Category Archives: Movies

Forgotten Film: The Enchanted Cottage (1945)

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Many contemporary fantasies fall flat. This one doesn't.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 157th in my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

It is rare that I get excited about contemporary fantasies, either on film or in published form. It’s not that I don’t like them. I really do but, as a general rule, they don’t ring true. There are some major exceptions – Portrait of Jenny and The Bishop’s Wife excel in both forms primarily due to the amazing stories crafted by Robert Nathan.

I want to direct your attention to one of my favorite contemporary films, The Enchanted Cottage. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Based on the play by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, the 1945 version is the second filmed adaptation following a silent version from 1924, which starred Richard Barthelmess and May McAvoy.

In the 1945 version, we have an amazing cast including Dorothy McGuire as Laura Pennington, Robert Young as Oliver Bradford, Herbert Marshall as the blind pianist John Hillgrove, Mildred Natwick as Mrs. Minnett and Spring Byington as Oliver’s mother, Violet Price.

In a quaint New England coastal town, Mrs. Minnett has a cottage for lease. The cottage has a reputation of being an enchanted place for honeymooners. Intent on leasing it are Oliver Bradford, an Army pilot, and his fiancée Beatrice (Hillary Brooke). Mrs. Minnett has engaged a local young unmarried woman, Laura Pennington, to be the maid for the young couple. The wedding is set for Monday, December 8, 1941. But before they can be married, Oliver is called up by the military and departs for the war, promising to return and marry Beatrice.

He does return but not as the man he was before. He has been shot down and suffered some severe damage. His right arm is virtually useless and he has had nerve damage to his face. He is no longer the dashing young man he was before the war. He returns to the cottage to escape from his mother and his fiancé who have not dealt well with the changes. When he refuses to respond to them, they leave and Oliver is left alone in the house with the exception of Laura, the maid.

Laura is homely and socially inept. She wears bad clothing that does not fit well and an awful hairstyle. Her makeup does not work. At a soldier’s canteen dance, every woman other woman is asked to dance except her. Love starved GI’s who have not seen a woman in months would rather sit a dance out than to be with her.

Laura encounters Oliver about to kill himself and stops him. He asks her if she knows what it is like to be shunned based on looks, and when he looks at her, he knows that she does. He is embarrassed for asking the question. After stopping the suicide, she gradually draws him out with the help of John Hillgrove, a friend of Oliver’s brother. Since Hillgrove does not see him, Oliver relaxes around him.

Eventually Oliver faces a crisis. His mother demands that he leave the cottage and come stay with her or she will come move in with him. Violet, as played by Spring Byington, is a clueless character who cares only for her own convenience. In a fit of panic, Oliver asks Laura to marry him. Laura has loved him for ages and wants to do this, but Oliver suddenly recants, thinking that this might be nothing more than a marriage of convenience to avoid his mother rather than one of love.

The pair marry anyway and Oliver’s doubts do not disappear. The couple spend their wedding night in the cottage and Oliver balks at it all, feeling he has deceived her. Suddenly there is a feeling in the cottage of something changing. Oliver’s injuries and imperfections are gone; Laura is suddenly beautiful. The cottage is working its magic. The couple has never been happier.

The film is sweet and rings true. It could easily be a maudlin mess but director John Cromwell, working with a script from DeWitt Bodeen with tweaks from Herman J. Mankiewicz, pull it off. The film was nominated for one Oscar for Best Original Score from the amazing Roy Webb. The score is wonderful and Webb apparently gave a performance of the suite at the Hollywood Bowl the year after the film’s release.

Apparently, when the film was released, the critics considered it too manipulative of their emotions and savaged it while they late embraced The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946 for its honest portrayal of the war’s effects on veterans returning home damaged to their families.

The TBYOOL is a great film. But I’ll take The Enchanted Cottage. IMDB indicates that a new version is due in 2016. Somehow I don’t think lightning will strike twice to make such a wonderful film. I hope they prove me wrong. Check it out when you get the chance.

Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Films: The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything (1980)

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The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything: Not a very good movie then and not a very good movie now.

This is the 156th in my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

One of my favorite writers of all time is John D. McDonald. I’ve read a lot of his books; at some point I will read many more. I read all the Travis McGee novels, but my all time favorite John D. McDonald novel is The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything. I’ve read it several times and I reviewed it as one of my Forgotten Books at some point in the past. I’m not sure when, because several of my reviews were lost when the Missions Unknown site succumbed to whatever evil it was that killed it. Some reviews had not been backed up (my very bad) and there are several which are not available in archived versions of the site.

So, when this book was announced as a made-for-TV movie in 1980, I was there waiting. I watched it. I was appalled. Kirby Winter was being played by Robert Hays, a TV actor who had not yet made his big splash in Airplane!, the film which was his next role. Pam Dawber, late of Mork and Mindy, was Bonnie Lee Beaumont, sporting a horrendous South Carolina accent.  My beloved book was being sanitized and bastardized into pabulum for the masses.

I still remember that paperback book cover which claimed “One day with Bonnie Lee was like a three-year lease on a harem.” Not in this version. “Throne Smith meets Mickey Spillane.” Not in this version.

So, for 35 years I have hated this film as the epitome of bad made-for-TV movies. And I was happy with that.

This week, I was going to watch Svengali with John Barrymore, a silent film that I had on VHS. I put the tape in and while the tape was moving, I was not getting the picture. I tried several times but it was just not tracking correctly…

So, suddenly I am looking for something to watch and review. I was sitting in the floor with the DVDs and was trying to decide. Should I do The Point with its wonderful soundtrack and hippy-dippy story? What about Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings? Or Roger Corman’s Forbidden World, an amazing Alien rip-off? All these were on the tapes in front of me. And I remembered that they were not going to last too much longer, as VHS tapes have a half life of 25 years or so (or at least that’s what I have been told). Anyway, The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything popped up and the next thing I knew I was shoving it into the player and watching it.

The movie’s protagonist, Kirby Winter, is a lovable loser, who worked for his uncle Omar Krebs. His uncle, worth $220 million dollars has died and Kirby is anxious as the will is read. Turns out Kirby’s inheritance is a gold-plated watch. And that’s it.

Suddenly the Board of the Krebs Foundation is noting that Omar moved $75 million into a side venture OK Enterprises, which Kirby worked for. The only other employee, the sexually-repressed-and-not-loving-it Miss Wilma Farnham (Zohra Lampert), has burned all the company records according to Omar’s instructions.

As a result, Kirby and Wilma are being hunted for embezzlement. Omar’s competitors Joseph Locordolos (Ed Nelson) and Charla O’Rourke (Jill Ireland!) are trying to unearth Omar’s secrets and are using Kirby to try and find out anything.

This leads Kirby to find a new place to stay. His hotel manager, Hoover (Burton Gilliam, notable in Blazing Saddles, not so much here), finds him a friend’s apartment. While there, Kirby is visited by Bonnie Lee Beaumont, who mistakes him for her boyfriend. This mistake leads to anger and then strangely to attraction. While having a hot dog, Kirby accidentally sets the watch and finds that he can stop time around him. He is able to act while everyone remains frozen in the moment.

So far, the film is OK – not good but OK. But from here, it goes bad. The way to fix things seems to be to undress people or leave them in awkward situations. Dressing hired guns up as Las Vegas showgirls is TV-risqué but not particularly effective.

The film was not as bad as I remembered, but it is still not good. I saw this so you do not have to. Nor do you want to see the sequel, The Girl, the Gold Watch and Dynamite (1981), which thankfully does not feature Hays or Dawber but does not replace them with anyone better.

Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Film: Phantom Lady (1944)

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Cornell Woolrich's Phantom Lady is an engaging mystery film, just not a great one.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 155th in my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

I really love the novels of Cornell Woolrich, whether writing under that name or William Irish or George Hopley. For a while, I had a very nice collection of first editions of his work including a beautiful copy of Phantom Lady. But I took the money and ran a long time ago.

Woolrich was a master of suspense and tension, particularly in his novels, though some also comes through in his films. Check out my review of Jacques Tourneau’s The Leopard Man which was based on Woolrich’s novel Black Alibi. It features one of the most terrifying scenes ever put on screen and that scene is straight out of the novel.

But, let’s talk about Phantom Lady. Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) is a successful engineer in a bad marriage. On his anniversary he and his wife have a fight and he storms out of the apartment. He goes to a local bar where he meets a lonely woman with a gaudy hat. They make small talk and he invites her to go to a show. When he asks her name, she demurs, saying that they should enjoy the night with no names and no history. They take a cab to the show where a drummer tries to get her attention and the headliner Monteiro (Aurora) is seen wearing the same hat. Monteiro is obviously furious.

Henderson returns home to find police Inspector Burgess (Thomas Gomez) waiting. Henderson’s wife has been strangled with one of his neckties. Henderson isn’t worried about being arrested for the crime because he didn’t do it. But when the police question the bartender (Andrew Tombes) he says Henderson was alone. So does the cab driver. And when Monteiro is questioned, she remembers nothing about the Henderson’s companion and the hat the argued about isn’t even among her costumes.

Henderson finds himself on trial for murder and, with no alibi, he is quickly convicted and sentenced to die. The only one convinced he’s innocent is his secretary, Carol “Kansas” Richmond (Ella Raines), who is in love with him. She cannot find any other way to help him, so she shadows the bartender. When he makes a casual slip about being paid, he tries to attack her and ends up getting killed in traffic. At that point, Carol suspects she is on the right trail.

She begins to track down the drummer (Elisha Cook, Jr.) who admits that he was paid $500 to forget what he saw. Carol calls Burgess, but by the time he gets there the drummer is dead. At this point, the film gives away the identity of the real killer, something which was not disclosed in the book until the very end.

Scott’s friend, Jack Marlow (Franchot Tone) has been in South America and when he returns he agrees to help Carol solve Scott’s problem. Together they find the Phantom Lady and the hat, but the murderer is still about and Carol is in deep trouble.

This was a good film, just not the great film which might have been made from the book. In glorious black and white, it has many of the features of a good noir film but somehow falls flat. The tense moments just don’t quite come across that way, until the point at which Carol confronts the killer. Part of the problem is the source material. Woolrich novels sometimes rely on coincidence and, as in this case, you have to buy that people are willing to let a man die after being paid to forget something. Somehow I tend to have a better opinion of people than that. Of the four, one should have broken down.

When reading the books, the breakneck pacing gets you through. With the film, that pacing isn’t there and the flaws emerge.

I still like this film, though, and I still love the work of Woolrich. I’m hoping you do to. TCM runs this film fairly regularly and you should check it out when you can. It’s not Out of the Past or Double Indemnity, but it’s still worthwhile.

Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Films: The President’s Analyst (1967)

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The President's Analyst might appeal to you if you like your comedies on the paranoid side. Not so much, however, if you're an Adam Sandler fan.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 154th in my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

Comedy is such a personal thing. Films some people, find to be hilarious, I find to be offensive, juvenile, or just not funny. I’m looking at you Adam Sandler! Nothing you have done is funny to me, so I make it easy on both of us and avoid your movies like the plague. Same goes for Ben Stiller, Kevin James, Seth Rogen, Melissa McCarthy and most of today’s “comedians.”

Now that I have gotten that out of the way, I want to recommend a very funny comedy. The President’s Analyst is certainly one of my favorite films. It is a product of its time and the rampant paranoia makes it seem like something Philip K. Dick might have done.

Dr. Sidney Schaefer (James Coburn) is a prominent New York psychiatrist. One of his patients is Don Masters (Godfrey Cambridge), a spy with the Central Enquiries Agency (the CEA). The opening scene of the film shows Don killing an Albanian spy while pushing a cart through the street of the garment district in broad daylight. Don drops off the cart with the dead body to some handlers so he can make his appointment with Dr. Schaefer. Don then tells Sidney how he feels about this action during his session and waits for the doctor’s reaction.

This turns out to be the final piece in the vetting of the good doctor to become the personal analyst for the president. He is told that everyone needs someone to talk to and he has been selected for the role.

Sidney and his girlfriend Nan (Joan Delaney in her first film role) are moved to Washington, DC, much to the disgust of Henry Lux (Walter Burke) the head of the Federal Bureau of Regulation (FBR), who has moral objections to the living arrangement.

Soon Sidney has more secrets in his head than is good for him. He can’t discuss them with anyone, and he becomes the target for various foreign powers. When it is discovered that he talks in his sleep, Nan is removed from the house. He can still see her, but he cannot go to sleep with her.

Then the fun really begins. Sidney starts to see spies and plots everywhere. Unfortunately for him, the spies and plots are real. He tries to escape by insinuating himself into the household of the Quantrills (a very young William Daniels and Joan Darling), a pair of gun-toting liberals. The Quantrills’ son wiretaps Sidney’s attempt to call the president for help and turns him over to the FBR, which naturally has orders to kill him.

Sidney escapes in the van of a rock band called Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (fronted by Barry “Eve of Destruction” McGuire and Jill Banner). Luckily, the doctor finds some peace and love here. While dallying with Snow White in a grassy field, we are shown how insane everything is with spies attempting to capture him killed by other spies who have the same intent. When Sidney and Snow leave, the field looks like a battle scene. Spies have been garroted, stabbed, shot, killed by poison dart and more. It is a marvelously surreal and funny scene.

Don, meanwhile, is teaming up with Kydor Kropotkin (the wonderful Severn Darden) to rescue Sidney. Kropotkin rescues Sidney from the Puddlians, rockers who work for the Canadian secret service. While fleeing with Sidney, Kropotkin finds himself undergoing analysis and liking it. Soon he is a patient.

I’m going to not reveal the ending, which deals with one of the most nefarious of all spy groups and features Pat Harrington in a great role. But Sidney, Don, Kropotkin, and Nan (who was also turns out to be a spy) have to try to save the world.

It a frantic, paranoid satire that is as relevant today as it was nearly 40 years ago. I’ve watched this film many times and given it to many friends. One way to judge how close our friendship will be is in seeing how they react. Those who don’t get it are never going to be close friends.

I love The President’s Analyst, and it’s pretty readily available if you need to see it. And, If you like those guys I singled out in the first paragraph, it’s likely you won’t like this one. As I said before, my taste is in my mouth. And I like it there.

Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Films: Predestination (2014)

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The Australian sf film Predestination isn't old, but it may not have cropped up on your radar screen.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 153rd in my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

This week we have a film that is again not very old but may not have cropped up on the radar of many of our readers. Predestination is an Australian film that was screened at South by Southwest in 2014 and opened in the U.S. in January of last year.

It is a tricky film with lots of twists and turns and I will try not to spoil too many of them. The story begins when a young man named John (played by Sarah Snook) enters a bar in 1975 New York and encounters the bartender played by Ethan Hawke. John reveals that he writes confession stories for the various true confessions pulps. There follows a bet with the bar tender where John says he has a weird story and bets a bottle of booze versus $20 that it is the wildest he has ever heard.

The story begins when John says, “When I was a little girl …” and goes forward. He had been a foundling, dropped at an orphanage where he was named Jane. Jane excelled at math and physics but failed miserably at relationships and getting along. Upon leaving high school, Jane applied to work for SpaceCorp, where young women entertain spacers on their return from missions. Essentially, this is a brothel for spacemen seeking intelligent women. But Jane has trouble getting along and eventually is kicked out of the program.

Jane then took a job as a servant for a family and enrolls in classes at a charm school. Here she meets a strange man whom she falls in love with and, in a fit of passion, has sex with. When he disappears, she chalks it up to experience until the skirts get tighter and she finds herself on the road to motherhood. When the child is born, Jane is informed that the delivery was a caesarean section. The doctor informs her that she was an unusual case. She had two sets of organs within her body — male and female. They were both underdeveloped. The pregnancy has messed up her female organs and she has had to have a hysterectomy. To save her life, the doctors make her a man. Also, while she was in the hospital, the baby is kidnapped.

Jane (or John) is now a fish out of water. A person with few social skills and no experience in her new identity, John becomes a secretary and, while typing up a true confession story, decides that he can do better at it and begins to write a column as “The Unmarried Mother.”

So far, it’s a pretty odd story. But the bartender offers John a chance to kill the man who caused her all this grief, made her pregnant, and cost her the life she knew. She leaps at the chance and finds out that the bartender is actually a time traveler for the Temporal Bureau and takes her back in her life.

If this sounds familiar, Predestination is based on the story “All You Zombies” by Robert A. Heinlein. And if you read that story, you know where this is all going. And, if you haven’t, you should.

Sarah Snook is great as Jane and John in her various incarnations. She is a lovely young lady and not a bad young man (bringing to mind a young Leonardo DiCaprio). There is a story about the “Fizzle Bomber” whom Ethan Hawke is tracking. The bomber has blasted him at least once, burning his face significantly in the early moments of the film. Overseeing it all is Mr. Robertson (Noah Taylor), acting strange and mysterious in much the manner that William B. Davis’ Cigarette Smoking Man handled the X-Files weirdness.

I enjoyed the film. I had initially heard about it on Facebook and found a Blu-Ray copy for less than $10 at Amazon, which still lists them at that price. It’s not a perfect film, but it is fun and odd and well worth your time.

Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Films: Cloud Atlas (2012)

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Audiences tend to love or hate Cloud Atlas.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 152nd in my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

This week’s film is not very old but I think it is pretty forgotten. There seems to be a sharp divide among the folks who have seen Cloud Atlas. Many of them love the film; the remainder seems to despise it. There’s not a lot of middle ground. Love it or hate it.

And it is pretty easy to see why the divide is there. Cloud Atlas is not an easy, mindless film. It requires work on the part of the viewer. No easy-to-follow caper or adventure film here. And, to top it off, it is long, clocking in at 172 minutes.

So let’s talk about the film and its structure. The story follows six narrative paths with intertwining fates. The basic story lines involve 1849 Pacific Islands and San Francisco, 1936 London/Edinburgh, 1973 San Francisco, 2012 London, 2144 Neo-Seoul and Hawaii 106 years after the big fall (estimated as 2321). The lead actors have the following roles:

  • Tom Hanks plays Dr. Henry Glass, hotel manager, Dr. Isaac Sachs, gangster/author,  Dermott Hoggins, an actor playing Timothy Cavendish (see below) and Zachry.
  • Halle Berry plays a native woman, Jocasta Ayrs; Luisa Rey, an Indian party guest; Ovid and Meronym.
  • Jim Broadbent plays Captain Molyneux, Vyvyan Ayrs, N/A, Timothy Cavendish, a Korean musician and a prescient.
  • Hugo Weaving plays Haskell More, Tadeusz Kesselring, Bill Smoke, Nurse Noakes, Boardman Mephi and Old George.
  • Jim Sturgess plays Adam Ewing; a poor hotel guest; Megan’s Dad; a highlander; Hae Joo Chang and Adam
  • Doona Bae plays Tilda Ewing, N/A, Megan’s Mom and Mexican woman, N/A, Sonmi-451 and N/A
  • Ben Whishaw plays a cabin boy, Robert Frobisher, store clerk, Georgette, N/A and a tribesman.

The primary viewpoint characters are Adam Ewing (Sturgess), Robert Frobisher (Whishaw), Luisa Rey (Berry), Timothy Cavendish (Broadbent), Sonmi-451 (Bae) and Zachry (Hanks). As you can see, each actor had multiple roles and each plays a different part in the overall plot.

The various plots include the awakening of a young rich man to the problems of slavery and a plot to kill him, a young composer trying to get ahead by being the amanuensis to an elderly composer, the quest of a young journalist to find out about a flawed nuclear power plant, the attempts of an elderly publisher to escape danger and a mental hospital, the awakening of a female android (fabricant) and her message to the people of her world and the trials of a middle aged tribesman trying to overcome his shame and fear of the unknown.

The Wachowskis (Lana and Andy) along with Tom Twyker wrote the screenplay based on David Mitchell’s novel and the trio also directed the film. The structure has the six stories running simultaneously, sometimes with dialogue from one era suddenly appearing and applying in another. And there is no rigid flow from one section to another. You may go from the post-apocalyptic final world to the South Pacific to Neo-Seoul to San Francisco and so on. The stories each have their cliffhangers, which are addressed, and there are numerous similarities between the stories. Somni trying to escape on a telescoping bridge matches to a sailor walking along a top sail beam ready to unfurl it.

It’s a complex movie that respects the intelligence of the viewer by not trying to explain everything, Much of the later sections’ dialogue are a patois that you can get the gist of without knowing the exact meaning of each word, since the language and everything else has evolved over time.

The film rewards the careful viewers in many ways, and, for once, the documentaries on the Blu-ray actually have insights that are revealed in later viewings.

If it sounds interesting, give this one a try. And, as I have said many times, your mileage may vary. I loved this film and wish I could describe it better to you. And I really, really wish I had seen it on the big screen.

Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Film: Blow Dry (2001)

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Not Alan Rickman's best-known film, but certainly worth checking out.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 151st in my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

With the unexpected death of Alan Rickman this week, I was reminded of my favorite film of his which, of course, no one mentioned in any of their notices about his career. So I pulled my DVD off the shelf and took another look at it — and I still loved it a lot.

Blow Dry has a pretty stellar cast with Rickman, Natasha Richardson, Rachel Griffiths, Rachael Leigh Cook, Josh Hartnett and Bill Nighy in the lead roles and lots of great British character actors like Warren Clarke (Dim from A Clockwork Orange), Rosemary Harris (Aunt May Parker from Spider-Man 1, 2, and 3) and David Bradley (Argus Filch from Harry Potter) in supporting roles.

The story starts in the town of Keighley in Western Yorkshire where the prestigious British Hairdressing Championship is coming. Tony (Warren Clarke), the mayor of Keighley, is excited about this but no one else seems to care until people start arriving. Among the contestants are Raymond Robertson (Nighy), the two-time defending champion and his daughter Christina (Cook), who is visiting from America. Their primary competition is seen as the Kilburn Kutters with Heidi Klum as their model and the Style Warriors from London. What Ray does not know is that Keighley is the home to his old nemesis Phil Alan (Rickman) who was also a two-time winner until, on the eve of the final competition, his stylist/wife (Richardson) ran off with his model (Griffiths), leaving him with a young son and no way to compete.

Phil now works as a barber with his son Brian (Hartnett) in Keighley. His ex-wife Shelley and her partner Sandra own a beauty salon in the town called A Cut Above. Phil has ignored them for ten years, never speaking to them.

Shelley wants to enter the competition. She has incurable cancer and has not told anyone. She’s told Sandra it has been cured. Only Daisy (Rosemary Harris), a blind old woman she does the hair of, knows her secret. Shelley wants Brian to help with the men’s timed cut, but he is reluctant to do it for fear of alienating his father.

Robertson makes the mistake of visiting Phil and talking about the competition, and Phil gets mad and agrees to let Brian help. Brian is fascinated by Christina, whom he remembers from the old contests when they were both kids. Robertson really wants the third win and he is not above cheating to get it.

In many ways this is a predictable film. There is anger and hostility from Phil but he eventually comes around. There is a come- from-behind victory and the reuniting of Phil, Shelley, Sandra and Brian as a family. And, yes, here are also some bizarre hairstyles.

One of my favorite bits has Christina trying to improve her hair coloring. Her attempts have not pleased Ray, so Brian offers to help her by taking her to the funeral home where he regularly cuts the hair of the recently deceased. She colors the hair of an old man bright red with Sid Vicious spikes. But, before she can return his hair to its natural color, Christina and Brian get locked out of the funeral home. The old man’s family is not amused when they arrive the next day.

The wonderfully quirky script was written by Simon Beaufoy who was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay for The Full Monty. He subsequently won on Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire. Warren Clarke delivers a fine performance as the mayor who gets more and more into the competition. It culminates with him lip-syncing over the closing credits to the Elvis Presley song “I Just Can’t Help Believing.” The soundtrack includes Bill Withers, Bachman Turner Overdrive, Roger Whitaker, Santa Esmeralda and Jackie Wilson.

One odd thing I did notice is that the DVD features both Hartnett and Cook on the cover while the movie poster just has a model. If you did not know it, you would not know Rickman was in the movie unless you read the fine print. Poor packaging in my opinion.

According to Wikipedia this film got blasted when it was released and only earned a score of 19% from Rotten Tomatoes. I’m not sure what film those critics saw, but I loved this one and the people I have shared it with also loved it. Apparently, it ran in US theaters for 24 days and earned a little more than $600K.

Others will remember Alan Rickman for Die Hard or Harry Potter or Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. I will remember him for those and for Galaxy Quest, too. But I will always remember him with flashing scissors and the amazing tattoos on the soles of his feet in this film.

Check it out. Your mileage and mine may be different but then, so are we. RIP, Alan Rickman. We will all miss you.

Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Film: Time After Time (1979)

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Time After Time pits H.G. Wells against Jack the Ripper in 1979 San Francisco.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 150th in my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

For me, this week we really do have a Forgotten Film. I recorded Time After Time the other day knowing I had seen it somewhere along the way, though not in the theater when it was released. It was released in late August 1979 when my work schedule was pretty hectic and I was dating the amazing Sandi. Two months later, Montgomery Ward moved me from San Antonio to Laredo, Texas, which was like going to the third or fourth level of Hell.

Anyway, I knew the basic premise. Jack the Ripper steals H. G. Wells’ real time machine and goes to 1979 San Francisco. Wells follows and tries to stop him. Sounds like a film I would really love. But I didn’t remember hardly anything about it before I screened it yesterday.

As I watched the film, I did not recall anything specific about it. I really think that I must have never seen it, but I knew enough about it to think I did.

I gave you the basics. Dr. John Leslie Stevenson (David Warner) is a London doctor in 1893 with some truly nasty habits which include slicing up prostitutes in Whitechapel and sending notes signed “Jack the Ripper.” He is a friend of H. G. Wells, visiting regularly for dinner and chess. As the film opens, Stevenson commits one of the murders on his way to Wells’ (played by Malcolm McDowell) for dinner.

Wells has something to show his friends on this particular evening – a working time machine. His is reluctant to test it yet, but he shows his guests the basic operations. A truly bad move on his part. The demonstration is interrupted when police arrive at the house looking for the murderer. Clues have led them to the area and while there, they discover Stevenson’s medical bag contains some bloody ephemera and souvenirs from the murder. The house is immediately searched but Stevenson cannot be found.

When the police leave, Wells suddenly has a revelation and going into his basement, he finds the time machine is missing. As he is watching, the machine returns empty, using a recall method that Wells had installed. He peers into the cab of the machine and finds it has been set for 1979. He hurriedly borrows money from his housekeeper and uses the machine to travel to the future.

Wells has imagined a utopian future where logic and reason have removed war and crime from the human condition. Not taking the Earth’s rotation into account, Wells arrives in San Francisco instead of London as he expected. His Victorian clothes and manners add a humorous effect to the film.

He realizes he has no easy way to find Stevenson, so he goes to a jeweler to sell some of the jewelry but fails in this attempt since the jeweler wants some form of identification. He eventually ends up at a pawn shop where such trivialities are not a matter of concern.

Realizing that Stevenson will have to convert his British currency and coins to American dollars he goes from bank to bank to try and find a clue. At the Chartered Bank of London, he meets the Foreign Currency Exchange Officer Amy Robbins (Mary Steenburgen), who has handled a transaction for Stevenson the day before and has recommended the Hyatt Regency to him.

Wells tracks Stevenson there. A fight ensues and Stevenson flees. With wells in pursuit, the two ran for an interminable period before Stevenson is hit by a car. He is tracked to the hospital where Wells is told that Stevenson is dead.

Amy has flirted with Wells and aggressively pursued him while he was at the bank. So when he returns to the area, she picks him up and takes him to lunch. They tour the city and end up as lovers. Soon it becomes apparent that Stevenson is not dead and, when he exchanges money again, he figures out that Amy was the one who set Wells on his trail.

I’ll save the rest for you to see for yourself. It’s kind of fun. McDowell and Steenburgen worked very well together, and they obviously enjoyed their time together, as they were married the next year and stayed together for ten years.

Much of the film’s charm comes from the reactions of a highly educated and fairly liberal Victorian writer to the world of 1979. McDowell plays Wells almost a naïf in his reactions to the knowledge of two (!!!) WORLD WARS as well as other wars. And the ease with which someone in the U.S. could procure a firearm. And the idea of Women’s Liberation.

All in all, I enjoyed the film, seeing it for the first time since I no longer recall the early viewing. And I loved the soundtrack from one of my favorite composers, Miklos Rozsa. It was reminiscent of some of my favorites of his work, like El Cid and Ben Hur.

According to Slashfilm.com, Time After Time has been picked up by Kevin Williamson of Scream fame and ABC has picked up the series. No idea when this will be happening, but the article was from September 2015. Of course, I had no idea of this when I selected the film for viewing. It had been a part of a science fiction marathon on TCM on New Years’ Day.

It appears to be readily available for reasonable prices if you want to find it. If you have not seen it, give it a look. If you saw it more than 30 years ago and remember nothing about it, also give it a try. And, as always, remember my taste is in my mouth and your mileage may vary.

Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Films: THEM! (1954)

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Yes, you've seen it before, but why not revisit those mile-deep catacombs?

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 149th my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

Welcome to 2016! I wanted to start this installment off on a good note so, when I got up that morning and turned the TV to TCM, what should appear? THEM! was coming on in ten minutes! And, yes, I know this is not a “forgotten” film. It is quite definitely well known, at least among film fans of my age grouping.

And, just like The Thing From Another World from two weeks ago, this one has James Arness in it. Growing up with Gunsmoke on TV as a kid, I have always liked Arness’ easygoing style.

THEM! Has an all star cast, which is amazing for the science fiction/horror film of the day. Along with Arness, you have James Whitmore, an Academy Award nominee in 1949 for Battleground and Edmund Gwenn who won an Oscar in 1947 for Miracle on 34th Street. That’s some star power. But then the supporting cast included soon-to-be-bigger names and character actors like Fess Parker (soon to be Davy Crockett), William Schallert and Olin Howlin as a drunk. Leonard Nimoy has a small part as a radio operator.

Originally set to be in color and 3D, Warner Brothers slotted THEM! back into black and white. And it is wonderful in that format. Two New Mexico State Police troopers, Ben Peterson and Ed Blackburn (Whitmore and Chris Drake, respectively), find a young girl (Sandy Descher) wandering in the desert. She is nearly catatonic. They find her home, a trailer, a few miles away. It has been ripped apart. Her family is missing.

Soon the troopers pass by a general store and find a similar type of destruction, including a shotgun that is mangled and the body of its owner. Strange tracks are found. Peterson leaves with the girl to make a report, leaving Blackburn to guard the store. A bad move for Trooper Blackburn, as he soon is killed by giant ants.

Giant ants have evolved in the New Mexico desert as a result of atomic bomb tests. Scientists Dr. Harold Medford (Gwenn) and his daughter Dr. Pat Medford (Joan Weldon) confirm that the strange tracks belong to ants. The group is joined by FBI agent Robert Graham (Arness) who develops an attachment with Pat Medford.

The crew tracks down a nest of giant ants in the desert and drops cyanide gas into the hole while the insects are inactive. Later the army sends in a crew with Pat and they find that the ants inside the nest are dead. However, Dr. Medford notices that a chamber contains some hatched eggs, but no bodies. The eggs were for queens and Pat is concerned that the queens have hatched and flown away to establish new colonies. Two queen eggs were noted, so a nationwide search is established to look out for unusual activity and reports of flying ants or flying saucers.

This leads to a psycho ward in Brownsville with a small craft pilot (Parker) who saw one of the queens heading into Mexico. And from there to a ship in the Gulf that has ants on board. The next big report comes from Los Angeles where a boxcar with 40 tons of sugar has been ripped apart. Nearby searches find drunk Jensen (Howlin) who has seen the ants from his window at a recovery ward. But, of course, no one believes anything he says. This leads to confrontations in the sewers under LA. Just exactly where I’d want to be fighting giant mutant ants.

THEM! is a wonderful film, well paced with good performances and decent effects. Plus, Bronsilau Kaper provided the movie soundtrack and that is always a plus!

Sure you’ve seen it before! But it’s worth seeing again and it got my year off to a great start. (I later went to see the new Star Wars that evening, so it stayed pretty enjoyable). I hope your New Year’s Day was as good.

Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Films: White Pongo (1945)

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White Pongo: Sometimes you're in the mood for a one-take ape flick.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 148th my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

It’s been a while since we did a good ape film here in the Forgotten Films. (And with this week’s choice, it will still be a while before we have a “good” ape film.) Whenever I am in desperate need of a short, interesting film to review, I go to my collection “Beyond Kong,” which contains eight ape movies. Over the years I think I’ve seen and reviewed four of them, including this one.

White Pongo will never be confused with anything other than a quick B film made cheaply and designed to bring some dollars into the studio coffers. The studio in question being Sigmund Neufeld Productions, headed by Sigmund who produced the film and was the brother to its director, Sam Newfield. Sam is legendary in Hollywood for having turned out somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 pictures in a 30-year career. Turn them out fast and cheap was his mantra.

White Pongo fits that mantra quite well. It has a flimsy story, an expedition trying to find an albino gorilla that might be the missing link, as well as a forced love story/triangle. But the one thing it does have is Ray “Crash” Corrigan in the title role.

Ray Corrigan was one of the best of the Hollywood Gorilla Men who worked in all the B flicks and comedies playing apes and gorillas. Corrigan owned his own suits and worked as a gorilla man early in his career, starting with 1932’s Tarzan the Ape Man with Johnny Weissmuller. Mark Finn could wax poetic for several pages here on the subtleties of Corrigan’s gorilla work. Let’s just say, he was among the best. When he finally retired from stunt work and the gorillas in 1948, he sold his suits to Steve Calvert. His suits lived on longer than he did.

Back to White Pongo. Captured scientist Gunderson (Milton Kibbee, the brother of actor Guy Kibbee) receives help and escapes from a Congo tribe intent on sacrificing him. Their attention is turned when the White Pongo (apparently Pongo is their word for gorilla) kills some of the tribesmen. Gunderson escapes with some scientific journals and manages to make it back to civilization, but in a bad physical state. He is delirious, but the journals interest Sir Harry Bragdon (Gordon Richards). Sir Harry organizes an expedition with his daughter Pamela (Maris Wrixon), his secretary Clive Carswell (Michael Dyne), a friend Baxter (George Lloyd) and guide Hans Krobert (Al Eben). Kobert has a native guide working for him named Mumbo Jumbo (Joel Fluellen). Among the safari workers is Bishop (Richard Fraser). Pamela takes an interest in Bishop, to the annoyance of Carswell, who has his own plans for Pamela. This leads to a confrontation when Pamela, at one of their rest stops, whips out her fanciest cocktail dress and entices Bishop to kiss her. Of course, this happens just as Carswell enters. One quick punch and Carswell is down, but Sir Harry does not like the help associating with his daughter.

There’s a lot of stock footage of animals and rivers. Apparently much of the film was shot at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanical Garden. The plot meanders with a double cross, a kidnapping, murder, mad monkey kung-fu fighting and more. One of those items may have been a hallucination.

Anyway, if you like gorillas, you want to see this. If you don’t, you should probably stay away. It makes less sense than an episode of Jungle Jim. But there is a fight between a black gorilla and the albino. You get to see the girl slung over the shoulder of Corrigan. Ray shambles through the jungle as only he can.

IMDB points out a weird inconsistency that I noted as the film went on. “Pongo” is apparently the native word for Gorilla. But the natives all say “Ponga,” not “Pongo.” Newfield was noted for being a one-take director so you can guess how many retakes he made here.

Anyway, I had fun. My wife stayed in the other room, so I know how much she would have enjoyed this one. Not. You should check it out, but be aware; mileage on gorilla films has been known to vary widely. And objects in the rear view mirror are really a lot closer than you think.

Have a great new year and we will see you in 2016.

Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.