By Ed Garea
STAR
OF THE MONTH
Our
Star of the month for May is June Allyson. She was one of MGM’s
most popular and busiest actors. When a star has run his or her
course, studios usually look for someone in that star’s image as a
replacement. My line of thought as it concerns June Allyson is that
she was MGM’s replacement for Margaret Sullavan, who had left MGM
in 1943, the same year Allyson started with the studio. Allyson bears
a slight resemblance to Sullavan and shares that husky voice.
May
7: TCM kicks off the celebration with two films worth
seeing. These also happen to feature her best co-star, Jimmy Stewart.
First up at 8 pm is The Glenn Miller
Story (1954) with Stewart as the popular late
bandleader and Allyson as his supportive wife. Then, at 10 pm, comes
an above-average baseball movie, The
Stratton Story (1949)
with Stewart as the pitcher who refused to let the loss of a leg in a
hunting accident deter his pitching career. Allyson again plays the
supportive wife - a role she played frequently.
May
14: Catch June at 8 pm in MGM’s remake of Little
Women (1949). It’s the usual MGM gloss, but
Allyson is far less annoying as Jo March than Katharine Hepburn was
in the 1933 original for RKO. Then get the recorder ready, for at 2
am is an interesting little comedy from 1950 she made with real-life
husband Dick Powell, The Reformer
and the Redhead. Powell is a lawyer running for mayor
who finds himself enlisted by zookeeper Allyson to help her father,
who has lost his job because of politics. Powell goes after the
corrupt incumbent, but almost loses Allyson when she begins to
suspect that the only reason he’s involved with her is for
political gain. But all is saved when Powell makes friends with one
of Allyson’s favorite charges, a lion named Herman.
FRIDAY
NIGHT SPOTLIGHT
The
Friday Night Spotlight for May is devoted to Australian cinema, or
rather, the best of Australian cinema.
May
2: Two of the best films about war will be shown this night,
beginning with Breaker Morant (1980)
at 8 pm. Based on an actual incident in the Boer War, Edward Woodward
is Lt. Harry “Breaker” Morant, who along with two other
Australian soldiers, is court-martialed for executing enemy prisoners
during the Boer War. However, they are merely serving as scapegoats,
for it was covert British policy to execute Boer (Dutch settlers)
prisoners. When the killings became world news the English were
afraid the Germans would use this as an excuse to become involved on
the side of the Boers. This is an intelligent film boasting a
standout performance by Woodward.
At
10 pm follows another classic, Gallipoli (1981),
Peter Weir’s film about one of the most disastrous defeats by the
allies in World War I. The film focuses on two men, Archy Hamilton
(Mark Lee) and Frank Dunne (Mel Gibson), who enlist in the Australian
army and are deployed, along with other Australian and New Zealand
troops, as part of a poorly planned and coordinated invasion of
Ottoman Turkey, landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula, where, in the
face of difficult terrain and poor naval support, they became little
more than cannon fodder for the Turkish defenders. The campaign, by
the way, was planned by none other than Winston Churchill, not one of
his finest hours. This was the lone film produced by Associated R&R Films, co-owned by Robert Stigwood (a music legend who managed Cream and the Bee Gees) and media mogul Rupert Murdoch four years before he bought Fox.
At
midnight is a rare screening of an early Mel Gibson film (his
third), Tim, from
1979. Based on a novel by Australian writer Colleen McCollough,
Gibson plays a 23-year-old mentally handicapped man who takes a job
doing gardening work for 40-year-old American businesswoman Piper
Laurie. The relationship blossoms into friendship, then love. I found
it somewhat akin to the 1955 Douglas Sirk film, All That
Heaven Allows, another May-December romance with Rock Hudson
and Jane Wyman.
Lastly,
at 2 am, is the film that put Gibson on the road to stardom: Mad
Max. This 1979 post-apocalyptic tale of a cop who
seeks revenge on the bikers that killed his family, was a box office
hit in Australia and gained a strong cult following in America. I’m
only glad I saw the sequel, The Road Warrior (1981),
before I saw this. Otherwise I never would have shelled out the money
to see the sequel. While The Road Warrior is wild
roller-coaster thrill ride, Mad Max moves at a
snail’s pace, and I found it difficult to connect with the film.
But one cannot fully appreciate the sequel without seeing the
original, so I recommend Mad Max.
May
9: The best bets for the night begin with Peter Weir’s
compelling Picnic at Hanging Rock
(1975) at 8 pm, a great open-ended mystery about the disappearance of
several students and their math teacher while at a picnic. What makes
this one different is the ambiguity; it’s not just another
cut-and-dried mystery where everything is solved at the end, and
because of that, it’s recommended viewing.
Later,
at the wee hour of 1:45 am comes Nicholas Roeg’s 1971
gem, Walkabout.
Jenny Agutter and Lucien John are a brother and sister abandoned by
their father at a picnic and become lost in the Australian
wilderness. David Gumpilil is the Aborigine boy who helps them
survive. While Roeg went on to direct two of the most notable films
of the ‘70s, Don’t Look Now (1973)
and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976),
this early effort seemed to have fallen through the cracks before
being discovered after a belated video release in 2000. It’s one of
the best films made in 1971 and one of the most beautifully shot.
OUT
OF THE ORDINARY
May
4: A nice double feature from Czechoslovakia is being
featured, albeit at the late hour of 2 am. First up is Intimate
Lighting, a 1969 production from director Ivan Passer
(Cutter’s Way, Stalin). This was his first
feature film (he wrote Loves of a Blonde and The
Fireman’s Ball) and is a simple tale of two old friends that
haven’t seen each other for about 10 years. Both are musicians:
Peter (Zdenek Bezusek) is an accomplished cellist in town to give a
concert. His old friend from music school, Bambas (Karel Blazek),
lives in town and plays trumpet at local funerals besides directing
the local conservatory. It’s a charming look at the urban
point-of-view as opposed to the rural and the human condition in
general. There are few films I would designate as a “must see,”
but this is one of them.
Following
right after is another gem, Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos’ The
Shop on Main Street (4
am), a bittersweet tale of the unlikely friendship formed between a
Czech carpenter and a Jewish shopkeeper during the Nazi occupation of
Czechoslovakia. Tono the carpenter (Jozef Kroner) lacks ambition, and
Rozalie the shopkeeper (Ida Kamisnka) is virtually deaf and oblivious
to the fact that a war is going on. Tono is hired by Rozalie’s
friends to give her an Aryan partner and forestall her being sent off
to a camp. The warm friendship they develop is put to the test when
the Nazis decree that all Jews are to be rounded up and shipped to
concentration camps. Tono’s reaction when he realizes the depth of
this pronouncement, is shocking, to say the least. Adding to the
films is the real-life experience of co-director Kadar, whose studies
at Czechoslovakia’s Bratislava Film School ended when he was sent
to a forced labor camp.
May
7:
Gary Cooper’s birthday. TCM celebrates it with a morning and
afternoon of Cooper's films. If I had to pick two of the films to
watch, I’d start with A
Farewell to Arms (1932)
at 6:15 am and later watch William Wyler’s delightful The
Westerner (1940)
at 11: 15 am, even though - or because - Walter Brennan steals the
film as Judge Roy Bean.
May
8: In the wee hours of the morning, when folks are beginning
to arise and Dracula is going to bed (4:30 am), TCM is
airing Marat/Sade: The Persecution
and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of
the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de
Sade (1967). The film is based on Peter Weiss’
play of the same name for the West Berlin’s Schiller Theater in
1964, and which Peter Brook adapted into English for The Royal
Shakespeare Company in 1965. The title says it all: it had become the
fashion for audience to attend these theatrical performances, which
were given as a sort of therapy. However, during the course of the
play that night, the inmates, who have performed their parts so often
as to believe they have become the characters, begin to see the
proceedings as real, with unsettling results. The film boasts a
distinguished cast, featuring Glenda Jackson, Patrick Magee, Ian
Richardson, Clifford Rose, Freddie Jones, and Michael Williams.
May
11: Louis Malle’s wonderful wartime drama, Lacombe,
Lucien (1974), will be shown at 2:30 am. Pierre
Blaise is Lucien Lacombe, a French peasant who joins up with the
Gestapo after being rejected by the French Resistance. Malle‘s film
is a brilliant psychological study without the inevitable
psychological interpretation, and, if anything, shows the influence
of Robert Bresson on Malle. Lucien is neither inherently evil nor
good. His father is a prisoner in a German camp and his mother, with
whom he lives, is dating her employer. Angry the Resistance rejected
him because of his youth, Lucien joins up with the Germans through a
series of accidental circumstances and becomes a nasty thug. Does he
believe in the Nazi cause? No, the Gestapo is merely a means to a
sense of self worth for a young man who lacks any sense of power. And
just when he has found his purpose, his world is turned upside down
when he falls in love with a Jewish girl. With this film, Malle has
taken Hannah Arendt’s famous dictum about the banality of evil out
of the ivory tower and located it right in our everyday world. This
is a film that belongs in every film lover’s library.
May
12: As
they did with regard to Gary Cooper earlier, TCM celebrates Katharine
Hepburn’s birthday with a morning and afternoon of her films. My
picks this day would by 1937’s Stage
Door (8 am),
and Howard Hawk’s delightful 1938 screwball comedy, Bringing
Up Baby (2
pm). Also of interest is her performance as Jo March in 1933’s Little
Women (6
am) for those who might want to compare it with June Allyson’s
performance as Jo, slated for May 14 at 8 pm.
May
13: TCM
is dedicating a night to a forgotten actress who at the time was
being heralded by producer Samuel Goldwyn as “the next Garbo”:
Anna Sten. Goldwyn gave her the big buildup after seeing her in her
breakthrough German film Der Morder Dimitri
Karamasoff (The
Murder of Dimitri Karamasoff) and signed the Russian-born actress to
a lucrative two-year contract. That Sten spoke not a word of English
upon her arrival didn’t deter Goldwyn in the least. He had high
hopes for her, labeling her as “The Passionate Peasant” in his
publicity. Her first film for Goldwyn was Nana (8
pm) a bowdlerized version of Zola’s racy novel. She looked good,
but the film was a turkey. Goldwyn next put her in We
Live Again (9:45
pm), also from 1934, but better suited to her as she plays a Russian
peasant girl seduced by nobleman Frederic March, based on
Tolstoy’s Resurrection.
That, too, flopped. When her third film for Goldwyn, The
Wedding Night (1935),
failed to generate any interest at the box office, despite the
presence of top-billed Gary Cooper, Goldwyn decided to cut bait. She
ended the ‘30s working for Poverty Row studio Grand National before
moving to Fox in the ‘40s for a series of low-budget B’s. An
excellent example of her Fox tour airs at 11:15 pm: They
Came to Blow Up America (1943),
starring George Sanders as a German-American attorney out to expose
Nazi spies. Finally, at 12:45 am comes a film from 1962, The
Nun and the Sergeant,
a Korean War saga that finds Anna as a nun who is trapped with her
schoolgirls near the front line.
PSYCHOTRONICA
AND THE B HIVE
Not
a bad selection for May, featuring several gems and a twin bill from
Awful Auteur Ted V. Mikels.
May
3: Begin the day at 8:30 am with He
Walked By Night (1948), a great piece of film
noir from Eagle-Lion (the company that absorbed PRC), told in
semi-documentary style, about the search for a cop killer in L.A.
Richard Basehart is effectively and mysteriously creepy as the
killer, and Scott Brady fine as the cop determined to bring Basehart
to justice. Look for Jack Webb as one of the police lab workers. Webb
was inspired by the film to create Dragnet a
year later. Cinematographer John Alton creates a dark and eerie
setting, and director Alfred Werker (with help from Anthony Mann, it
is said), keeps the film moving.
At
10:30 am comes another entry on RKO’s popular “Mexican Spitfire”
series, Mexican Spitfire Sees a
Ghost. It’s not one of the better entries in the
series, which finds Lupe Velez, as Carmelita Lindsay, visiting the
country with husband Dennis (Charles “Buddy” Rogers). They stop
at what they believe to be a deserted country house, but in reality
gangsters in the basement are building a nitroglycerine bomb. If it
were not for the talents of Leon Errol as Uncle Matt/Lord Epping,
this film would be almost unwatchable. Even worse, the great
comedian, Mantin Moreland is given almost nothing to do, which might
just be a blessing as his name in the film in “Lightnin.” The
film is also notable to film historians as the movie paired with the
truncated 88-minute version of The Magnificent Ambersons,
which was put into the “B” slot on the marquee.
But
then comes Late Night, with a double bill from Ted V. Mikels. It
begins at 2:15 am with The Doll
Squad (1973), about a team of female secret
agents who take down a master criminal. With name players like
Michael Ansara and Anthony Eisley, it was Mikels’ most expensive
production to date. Watch it for the girls, especially Tura Satana.
Reportedly, Sissy Spacek auditioned to play one of the girls, but was
turned down. Following at 4 am is 10
Violent Women (1982). In this one, a group of women
miners (?) tired of their work decide to go into the robbery
business. They knock off a jewelry store but can’t fence the goods
and are busted by undercover cops. Sent to prison they are exploited
(naturally) by a deviant head guard and eventually bust out. Record
this one - Mikels’ directing style and dialogue can be sleep
inducing.
May
5: The day begins at 6:15 am with the docudrama UFO from
United Artists in 1956. This was a favorite of mine when I was a kid
and actually believed in flying saucers. It’s a rather skillful
mixture of fictional characters with real-life witnesses and
personnel as we follow a government investigator and press liaison
(Tom Towers) as he goes from military base to base, investigating
events and interviewing witnesses.
At
6:30 pm comes one of the great film noirs. D.O.A. (1950)
stars Edmond O’Brien as a small-town accountant who visits San
Francisco for a week of fun before settling down with his fiancée.
Waking one morning with what he believes to be a hangover, he is told
by doctors that someone has poisoned him and that he has a week or
less to live. We then follow O’Brien as he tries to track down the
culprit and the reason why. Look for Neville Brand playing one of the
villains. And forget the lousy 1988 remake with Dennis Quaid. This is
the one to see.
May
6: This is a “Scarlet” day, with the word “Scarlet”
appearing in the title of every movie shown in the morning and the
afternoon. I recommend two. First, at 11:15 am, A Study
in Scarlet from 1933. When members of a secret
society begin disappearing, Sherlock Holmes is called in to
investigate. It’s a good, low-budget effort from World-Wide
Pictures and Fox with Reginald Owen as a decent, if not particularly
memorable, Sherlock Holmes. Also in the film is the exquisite Anna
May Wong as a shady widow. The plot, which bears almost no
resemblance to the original story, has good twists and turns; enough
to keep the mystery fan fully involved.
At 2:15 pm is Fritz Lang’s
noir classic, Scarlet Street (1945)
starring Edward G. Robinson as a meek, henpecked would-be artist who
is pulled into the depths of crime and deception by Joan Bennett and
her slimy boyfriend, Dan Duryea. Directly following at 4:15 is The
Scarlet Clue, one of the better Charlie Chan entries
from Monogram Studios, which took over the Chan franchise after Fox
dropped it in 1942. In this one, Charlie (Sidney Toler) is on the
track of murderous spies who have stolen government radar plans. The
Monogram Chans featured Benson Fong as Number Three Son Tommy, and
Mantin Moreland as chauffeur Birmingham Brown. In this entry,
Moreland actually gets something more to do than bug out his eyes and
act scared. Here he gets to reenact some routines from his vaudeville
days with frequent partner Ben Carter, who’s also in the film.
May
9: At the dreadful hour of 5:45 am comes an entertaining
little B from Warner Bros, San
Quentin (1937). Directed in workmanlike manner by
Lloyd Bacon, it stars Pat O’Brien as the captain of the prison
guards. His troubles begin when his girlfriend’s (Ann Sheridan)
rebellious brother (Humphrey Bogart) is assigned to his block. Never
mind the predictable plot and concentrate on the great dialogue and
the support of cast members such as Barton MacLane. Marc Lawrence,
Joe Sawyer, and Veda Ann Borg.
May
10: At 3:45 am, it’s the Japanese psychotronic
wonder, Hausu (1977).
This is the movie that revived the moribund Toho Studios when it
suddenly became an unexpected hit. For a more detailed description
see my Best Bets in the current TiVo Alert. Suffice to say you won’t
know whether to moan, groan or laugh out loud when watching this one.
May
15: To
round out this chapter comes Roger Corman’s celebrated The
Little Shop of Horrors (1960)
about Audrey Jr., the carnivorous plant grown by one Seymour Krelboin
(Jonathan Haze). With Mel Welles in a fine turn as flower shop owner
Gravis Muchnick, Jackie Joseph as Audrey Fulquard, the love of
Seymour’s life, Jack Nicholson in an early role as masochistic
dental patient Wilbur Force, and Corman regular Dick Miller. Most of
the movie’s success lies in the fact that it was adapted into a
successful stage musical that was later made into a film. But
Corman’s version is actually better than the later versions and
definitely worth the time.
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