1984 - THE MASKS OF DEATH, an original Sherlock Holmes story

 A real old time actors film if ever there was one.  Peter Cushing in his 70's plays Sherlock Holmes for the last time.  He had played Holmes in Hammer's good version of The Hound of the Baskervilles and in a TV series.  British actor John Mills was Dr. Watson.  Mills was I believe 76 years old when this was filmed.  The rest of the cast is virtually a list of old guy British actors, Ray Milland, Gordon Jackson, Anton Diffring and somewhat incongruously American actress Anne Baxter in the role of Irene Adler.

The plot has Holmes and Watson called out of retirement to find a missing German prince.  But what you really have in this film is a couple of very good veteran actors showing how it's done when it comes to performing.  The film was directed by another old veteran Roy Ward Baker whose career started in 1947 and lasted until 1984.  Cushing had worked with Baker at Hammer so they probably got along very well.

 

The Masks of Death is Cushing's last major role before his retirement. He did some minor work after that but his health had started to decline.  Peter Cushing certainly had an interesting career.  His work at Hammer studios left an indelible mark on the studio and he found a whole new fame as Grand Moff Tarkin when George Lucas cleverly cast him in Star Wars.  A remarkable career.

 

The film was written by Anthony  Hinds and N. J. Crisp.  The running time is 78 minutes.

1943 - MY FAVORITE BLONDE, amusing Bob Hope comedy

Along with being one of Paramount's top comedy stars of the 1940's, Bob Hope had an equally successful career as a radio personality.  While on the radio show he apparently rhapsodized about classy and glamorous English actress Madeleine Carroll week after week. Sort of a pretend infatuation I guess.  Well maybe?

Someone got the bright idea to put Carroll and Hope together in a comedy.  The end result was one of Paramount's most successful films when it released.  Surprisingly Hope's comedic persona played off extremely well with the elegant Carroll.

 

The 1940's is kind of Bob Hope at the peak his career.  His comedic timing is so good that he can even play off scenes with a penguin and still get the laughs.  Madeleine Carroll is usually considered the first of Alfred Hitchcock's "cool blonde actresses."  She personified his idea of the sexy heroine.  The surprise in this film is that she is also very funny.

 

The plot which has British secret agent Carroll fighting off a German spy cell with the help of Bob Hope playing a vaudeville performer whose partner  just happens to be a penguin.  This is just an excuse to watch these two performers deliver the comedic goods.  The film isn't rolling down bust your gut funny but it is amusing.  Frankly they could have used more scenes with Hope and the penguin.

The film had comedy writers who were associated with Bob Hope on and off throughout his career, Don Hartman, Frank Butler, Melvin Frank and Norman Panama.  The running time is 78 minutes.

1938 - THE BIG BROADCAST OF 1938, or what passes for entertainment in 1938

 Even at 90 minutes this film was a chore to sit through.  Paramount had done a few of these "Big Broadcast" films where they mixed radio personalities with their contract players.  They usually had to stick some kind of a plot in these films, in this case it's a race between two ocean liners, The S.S. Colossal and the S.S. Gigantic.

W. C. Fields gets top billing in the cast, this was Fields last picture for Paramount.  Apparently Fields was somewhat of a challenge to work with on this film.  There are a number of what I would call strange acts in this film.  Shep Fields and his Rippling Rhythm Orchestra.  Metropolitan Opera Singer Kristen Flagstad belting out Brunnhilde’s Battle Cry.  The grating Martha Raye performing "Mama, That Moon is Here Again." Probably the best song is "Thanks for the Memory" sung by Bob Hope and Shirley Ross.  In fact this was Bob Hope's first appearance on film I believe,  he has that easy going charm and humor that carried him through a long career.

 

The finale of this film features a supposedly big production number called “The Waltz Lives On," which isn't much of a big production number.  Really in the 1930's only Warner Brother's studios and Busby Berkley could pull something like this off.  The number comes off as second rate, in fact the whole movie is sort of second rate.

 

The film was written by a whole lot of writers, never a good sign,  Frederick Hazlitt Brennan, Russel Crouse, Walter DeLeon, Ken Englund, Howard Lindsay and Francis Martin.  

The running time is 91 minutes. 

1994 - PULP FICTION, still very entertaining

I probably haven't seen since Pulp Fiction since it was first released around Christmas time in 1994.  That was back when after spending the Holidays with your family you were desperate to get away from them for a couple of hours by running out to a movie.

Pulp Fiction was Tarantino's follow up to Reservoir Dogs a film which got him attention from the critics and the audience.  Pulp Fiction really cemented his reputation as the preeminent maker of cool guy films.  In spite of a few slow moments the film still holds up and is still incredibly entertaining.

Tarantino put together an impressive cast anyway you cut it.  Samuel Jackson is great as the philosophy spouting killer.  John Travolta's career was revitalized with this film.  Uma Thurman went on to work with Tarantino in Kill Bill Vol's 1 & 2.  Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken, Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer all contribute amusing bits to this film.  It's kind of like the actors sensed they had good roles for a change and really ran with the parts when they showed up in film.

 

The film had a unique structure like chapters in a book,  Tarantino boldly jumped back and forth in time something audiences never really saw in a mainstream film. I enjoyed revisiting this film again.

 

The running time is 154 minutes, the screenplay was by Tarantino with a story assist from Roger Avery.

1953 - GIVE A GIRL A BREAK, a forgotten MGM musical

One of the masters of the Hollywood musical Stanley Donen directed this basically forgotten musical.  There were apparently a lot of behind the scenes production issues and the generous budget MGM allowed for the film didn't really translate to any kind of commercial success.

The film was loaded with talent in front and behind the camera.  Donen had co-directed Singing in the Rain and On The Town with Gene Kelly, Bob Fosse was in the cast an excellent dancer at this point in his career.  Marge and Gower Champion were a talented dance team.  Debbie Reynolds was certainly a very hard working performer in the traditional sense of the movie business.

Behind the scenes was the cameraman William C. Mellor frequently associated with George Stevens so he was no slouch when it came to photographing films.  Burton Lane and Ira Gershwin wrote a decent score for the most part.

 

But the problem seems to be the screenplay written by Albert Hackett and  Frances Goodrich.  They were top writers but for some reason they sure didn't bring their "A" game to this film.  The very simple story is about 3 aspiring dancers hoping to land the lead in a Broadway musical is just a pack of cliches.  The story is so thin it's amazing they were actually able to get an 84 minute movie out of it.

 

The dancers, Debbie Reynolds and Marge Champion were very good no wimping out in a Stanley Donen musical that's for sure.  Then there is the very strange story of the third lead dancer Helen Wood.  She is certainly as talented as the other two but for some reason her career in Hollywood never really turned off and eventually she returned to NYC and ended up in porno films of all things.  In fact she appears in Deep Throat as a performer called Dolly Sharp.  

 

What's let to enjoy in this film are the musical numbers themselves.  The film may be a next to nothing confection but there is a high degree of performing skill particularly in the sequences with Bob
Fosse and Debbie Reynolds performing together.  It's kind of amusing to see Fosse playing a clueless hayseed from Montana who knows nothing about dating a woman.  This certainly contrasts with his later life where he was a notorious womanizer.

1969 - THE ASSASSINATION BUREAU, amusing British comedy thriller

When you think about romantic leads in films probably the late actor Oliver Reed would have been about the last person you would hire for this clever comedy/thriller.  Reed is certainly a presence on the screen as they like to say. 

In The Assassination Bureau, Oliver Reed mugs shamelessly and seems to work fairly hard at stealing scenes from the rest of the cast.  But Reed kind of meets his match in Diana Rigg with her amusing performance as the female lead and Telly Savalas who also knows a trick or two about grabbing attention.

The Assassination Bureau is about an organization of profession killers knocking off world leaders in the early 1900's for money.  Reed is the head of the Bureau, Diana Rigg is the heroic reporter who is out to stop Reed and the Bureau and Telly Savalas is the publisher of the newspaper that Rigg works at.

  

The film was directed by Basil Dearden who along with his associate Michael Relph the screenwriter /producer and production designer did a good job putting the film together.  Nothing in it is to be taken very seriously and the actors appear to be having a lot of fun which for a change they can communicate to the audience.

 

This is the kind of droll understated humor that the British can be very good at.  Probably the biggest disappointment in the film is the climactic battle on a Zeppelin.  This sequence suffers from very poor special effects photography, the Zeppelin looks very much like a model photographed against a very poor backdrop.  In spite of this sequence the film is still quite fun and it's also a very good looking film well photographed by the legendary British cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth.

The running time is 110 minutes.

1943 - FLESH AND FANTASY - excellent 1940's anthology film

The actor Charles Boyer and the director Julien Duvivier teamed up to produce this fantasy film for Universal Studios kind of the home for these kind of films.  Duvivier was a French filmmaker who left France during World War II and settled in Hollywood for a while working for the Hollywood studio system.  Duvivier was also a superb director.

The film consists of three stories about a half and hour each and frankly time has worn a bit on the stories themselves.  Shows like The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery have kind of reused this material over and over.

However what hasn't aged in this film are the performances of an excellent cast with actors like Charles Boyer, Edward G. Robinson, Thomas Mitchell, Robert Benchley (playing Robert Benchley as usual). Barbara Stanwyck and Betty Field.  Also to be commended is Duvivier's technique behind the camera who along with his production team put together a film that shows a real command of the film medium, this film is a pleasure to watch.

The writers were Ellis St. Joseph, Oscar Wilde, László Vadnay, Ernest Pascal and Samuel Hoffenstein.  The running time is 94 minutes.

1987 - 84 CHARING CROSS ROAD - dull quality entertainment

This is the supposedly true story of Jewish writer Helene Hanff played by Anne Bancroft a devote of English fiction particularly that stuff that John Donne, Alexander Pope and lots of obscure classical English authors jotted down in the 18th century.  Hanff begins a correspondence with a rare book shop in London, England called Marks & Co, run by Frank Doel played by Antony Hopkins,  The movie basically consists of letters written between Hanff and Doel which are read mostly in voice over as they correspond about English literature and other stuff.

The acting is at a very high quality Anne Bancroft was an excellent actor who really made her mark when she moved to Broadway.  Anthony Hopkins has had a long career in the English theater and Hollywood movies.  He's the guy you hire to class up your films such as Silence Of The Lambs, or the Thor movies and what naught.

 

The film was produced by Mel Brooks,  Bancroft's husband and was clearly a labor of love to give her a showy role as the rather flamboyant writer.  Oh Judi Dench is in it as well playing Hopkin's wife, this was before Dench became the great thespian in such pictures as Cats and The Chronicles of Riddick.

 

There's nothing wrong with the film, it's just very boring.  It probably would have played better as a one hour television special or something.

Written by Hugh Whitemore, the running time is 100 long minutes.

1944 - WEIRD WOMAN, an Inner Sanctum mystery

As a bit of background, the Universal Inner Sanctum series was based on an old 40's radio show that was sort of a version of the Twilight Zone or some kind of spooky series.  Universal apparently bought the rights or partnered with the makers of the series to produce some rather indifferent B-movies for the most part.

 

The series starred Lon Chaney Jr., hardly  a guy one would associate with leading man type roles.  Weird Woman was one of the films in this series and probably one of the better ones.  Chaney plays a college professor with a new wife he picked up on some tropical island.  The wife is a big believer in the occult which Chaney scoffs at.  He probably should have been a little more aware for it seems at the college that Chaney teaches, black magic is being used to advance the careers of certain members of the faculty at his expense and maybe even his life.

Weird Woman is based on a book by a fantasy writer named Fritz Leiber called Conjure Wife.  Considering the 63 minute running time the film does a fairly decent job of following the the plot of the book.   

 

This film isn't bad but considering it's age it does sort of play like an extended version of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone TV series.  The screenplay was by  Brenda Weisberg .

2023 - KILL BOKSOON , South Korean action/drama.

Coming to a streaming service near you, in this case Netflix, is this South Korean film about a for hire female assassin.  A lot of reviews have compared this film to a female version of a John Wick film but there is a little more going on here.  True, the setup is somewhat the same.  There are assassination organizations all over South Korea kind of like a chain of Starbucks coffee shops.  In this case Gil Bok-soon works for an organization called M. K. Ent.  She is their top killer.  Bok-soon also just happens to be a single mother dealing with a teenage daughter who has decided to come out as a lesbian.  The story involves how Bok-soon's navigates these two roles in her life as she attempts to stay out of trouble with her superiors at M.K. Ent. while raising her daughter.

There are plenty of fights, gunfights and many people getting stabbed with various sharp things.  Lots of violence for the most part but the single parent angle is kind of interesting, something John Wick never had to contend with.

The film is well directed by Byun Sung-hyun who also wrote the screenplay but the big selling point with this film is the performance of an actor named Jeon Do-yeon.  Here is a performer who expertly straddles the roles of cold blooded killer and the concerned parent of a teenager, this is an impressive performance.

 

The film has been criticized for it's length, it runs 137 minutes and I suppose there is a case to be made that it could probably have been trimmed by about 20 minutes or so.  Still this is an entertaining action/drama for the most part with a very impressive central performance.

1977 - SPECTRE, failed Gene Roddenberry pilot

This is a failed pilot from Gene Roddenbery the creator of Star Trek.  After the cancellation of Star Trek Roddenberry struggled with getting another TV series launched.  One of his ideas was to do a supernatural series with two protagonists taking on devils and demons and whatever each week.  This show was basically an update of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes character with Robert Culp playing a paranormal investigator modeled on Holmes and Gig Young in the Dr. Watson part.

The TV pilot is generally diverting stuff mostly due to the cast and the director Clive Donner doing their best to move things along.  Anyway the plot is about the heir to a British family being menaced by some kind of demon who looks a lot like one of Star Trek's aliens aka kind of phony.  

 

There is an extended sequence with Gig Young being hit on by a group of sexy women which seems like a hold over from Roddenberry's film Pretty Maids All in a Row which probably could have been cut out of the script as it is not sexy or funny.

 Well anyway the film ends with one of those sacrifice the innocent victims on the alter of evil conventionally located under neath the British family's estate.  

 

I watched the European cut of this film which includes female nudity towards the end of the film.  Never ones to miss a buck, Hollywood studios would frequently release their TV films as actual films and insert some salacious stuff in them for the European audiences.

The running time is 98 minutes.

1975 - THE APPLE DUMPLING GANG, another questionable Disney family film

 Hovering around in that rock bottom pile of Disney family films which include, The Boatniks, Snowball Express, No Deposit, No Return and The Cat From Outer Space, sits The Apple Dumpling Gang.

This is really bottom of the barrel stuff for the Disney studios probably made just to keep people working at the studio.  The director is Norman Tokar who I can safely say is not much of a stylist, he films everything very conventionally to put it mildly.

The plot what there is of it has something to do with 3 cute orphans who end up living with a gambler who slowly learns to become their parent.  Bill Bixby plays the gambler and he had done enough comedy to know how to milk a laugh or two.  Susan Clark is his "tom boy" love interest and you just know they will get together in the end.  Throw in Tim Conway and Don Knotts who play a couple of inept robbers who call themselves The Apple Dumpling Gang and away we go with lots of silly slapstick, a lame chase or two filmed against a process screen and a film which was for the most part clearly filmed on Disney's back lot.

 

Well the best you can say for the film is it gave a lot of work to a number of character actors such as Slim Pickens, John McGiver, Harry Morgan, and David Wayne a chance to grab a paycheck so they could at least make their mortgage payments.

 

This is the kind of crap that was heavily marketed by Disney as a film you could bring the whole family to.  The problem was that nobody put in the work to actually make this a fun or entertaining film.  As it is the damn thing made money and actually prompted a sequel which I suppose I'll have to eventually sit through to be a completest.

Written by Don Tait, the running time is 100 minutes.