Heart of a City

I recorded a couple of Rita Hayworth movies in relative proximity several months back. One of them was One Touch of Venus, as part of the spring run of Two for One and which I blogged abou when Two for One was re-run during the autumn. The other one was Tonight and Every Night, and recently, I finally watched it.

The movie opens up with an establishing shot of London, presumably in 1944 (the movie was released in January 1945 and based on a 1942 play). A photographer from Life magazine shows up at the Music Box theatre, having heard that it's the one theater that never shut down during the bombings of the Blitz and that this would make a good story. Theatre owner May Tolliver (Florence Bates) lets the reporter take photographs, while one of the stage hands informs him that there's a really good back story to all of this. As you can guess, this means we get the inevitable flashback....

Tolliver is preparing a new stage show, which will be an ensemble affair and which includes a couple of American chorus girls, Rosalind Bruce (Rita Hayworth) and her friend Judy Kane (Janet Blair). Walking into the theater is Tommy Lawson (Marc Platt), an improvisational dancer who is clearly talented, but who Tolliver feels wouldn't be appropriate for the show since he only dances how he feels instead of sticking to choreographed steps. However, he's so determined to dance that he learns the routines from Rosalind and Judy and gets a spot in the show. He also develops felings for Rosalind, although as he's not the top-billed man in the movie, he's not going to wind up with Rosalind.

The top-billed actor is Lee Bowman, playing RAF pilot Paul Lundy. Paul shows up at one of the shows at the Music Box, and obviously likes Rosalind too. After all, who wouldn't? But how to meet her? Well, luck in a way intervenes in the form of a German bombing raid. The air-raid sirens go off, forcing everyone into the basement bomb shelter, with Paul and Rosalind winding up in close proximity. Paul wants a further relationshp with Rosalind, but makes the mistake of coming up with a lie about an American soldier from her hometown being at his apartment and using that as an excuse to get Rosalind there to try to put the moves on her. Needless to say, Rosalind is put off.

We're less than halfway through the movie, and when a notice is put up at Paul's RAF base of a Shakespeare company coming through to do a benefit prformance for the soldiers, Paul gets his CO to ask the Music Box company to do a performance. Paul is able to convince Rosalind of his love for her, and the start the relationship anew.

Of course, Paul being a pilot, he often gets called away, and it's not always for just one night, something that Rosalind probably should have expected. But she doesn't, and other misunderstandings also threaten to blow up the relationship. With the movie having been released while World War II was still going, however, you can expect that there's going to be a happy ending of sorts.

Tonight and Every Night is an interesting idea for a World War II-era musical, and unsurprisingly Rita Hayworth does quite well. However, the movie probably could have used her better. She had already danced with Fred Astaire and showed herself to be a very adept dancer. Yet the movie doesn't really give her one big dance of her own, prefering to stick more to ensemble numbers and songs (with Hayworth's singing voice dubbed). The military romance is also a plot that's not particularly original.

So, I think there are reasons why Tonight and Every Night is not an all-time classic. But it's certainly something that none of the people involved in making it would have had anything to be ashamed of. It also succeeds in being an entertaining morale-booster for the audiences on the homefront, so it's definitely worth a watch.

Take Aim at the Police Van

I've been mentioning pretty much every time I do a post on a foreign film recently that I've got a bunch of them on my DVR, which is why they've been showing up as blog posts more often. My most recent foreign film watch was actually a move selected by Eddie Muller for Noir Alley that I'd never heard of, Take Aim at the Police Van.

Thankfully, the movie opens up with someone taking aim at the titular police van, which is more like a bus, but that's not the point. On a road in a place that looks deserted enough that it's got to be someplace outside of Tokyo, prisoners are being transported when the transport van gets in a run-in with a truck. This is of course a ruse to get the bus stopped. Not so somebody can free prisoners which would normally be the case, but instead to shoot some of them. The shoot is successful, in that two men wind up dead.

Tamon was the guard on the transport responsible for the safety of the prisoners. Even though there wasn't really anything he could do to prevent the shooting, he's still responsible, so his superiors suspend him for six months. On the one hand, that sucks, but on the other hand, this gives him the chance to do some investigation of his own. One the bus, one of the prisoners had been writing the name "Aki" in the fog on the window, so Tamon goes looking for this man, Goro, to see if he has any clues. Goro, however, still seems to be wanted by someone else, so even though Tamon finds him, Goro immediately goes on the run.

Tamon's search also brings him into contact with an employment agency that presumptively provides masseuses and the like, but it's really providing them for the happy endings. They've provided women to a hotel in a seaside spa town, so it's there that Tamon goes. And just before he can interview the woman he wants to, she gets shot with an arrow right through the breast!

Tamon talks to Yuko Hamajima, who is currently running the agency in place of her father, who's in hospital. She has obvious reasons to distrust Tamon, but wouldn't you know it, she seems to be falling in love with him. And what does all of this have to do with the two people who were shot on the prison bus, anyway?

Take Aim at the Police Van has a convoluted plot, as even Eddie Muller himself would admit. As such, it's the sort of foreign film that would probably work better if you're actually fluent enough in Japanese that you don't need subtitles. I'm not, so I felt as though there was a lot that I was missing. I do have to say, however, that the movie was extremely visually stylish, and that covers up for a lot of the film's messy plot.

The Lily of color

Twenty years ago, when TCM was more flush with money, one of the things they did was to have a young film composers' competition in which the winner won the chance to score a silent picture that had an extant print, but no accompanying score. One of the silents that was reintroduced to the world in this way was The Red Lily. The last time it showed up on Silent Sunday Nights, I recorded it, and recently, I finally watched it.

Ramon Novarro is the star here, playing Jean Leonnec, who is the son of the mayor of a small town in western France. He's in love with Marise (Enid Bennett), daughter of the local cobbler. They're even thinking of getting married, at least until Marise's father summarily dies. She's sent to live with her nearest relatives, who treat her like dirt to the point that she wants to escape, even in the middle of a driving rain storm. She meets up with Jean again, but his dad doesn't approve of their relationshp.

So the two young lovers leave for Paris, and just as they're leaving, Jean's dad discovers that there's money missing from the municipal safe, which to him obviously means that his own son must have stolen the money. The lovers reach Paris; at the train station, Jean looks for an information booth to find out where they can go to get married. Instead, he's approached by a couple of gendarmes who inform him he's accused of larceny back in his home town and he's going to have to go with them. He doesn't even get a chance to inform Marise of this, so she sits for hours at the train station waiting for Jean to come back.

Eventually, we learn that the real thief admitted his crime back in the small town, but Jean escaped from the train before he discovered this, so for the rest of the movie he thinks he's a fugitive. Marise, meanwhile, needs a job. She's able to get one in a factory at first, but circumstances turn against her and she eventually turns to prostitution, because the movie insists on piling on more and more for the two lovers to overcome.

Jean makes it back to Paris, always living in the shadows, when he mets Bo-Bo (Wallace Beery), part of the gang of thieves that populated Paris of this era, at least in the imaginations of writers. Jean keeps looking for Marise while trying to stay one step ahead of the police. But what's going to happen if he finally meets her and discovers that she's been forced to turn to prostitution?

The Red Lily is relentlessly melodromatic, at least until the final reel, in that it makes the situation worse and worse for the seemingly doomed young lovers. In that regard, the plot is ridiculous, although I suppose it may have been the sort of material that audiences of the day absolutely loved. While this sort of story line isn't quite my cup of tea, I do have to say that in terms of the acting and the technical aspects of filmmaking, The Red Lily is definitely very well made. It's definitely worth a watch.

End of year briefs

Tomorrow is New Year's Eve, and it's unsurprising that TCM has special programming for the day. Two things that TCM has commonly done to ring in the new year are to play all six of the Thin Man movies, or to show That's Entertainment! and the spinoffs of decreasing quality since the first one used all the good MGM musical material. And wouldn't you know it, but this time the daytime lineup for TCM on December 31 has the Thin Man movies. The Times Square ball drop, however, does not coincide this year with the middle of That's Entertainment! II. Instead, prime time on December 31 has each of the TCM hosts selecting a film that has a prominent scene set at New Year's.

Another thing TCM has done in the past on New Year's Eve is to present a night of concert films. In fact, that's where I first saw ABBA: The Movie, I think 20 years ago when TCM was ringing in 2005. I bring all this up because TCM has decided to give us some concert movies, but during the morning and afternoon of January 1, 2025, rather than prime time. And at 8:00 PM on January 1? Oh, there's That's Entertainment! again. And you can guess the following two movies. This time, however, instead of something like That's Dancing!, the fourth movie, at 3:15 AM, is Soundies: A Musical History. Note, however, that TCM lists this as a 76-minute movie in a 75-minute slot, while That's Entertainment! III is a 113-minute movie in a 135-minute slot.

Posting picked up a bit this year from the past two years, as I'm fully enough ensconced in the new digs Dad and I moved to in March 2023. A new Blu-ray player and larger TV -- yeah, I know 40 inches isn't particularly large any more when it comes to TVs, but that's what fits against the sloping ceiling upstairs where I do my movie viewing -- have made it a lot more convenient for me to watch movies. Indeed, I'm getting close to three weeks ahead in terms of posting. If I get posting back to the slightly higher levels I had throughout the 2010s, post #8000 should come by the end of 2026.

Unsurprisingly, since I put up the post on the night of TCM Remembers movies, a couple of people worth noting died. Foremost among them would be Olivia Hussey, who played Juliet in the 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet that got shown to high schoolers for decades when they studied the Shakespeare play. I mean, I saw it in high school 20 years after it was released. Hussey died on Friday aged 73.

Also dying on Friday was Oscar-nominated screenwriter Charles Shyer. He picked up his nomination for Private Benjamin, which I'll be getting to sometime in 2025 since I recorded it when TCM ran it last Veteran's Day. He also directed, with several remakes among his films: the 1990s Father of the Bride, as well as the 200sremake of Alfie. Shyer was 83.

The seesaw and the shoe

I've mentioned John Nesbitt's Passing Parade shorts, made at MGM in the 1940s, a couple of times before, although I've tended not to do reviews on them so much largely because, to me, the shorts aren't quite as interesting as some of the other series, or standalone two reelers. A good example of this is The Seesaw and the Shoe, which showed up recently to fill out the time slot of a movie I watched off my DVR.

We this time take the true stories of two small, unimportant things, as Nesbitt tells us in his opening narration, that changed our lives for all time. Those things are the titular seesaw and the pair of shoes, but the short tells us how two men were able to use these things to come up with substantial inventions.

For the seesaw, that man was René Laennec, a French doctor circa 1820. He was trying in vain to hear a man's heartbeat well; as you can guess, this is going to lead to the invention of the stethoscope. Laennec purportedly saw two kids using a seesaw to vibrate sound through it, with one tapping at one end and the other with his ear to the seesaw listening to the vibrations. This gave Laennec the idea for a listening tube that ultimately became the stethoscope, at least if you believe Nesbitt's story.

The shoes were a pair of shoes that Charles Goodyear showed off to his friends in the early 1830s. They were made of latex, and as such were waterproof, but subject to melting due to high heat, such as being placed by a fire to dry off. It was going to take vulcanization to produce rubber that remained stable, and according to the short, that process was discovered accidentally after many years of trial and error, as well as supposedly a stint in debtors' prison. Of course, we know Goodyear was eventually successful.

I think the problem with the Passing Parade shorts is how there's no real plot as opposed to the Crime Does Not Pay shorts; no humor compared to Pete Smith or Joe McDoakes; and no time capsule value like the Traveltalks shorts. I can see why they might have been interesting to audiences back in the day, but they just don't hold up as well as some of the other series.

I will always love... Lawrence Tierney?

Another of the movies that I recorded off of TCM because it sounded like an interesting premise was the B movie Bodyguard. Having watched it, I can finally do the review on it.

Lawrence Tierney plays Mike Carter, one of those police detectives who has a tendency to do things not quite by the book, and for which he has a tendency to get in trouble, although he also seems to have a group of kids who love him for it. Most recently, he's tried to investigate a place the vice squad already had on their radar, and his looking into things screwed it all up. So his supervisor is none too happy with him, and calls him into the office to chew him out and suspend him with desk duty. Mike has a nasty temper and responds by smacking his supervisor and quitting.

The next day, Mike is taking some of those kids to a ball game along with his fiancée Doris (Priscilla Lane), who also works at the police department. Showing up at the game is Freddie Dysen (Phillip Reed), who apparently knows that Mike has recently left the police force. Freddie is the nephew of Gene Dyson (Elisabeth Risdon), the owner of Continental Meat Packing. Freddie is worred about death threats against his aunt, and wants somebody who can serve as part investigator and part bodyguard. Freddie is willing to pay a retainer of $2,000, which is quite a bit of money for the late 1940s. Mike, however, isn't interested.

Later that evening, when Mike is back at his apartment with Doris, somebody slips an envelope under the door. It's presumably from Freddie, but it's enough of an inducement to get Mike to go over to Pasadena to see the Dysens. And when Mike is there, somebody fires a shot into the room where everybody is. Now, since this is a movie, it seems like a reasonable assumption on the part of the viewer that this is a set-up. But, unsurprisingly, Mike doesn't get that impression. In any case, he decides to take the job, at least in the form of taking an envelope from Freddie. Gene didn't see the need for a bodyguard, and doesn't know that Freddie has hired him.

Overnight, Mike catches Gene's secretary trying to remove the bullets from the wall that were shot the previous night. Mike then sees Gene heading off very early to one of the meat packing plants, and follows along. But he gets hit over the head, and wakes up to find... his old supervisor on the police force very much dead, and his car stalled on the train tracks, where a train is about to hit the car. Mike realizes he's been framed, and has to try to find the killer before the cops can bring him in.

Bodyguard is an interesting little B movie, although perhaps it's a bit too little at 62 minutes. It probably needed a bit more to flesh things out. However, the use of the word "interesting" is appropriate, and not just becuase the movie itself is worth a watch even if you didn't know anything about what's behind it. In addition to being a relatively early acting role for Lawrence Tierney, it's a relatively early directing job for Richard Fleischer, who would go on to bigger and better things. Even more interesting, however, is that it's based on a story co-written by a very young Robert Altman.

If you can find Bodyguard, it's definitely one to see, even if it's not a great movie.

Katha

I noticed that one of the movies I had in my saved list on Tubi is about to expire at the end of December, so I had to watch it now and juggle my posts around to be able to put up a post on it now. That movie is an early-1980s movie from India called Katha.

The movie opens with a grandmother telling her grandson a bedtime story, Aesop's fable about the Tortoise and the Hare, and the movie cuts to an animated version of that old fable. Except that as Grandma says, this is going to be a more modern version. As we all know in the original, the hare is so arrogant that he thinks he can take a long nap and still win, while the slow and steady tortoise walks right past the sleeping hare. In this animated version, however, the hare climbs up on the tortoise's shell, jumping right off just before the finish line to run ahead. The kid says that's not how the story goes, but grandma knows real life isn't always a fable....

Cut to a chawl, a sort of lower-middle-class apartment block like those old US motels where every room had a front door facing the outside and you climb outside stairs if you don't live on th ground floor, in Bombay. Rajaram Joshi (Naseeruddin Shah) is a clerk for a shoe manufacturer Footprint Shoes trying to get ahead in life, but he's such a timid guy that he's never gotten that far. In fact, he thinks that if he can get his next promotion, he's going to be set for life in a cushy job. He loves Sandhya (Deepti Naval), who lives in another residence in the chawl with her parents, but he's never been able to let the family know about his feelings so they can think about arranging a marriage. Clearly he's the tortoise here.

And then the hare shows up, in the form of Rajaram's old acquaintance Vasudev (Farook Shaikh), who is now calling himself Bashu which, as I understand it not speaking Hindi, is another form of the same name. Bashu has been god only knows where, but he quickly makes himself a fixtur in Rajaram's life, to the point that poor put-upon Rajaram and the rest of us can't help but think of Bashu as a dishonest smooth operator at best and a mooch at worst. Bashu tells Rajaram stories about his past jobs that clearly seem exaggerated, while saying that jobs just fall from heaven. And for Bashu, they really do.

Bashu goes stalking a couple of rich guys playing golf, and at the 19th hole tries to pass himself off as a golf expert. One of the guys is businessman Mr. Dhindhoria, there with second wife Anuradha and daughter from a first marriage Jojo. Bashu charms them so much that Mr. Dhindhoria gives him a job and invites him to the best parties, while Bashu also starts flirting with Jojo.

It turns out that Mr. Dhindoria's company is... Footprint Shoes. Worse for Rajaram is that he stays late to do extra work to try to get ahead, only for Bashu to try to pass that work off as his own. And then Sandhya's parents come over to Rajaram's rooms to talk about marriage... only for Rajaram to learn they want to arrange Sandhya's marriage to Bashu.

Katha turned out to be an interesting movie, one that in some ways plays on universal themes, but one that in other ways is either very much Indian or at least very much not Hollywood. There are four or five Bollywood-style musical numbers, along with a presentation of Indian business culture that's much more predicated on the idea of everybody being out for himself than even in American business culture. At least here in the US getting ahead in life isn't really done with the idea that if you're not cheating, you're not trying, certainly not to the extent it's portrayed as being done in this movie.

I mostly enjoyed Katha, although I do have to point out the print Tubi has runs almost 137 minutes, which I felt was a bit long for a fairly simple story. The print was also not subtitled by default the way the foreign films TCM shows are, but on my Roku box when I turned on captioning, I got English-language subtitles. So give Katha a try before it leaves Tubi in a few days.

Reality TV with Nicholas Ray

With TCM spending this evening looking at the films of some of the people who died in 2024, I decided to watch a movie off my DVR that's nominally a documentary of a man who is dying: Lightning Over Water.

The man in question is director Nicholas Ray, who died in June 1979 after a couple years battling cancer. Some time before that, he had met German director Wim Wenders when they were working on a film together, and became friends. So, when Ray was diagnosed with cancer and wanted to keep working rather than go off someplace and die peacefully, Wenders was willing to work with Ray.

The movie opens up in early April, 1979, about two months before Ray's death. Wenders has been able to secure two weeks away from Los Angeles, where he was working on another project, and flies to New York where Ray is still living. All of this looks like it's done as recreations and on good film stock. Wenders gets to Ray's apartment fairly early in the morning when Ray is still asleep, but appearing to be in rather horrible pain from the cancer that's killing him. When Ray wakes up, at some point the film stock switches to video, which I presume is supposed to represent the idea that this is the "real", raw footage, as opposed to all those recreations that might not have represented any sort of reality in Ray's life.

Ray talks some about ideas he has for a film script, something that's obviously not going to be completed in his lifetime. But Wenders lets Ray talk about this, and then film scenes with Ray in a way that seem obviously scripted and not part of a documentary. Meanwhile, Ray also heads up to Vassar in Poughkeepsie to give a lecture after a screening of his earlier work The Lusty Men. Wenders films the limousine ride, as well as scenes from backstage and a bit of Ray's speech.

Eventually Wenders has to fly back to Los Angeles, but in mid-May, just a few weeks before Ray's death, is able to get back to New York to film more footage, including Ray working on "directing" rehearsals of a production of a Kafka stage play. But, it's not enough footage, as Ray dies, and there's an epilogue filmed after Ray's death.

There have been any number of documentaries of terminally ill or very elderly people who want portions of their lives documented before they die, so doing that for a prominent movie director like Nicholas Ray is not a bad thing. However, in watching Lightning Over Water, I couldn't help but get the feeling that almost none of this is real. It also feels a lot like a vanity project. In short, I think that Lightning Over Water is the sort of movie that fans of Nicholas Ray will like, but that average movie fans, and even more so people who aren't (yet) that big of a fan of older movies, aren't going to care so much for.

Parade of the Dead 2024, plus one more programming note

Every year, TCM does a year-end TCM Remembers piece to commemorate all the movie-related people who died over the past year. Also in December, they've been running a night of movies where each one features a different person who died over the preceding twelve months and who didn't necessarily merit a longer programming tribute. That night of movies airs tonight, into tomorrow morning, and honors six people:

8:00 PM Le Samouraï, with the late Alain Delon as a hired killer in 1960 Paris;
10:00 PM 3 Women, a new-to-me Robert Altman film about three female roommates, including one played by Shelley Duvall;
12:15 AM Blood Simple, honoring M. Emmett Walsh who here plays another hired killer;
2:15 AM Lola, with Anouk Aimée as a married singer who gets involved with two men not her husband;
4:15 AM Romance on the High Seas, starring Janis Paige as a woman who tricks her husband who thinks she might be being unfaithful; and
6:00 AM Fighting Father Dunne, a Boys Town-like story including Darryl Hickman as one of the boys

TCM couldn't really have added any more movies to the tribute even if they wanted to, since the block comes up against the Saturday Matinee block. Following that, at noon on December 28, is the Saturday musical, which I really want to mention because it's Xanadu. Yeah, it's a movie that notoriously bombed at the box office, but it's a fun disaster, and one that you really should watch just once if you've never seen it before.

And since I mentioned the annual TCM Remembers piece, that's been playing for a week or so now, and is also up on YouTube:

An outfit

Some time back I briefly mentioned a 1970s movie called The Outfit. I think I saw it many years ago which is why I thought it looked familiar when I saw it show up on the TCM schedule back in 2016. It got another airing last year, and I recorded that airing. A search of the site suggests I've never done a full-length review of The Outfit, so I watched it again to be able to do that review. Parts of it looked familiar, but parts I didn't remember; I wouldn't be surprised if it was one of those movies that I turned TCM on in the middle of and watched the rest of it.

The movie opens up with a pre-credits scene of taxi driving along what looks like the back roads in the agricultural parts of California, although apparently the movie isn't set in California. The passenger has a suitcase, and opens it up to start putting together what looks like one of those guns that you don't want found out. Eventually, the taxi goes to the home of Eddie Macklin, and the passenger gets out and shoots Macklin dead. Jane Greer has a smallish part as Eddie's wife Alma.

Over the credits, a man is being released from prison. This man is Earl Macklin (Robert Duvall), who as you can guess is the brother of Eddie, although I've mentioned this before an actual viewer of the movie learns all of this. Earl is picked up from prison by his girlfriend Bett (Karen Black), who takes him to a motel. Earl is no dummy, and from talking to Bett figures out that they're at a motel so that somebody else will know Earl is that. That somebody is the hitman Orlandi, and Earl surprises Orlandi.

Earl, having pulled a gun on Orlandi, gets the name Jake Menner (Timothy Carey) out of Orlandi, and goes looking for Menner to gain revenge. Menner, however, belongs to a group called The Outfit, and that's part of why the Macklins are in trouble. (Well, Earl is still in trouble; Eddie being dead is no longer in trouble.) Earl was in prison for bank robbery, but what he didn't know when he and his brother robbed the bank is that they made the mistake of robbing one that was controlled by The Outfit. You hit us, we hit you, as Menner tells Earl. Earl wants money from the Outfit for what they did to him, but the Outfit isn't about to pay out.

Menner calls his boss, Mailer (Robert Ryan), to tell him that Macklin is still alive, which is of course a problem for the Outfit. But Mailer is generally smart enough such that he's not directly involved with anything the underlings do. So it's up to Menner to deal with Macklin. However, there was also a third guy in the robbery, Cody (Joe Don Baker). He's still alive and owns a diner, but when Macklin comes for him he's up for revenge too, especially since the Outfit's men have already tried to get Cody.

The Outfit is a well-enough made movie, but on watching it again I see why it's one of those movies where I felt as though I'd seen it before but didn't really remember it. There's nothing particularly new going on here, other than a 1970s update of the sort of plot line that had already been done on any number of occasions. If you enjoy 1970s cinema, I think you'll definitely enjoy The Outfit.