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.

Robert Mitchum in another invasion movie

Back on June 6 I mentioned The Longest Day about the D-Day invasion of Normandy, in which a ton of Hollywood and international stars, including Robert Mitchum, have roles of varying sizes. Several years later, for Italian producer Dino di Laurentiis, he made a movie about a different World War II invasion: Anzio.

After a horrendously awful song sung by Jack Jones over the opening credits that makes it sound like one of those 1960s potboilers instead of a war film, we see a bunch of Allied soldiers somewhere in southern Italy. The Allies had taken Sicily relatively early since it was an island, while getting across to the mainland was somewhat more difficult. They were able to take some of southern Italy before the Nazi commander in Italy, Field Marshal Kesselring (played in Anzio by Wolfgang Preiss), was able to set up a defensive line that more or less stalemated the Allies as winter was setting in.

Obviously, the Allies were going to try to break out somehow, and while the generals were preparing, the grunts are getting all rowdy in one of the palazzos, observed by war correspondent Dick Ennis (Robert Mitchum playing a composite character; most of not all of the Allies are either wholly fictional or composites based on real militry officers). But then some commanders come in, which can only mean one thing: the big invasion is about to being.

Thankfully, although this is winter, it's Italian winter, so it's not bitter cold like the Allies would get the following winter when they pushed eastward from Normandy, meaning that another invasion is doable if not necessarily easy. The big question is, how much resistance are they going to face from the Germans. In command is American general Lesley (Arthur Kennedy), who wants to make certain the Allies can secure the beachhead, that being necessary before further advances can be made.

So the Allies land at Anzio, and as Gen. Lesley sets about securing the location, everybody seems surprised at the lack of resistance that they're facing. Indeed, the lookout points for snipers seem to be completely empty. With that in mind, Ennis procures a driver and sets out for Rome, which isn't all that far away from the landing site. They even get all the way to the outskirts of Rome, basically facing no resistance whatsoever. The Allies, it appears, could just take Rome right away, which would be a major victory.

However, the difficulty lies in getting in touch with the commanding officers and getting them to believe that the Allies could in fact advance. Lesley has some reason to believe that the Germans are in fact setting a trap, trying to get the Allies to overextend themselves after which the Germans can really put a hurting on the Allies. This proves to be wrong, however, and this delay gives the Germans vital time to fortify their position, more or less trapping the Allies on the beach.

It's not hard to see why someone would want to make a movie about Anzio, and with the movie being made in the late 1960s, it's also not hard to see why moviemakers would want to make something that suggests the futility of war. However, there's something about Anzio that makes it come off as not quite right, already starting from that opening song. I think what goes wrong has a lot to do with the script, and a sense of di Laurentiis wanting to make an epic on a tight budget.

The cast is professional although a lot of them are underused. They do the best they can with the material, but ultimately, Anzio comes off as another of those movies that probably could have been so much more than the final product we get.

Billy Budd

When I was in high school, one of the books we had to read was Herman Melville's Billy Budd. It's really only a novella, because Herman Melville never actually finished it and what we have is what he left behind at the time of his death combined with some compilation and editing by his widow and later scholars. The book was popular enough, however, that in the late 1940s the material was adapted into a stage play; it's that play which is the basis for the 1962 movie Billy Budd.

The year is 1797, and if you remember the movie Damn the Defiant! that I reviewed a several weeks back, you'll recall that this was the year that the British Royal Navy suffered the Spithead mutiny, which was quite a serious thing. Edward Vere (Peter Ustinov) is the captain of the HMS Avenger, and in need of replenishing his crew. Since there's a war on and he's at sea, going to port and impressing the men there, as we've seen from other naval movies like Mutiny on the Bounty, is a non-starter.

Ah, but the laws of war suggest that in a time of war the Royal Navy may impress men from British-flagged merchant ships. After all, they're already sailors. So when the Avenger encounters the Rights of Man, Capt. Vere takes some of the crew, including a young foretopman named Billy Budd (Terence Stamp in his feature film debut).

Billy is considered a naïf by his crewmates, but he also has a strange sort of charisma, where practically everybody he meets loves him because he's just so... something or other. This even though he doesn't seem to have any desire to be a leader of men. He just wants to get on with his work. The only person who soesn't seem to like Billy is the ship's Master of arms, Claggard (Robert Ryan). That, however, is because Claggart doesn't like anybody. In a bit of reversal from Mutiny on the Bounty, it's Claggart who feels the need for iron discipline, while the captain has a more nuanced view.

Still, Billy is just so nice that he's going to try to get in the good graces of Claggart not out of any desire to toady up the a boss who has considerable power over him, but because it seems he's incapable of doing anything else. Claggart isn't stupid, and sees the power that Billy unwittingly has over other crewmen, so Claggart decides he's going to trump up charges against Billy by any means necessary. Knowing of the Spithead mutinies, Claggart gets his loyalists to try to fabricate evidence that Billy is part of an incipient mutiny.

When Vere calls Claggart and Budd in for a meeting, Budd has one of his few weaknesses, which is a nervous stammer. He's incapable of saying what he's thinking because Claggart's bullying has made him so scared. So he instinctively reacts physically, accidentally striking Claggart, who falls backwards and hits his head, killing himself. In a modern-day court of law on dry land, this would probably be negligent manslaughter, but at sea during war, it's a court-martial offense, and the penalty is death, even if everybody is secretly relieved that Claggart is dead and nobody really wants Billy to die if they had their way.

Herman Melville is not my favorite author, so when I had to read Billy Budd back in high school I wasn't too thrilled with it. This movie adaptation, however, really makes the material come to life, thanks in no small part to a series of excellent performances by the three leads. There's also smaller supporting roles for Melvyn Douglas and David McCallum, among others.

If you haven't seen Billy Budd before, do yourself a favor and watch it. It's much better than the Melville novella.

Neither 30 nor dirty

Some years back, TCM ran a movie with an interesting title: Lolly-Madonna XXX. For whatever reason I didn't get to record it. Back in August when Robert Ryan was honored in Summer Under the Stars, I got the chance to record it so that I could finally see it and do a post on it.

The movie starts off with the opening credits panning over a series of old-timey family photographs, as well as bucolic scenes of the eastern Tennessee hill country. The photos show two families: the Gutshalls with patriarch Pap (Robert Ryan), and the Feathers, headed by Laban (Rod Steiger). The two families have been in a feud, presumably for generations, with one of the big parts of the field having to do with a certain meadow between their properties. The current younger generation engages in a series of skirmishes over that meadow.

The current one involves one of the Gutshall sons, Ludie (Kiel Martin). He creates the fictitious Lolly-Madonna, writing a postcard from her that implies she's a bride coming to get married. The Feathers get the postcard, and two of the sons, Thrush (Scott Wilson) and Hawk (Ed Lauter) go down to meet the non-existent Lolly. This is a ruse to get them to go to the bus stop and away from their still in the woods, with the Gutshall boys planing to destroy the still as revenge for some hogs that the Feathers have taken.

However, when Thrush and Hawk arrive at the bus stop, which is as much of a bus stop as the place Cary Grant stands in the crop-duster scene in North by Northwest, they find a woman there. She's not Lolly-Madonna, of course, but a totally innocent bystander, Roonie Gill (Season Hubley). Thrush and Hawk, for their part, have no reason not to believe she's the Lolly-Madonna of the postcard, and as part of the family feud they decide to kidnap her and bring her back to the Feather place. Despite her protestations nd Laban questioning her, she can't convince the Feathers that she's not Lolly-Madonna, and just passing through on her way to Memphis.

All of this only serves to escalate the conflict between the Gutshalls and the Feathers. Meanwhile, younger Feather brother Zack (Jeff Bridges) begins to fall in love with Roonie/Lolly, and the feeling begins to become mutual as these two aren't really made for the life the Gutshalls and Feathers are living. Their feelings for each other also serve as a way to flesh out the back-story of how the two families wound up feuding. The rest of the family members can't be bothered to care about what caused the feud in the first place, just keeping it going, which will eventually lead to disastrous consequences.

Lolly-Madonna XXX is a movie that surprised me, in part because the opening credits point out that it's based on a novel by Sue Grafton. Yes, that Sue Grafton of the Kinsey Millhone mysteries. I didn't know she had ever written material like this. It's also not the sort of material you'd expect based on the title of the movie (the book is slightly more indicative, titled The Lolly-Madonna War; the XXX of the title is for three kisses on the postcard). As such, the movie may not be for everybody. It's also a bit slow to develop and a bit complicated because of the way the movie presents the back-story in bits and pieces.

But for people who want something a bit quirky, Lolly-Madonna XXX is definitely worth watching, in no small part thanks to the ensemble cast giving some fairly fine acting performances and lovely location shooting.

Best of the Badmen

Robert Ryan was another of the people honored in Summer Under the Stars this past August. That gave me the opportunity to DVR several of his movies that I hadn't seen before. One of these is Best of the Badmen, so recently I finally got around to watching it in order to do a review on it here.

The movie opens with title cards telling us about a forgotten chapter of American history. After the Civil War ended in April 1865, there were still some isolated areas where things didn't become peaceful right away, such as in southwestern Missouri thanks to the presence of Quantrill's Raiders. Now, if you've read my reviews over the years, you'll recall that there are a couple of movies that deal with famous outlaw Jesse James (played here by Lawrence Tierney) and how he and the males in his extended family were part of the Raiders. Walter Brennan plays a character named Doc and gives voiceover narration about the remaining stragglers in the Raiders.

Into all of this rides Maj. Jeff Clanton (that's Robert Ryan, if you couldn't tell). He served with the Union Army, and has terms regarding the late President Lincoln's proclamation. If people like Quantrill's Raiders who served in uniform for the Confederacy will sign an oath of allegiance to the Union, the Army and federal government will grant them parole, which means a chance to start over. They're not certain, largely because they have good reason to believe that the carpetbaggers that came in from other places and are now in high government positions won't give men like Quantrill's raiders a fair chance.

One such man is Matthew Fowler (Robert Preston), who ostensibly runs a detective agency but is hated by Maj. Clanton because he knows how dishonest Fowler is. Indeed, Fowler is well aware that there's reward money out there for unpardoned confederates, and he'd like to get him some of that sweet, sweet money. He'd very much like it if those raiders don't get pardoned. Fowler is even willing to use violence to keep the oath from being administered, having a deputy shoot Bob Younger. Clanton shoots back, which is the right thing as long as he's in the army. But once he's out, Fowler is going to use his bought and paid for sheriff to try to prosecute Clanton, eventually obtaining a guilty verdict and death sentence.

But in jail, a strange woman named Lily (Claire Trevor) shows up, claiming to be Jeff's lover. She springs Clanton from prison, and we eventually learn that she's Lily Fowler, the estranged wife of Matt Fowler. The two of them flee before eventually running into some of Quantrill's Raiders, who also had to flee because the pardon proclamation never got finished. Eventually everybody winds up in what is now the Oklahoma panhandle, looking for a way to gain revenge against Fowler and right historical wrongs.

Best of the Badmen is the sort of western programmer that was big in the 1940s, but within a few years would be much less common thanks to episodic TV as well as more psychological westerns like the ones Randolph Scott made with Budd Boetticher. It's not the greatest movie ever made, but it's not bad, and entertaining enough.

Back from Eternity

It's been over 14 years since I blogged about the Lucill Ball movie Five Came Back. I knew that it was remade in the 1950s, and that the remake, titled Back from Eternity, showed up a lot on TCM because both versions were made at RKO. But, for whatever reason, I had never watched Back from Eternity before. So the most recent time it showed up, I finally recorded it so that I could do a post on it here.

Having already seen Five Came Back, I already knew the basic plot of the movie. Robert Ryan stars as Bill Lonagan, pilot for an airline that's reduced to flying Americans down to some tinpot little South American country, in this case with the fictional capital city of Boca Grande. On this particular flight, he's got a new co-pilot in Joe Brooks (Keith Andes). There's also the motley assortment of character types on this particular flight, all of them with back stories, but with those stories not always being the reason they're on the flight. The Spanglers (Beulah Bondi and Cameron Prud'Homme) are the elderly couple where the husband is a college professor taking a research trip; Jud (Gene Brooks) is a wealthy businessman engaged to Louise (Phyllis Kirk); young Tommy is the son of a gangster who has just been killed, with one of the gangster's underlings, Boswick (Jessie White) taking him out of the country to shield young Tommy from the news; Rena (Antia Ekberg) is the requisite woman of ill repute being sent to South America; and Vasquel (Rod Steiger) is a political revolutionary wanted in Boca Grande and who is to be delivered there by Crimp (Fred Clark).

The various passengers already start having interactions on the way down to Boca Grande, such as one reading a newspaper that has a story on the death of Tommy's father. Prof. Spangler also mentions the natives they'll be flying over, a bunch of headhunter types who have a way of shrinking the heads of the people they capture and turning them into talismans. The exposition is also a form of foreshadowing, as you might be able to figure out even if you hadn't seen the movie Five Came Back and didn't know the plot synopsis of the movie. Soon enough, the plane hits rough weather, and you know that's going to drive the plot.

Sure enough, the plane is forced to crash land, and the plane is somewhat damaged. The radio, for example, is no longer working, while one of the engines went out. However, it's not so damaged that the plane is irreparable. They might be able to fix it just enough to get off the ground again and go to their destination. And they're going to have to do that too, since they're way off course and nobody is going to know exactly where they went down in the storm.

Time is of the essence, as they didn't pack enough food for the reason that they didn't expect to be in the jungle for possibly weeks. More importantly, though, are those headhunters they only expected to be flying over. You have to know that they're going to figure out these Americans are in their midst, and they're not going to let the Americans stay there peaceably. And to make matters worse, the characters begin to have conflicts with one another. Louise looks like she might like co-pilot Joe more than she does her fiancé, while Jud, Vasquel, and pilot Bill don't see eye to eye on who should be in charge.

And then when the plane does get repaired, there's a catch. It's been damaged enough that the plane will only be able to take five passengers to Boca Grande. And who should have the power to make those life and death decisions?

Back from Eternity isn't a bad movie, and it would probably have a better reputation if it were an original story instead of being a remake of a movie made in Hollywood's annus mirabilis of 1939. It also has a bit of a TV movie feel in terms of production values, having been made near what was the end of the road for RKO. Still, the acting is pretty good, and the movie is definitely worth a watch.

The Sky's the Limit

Another of the movies that I watched recently in order to try to free up some space on my DVR was the Fred Astaire vehicle The Sky's the Limit.

Astaire, clearly much too old for his role, plays Fred Atwell. He's been doing his service in World War II flying with the Flying Tigers based with the Republic of China forces in the western part of mainland China which the Japanese did not control. He and his fellow pilots Reginald Fenton (Robert Ryan) and Richard Merlin have done some rather heroic work with the Flying Tigers, and the US military have decided to give them a bit of a theoretical break from normal military service by sending them back to the States and going on a bond tour, in which they're making public appearances and raising support for buying war bonds.

This tour involves Fred and the other guys getting ticker-tape parades and the like, but for Fred, it doesn't give him the one thing he really wants, which is real, no-fooling leave. So while they're taking a train to go from one stop to the next on the bond tour, Fred gets out at the wrong stop, ditches his military uniform, and makes his way east to New York in the hopes of getting that real relaxation.

Fred goes to a nightclub where somehow he's able to get in. There, he finds photographer Joan Manion (Joan Leslie), and immediately falls in love with her. And he's quite forward about trying to pursue her, to the point that he's continually popping up whenever she tries to take a photo. Joan unsurprisingly finds this profoundly annoying. Meanwhile, she has dreams of becoming a real professional photojournalist. She's also got a boss in Phil Harriman (Robert Benchley) who has a romantic interest in Joan, too, although she doesn't feel anything more than friendship for him.

Fred finds the rooming-house where Joan lives, and seeing that there's a room available, takes it for the week before he has to join back up with the bond tour, still out of uniform since he doesn't want Joan to know his real identity lest she start peppering him non-stop with questions about his service, which is precisely what he doesn't want.

Along the way, the two dance together and sing several songs, such as Joan singing the Oscar-nominated "My Shining Hour", while Fred gets to sing "One For My Baby (And One More for the Road)", which would later become a standard. You know that the two of them are going to wind up together in the final reel, of course.

To me, The Sky's the Limit is one of the weaker of the Fred Astaire musicals I've seen. Part of this is a feeling that RKO should have sprung for Technicolor; as things stand the movie looks like is stuck with pre-war production values. But the bigger problem for me was several of the plot elements. One is that Fred is way too pushy, to the point that you hope somebody will smack him for it. But there's also his status as a hero. Harriman, being in publishing, eventually is able to discover Fred's real identity, but since he had been in ticker-tape parades that would presumably have garnered a fair bit of attention, even if they were on the other coast, especially considering Harriman is involved in journalism.

It's not that The Sky's the Limit is a bad movie; it's more that it's decidedly lesser Fred Astaire. There are so many good Fred Astaire musicals, even among movies where he wasn't paired with Ginger Rogers, that this one comes well down the list.

Frogmen in the Air

Today is Veterans' Day here in the US. Of course, it used to be Armistice Day, since it originally marked the end of World War I, but nowadays it's another holiday to honor all veterans. TCM is running a bunch of war movies, but either I've blogged about their selections, or don't have them on my DVR or on a DVD. I couldn't find anything World War I-related offhand, so instead I decided to dig out my box set of John Wayne war movies, and watch Flying Leathernecks.

Wayne stars as Maj. Kirby, who has just been given command of a group of Marine flyboys in World War II who are about to get involved in the battle for Guadalcanal. None of the men in the squadron know Kirby, and they were expecting that the group's former second-in-command, Capt. Griffin (Robert Ryan), would be elevated to commander to replace the old guy. But apparently the brass some levels above didn't think Griffin was ready for command yet, which is why Kirby has been brought in.

So it's understandable that the men don't particularly like Kirby. But he only makes it tougher on himself by being a stickler for doing things the right way, and being particularly not nice about it when the men under his command screw up. When one guy loses a fighter while chasing a Japanese reconnaissance plane, Kirby schedules the man for a court martial! But in Kirby's defense, there's a war on, and if there's too much laxity, there's no way the Americans are going to win.

Since there's a war on, we get a lot of combat sequences, and these are all made up of actual combat footage from World War II, which is mildy jarring since it looks like it ws done on different film stock compared to all the Hollywood scenes. And there's not much of a plot fleshed out besides the ever-present conflict between Kirby and Griffin over whether Griffin will ever be fit for command.

It's not all that long ago that I did a post on the Fox film The Frogmen, which deals with many similar themes, with Richard Widmark in the "new commander" role taken on here by Wayne, and Dana Andrews in the "man passed over" role given to Robert Ryan. And frankly, I preferred The Frogmen, because I think the characters are better fleshed out. Everybody tries their best in Flying Leathernecks, but the picture never really goes anywhere.

Twelve of her men

Continuing to get movies off the DVR to make space for new movies I haven't blogged about for, one of my recent movie watches was Her Twelve Men.

Greer Garson plays Jan Stewart, who at the start of the movie is taking a plane to go to her new job, as a teacher at the all-boys Oaks boarding school. It turns out that one of the students is on the plane with her, and he's aghast at the thought of a woman teacher. (Really?)

Anyhow, Jan gets to the school, and finds that she'll be teaching a dozen boys. They live upstairs in a dormitory, and she gets an efficiency on the ground floor. So she's going to be spending a lot of time with them. At first, as seems to be a standard trope with a new teacher, they test her a lot.

One of the other teachers, Joe Hargrave (Robert Ryan), isn't so sure Jan is going to be up to the job, but he gives her some pointers along the way. The Oaks has strict rules, but part of being a good teacher is knowing when to bend those rules. These boys need a stable adult presence in their lives, since many of the wealthy parents are boarding them just to make their own lives easier.

Some of the boys need her more than others, such as the one whose parents are vacationing in Europe and can't even be bothered to send him letters. Jan writes fake letters, which should have been obvious fakes to the boy with the lack of foreign stamps and the photos cut out of magazines. Then there's the kid (Tim Considine, later of My Three Sons) who gets injured. When Jan takes him back home for convalescence, she begins to fall in love with the boy's father (Barry Sullivan).

But the other boys back at the Oaks need Jan too, and as we'll learn by the end of the movie, they'll even grow to love her. Her Twelve Men is a sentimental, episodic movie, reminiscent of The Trouble With Angels but not nearly as good. I think that's down in no small part to this being an MGM movie, with some of the same issues that brought to some other movies I've mentioned. MGM certainly had a professional gloss, but sometimes they needed to tone it down, and this is one of the movies.

It personally didn't help either that for some reason I thought this was a comedy, and was looking forward to seeing Robert Ryan do comedy. Although there are humorous scenes as befits an episodic movie, it's certainly not a straight-up comedy. But that's my fault for having a mistaken impression of the movie, not the filmmakers'.

Her Twelve Men is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

In which yours truly takes a decidedly minority opinion

I've never taken part in the "Blind Spot" blogathon where people take up the challenge of seeing a bunch of well-known and highly-rated movie that they've never seen before. If I did, one of the movies I could have used this year would have been Sam Peckinpah's 1969 western The Wild Bunch. However, I have to say I was decidedly underwhelmed by it.

There's really nothing wrong with the story. William Holden plays Pike Bishop, an outlaw at the end of the old west era who's looking to score one last haul with his gang so he can go into retirement. The gang includes Dutch (Ernest Borgnine); bothers Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector (Ben Johnson); and Mexican Angel (Jaime Sanchez). Pike and the gang are planning to rob a railroad payroll in south Texas.

Waiting for Pike's gang is bounty hunter Deke (Robert Ryan). He's able to disrupt the robbery enough to kill a couple of minor members of Pike's gang, but Pike and the big names escape with at least some of the loot. Except that when they get to Mexico they find that it's not loot at all, but steel washers instead of silver coins. They're going to have to do yet another robbery if they want to retire.

Meanwhile, the gang has temporary sanctuary in Angel's home village where a brutal revolutionary officer has taken over. Pike offers to steal a bunch of guns from a US military transport in exchange for a substantial sum that will allow everybody to retire. But he's worried that the general is going to try to fleece him, and he still has to worry about Deke and his gang, who probably don't have any qualms about crossing the border to get him.

In addition to a reasonably conceived story, I also have no issue with the actors. I enjoy all of them, and nobody here is noticeably obnoxious. The Mexican general is a clear bad guy, but that's the way the character is written and not a problem with the actor (Emilio Fernandez).

So what did I dislike about The Wild Bunch? I think it all comes down to Sam Peckinpah's direction. The movie is known for its violence, which was fairly extreme at the time. Now, I don't have any particular problem with gratuitous violence -- I happen to love Bonnie and Clyde, for example, which to me seemed just as violent as The Wild Bunch. And frankly I'd much rather watch gratuitous violence than gratuitous sex. The problem I had was the way Peckinpah filmed it. People get shot and fall off rooftops. No big deal there. But almost invariably, Peckinpah has them fall off in slow motion. Other people who get shot standing (or sitting) on solid ground also die in rather florid mannerisms.

Peckinpah also drew the story out with some flashback scenes that reminded me of one of the problems I had with Marathon Man. Also, the movie is quite languid for much of the running time, telling what is probably a 100-minute story or so in an excruciating 144 minutes. Finally, this being the late 1960s, there are a bunch of those pointless zooms that I like to rail about in movies of the late 60s and early 70s. Here they were really noticeable and served no discernible artistic purpose.

Still, almost everybody else loves The Wild Bunch, so this even more than most other movies is one I'd suggest you watch and make your own decisions about. It's available on Blu-ray at a fairly moderate price.

About Mrs. Leslie

Almost a year ago, I briefly mentioned the movie About Mrs. Leslie. It's running on TCM again tonight at midnight, and is worth a watch.

Mrs. Vivien Leslie (Shirley Booth) is a now unmarried woman living in Los Angeles, running a rooming house. Among her roomers are an older couple who are only in town to deal with a relative in hospital, a young woman who wants to make it in Hollywood and seems to be a party girl, and a young man who would probably be better for the young woman, but does he have the gumption to convince her of it? Vivien tries to make everybody's lives a little less humdrum in her own subtle way.

Meanwhile, there's the story of how Vivien wound up in Los Angeles. Fifteen year ago, before World War II, she was working as a nightclub singer in New York (yeah, Shirley Booth of the 1950s as a nightclub siren). Into the nightclub come a couple of businessmen, including George Leslie (Robert Ryan). George is captivated by Vivien, and Vivien seems flattered by the man's erudition. He makes her a strange offer: accompany him on a trip to California for six weeks, and after that time they'll go their separate ways.

Amazingly, she takes him up on the offer, and unsurprisingly, the two fall in love. But there's a catch: George Leslie is only using his first and middle names. His last name would give the game away as he's in the news and once the war comes he's one of those people who serves the government by offering his expertise free of charge, like the Charles Coburn character in The More the Merrier. And he's already married into a prominent family. Of course Vivien finds out eventually, but what will that do to their relationship? And what will happen to the folks in her romming house and the girl next door?

It's with good reason that TCM is running About Mrs. Leslie as part of the Spotlight on post-war melodramas: boy does this one fall into that category. It's actually not a bad little movie however. That probably has a lot to do with the two leads, both excellent actors who could rise above less-than-stellar material. And the material here is at times less than stellar. Most of the screen time is given to Booth, with Ryan close behind; the stories of the rooming house tenants are decidedly secondary, thankfully.

I'm not certain if About Mrs. Leslie has ever been released to DVD, so you'll have to catch the rare TCM showing.

Lawman

I watched Lawman over the weekend since I saw that it was coming up on StarzEncore Westerns for those of you who have the Encore package (or however your cable provider packages the premium channels). It'll be on tonight at 8:10 and overnight at 2:45 AM. The movie has been released to DVD, but as far as I can tell the DVD is out of print: it's available in limited quantities on Amazon and not available at the TCM Shop.

The movie starts off before the opening credits with a bunch of guy shooting up a town somewhere in the west. Then come the opening credits, with a man riding horseback with a dead man on the horse behind him, coming into another town, which is how we learn about both towns. The first own was Bannock, with Marshal Jared Maddox (Burt Lancaster). He's bringing the dead body back to Sabbath, as well as to see Sabbath's marshal, Cotton Ryan (Robert Ryan). Maddox informs Ryan that there are a bunch of people that Maddox wants to bring to trial in Bannock since the guys who shot up the town killed a man. Oh, and you can strike one of the men off the list, since that was the dead guy Maddox brought into Sabbath during the opening credits.

Ryan kindly informs Maddox that it's going to be kind of difficult to bring in those men, since they all work for Bronson (Lee J. Cobb). Bronson effectively owns Sabbath, having built it out of nothing with his cattle ranching. The townsfolk all feel they owe their livelihoods to Bronson, so there's no way any of them are going to turn his men in. Oh, and Ryan happens to consider himself bought by Bronson too. He's OK with it, since he's at the age where he just wants to lead a quiet life, and Sabbath is quiet as long as nobody crosses Bronson.

Of course, Maddox's arrival is going to cross Bronson, but not for a while yet. Bronson, despite having built up Sabbath, also sacrificed a lot in doing so, and given a choice would prefer not to have to resort to violence. He'd rather deal with his legal problems by buying Bannock, too, if that were possible. But the men who rode through Bannock are convinced that they're going to be made to hang for it, and naturally they have no desire to be stretched at the end of a rope. So Bronson's right-hand man Harvey (Albert Salmi) comes into town to try to deal with Maddox, and gets himself killed for it.

At this point, everybody starts gunning for Maddox in ones and twos. Meanwhile, the townsfolk, some of whom have a past with Maddox, also decide to form a citizens' committee to ride Maddox out of town. Most interesting among these are two people who weren't in Bannock at all. First is Laura (Sheree North). She's the common-law wife of one of the men who was in Bannock, and she was in love with Maddox way back when. But Maddox didn't want to settle down. The other is one of Bronson's younger workers, Crowe (Richard Jordan), a hothead who is confronting Maddox when somebody else tries to ambush Maddox.

The movie has an intersting plot, although it ultimately winds up in a less than satisfying place. The ending feels rushed and illogical. But what I found more jarring was the cinematography. Lawman dates from 1971, a time not long after more zoom lenses came into use. Directors starting using zooms incessantly, something that can really be noticed in many 60s and 70s films once you learn to watch for it. In Lawman, it's particularly noticeable, and used to ill effect a lot of the time. The cutting doesn't work as well as the director would hope for. I think it's notable that I recognized these things, as this is normally the sort of stuff I'm not paying such close attention too (especially the cutting), so if I see it, it's pretty blatant.

Overall, western fans and fans of Burt Lancaster or Robert Ryan will like this one. If I were going to introduce people to later westerns, I wouldn't start with this one, however.

It's Memorial Day weekend again

TCM usually spends Memorial Day weekend showing a bunch of war movies. This year is no different. Well, perhaps there is one small difference, which is that it looks like the war movies are actually beginning in prime time tonight instead of 6:00 AM Saturday. That's because Robert Ryan, the Star of the Month, made several war movies, and TCM is showing those in prime time tonight.

Granted, Ryan's performance in The Dirty Dozen isn't particularly big, although it is memorable....

TCM Star of the Month May 2015: Robert Ryan

We've finally reached the Star of the Month for May 2015, that being Robert Ryan. His films are airing every Friday in prime time, although this week the films actually start early. The first movie up is Woman on the Beach at 11:00 AM, a movie I thought I had blogged about before, but which a search of the blog claims I haven't blogged about. Either the blog search is on the fritz again, or I really screwed up by not blogging about it yesterday. I guess I need to do a database of all the movies I've blogged about with full-length posts, but even of only a third of the posts are full-length reviews of movies, that would be over 1100 movies. Going back and doing it at this late date is a bit of a problem. Then again, Woman on the Beach is also a movie that I have some problems with, as it really loses steam.

Then there's The Set-Up, early tomorrow morning at 4:00 AM. I thought I had done a full-length post on this one, too, but again, that's not the case. In this one, Robert Ryan stars as a fading boxer still trying to get to the big time who discovers that his trainer has bet against him in his latest fight and not told him, figuring the guy has become so bad he has no chance of winning anyway: there's also a pay-off if he loses. When Ryan finds out, he's determined to win, consequences be damned. It's quite a good movie, but one of those that, being told in real time, is a bit more difficult to do a full-length post on.

More traditional would be Bad Day at Black Rock, which kicks off prime time at 8:00 PM. Act of Violence (tomorrow at 5:15 AM) received a blog post at 5:15 AM. And if you haven't seen it before, I'd recommend The Woman on Pier 13 at 12:15 PM today. It's not very good, but it's one to see just to say you've seen it.

Robert Ryan vs. Robert Mitchum

TCM is showing The Racket overnight tonight at 12:15 AM as part of a night of Robert Mitchum movies. Now, I recommended The Racket a month ago, but that was the 1928 silent version. This is a remake, in which Robert Mitchum plays the McQuigg role and Robert Ryan takes on the Louis Wolheim role, renamed to a less ethnic Nick Scanlon. The Racket wasn't even the first time that Mitchum and Ryan had appeared together; four years earlier the two had starred together in Crossfire, which also had Mitchum playing the good guy and Ryan playing the bad guy.

I would tend to think that Ryan got cast in the bad-guy role in part because he didn't have the looks that Robert Mitchum had. Crossfire was early in his career. He had been in several smaller roles before and during the war, but there was a three-year gap before Ryan's career really took off in 1947. However, Ryan proved to be quite good at playing unreservedly bad guys, while Mitchum was playing a lot more characters who were supposed to be sympathetic, but had really screwed up their lives, from Out of the Past on. Ryan's bad-guy roles include such excellent movies as Bad Day at Black Rock, Odds Against Tomorrow, and Billy Budd.

But I wonder which movie would contain Ryan's most sympathetic, this is obviously a good guy role, where it's not even a case of making some really stupid decisions like the aforementioned Mitchum's character in Out of the Past. One good suggestion would be The Set-Up, even if by design the movie doesn't give us too much background on any of the characters. There's also Inferno, which still doesn't seem to be on DVD. Even in Inferno, though, he's not the easiest person to be around at the beginning.

Or perhaps it was Ryan's portrayal of John the Baptist in King of Kings. I don't think that character is supposed to be a bad guy.

What's your favorite Robert Ryan good-guy performance?

Audrey Totter, 1917-2013

Audrey Totter and Robert Ryan in a promotional still from The Set-Up

Noir actress Audrey Totter died on Thursday, but I don't think the news of her passing hit the Internet until yesterday afternoon. Totter was a week shy of her 96th birthday.

One of the movies she was in that I'd love to recommend is The Set-Up. But she's not really the star here; that honor goes to Robert Ryan. Even though she gets star billing, it's in a smallish role that's clearly a supporting role. That, and it appears to be out of print on DVD, having been released as part of some noir collection back in 2004. Totter plays the wife of Ryan, who is a boxer on the way down, reduced to fighting in small-stakes bouts that are maybe one step up from the church Rocky Balboa fights in at the beginning of Rocky, or where the fights take place in Fat City. In fact, Ryan is such a lousy boxer that his trainer has agreed with a mobster backing Ryan's opponent to take a dive for some extra money. But the only complication is that Ryan isn't told about this. He's supposed to be so lousy now that he's bound to lose even without having to take a dive, but he's going to try to win the fight anyway. Totter, as his wife, desperately wants him to give up boxing and take up something more honorable, like being a trainer.

The final night for Star of the Month Burt Lancaster

We're already up to the final Wednesday in November, which means it's one final night of Burt Lancaster's movies for his turn as TCM's Star of the Month. The overnight schedule includes The Professionals at 1:15 AM. This is another of those movies I thought I had blogged about before, but a search of the blog, as well as a search of the posts on my computer claims no, I haven't. So now would be a good time to blog about it.

The scene is the Amreican Southwest in 1917; a bit later than your standard-issue western, but just before World War I and the social change that would bring. Over on the other side of the border, in Mexico, there's a revolution going on. Sure, the government is bad, but it's just as likely that the rebels are going to turn out to be a problem, too, as we saw in Crisis many years earlier. Industrialist JW Grant (Ralph Bellamy) has had his wife kidnapped by bandits, and taken to a stronghold somewhere on the Mexican side of the border. And dammit, he wants his wife back! To that end, he's willing to hire the best mercenaries, and pay them a substantial sum. Leading them is soldier-of-fortune Henry Fardan (Lee Marvin). Hnery assembles a team of the best fot the operation: dynamite expert and bon vivant Bill Dolworth (Burt Lancaster), who always seems up for an adventure; horse wrangler Hans Ehrengard (Robert Ryan), and tracker Jacob Sharp (Woody Strode). Their mission, as Grant explains it to them, is to go into Mexico, find Mrs. Grant, and bring her back to him, for which they'll be mighty well compensated.

And so, they head off to Mexico, a place that is pretty desolate and tough to live in, as we saw when discussing the movie Bandolero! back in January 2010. But our team of mercenaries braves the conditions and eventually gets to the camp where Mrs. Grant has been spirited away to, which is where they discover the first of their problems. It's the camp of Jesús Raza, one of the more notorious revolutionaries. As a revolutionary, he's pretty well armed, and getting Mrs. Grant out of there is going to be a darn sight difficult. Additionally, with Raza being her kidnapper, there's also the problem that the Mexican government wants Raza, so our Americans dealing with Raza means they're also eventually going to have to deal with the other side of the revolution. But they want their money, and in a nice set piece they rescue the lovely Maria Grant (Claudia Cardinale; where do all these people in Westerns get their trophy wives from?).

At this point, with Maria in tow and Raza and the Mexican government going after them, the team faces its third problem: Maria doesn't want to go back to Grant. Hers is a marriage not born out of love, but out of Grant's rapacious and controlling desire to have a beautiful wife. In fact, Maria loves Raza and is happy to be with him. But our professionals, faced with all the other problems they have, understandably figure that the least bad thing to do is complete their mission and get the money; if Maria wants to escape back to Raza afterwards that's her business. Except that there are going to be complications getting back to the States, with another set in a mountain pass; more difficult is when Maria suggests that Grant isn't going to pay them according to the terms of hte deal he made with them....

The Professoinals is more entertainment than anything else, as it's not rying to address any social issues or make any really dark points the way that a lot of other movies started to do with the destruction of the Production Code in the late 1960s. But there's nothing wrong with a movie being pure entertainment, and in that regard The Professionals succeeds in spades. Lancaster looks like he's having the time of his life making this one, getting to be rakish at times as he gets knocked on his keister wearing just his long johns. Lee Marvin is good, even if he was more enjoyable when he was playing bad guys. Everybody else has smaller roles, but all of them do well. All along the way, The Professionals is lovely to look at.

The Professionals is available for purchase from the TCM Shop.

Odds Against Tomorrow

Apparently I've never blogged about Odds Against Tomorrow. It's coming up overnight at 2:15 AM as part of this month's TCM series of heist and caper movies, and most definitely deserves a viewing, especially since the DVD seems to be out of print.

Ed Begley plays Dave Burke, a policeman who's left the force in less-than-honorable circumstances. As a policeman, he knows quite a bit about crime from the other side, that being how the police try to detect it and stop it. Perfect knowledge, you'd think, for somebody who wants to commit a crime. And boy does Burke want that. He's fingered a small-town bank and has an elaborate plan to rob it. The only thing is, it's something he can't do alone. And so, he's found two people to help him. Hary Belafonte plays Johnny Ingram, a nightclub singer with alimony and child support payments driving him deeply into debt. Well, there's the illegal gambling too. Obviously, somebody desperately in need of a quick buck is a good candidate to be roped into a heist. The other partner is Robert Ryan, playing Earle Slater. He's a released prisoner who, having been in jail, is now on the margins of society, not able to eke out much of a living. But he's got knowledge of how to rob. So Burke recruits both Ingram and Slater.

What could go wrong? Well, this is a heist movie and one filmed while the Production Code was still being enforced, so we know that something has to go wrong. In the case of Odds Against Tomorrow, much of that is down to Slater. Not only is he a former prisoner, he's a transplant from the South, which means he's a pretty vicious racist. And with Ingram as a black man being in on the job, it's clear right from the beginning that there's going to be tension between the two that might just doom the whole plan. (You'd think Burke could have found a way around this.) Can Slater trust Ingram? And can Ingram overcome his understandable distrust of racists to carry out his part in a plan that will benefit one of those racists? Shades of The Defiant Ones here.

Harry Belafonte always strikes me as a bit of a lightweight: more than good enough for supporting roles as in Bright Road, but a bit lacking when he gets a bigger part as in Carmen Jones. That having been said, he's more than adequate here. He's overshadowed by Robert Ryan, though. Ryan is one of those actors who could play the menacing with a violent temper under the surface type seemingly in his sleep. As such, this is a role that looks as though comes easily to him, and he pulls it off effortlessly, giving a superb performance. Ed Begley was a good actor, although here he's really more of a supporting role linking the Ryan and Belafonte characters. There are probably a lot of character actors who could have played it, but that's not a knock on Begley. I haven't mentioned the women yet. Shelley Winters plays the Slater's girlfriend Lorry, and she might be even more clingy here than her character in A Place in the Sun. Gloria Grahame plays their neighbor, showing a romantic interest in Slater. Ingram's ex-wife is played by Kim Hamilton in a smallish role that, while small, seems realistically drawn. Odds Against Tomorrow also benefits from bleak black-and-white photography, much of which was done on location in Hudson, NY, maybe two hours from New York City and about an hour away from where I am here in the Catskills on the other side of the Hudson River

If you haven't seen Odds Against Tomorrow before, this is your chance to do so. It did get a DVD release, but I think it's out of print since Amazon lists only a couple of copies available for purchase and TCM doesn't list it as being available for purchase at all.

Judging those evil Commies

Tomorrow morning at 7:30 AM TCM is showing the seriously flawed movie The Woman on Pier 13. This is a re-release title, as the original was I Married a Communist.

The original title sounds like a fun slightly exploitative title, along the same lines as I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang or I Married a Monster From Outer Space. Robert Ryan stars as the Communist, or in fact the ex-Communist. His character, Brad Collins, is the head of the local branch of the dockworker's union. At the start of the movie, we see him getting married to Nan (Laraine Day), and then having his past catch up to him. That past is in the form of the lovely Christine (Janis Carter), who reminds Brad that he used to be a Communist. More importanly, once you're a Communist, you can never really leave. And the Party wants Brad to do something for them. That something is to start a strike against the shipping companies. Brad doesn't want to, because it's not in his workers' interest to do so. But if he doesn't, the Communists will reveal his past, which will certainly wind up in his getting blacklisted....

The Woman on Pier 13 is, as I said, a movie that has serious flaws. That largely comes down to the portrayal of the Communists. It's almost cartoonish, and it's terribly heavy-handed. The funny thing is that even though the movie is depicting stuff which has a fair bit of truth to it -- remember, the Communists were trying to get their own unions into Hollywood, which caused serious labor problems during the shooting of Night Unto Night. But the way the Communists are portrayed here is almost laughable. That having been said, The Woman on Pier 13 is the sort of movie it's fun to laugh at as you're watching it.

It was only after reading some of the user reviews on IMDb that I got a better idea of how to review a movie like The Woman on Pier 13. One of the commenters writes that the Communists are portrayed here as a sort of waterfront Mob, which is in some ways true. But it also leads to a good question one can ask whenever dealing with a movie portraying the Communists as beyond evil. Ask yourself if the movie would be any better or worse if it were about not the Communists, but about either the Mafia or the Nazis, depending upon which one would be more appropriate to the plot. In the case of The Woman on Pier 13, the movie would come across as a pale version of On the Waterfront (although to be fair, On the Waterfront came out several years later). It would have nothing to do with the fact that the former movie is about Communists. In fact, a movie like Man on a Tightrope holds up just as well as an escape-from-the-Nazis movie like The Mortal Storm. For domestic Communists, I Was a Communist for the FBI is pretty good, and right up there with The House on 92nd Street.

On location in Japan

Interestingly enough, both TCM and the Fox Movie Channel are showing movies today that were filmed on location in Japan back in the day. TCM is showing Humphrey Bogart in Tokyo Joe overnight tonight (or very early tomorrow morning) at 4:15 AM, while FMC has House of Bamboo at 1:00 PM. I can't recall if I've seen Tokyo Joe before, but since FMC shows their movies over and over, I just watched House of Bamboo a week or two ago, and it's worthy of a mention.

Robert Stack plays Eddie, a man who arrives in Japan at the beginning of the movie, looking for a friend. However, he meet's the friend's girlfriend (Shirley Yamaguchi), who informs him that the friend has died. That death occurred in a botched train robbery, and Eddie, having had a dark past, winds up getting himself involved in the gang.

Or, at least, that's what Eddie wants people to believe. In point of fact, he's actually working for the US military police, since the train had US military guards on it. Apparently, they also know that there's an American running the gang that was responsible for this robbery, or else they wouldn't hire an American and give him a false dishonorable discharge in order that he may look like a suitable gang recruit. And it's Eddie's job to infiltrate the gang. The gang, as it turns out, it run by Sandy, played by a Robert Ryan who is about as about as ill-tempered and violent as he was in Crossfire and On Dangerous Ground.

House of Bamboo is passably entertaining. The basic plot is easy enough to follow, but some of the details never really seem to be explained, such as how they knew about Robert Ryan's involvement. Still, Ryan is perfect for this sort of role. Stack is nothing special, but doesn't do anything to take away from things. What is probably nicest about House of Bamboo is the Cinemascope and color cinematography of Japan as it was back in the mid-1950s.