1954 - GORILLA AT LARGE, entertaining murder mystery with a great gimmick

Yes examine the title.  The film features a guy in a monkey suit but that's not all.  There are actually two people in monkey suits.  The film also has an amazing cast of actors who I thought I would never see in a movie called Gorilla at Large.

Anne Bancroft a two time Tony award, one time Academy award, three time BAFTA award and two time Emmy award winning actress is in full femme-fatale mode.  She's a circus acrobatic working at a seaside carnival.  She runs around in tiny sparkling costumes and vamps any male she can.  She's married to Raymond Burr the owner of the carnival who at this point in his career was usually cast as bad guys.  Bancroft's trapeze act has her performing above a wild gorilla to titillate the audience.  Admittedly this film is very early in her career and I would like to say Gorilla at Large is a companion piece to The Miracle Worker but that would probably be pushing it a bit.

The gorilla is played by George Barrows who specialized in wearing gorilla suits.  Barrows was the gorilla in Robot Monster, Tarzan and His Mate, The Adventures of Captain Africa, Hillbillys in a Haunted House and that unforgettable episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., My Friend the Gorilla. 

Well there's a murder at the carnival so let's call in detective Lee J. Cobb to solve it.  Cobb had worked with Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, George Cukor and Sidney Lumet.  Cobb has to unravel the murder while constantly chewing on a big gross cigar and firing off the "one-liner" gorilla jokes.  He acts like he is doing stand-up at some comedy club. Also a call out to Lee Marvin as a really stupid cop who is clearly the comedy relief in this film. 

Well it all comes down to the gorilla escaping and terrorizing the crowd on the carnival midway, while carrying Bancroft around.  It's in the great tradition of the ending of King Kong and it you are going to steal from a classic gorilla movie you might as well steal from one of the best.

 Needless to say this film was shot in 3-D so we get lots of shots of things flying at you which of course means nothing on a TV screen.  Gorilla at Large is an extremely entertaining show in the great lore of the B-movie.

The film was written by Leonard Praskins and and Barney Slater, the running time is a brisk 83 minutes. 

2025 - ETERNITY, another afterlife comedy/romance/fantasy

Apparently in these Hollywood movies about the afterlife you just don't get to go to heaven and enjoy yourself you still are faced with all sorts of decisions about what kind of eternity you are going to enjoy and who you are going to enjoy it with.  This is the dilemma for The Scarlett Witch herself Elizabeth Olsen who has passed on and has to pick who she will spend eternity with her last husband who she was married to for 65 years or her first husband who was the passionate love of her life before he died early.

There's a whole bunch of these afterlife films.  The weird Robin Williams film What Dreams May Come which has a love story/suicide plot line.  Albert Brook's very funny Defending Your Life with Brooks as an advertising executive who ends up in Judgement City.  At time of his death he was screwing around with the CD player in his car instead of paying attention to the road.  

Made in Heaven has Timothy Hutton and Kelly McGillis as a couple of unborn souls who fall in love and have to find each other when they are on Earth or else they will get yanked back to Heaven.  Made in Heaven was directed by Alan Rudolph so you can be sure it's going to be on the strange side.  

A quick shout out to Powell and Pressburger's Stairway to Heaven a very impressive World War II film made at the peak of their skills.  That should go near the top of the list. 

For my money the best afterlife film is Heaven Can Wait the Ernest Lubitsch film. This is not strictly an afterlife film although it starts in the afterlife.  Don Ameche is a philandering husband who has to relate the story of his life to the Devil before he goes to hell.  This is a terrific film filmed in beautiful 1940's technicolor. 

 Let's get back to Eternity.  Yeah it's okay, the actors are decent the world building of the afterlife is some sort of train station.  That's kind of interesting.  It drags in the middle as we have to wait for Elizabeth Olsen to make her husband decision although it's fairly apparent who she will pick.

Eternity was written by Pat Cunnane and David Freyne, the running time is 114 minutes. 

2026 - THE ODYSSEY, on the big screen is long and very loud

This is the big summer movie filmed in 70mm with a big budget and a big Hollywood cast.  It has it's good points and not so good points.  As a high school student who along time ago was forced to read the Robert Fagles translation of Homer's poem I can say that Christopher Nolan changed a lot of stuff.  But there have been so many translations and interpretations of this epic Nolan certainly has the right to create his version.  The biggest change is the addition of the Trojan horse and the siege of Troy which I believe are not mentioned in the poem.  Odysseus is also now a doubting leader racked by guilt about his role in the war and haunted by the deaths of his men  He's a candidate for some serious mental health counseling and maybe a prescription of Prozac.

The film includes all the greatest hits of The Odyssey.  The encounter with Polyphemus the cyclops (probably the best scene in the film) who munches on his crew like they were after dinner mints.  A battle with the Laestrygonians, some giants that attack and destroy his ships. We are spared the scene from the book where they also eat some of Odysseus's men.  Apparently one cannibal scene was enough for this film.  Circe and Calypso are here and there's a side trip to Hades.  The final slaughter of the suitors in the banquet hall is for the most part unchanged.  About the only mythological character Nolan missed was Bobo from Clash of the Titans. 

The cast much to my surprise was fairly decent.  Matt Damon isn't bad as Odysseus and doesn't look to silly with that broom helmet on his head.  Anne Hathaway is his wife the faithful Penelope.  She's actually very effective in her scenes.   Robert Pattinson is one of the suitors of Penelope he makes a good hissable villain in the great tradition of these "sword and sandal" epics.  Tom Holland an actor now in his 30's is also good playing Odysseus's young son Telemachus.  Every time he refers to Odysseus with the anachronistic name of "Dad," that played a little cringy for me.  Tom Holland's wife Zendaya is Athena the muse of Odysseus.  However Zendaya makes absolutely no impression in this very small role. 

Yes the production is impressive considering the challenges of filming with 70mm cameras.  The Odyssey does have plenty of fighting and battle scenes to satisfy the action fans.  For a 2700 year old poem a lot of the story still works fairly well.  The soundtrack on this film is very LOUD.  I actually sat in my car for a few minutes after the film to wind down.

I will give Christopher Nolan credit this guy isn't afraid to think big and go over the top in his film making.  If he doesn't always succeed with his approach at times at the very least he is trying to go there with his large scale approach to storytelling.  Nolan's in the great tradition of super epic filmmakers like David Lean and Sergei Bondarchuk, directors who worked on a large canvas. 

 The running time is 173 minutes, screenplay by Christopher Nolan.

1936 - LIBELED LADY, a big MGM all star comedy

This is a big and very popular comedy from MGM.  It's got four top stars, Jean Harlow, William Powell, Myrna Loy and Spencer Tracy.  Since it's an MGM production the sets are elaborate and the fashions particularly the women's clothes are really glamorous.  MGM wasn't the number one studio in the 1930's for nothing.  If the film has a drawback it's with the screenplay that sets up a wacky situation and then doesn't seem to know how to resolve it.

Lets go to the videotape as they used to say.  Myrna Loy is a heiress who has been wrongly slandered by managing editor Spencer Tracy's newspaper.  Loy decides to sue the paper for five million dollars.  Tracy gets the big idea to hire William Powell to set her up in an actual scandal.  Throw in Tracy's fiancee played by Jean Harlow and you have lots of running around and lots of misunderstandings.  Libeled Lady is a screwball comedy since these top performers were put through some really silly situations.

This film has a real 1930's cast.  Myrna Loy was a good looking performer who as it turned out was also a very good comedian.  Spencer Tracy was one of MGM's top stars and was considered an actor's actor.  Then there was the interesting case of William Powell and Jean Harlow.  At the time of this film Powell and Jean Harlow were romantically involved.  The romance didn't have a happy ending when Harlow died in 1937. 

Watching Libeled Lady today I was struck by the professionalism of the cast.  Talk about squeezing blood out of a rock.  This is not what I would call a film with a real clever and funny screenplay.  However the actors milk every bit of humor out of the story that they can find.   A measure of the unsatisfactory nature of the film is that the film literally just stops and fades to black without an ending.

The film was written by Maurine Dallas Watkins, Howard Emmett Rogers and George S. Oppenheimer.  

The running time is 98 minutes.   

2026 - THE SHEEP DETECTIVES, bah bah (what else).

Hugh Jackman is a sheep herder who lives in a caravan in some rural town in England.  He spends all  his days tending to a flock of sheep.  In the evening the sheep gather round and Jackman reads mystery stories to them.  Well surprise surprise when the sheep are by themselves they talk in the Queen's English.  Jackman is murdered and suspicion falls on his estranged daughter from America who has come for a visit.  It's up to the sheep to solve the murder of Jackman and somehow communicate to the police whodunit. 

This is sort of a family film which has a lot of whimsy make that a whole lot of whimsy.  The sheep all have individual personalities and they are voiced by actors British and American actors.  Besides Jackman, Emma Thompson, Nicholas Braun and Conleth Hill are the actual human actors. 

Obviously the sheep are animated.  The director Kyle Balba started his career in film working for Industrial Light and Magic and had animated films like A Bug's Life, Mars Attacks and Monster's Inc. so he knew his way around integrating computer animation with live action. 

There's nothing particularly bad about this film although I have to say I didn't particularly care for it.  The Sheep Detectives just seems to have a very serious case of "the cutes.''  The film at times wallows in it's own sentimentality and cleverness.  Yes it has some funny stuff in it.  However you also have to endure a lot of sheep talk about their place in the universe.  I enjoy fantasy films as much as the next film nerd but even I have my limits.  And come on, this is a film about talking sheep.

 As an aside, I've spent some time around actual sheep and I can state that they are very stupid creatures.

 The film was written by Craig Mazin, the running time is 109 minutes.  

1979 - CITY ON FIRE, aka burning people

Why review a film called City on Fire?  Well it's a nostalgic look back to a time in my life when I was younger and forced to watch movies on television which were loaded with lots of commercials.  Well to get to the point, City On Fire was one on the earliest films that got the Mystery Science Theater 3000 comedic voice over treatment. 

MST3K originally aired on a Twin Cities UHF channel KTMA 23.  At the time much of the show's comedy revolved around references to Minneapolis and St. Paul.  Being a resident and younger I found all of this stuff quite funny.  Well the rest is history as they say.  The show got picked up and they were off and running.   Watching the unaltered (original) version of this movie was a chance to see if it was as dumb as it seemed in 1989.  The answer is a resounding yes.  

An extremely disgruntled employee of a large metropolitan city sabotages an oil refinery which ignites a fire that basically consumes the entire city.  Coming to the rescue is a group of television and past their prime actors trying to save the day.

And what a cast.  Henry Fonda in a where's my paycheck role is the fire chief.  Fonda probably shot this film in a couple of days since he never leaves the command center set.  Whoa, Ava Gardner one time screen queen is a television reporter and she's looking mighty rough after years of partying.  Leslie Nielson is the slimy mayor of the city.  Nielson was a Canadian by birth and that's only right because this film was shot in Canada.  Hammy actor Shelly Winters is a nurse.  

Finally there are the supposed leads of this film.  Barry Newman's career started out strong with the cult film Vanishing Point but descended into mediocre made for television films.  He's the lead playing the ER doctor running around saving people's lives.  His leading lady was played by Susan Clark who I swear was in just about every other piece of junk Universal Studios cranked out.  Seeing her in a television show was like visiting an old friend.  Clark actually started her career playing in the classics on the stage.

This post could go on and on but it's safe to say the plot, the dialog and the acting are shall we say not exactly something Harold Pinter would write.  Actually the burning city fire effects are fairy well done for this poor man's version of The Towering Inferno.

It took three writers to put this together,  Jack Hill, Dave Lewis and Céline La Frenière^.  

The running time is 106 minutes.

1957 - HELL DRIVERS, the world of macho British truck drivers

Stanley Baker is an ex-con looking for work.  He ends up getting a job at a company that hauls gravel for a road construction project.  The catch is that the drivers are expected to drive really fast in order to meet their daily quota.  A young Patrick McGoohan is the leader of the truck drivers.  He's a nasty bully and we know this because he always has a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.  Peggy Cummins is the office secretary who knows where all the dirty secrets are buried at the trucking company,  Sean Connery and Gordon Jackson are also in the cast as truck drivers in smaller roles. 

As some critics pointed out at the time this was an unusual film since it was filled with lots of macho posturing and tough action.  Usually British films had a more shall we say refined approach to excitement as in the boring film The Scarlet Pimpernel.  For a change Hell Drivers was a rare film at this time that focused on the lives of the British working class.

The film was directed by a blacklisted American writer/director Cy Enfield.  Enfield relocated to England and filmed some tough crime and action films.  Enfield's big picture was Zulu which he produced with Stanley Baker.

Peggy Cummins had an aborted career in Hollywood after being recast in Forever Amber is in this film to sex it up.  Cummins most memorable film was the classic Gun Crazy.  Perennial British character actor Herbert Lom shows up playing Baker's Italian friend.  Ace cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth shot the exciting driving scenes.  Overall an entertaining action film. This film is dripping with testosterone and mano a mano fighting.  The action is rough and exciting.

The screenplay is by Cy Enfield and John Kruse, the running time is 108 minutes.

1960 - CIRCUS OF HORRORS, what passed for a horror film in the early 1960's.

Well they really went for it with Circus of Horrors.  Or went for it as about as much as they could for an early 1960's horror film,  A maniacal plastic surgeon has developed a new surgical technique that unfortunately has a side effect of disfiguring one of his patients.  He goes on the run and ends up at a defunct circus.  He gets the brilliant idea of performing plastic surgery on criminals to hide them from the police.  Lots of plot later the circus ends up in London where the plastic surgeon who now runs the circus kills off anyone who might reveal him to the police.

We get lots of scenes of women getting transformed into beautiful babes before that are knocked off by the surgeon.  For good measure there is a nasty bear in the circus who occasionally gets out of his cage so he can maul someone.  There's also a knife throwing act that doesn't end well for the woman on the receiving end of the knives.  

The film has quite a cast.  Perennial bad guy Anton Differing plays the plastic surgeon.  Donald Pleasence plays the original owner of the circus and he's not around very long.  Yvonne Romaine was in a lot of Hammer films.  She's a lion tamer who doesn't have much luck taming one of the lions.  Yvonne Monlaur played the daughter of Donald Pleasence.  I remember her as one of the future brides in Brides of Dracula.    

Circus of Horrors was photographed in very bright colors by Douglas Slocombe.  Slocombe went on to work with Steven Spielberg on the first three Indiana Jones films.  He was a major factor in the success of that series.

The screenplay was by George Baxt, the running time is 87 minutes.

1953 - PLUNDER OF THE SUN, a noir film more interesting for it's location

During the 1950's John Wayne along with his producing partner Robert Fellows formed a production company called Wayne-Fellows Productions.  Their goal was to make a series of modestly budgeted films some of which Wayne would appear in and some without him.  As with these actor created companies they had their hits and misses.  Plunder of the Sun was one of the films that was produced by Wayne-Fellows that did not star Wayne.

Glenn Ford plays a down on his luck adventurer who gets involved with a dealer of antiquities played by character actor Francis L. Sullivan.  Sullivan is looking for him to smuggle a map with the location of treasure supposedly hidden in the Zapotec temple ruins in Mexico.  Ford is channeling a Humphrey Bogart type of cynical character.  He has not one but two femme-fatale characters he has to deal with.  There is also another treasure hunter on the prowl played by a blonde haired Sean McClory.  McClory was part of John Ford's stock company and is the bad guy this time instead of some whimsical boob of an Irishman in a Ford film. 

 

Frankly the treasure hunt story isn't anything special.  The director John Farrow does a decent job moving things along but the script doesn't really do him any favors.  What this film really has going for it is the on location filming at the spectacular Zapotec temple locations and the city of Oaxaca, Mexico.  This is really the only reason to watch this film.  The locations are well photographed in black and white.  The film has a nice noir look to it.

 

The film was written by Jonathan Latimer, the running time is 82 minutes. 

1920 - NEIGHBORS, Buster Keaton's version of Romeo and Juliet

After sitting through the almost 3 hour version of Romeo and Juliet called West Side Story it is a relief to see Buster Keaton's version of Romeo and Juliet.  Let's face it West Side Story gets mighty pretentious at times for a musical.

Keaton's film is set in the courtyard of a tenement building where Buster is in love with the girl next door. As in Shakespeare's story the families are feuding and Buster and the girl are forced to see each other on the sly.  There are a lot of very impressive slapstick scenes.  The tenement courtyard isn't really conducive as a location for humor.  However Keaton and his co-director Edward Cline came up with some really amazing stuff.  The film climaxes with Buster balancing the girl on his shoulders while being chased by her family.  What makes this chase special is that Keaton is on the top of two other individuals as they are being chased down the street.  Apparently these men were part of an acrobatic act.

 

The worst thing I can say about this film is that it has some stupid blackface humor which I never care for.  I did spot Buster's father Joe Keaton playing who else but Buster's father.  Neighbors gets the job done as another version of Romeo and Juliet and Keaton does Shakespeare one better, he has a happy ending instead of all that young love suicide stuff in the original.  Let's see the Bard top that.  Neighbors is available on YouTube.

 

The film was written by Buster Keaton and Edward Cline, the running time is 18 minutes.  

1955 - A KID FOR TWO FARTHINGS, a fable about 1950's London

 One of England's best directors took on this very delicate story about the lives of people living in an area of London's East End called Petticoat Lane.  The film was shot in very garish color.  Petticoat Lane at the time was populated with Jewish immigrants.  For some reason the film barely gets into this and it's almost impossible to tell that any Jewish people live there and this is a story where the setting is very important to the film.

The story follows a young boy who has been listening to stories from an old tailor.  One story in particular is about a magical unicorn that grants wishes.  The boy  finds a young goat with only one horn and believes it to be be a unicorn.  The story focuses on the boy's fantasy about the goat and how it affects the lives of people living in Petticoat Lane.  We get a body builder who has put off marrying his girlfriend due to lack of money.  The tailor wishing for a steam machine to iron his customer's clothes. The boy's mother waiting for the return of her husband who is working abroad etc.

 

You can't fault the cast of the film.  Celia Johnson one of the mainstays of the British acting establishment plays the mother.  Diana Dors who was considered the British version of Marilyn Monroe gave a very good performance as the girlfriend waiting to get married. A very young actor named Jonathan Ashmore also does very well as the boy with the goat.  One of Carol Reed's strengths as a director was working with actors.  Orson Welles had said that Carol Reed was one of the few directors who really liked actors.

 

I think the problem with this film is that the story is maybe just a little to whimsical for it's own good.  It's also very tough to pull off a story that is told from a child's point of view.  Not to say that the film doesn't have good scenes in it.   But overall it just seems a little lacking.  Still Carol Reed was a superior director and the film for the most part is certainly worth a look.

The screenplay was by Wolf Mankowitz, the running time is 96 minutes.

1961 - WEST SIDE STORY, in 70mm on the big screen, accept no substitutes.

West Side Story is part of a 70mm film series that is being screened at our revival theater The Heights located in Columbia Heights Minnesota prior to the release of The Odyssey.  The 70mm print was in very good shape and it played to a packed house.  The film definitely has it dated aspects but this is film making at a very high level.

The film was directed and produced by Robert Wise.  The choreographer Jerome Robbins received co-director credit but was fired during the production on the film.  Apparently somewhat of an arrogant perfectionist Robbins went a month over the allotted schedule.

 

This film was a high point in the career of Robert Wise an excellent director. He had one of the best production teams in Hollywood working on the film.  Ernest Lehman wrote the screenplay, Daniel L. Flapp was the cinematographer, Boris Levin was the production designer,  Saul Bass was a visual consultant responsible for the titles and most importantly Thomas Stanford did an outstanding job editing this film.  These craftsmen were working at the top of their creative abilities. 

 

The film was an important role for Natalie Wood.  She had started her career as a child actress and moved into adult roles.  She was a total professional on about any film she worked on.  It's well known that she didn't like her leading man Richard Beymer during production but you would never know it watching the film.  Rita Moreno had been stuck playing stereotypical Hispanic parts early in her career.  This was her big breakout but it didn't really do much for her career.  Russ Tamblyn was more an acrobat than dancer but he didn't seem to have any problem with the strenuous musical numbers in this film.

 

West Side Story was a big commercial and critical success and an award winning film during it's initial release.  Viewed 65 years later what really stands out are the impressive musical sequences.  Steven Spielberg for some reason remade West Side Story in 2021.  It was a critical success but a commercial failure.  I suppose I'll have to give his version a look.

The running time is 152 minutes 

2025 - NOW YOU SEE ME NOW YOU DON'T, the 3rd in the magicians turned crime fighters series

Amazingly another in this magicians turned do-gooders film series. The gang known as the 4 Horsemen specializes in elaborate and improbable large scale magic tricks.  In the first film Now You See Me (2013) they showed up where I believe they were sort of bad guys who eventually saw the light.  That film made a lot of money.  The Horsemen returned in a sequel called naturally Now You See Me 2 in 2016.  This time they had to stop evil Michael Caine and that guy from those Harry Potter films from doing something bad.  That film also made a lot of money.

Well it's been 9 years since the last film and the original gang is looking a little long in the tooth so some hip, younger and more importantly sexier magicians are now recruited to this magical gang.  This time they are going to steal a diamond from evil Rosamund Pike.  Rosamund Pike has carved out a career in the entertainment business playing criminals.  It seems like she is in a lot of streaming shows where she is naughty and eventually gets what's coming to here. 

 

For the most part these movies are all okay if very repetitive.  They all follow the same formula, lots of chases, some elaborate if very improbable magic tricks and finally many and I mean many plot twists kind of like in The Sting.  By now these films are what they are entertaining and very undemanding time killers.   

 

Why do these films keep getting made?  Well because they still make money, what else.

This film was written by Michael Lesslie, Paul Wernick, Rhett Reese and Seth Grahame-Smith.  These writers specialize in this kind of light weight story telling.  The running time is 112 minutes. 

2004 - IKE: COUNTDOWN TO D-DAY is an acceptable version of the D-Day story

TV star Tom Selleck is General Eisenhower in this version of the events leading up to the World War II invasion into Normandy.  Selleck has given interviews in which he has stated that this is the performance he is most proud of.  For the most part his portrayal is decent I guess.  Frankly the problem I have with Selleck is that every time he's on screen all I can think about is Magnum P.I. goes to war.  I kept looking for Higgins and the "Lads" to show up.  

This film gets it's facts reasonably straight. It refers to the training debacle in England called "Exercise Tiger" that cost the lives of over 700 soldiers conducted prior to the invasion.  It also focuses on General Henry Miller who got drunk in a restaurant and blurted out the time and location of the invasion.  The film also covers Eisenhower's message to the allies that had him taking blame if the invasion failed that fortunately was never needed.  It's all fairly well known history stuff.  

 

The film has the usual World War II celebrities.  Winston Churchill turns up, George S. Patton gets yelled at by Eisenhower and British General Bernard Montgomery is here in all his arrogant glory.

The production of this film was on the modest end.  It was apparently filmed in New Zealand in 10 days. The film is an okay if kind of boring version of a major World War II event. 

The film was written by Lionel Chetwynd who has done a lot of these docu-dramas.  The running time is 89 minutes.