lot of the success of MGM could be contributed to one man,  the legendary Hollywood big wig Louis B. Mayer.  There are many stories about Mayer's iron handed rule of the studio but there is no question he built a pretty remarkable organization. 

Seeing something like this really makes the Cahiers du cinema's auteur theory look like a total joke.  The real auteurs of Hollywood films were the various studio department heads who were responsible for the look and quality of a film.  This was particularly true at MGM.

As I watched the contract directors posing for the camera, I realized that most of them ended up leaving the studio.  MGM in particular was not a director friendly studio.  You did not express your personal vision at MGM.

MGM was in the business of pumping out pictures for the public.  It had to keep the product flowing to their chain of theaters.  It also maintained a certain level of technical quality which gave their films a certain glossy look.  They may not have always made the greatest films and they certainly produced plenty of crap but the films always looked good. 

About 30 minutes.  

1955 - WICHITA, trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear part 1

The director Jacques Tourneur was a master filmmaker for a while in the 1940's.  He made a series of classic film noir and horror films where he demonstrated his ability to create mood and very interesting visual effects with editing and lighting.  By the 1950's Tourneur was no longer getting the good scripts.

Wichita was the definition of a 1950's B movie western.  The star Joel McCrea was pretty much past his prime, the script was a bunch of western cliches and the producer was the legendary cheapskate Walter Mirisch.  Mirsch was good at making something out of next to nothing budget films and he gradually worked his way up to A class productions working with directors like Billy Wilder and John Sturges. Walter Mirsch even won an Academy Award for In The Heat Of The Night.

As cheap as the budget was for Wichita, Walter Mirsch gave Jacques Tourneur the money to shoot the film in Cinemascope.  Tourneur was able to get some pretty interesting visual effects in some scenes.  He particularly seemed to understand the way to compose for the horizontal nature of the frame.

The problem with Wichita is it's basic mediocrity as a western and a film.  Joel McCrea is barely going through the motions playing Wyatt Earp and there is a certain seen it all before quality to this film that even Tourneur couldn't bring to life with all of his visual skill. 

Jacques Tourneur eventually ended up working in TV, where he directed episodes of Bonanza and The Twilight Zone.

The producer Walter Mirsch ended his career with Midway.  Mirsch took footage from old World War II newsreels, Tora Tora Tora, The Battle of Britain and some old Toho war films to produce a very poor film about the Battle of Midway.

 81 minutes, written by Daniel B. Ullman.

1976 - MURDER BY DEATH, probably about as funny as Neil Simon gets.

An old school Hollywood all star cast does a great job with Neil Simon's lame spoof of film detectives.  If you ever needed a demonstration of the art of comedy timing, this movie's one joke premise which is full of silly one liners and ridiculous situations is raised from the dead by this amazing cast of comedy pros.  

The director Robert Moore was not a guy who was known as a film stylist, but he must have been pretty good at keeping this set under control considering the number of actors with big egos that he  had to endure.  It's also important not to forget another big ego on Murder by Death,  the writer Neil Simon.

At this point in his career, Neil Simon had a formidable if undeserved reputation as one of the funniest guys in the theater or Hollywood.  This reputation was primarily earned on the basis of his hit play The Odd Couple, something he constantly rewrote in one form or another throughout his career.  Simon had a clause in his film contract that not one word of his scripts could be changed by anyone.  Neil Simon finally petered out around 1998 with The Odd Couple II which was supposedly pretty bad. 

This is the movie where Alec Guinness received the script for the first Star Wars film during the filming of Murder By Death.  Guinness had never done a science fiction/fantasy film before and he was persuaded by Robert Moore to sign on to that film.  The rest as they say is film history.

 

Murder by Death is a really good example of talented actors literally carrying a barely funny script and making an entertaining movie out of it.

The running time,  94 minutes.

2009 - OBSERVE AND REPORT, a comedy about the Sarah Palin crowd

Nasty but pretty funny comedy from the writer/director Jonah Hill.

Seth Rogen plays a security guard at a crappy shopping mall who dreams of someday becoming a police officer.  The problem is that he is a bi-polar psychotic nutcase who decides to go off his meds.

Observe and Report is extremely good at capturing that segment of the population that seems to be in the news most of the time these days.  It's that group that sees the American Dream passing them by. The basically stupid and ill informed Palin/Tea Party crowd that can't see past their myopic vision of the Christian way of life.

Observe and Report captures the lives of these disenfranchised nut jobs better than any You Tube video ever could.  This film has a great feeling for it's tacky shopping center setting with the crappy mall kiosks and shitty food courts that take up rental space.  The actors do a great job creating characters that sane(?) people don't want to think even exist about much less go anywhere near. 

Probably as close as you are going to get for political satire in film these days.  Not a comforting film, but a very funny one.