1963 - PT 109, sickening tribute to John F. Kennedy's navy years.

Everyone, well Democrats anyway complain about how Republicans are constantly sucking up to the current President.  Here's an example of the libs really going for it in the ass-kissing department.  An entire movie celebrating the military exploits of the then sitting President John F. Kennedy.  Politicians whether conservative or liberal apparently have no shame when it comes to currying favor with people in power. 

During World War II inexperienced Lt. (j.g.) John F. Kennedy wants to see action.  He gets assigned to a beat up PT (patrol torpedo) boat and only has one week to refurb it or the grumpy maintenance officer will scuttle his command.  After a few suspect adventures, PT 109 is rammed by a Japanese destroyer. Lt Kennedy must now rally to save the lives of his crew.

 

This film had a few production problems.  Warren Beatty was originally chosen to play Kennedy but Beatty could smell a stinker script when he read one.  The White House had a "liaison" officer on set probably to make sure nothing derogatory was allowed to get into the film.  Kennedy had veto power over the director and declined to have veteran Raoul Walsh helm the film.  Admittedly Walsh was on the tail end of his career.

The next choice  Lewis Milestone dropped out of the project also citing issues with the script.  The man who ended up with the job was Leslie Martinson primarily a television director.  Martinson got the job done but he was no John Ford who had already made the best film about World War II PT boats, They Were Expendable, which is really the film to watch. 

 

Cliff Robertson ended up being cast as Kennedy and he probably does about as well as an actor can do having to play a living President.  But Kennedy is portrayed as such a goody-two shoes it's really sickening to watch.  The rest of the cast was made up of character actors the one standout being veteran performer James Gregory who really hams it up as Kennedy's superior officer.

 

This is frankly not a bad film just a really mediocre one. All the expected cliches are in place for any viewer who had already seen about any other war film.  The only thing good about the film is the cinematography of Robert Surtees a legendary cameraman with extensive credits which included Ben Hur, The Graduate and The Sting.

The film was written by Richard L. Breen probably with the White House watching every word and comma he put into the screenplay.  The running time was an overlong 140 minutes. 

1960 - STOWAWAY IN THE SKY, aka LE VOYAGE EN BALLON

A rare family film that's actually good for a change.  Stowaway in the Sky has a very light touch like the air balloon that our protagonists use to travel across France and eventually the Alps.

The story is a very simple one, a young boy, Pascal manages to stowaway on his grandfather's latest air balloon. They fly over the French countryside and narrowly miss church steeples and towers and that's about it for a plot.

 

What this film has going for it is spectacular aerial footage taken with a specially developed camera by the director Albert Lamorisse called "Helivision." This camera was sort of an early version of the "steady cam."  

 

The photography in Cinemascope is remarkably clear and steady this is wide screen camera work at it's finest.  The film took 3 years to complete and was apparently a very difficult production but the resulting film is very impressive.  A really marvelous film.

This film was written by Albert Lamorisse, the running time is 85 minutes  

2018 - OCCUPATION, space alien invasion stuff from Australia

Yet another space alien invasion story.  Let's get this out of the way the film is clearly beholden to War of the Worlds, Battle:  Los Angeles, Independence Day and particularly Red Dawn.  Space aliens have landed on earth in particular the Australian Outback.  A plucky group of survivors flee into the woods and set up a makeshift camp where they learn survival skills and begin to carry out a commando war against the aliens who are up to a nefarious purpose.

You can't argue there isn't enough action in this film, it has lots of shooting, ray gun blasting, car chases and explosions to keep the non discriminating action freak satisfied.  There is some attention paid to characterization.  One guy suffers from depression, there is a pregnant young couple, an ex-con whose family has been put in an alien concentration camp, the usual stuff.  

 

The is a B-movie with a fairly decent budget but it's still a B-movie.  It's entertaining in it's own way and has the required big action climax which feels a little tacked on.  The acting is decent for the most part. The special effects are not that bad.  

 

An attempt is made to send a message of brotherhood between the earthlings and the space aliens but who the hell is interested in that.  Peace is peachy but fighting is more exciting.  There is actually a sequel to this thing called Occupation: Rainfall. 

The film was written by the director, Luke Sparke, the running time is 119 minutes. 

1964 - THE BLACK TULIP, entertaining update of a traditional swashbucker

French star Alain Delon does the Errol Flynn swashbuckler thing in this entertaining throwback to one of Flynn's 1930's or 1940's sword fighting films.  Delon's in a dual role as Guillaume de Saint Preux, The Black Tulip sort of a Robin Hood type of role.  Delon also plays his look alike brother brother Julien de Saint Preux who has to step into the role of The Black Tulip after Guillaume is injured.

This film is set just before the French Revolution and it's a handsome production filmed in 70mm by Henri Decaë who had an extensive list of credits working for directors Francois Truffaut, Louis Malle, Claude Charbol, Jean Pierre Melville, Roger Vadim, Robert Wise and Wim Wenders, a very impressive resume.

 

The film also stars Italian actor Virna Lisi an attractive woman who as it turns out could act.  Also showing up in this film is perennial ham actor Akim Tamiroff who as usual just plays the same character from film to film.  Tamiroff was a favorite actor of Orson Welles and showed up in a couple of his films.

 

The director Christin-Jaque keeps the film moving with some very entertaining action scenes and the whole film has a very fast moving light touch to it.  It takes a lot of skill to pull off this kind of a fun film.

The film was written by Henri Jeanson and Christian-Jaque, the running time is 110 minutes.

1979 - ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN aka ISLAND OF MUTATIONS

A horror film as only the Italians could do it.  A survivor of a shipwreck ends up on an uncharted island that just happens to be near the underwater continent of Atlantis.  The island is ruled by a madman who has coerced a mad scientist to breed fish people in order to steal the gold from underwater Atlantis.  Needless to say the mad scientist has a beautiful daughter and somehow a voodoo priestess is mixed up in all of this.

This film borrowed from many other films.  The Creature From the Black Lagoon, Plague of the Zombies, The Island of Dr. Moreau and War Gods From the Deep.  The great thing about this film is that it just doesn't borrow (plagiarize) from all these other films, it takes scenes and situations from them and just bends them into it's own nutty story line.

 

The film stars model/actress Barbara Bach with the emphasis on model when it comes to her performance. The actor Claudio Cassinelli died young while working on another film for this director.  Then there are a couple of washed up English speaking actors, Richard Johnson and Joseph Cotton.  Johnson had acted with the Royal Shakespeare Company performing in Shakespeare but an actor still has to make the house payment.  

 

What can you say about Joseph Cotton?  The star of Citizen Kane, Shadow of a Doubt, and The Third Man.  Well Hollywood is not particularly kind to it's older actors.  I guess you take the work where you can get it.

The film was written by Sergio Martino, Sergio Donati and Cesare Frugoni, the running time is 100 minutes.

1998 - AUTUMN TALE, Rohmer's take on middle age love

A film so light as a feather it could blow away if it were not made by one filmmaker, Eric Rohmer.  The last of Rohmer's group of films called  the "Tales of the Four Seasons, " an Autumn Tale is a serene love story.  Many of Rohmer's films are about young people falling in and out of love.  The spin in this film is that it focuses on a group of middle aged people. 

Rosine and Isabelle are the friends of a winemaker named Maxine.  Maxine is lonely so her two friends decide to play matchmakers and set her up with someone she can start a relationship with.  Rosine through the want ads finds a man named Gerald who she thinks would be good boyfriend material.  Isabelle also zeros in on one of her old college professors Etienne who as it turns out is only interested in relationships with younger women.  With all Rohmer films complications arise as everyone sorts out what is going on and who is interested in who.

 

By this point in his career Rohmer was an old pro at telling this type of story.  His storytelling style was never flashy and he tended to get his plot points across with his actors and his dialog instead of lots of fancy photography and editing.

 

Autumn Tale is set in the Rhone Valley near the Swiss Alps I believe.  The scenery in the small towns and vineyards in this area is gorgeous. This is a smoothly made and very enjoyable film from the master storyteller.

 As usual Rohmer wrote the film.  The running time is 112 minutes. 

1960 - THE SUNDOWNERS, a "Meat Pie Western."

A well made but almost plot free film set in the outback of Australia around the 1920's.  The story concerns a roving family of sheepherders moving flocks of sheep from one location to another. The mother wants a place to call home but the father is a free spirit who doesn't want to be tied down and that's about it for a plot.

The entertainment value comes from the director Fred Zinneman one of Hollywood's best storytellers and the excellent cast.  Robert Mitchum is the father and he does a decent job with his Aussie accent.  The mother is played by Deborah Kerr and their son is Michael Anderson Jr. the son of unsurprisingly the director Michael Anderson.  Kerr was one of Mitchum's favorite people to work with and he amusingly said "she was the only leading lady I never slept with."  

 

Zinnemann was a very meticulous filmmaker he carefully cast the supporting cast with some excellent actors.  Peter Ustinov, Glynis Johns and an actual Australian actor Chips Rafferty who I think showed up in about every Australian film I've seen.

 For a story with an almost nonexistent plot Fred Zinnemann's story telling skill was so good The Sundowners is a very entertaining film.  Some of Zinnemann's other films worth checking out, High Noon, Act of Violence, The Seventh Cross, The Search and The Nun's Story.  

The film was written by Isobel Lennart, the running time is 133 minutes.

1935 - THE WALKING DEAD, modest but entertaining horror/crime film

Boris Karloff is a man framed for the murder of a judge.  After being sentenced to death in the electric chair he is brought back to life by sort of mad scientist played by "Santa Claus" himself Edmund Gwenn.  As is the way with a 1930's Karloff film he lumbers around seeking revenge sort of like Frankenstein looking for the people who set him up for murder.  Karloff is a very good lumberer.

This is a Karloff horror film not produced by Universal for a change.  Warner Brothers probably offered Karloff more money than he was getting at Universal to play yet another sort of monster.  One thing you have to say Karloff was very good at playing the sympathetic monster.  You actually feel sorry for the guy by the inevitable climax.

The film was directed by one of Hollywood's greatest studio directors, Michael Curtiz.  If any director knew how to move a story along it was Curtiz, this film races along at top speed.  Curtiz had an amazing career starting in the silent era and finishing in the early 1960's.

 

The Walking Dead was the usual good Warner Brothers production with an interesting mix of Warner's character actors.  Hal Mohr was the cinematographer his chief claim to fame was as the cameraman who filmed the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer.

The film was written by Ewart Adamson, Peter Milne, Robert Andrews and Lillie Hayward.  The running time is a brisk 66 minutes.

1954 - EXECUTIVE SUITE - a look inside the management team of a company circa 1954

This film was big stuff when it was released.  The story involves the jockeying for power among the senior vice presidents of a manufacturing company after the CEO dies from a stroke.  The drama comes from all the manipulation and backstabbing among the vice presidents as they maneuver to replace the deceased CEO and assume the leadership of the company.

 

This film is notable for being the first produced screenplay from Ernest Lehman who went on to write North By Northwest and The Sound of Music.  Robert Wise was the director and as a former editor at RKO he knew how to pace this story for what is basically a film with a lot of talking heads sitting around a conference table. 

MGM didn't scrimp on the cast it was a major group of stars.  Frederick March is the CFO who is strictly a numbers guy and doesn't care about the employees.  Paul Douglas is the head of sales having a fling with his secretary played by Shelley Winters.  Walter Pidgeon is a VP who knows where all the bodies are buried.  Dean Jagger is the old timer who is in charge of manufacturing. A very hammy Barbara Stanwyck is the major stock holder. An impressive cast anyway you cut it.

Then there's our hero William Holden the VP in charge of design and development, he's married to June Allyson who for a change isn't playing her usual goody two shoes character.  Holden is so full of the compassion for the company and employees he's just to good to be true. 

 Executive Suite has a real 1950's vibe to it and seems very dated.  Ernest Lehman did a good job moving all the chess pieces of the plot around but overall the film seems very superficial and hackneyed, time has not been kind to this film.  The film was a critical and commercial success.

The running time is 103 minutes. 

1978 - THE WIZ, the legendary bad musical

Writing about this film is like swatting a fly with a jackhammer.  Whatever is said about it today was covered in negative reviews of the film when it was released and they were very negative reviews.  A lot of the criticism of the film was focused on Diana Ross who was able to use her status as a superstar performer to get the role of Dorothy Gail the protagonist of The Wizard of Oz. In the original story Dorothy was a 6 year old girl. The role was rewritten for Ross to play a young insecure woman in her 20's.  Diana Ross hadn't seen 6 years old in a while much less 26 years old.  She was 33 when she played this role and she looked it.  However in spite of the disastrous participation of Diana Ross there was plenty of blame to go around.

For a film that wanted to channel the Black American experience there sure were an awful lot of white people behind the scenes calling the shots.  The director was Sidney Lumet who was known for filming tough dramas about New York City in particular.  Lumet's last film had been Network and there wasn't a dance sequence in that one.  Lumet had never directed a musical before and it showed.  Almost every number is shot in boring wide angle shots apparently more to show off the sets than the performers.

More white people behind the scenes.  Joel Schumacher another white guy wrote the screenplay.  Schumacher's claim to fame was as the director who took over for Tim Burton in the Batman series and ran that into the ground.  The cinematographer Oswald Morris was British.  The editor Dede Allen had cut Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico, again not a lot of singing in those films.   The costume designer Tony Walton was another Brit.  Quincy Jones was the music supervisor on the film and he apparently was not very impressed with the songs which probably didn't help matters.

 

The Wiz was a film with an all black cast and it's failure commercially and critically gave Hollywood executives an excuse not to finance any films which featured black performers and stories a fairly lame excuse considering all the under performing films featuring casts of white people that really suck. 

The film's running time is an unending 133 minutes.       

2024 - HERE, today gone tomorrow

Took me all night to think of that title which is probably more time spent on that then on the script for this film.  The most depressing aspect of this film is the ongoing downhill slide of the career of the director Robert Zemeckis.  At one time he was a reliable provider of entertaining films like Used Cars, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Romancing the Stone, Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

 

But into the 1990's Zemeckis began to embrace cutting edge film technology.  The flaw of this approach was a failure to see the weaknesses in the scripts and stories at the expense of the visual effects he loaded his films up with.  This resulted in some disappointing films like, Forrest Gump, A Christmas Carol, Pinocchio, Welcome to Marwin and the very strange Beowulf.  Here almost seems like a summation of the worst aspects of his film making style.  Interesting and sometimes amazing technical achievements and a complete failure in the storytelling department. 

 

Here isn't the worst film I've seen but for all it's razzle dazzle special effects junk it's bad.  The decision to shoot with only one camera angle robbed Zemeckis of his ability to edit the film, use the tools of the close up, the pan, the moving camera and the long shot.  Having the actors walk towards the camera appeared to be the solution for the close up but that came off like a poor 3-D gimmick.  For all the special effects of traveling through time to different eras using split screens and what not it just became a cheap gimmick.

The de-ageing software used to create younger versions of Tom Hanks and Robin Wright still has a long way to go, they look like cartoon versions of their younger selves.  It sure didn't help their performances. It's like watching an animated versions of themselves, exaggerated and ridiculous.  In fact the whole film has a weird phony look to it.  Zemeckis and his team should have spent more time on the characters and less time in the computer rendering department.

At the time of release this film was understandably clobbered by the critics.  If this is the future of film, the viewer should prepare for a wave of very mediocre AI films.

Written by Eric Roth and Robert Zemeckis, the running time is 104 minutes.

1948 - MR BLANDINGS BUILDS HIS DREAM HOUSE, still amusing post World War 2 comedy

 A film about the post World War II housing explosion that occurred in the United States.  Cary Grant is Jim Blandings an advertising executive living in NYC in a cramped apartment along with his wife and two daughters.  Blandings decides enough is enough and buys a rundown house in Connecticut which as it turns out can't be refurbed but needs to be torn down instead.  The humor comes from his decision to build a new home on his now vacant lot.  There are lots of jokes about dealing with contractors, dealing with commuting into NYC and dealing with the hidden expenses of home building.

Cary Grant gives another expert comedy performance as the put upon Blandings.  Myrna Loy is his wife and Melvyn Douglas is the family friend who is also the narrator of the film, he's kind like a Greek chorus commentating on the action.  These three actors were movie stars in the classic Hollywood sense, good looking and charismatic.  They were also expert comedians and knew how to get the most out of a humorous situation.  

 

The director was H.C. Potter and expert at film comedy.  The writers/producers were a couple of Hollywood pros Melvin Frank and Norman Panama who had started out their careers as joke writers for Bob Hope and worked into the 1970's as writer/directors, an impressive career run.

 

A quick shout out to the cinematographer James Wong Howe a Chinese-American who shot over 130 films and was a noted black and white stylist, this is a good looking film from another golden age Hollywood legend.  Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House was a box office success and considering the talent in front and behind the camera couldn't miss.

The running time is 93 minutes. 

1958 - DUNKIRK, a good version of a frequently told World War II story

If the famous Dunkirk "miracle" is remembered in the movies today, it's probably for the spectacular Christopher Nolan film that was released in 2017.  This version of the Dunkirk evacuation is also a very good account of this decisive moment for the British during World War II.

The film was a production of Ealing Studios and it's a little different from their famous comedies but it was made with all the care that they brought to all of their productions.  The producer was the legendary Michael Balcon who also was the head of the studio.  Balcon was probably one of the most important individuals in the development of the British cinema.  He was responsible for developing a lot of talent which included individuals like Alfred Hitchcock, Alec Guinness, Alexander Mackendrick, Jack Hawkins, Joan Greenwood and Charles Crichton to name just a very few.

There were no hammy actors in this film.  John Mills, Bernard Lee and Richard Attenborough were character actors first if movie stars at all.  This film was shot in France, and England with very careful attention payed to getting the physical production right. The director was Leslie Norman a competent technician who spent a lot of his career working in British television.

 

Dunkirk was written by David Divine, the running time is 134 minutes. 

1982 - FERAT VAMPIRE, aka UPIR Z FERATU, the vampire car movie

Well here's a plot you don't see everyday.  A race car company has developed a car that runs on human blood.  A doctor suspecting something is not right tries to get to the bottom of this unusual situation.  This leads him into a conspiracy where the automobile company that has developed the car now wants to market and sell it around the world.

The director Juraj Herz really plays up the horror elements of the story but he also seems to be making some sort of statement about the need for human kind to commit suicide by getting into a moving four wheel machine and driving faster and faster until it finally kills him or someone else.

 

Unlike the previous Herz film I viewed Beauty and the Beast, which had a lot of atmospheric gloom and doom, much of Ferat Vampire takes place in the daylight and is set in contemporary Czechoslovakia to emphasize the modern horror of the situation.

 

Does Ferat Vampire succeed as a horror film or a commentary on people's fascination with killing themselves in fast cars?  I have no idea.  However one thing you can be sure of is that this is certainly a journey into weirdo film world. I know there have been other possessed automobile films like The Car and Christine, but Ferat Vampire definitely has a tire up in the evil jalopy story sweepstakes.

The film was written by Jan Fleischer and Juraj Herz, the running time is 90 minutes.