Gatorman9 Reviews

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

An Alumn's Review: Big Disappointment

[5/10 · 26 February 2024]

I ignored this movie for an entire generation's timespan, assuming from its promotion upon release (not to mention its resemblance to that of equally vacuous-looking movies that were coming out in the same time period) that it would be by turns, vapid and insipid. But, recently, I reached some point or other in my life where it dawned on me that here a famous movie had been made about the place where I started high school and yet I had never seen it. Having over the years become a sort of hobbyist of classic movies, that suddenly struck me as incongruous. So, on that basis alone, I ordered a copy, albeit not without the hope of seeing something that would resonate personally at some level (and This, boys and girls, is what happens to you when you get Old.)

It turned out to be a total disappointment from one end to the other. Even the setting, which I had so hoped to see reprised in some recognizable manner, was all wrong. The story derives from what was allegedly a non-fiction book written about Clairemont High School, in the neighborhood of Clairemont, and one block off Clairemont Drive, in San Diego, California. But according to a graphic included among the Special Features, this was shot at Van Nuys High School, a campus at least a generation older and looking every minute of it, and on the far side of Los Angeles from San Diego. To put that in perspective, you'd might as well make a movie about Long Island and shoot it in New Jersey; or for that matter, about Texas A&M and shoot it at what Texans call, "UT" (the Texans will get it. I think.) I never felt for one second like I was back in any part of San Diego, much less Clairemont High.

And it was all downhill from there after that. My second impression, after that initial disappointment, was to find myself debating whether it would be better to characterize this movie as boring and dumb, or just dumb and boring. Comparisons to *American Graffiti* are vastly overblown. That movie is interesting, intelligent, compelling, and is on the American Film Institute's Top 100 List, and in my experience is flawlessly made and just gets better with every successive viewing. This movie is primarily, as another reviewer here eloquently observed, just an old-fashioned ABC-TV "teen issues" After School Special with glaring insertions of profanity and surprisingly explicit pornography (the original cut is said to have drawn an "X" rating -- ! -- and at certain places it is not hard to see why; 2AM Cinemax R-rated soft-core porn is more heavily romanticized). Even then, the old TV show would surely have done something distinctively more effective with the dramatic aspects of the issues of sociosexual incompetence and exploitation raised in this movie. In this regard, the blase, "matter-of-fact" treatment of these issues may result from nothing more than that the director is from The Bronx, i.e., New York, New York, where the citizenry (or should it be, denizenry?) is famous for being blase and matter-of-fact about all kinds of things normal Americans would find strange, unusual, or even shocking. (One may even wonder how autobiographical the treatment of the nude misadventures of the female lead in this movie are.) But in that regard, it makes it out of place for this movie. This movie is about Southern California. It is not a commentary on the cultural quirks of New Yawk. (By the way, if you want to see a movie showcasing the cultural quirks of New York, watch *The Taking of Pelham 123* - the original version, starring Walter Matthau, and not the faint remakes. Great stuff.)

And were that not bad enough, the sex that unfortunately dominates this movie is bad to the point of totally clueless, and even if that were in fact the whole point, looked (if this is not giving too much away) more like something from *junior* high school experimentation than anything I would expect from somebody hovering, as these characters are supposed to be, around the age of 17. Moreover, if you want to do a movie about sex in high school, you have to cover the whole subject, including unmistakable references to the majority who are more like the Ratner character than anybody else you see in this movie. The fact that the Jennifer Jason Leigh character (especially paired as she is here exclusively with the Phoebe Cates character) is an especially notable little slut for a high school girl in the late 1970's is not ever made clear here. Even worse, this character is shown here ONLY in her sexual confusion mode. We know absolutely not one other thing about her personality. These omissions are not just bad character development, but just poor storytelling, storytelling simply incompetent by the standards of any decent writer even 60 seconds older than Cameron Crowe. And lastly, if the intent of this movie is to be light-hearted comedy, this sequence has no place in this movie. Whether you see it as heavy material, as people normally would, or merely as blase Bronx beauty-shop gossip material, there is nothing light-hearted about it.

Meanwhile, this drivel fails to be relieved by anything compelling in any way of the other story lines, which are universally monumentally contrived, exaggerated, and in the end, simply hackneyed. Much as Ray Walston was a noteworthy actor, even the Mr. Hand subplot is thin and lacking in genuine wit.

Nor is it relieved by any great moments of high hilarity. The only time it actually got me to sit up and take notice at all was the autopsy scene (yeah, that's about where the way things were going . . . But at least, for a second there, I mistakenly began to wonder if this thing were suddenly going to finally catch fire). This is no Animal House; it is no Caddy Shack; there is no moment anywhere here that rises to the level of Richard Dreyfuss crawling under a police car to wrap a chain around the rear axle.

It helps not, apparently, that director Hecklering (director who?) is no George Lucas (you know, the guy who calls himself "not a very good film-maker" and "not good with actors"), no John Landis, or no Harold Ramis, either. She is not even either half of the Coen Brothers. A treatment by any of the aforementioned would have almost certainly elevated the execution of this thing to the level of its otherwise incomprehensible hype.

The bottom line is, Cameron Crowe, the author of the original book who was also erroneously permitted to do the screenplay adaptation here, must be one of those writers who knows how to string words together with the greatest of fluidity without having hardly anything to say. Certainly, that was the case here. He is no Billy Wilder (about whom, ironically, he eventually wrote a book) or even an I. A. L. Diamond. And that so many people believe this movie says anything worth hearing is again a testament to how, now well into fat, hairy, balding, sagging middle age, certain people could find nothing wrong with voting for a sleaze-covered, slime-drenched, lying, cheating, and stealing, utterly incompetent and iconically irresponbsible megalomaniac real estate developer (don't they know that a "real estate developer" is just a crooked used car salesman with a much, much bigger line of credit?) for President of the United States. It's yet another testament to the moronocracy to which our once-mighty civilization has fallen, and out of respect to talented actors like Ray Walston, Sean Penn, or Forest Whitaker (however tiny his part here) as well as the cameramen and other unseen entirely competent production people signed on to make this in order to be able to meet their mortgage payments and other expense of daily living, I leave it with a consolation-prize-quality rating of five out of ten.

Little Big Man (1970)

Entertaining 1960s Counterculture Satire . . .

[8/10 · 5 September 2023]

This movie is a classic example in certain ways of the trends in thinking, and thus of the better movie-making, of time and place in which it was made,which in this case was the ever-challenging late 1960s in America. This movie is not really about anything that happened in 1869. It is about what was happening in 1969. That era was one of challenging traditional notions of practically everything imaginable (I have tutored modern history students by giving them the short-hand metaphor of calling it the "anti-everything" era) and this movie is a faithful illustration of that. The movie is a satire developed by way of two parallel and contrasting themes (reminding one somewhat of the structure of the famous satire, GULLIVER'S TRAVELS), juxtaposing traditional European American civilization with that of the more primordial native American Indian society of the Great Plains. But that is merely the vehicle. It is not really a Western, but a satire of the modern American civilization of the times it was made using a Western setting.

The mythos of the Wild West was still a dominant cultural feature in American society right up to the time the movie was made, and so in classic Sixties zeitgeist the story parodies, lampoons, skewers, ridicules, and at times operates to simply condemn numerous classic tropes of that mythos. And the reason you are seeing this kind of treatment at the moment this movie appeared is because that mythos, though having been pervasive throughout American society for the better part of the preceding hundred years, had pretty much finally arrived at its deathbed (with only its heritage of excessive gun-toting and other violence surviving in the culture of today in other even more fantastic forms even more divorced from any kind of cognizable reality; but possibly I digress), and movies like this seemed to be helping to give it its last push into its eternal grave. Thus, the movie takes on the Christian zealot, the gunfighter, the traveling medicine salesman, the shopkeeping townie, and even the humble immigrant settler and traditional marriage and the nuclear family, attacking throughout the hypocrisy in Eurocentric civilization that it seeks to highlight. Attacking hypocrisy was probably the most central consistently expressed theme of the 1960s Anti-Establishment movement.

Moreover, it's ultimate focus on the debacle of General Custer (unlike what some would-be historian wrote in another review, it was common courtesy to refer to a soldier of the period by his brevet rank even after he had returned to standard rank after the demobilization at the end of the Civil War, and if you find that confusing, well, Google it) at the battle of Little Big Horn was quite topical at the time the movie came out. It was about that time that school curricula had been updated to start teaching that Custer's decision to take on well over 1,000 plains Indian warriors with a cavalry troop of less than 200 men was a damned foolish thing to do. Previously, school children for generations had routinely been taught that he was a Great War Hero who died for his country in the usual treatment given practically anyone who died in any battle in any and all of America's previous wars. Oftentimes the term "hero" was (and still is) applied to anybody just for merely showing up at a battle someplace, regardless of whether his contribution was great or small, successful or unsuccessful, or even involved any actual combat. On the other hand, if you apply the term more narrowly, to mean someone who was actually successful in accomplishing something noteworthy in battle, the word "hero" no longer carries the connotation of a badge of honor in the nature of a participation trophy (or in informal military parlance, an "I Was There" medal). Rather, the latest, greatest thing to do in judging military leaders like Custer by 1970 was to apply this latter more limited notion of the hero, and so the movie naturally goes with that interpretation. And not only was this a historical connotation, but it was also a clear reflection of many people's widespread attitudes towards military leadership generally at time the movie came out, as a result of what by then had become the highly controversial (to put it but mildly) nature of the then ongoing, hotly fought, bloody and volatile Vietnam War. The movie is not just commenting on the purely historical curiosity of Custer's legacy; what it is really after is General William Westmoreland and the failure of our top leadership regarding Vietnam. In this sense this movie is operating in the same kind of vein as, for example, M*A*S*H, which also came out in 1970.

Also trending at that time was a lot of attention given the plight of minorities in the United States, and that extended to American Indians living in great poverty on many reservations, which in turn led to a lot of attention being given to incidents of atrocities committed a whole century earlier during the Indian wars by the U. S. Army against Indian villages on a particular noteworthy occasions, something this movie tends (unfairly, but completely in synch with its times) to generalize. Eventually, this trend led no less an icon than Marlon Brando to refuse his Best Actor Oscar award for THE GODFATHER in 1973 in some bit of Brando-esque sympathy with modern Indian protestors at a town called Wounded Knee, South Dakota, who were seeking attention for Indian rights (the site being chosen for being the location of an Army massacre of an Indian village there in 1890). Instead, Brando sent an essentially unknown actress who called herself Sacheen Littlefeather (her actual name was Maria Louise Cruz) to make a speech to this effect on his behalf at the awards ceremony.

Thus, the Indians in the movie are portrayed in contrast to the Whites as essentially, even sterotypically, honest and pure, simply taking things as they come without pretension in accordance with their much simpler guile-less traditional ways and essentially free of any taint of hypocrisy. This is not as "revisionist" as some mistaken people like to glibly toss that expression around in some of these reviews. The "Noble Savage" motif long preceded this movie and even this era (the expression first appears in print in 1672), and years before this movie Hollywood had already begun to treat Indians with sympathy, culminating with efforts such as CHEYENNE AUTUMN in 1965 which was made by no less than that ultimate master of the classic, traditional Western cavalry-hero genre, the iconic John Ford. Even Ford's favorite star, John Wayne, was taking a sympathetic tack with Indians in movies he himself produced during the period, with sympathetic if oblique or minor treatment in movies such as CHISUM (1970), BIG JAKE (1971), and even HATARI (1962). Thus, while the Indian sequences in the movie are not without humor, they are generally serious rather than comedic and almost entirely devoid of any satirical tone, and frequently are chequered with tragedy.

Reviewers who relate that they are lost as to what kind of movie this is speak the truth, it seems: they ARE lost, not recognizing that the piece is a satire of modern America as it was in 1970, and the duality employed, rather Jonathan-Swift-style, to make that point. Thus, much like BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, this movie is NO classic Western at all, but yet another well-made 1960s cultural criticism vehicle, scoring its points with perfectly-wrought satirical humor as well as effective poignant personal drama along the lines of so many other films of the time. The only disappointing thing I can think of about this movie is how, in reviewing the other reviews here, almost no one (even the most articulate writers) recognizes that this is what the movie is all about. It is shocking to see things that were once almost universally understood become almost nonexistent in the minds of 21st century people only 50 years later. I am increasingly giving up hope in believing that mankind can ever improve its overall level of understanding when so little cultural knowledge can succeed in transcending even only a couple of generations.

But to the viewer who gets this movie, it flows as smooth as silk. And in that regard, I thought that the screenplay was especially well-written, superimposing a lot of very interesting and entertaining characterization on top of the basic themes discussed above (these writers really know what real people, or at least, classic stereotypes, are like, especially elderly ones - the 121-year-old Jack Crabbe is priceless), and there is no discernable flaw in the first-class acting or any other aspect of this film I can see. While normally I don't feel engaged by Anti-Establishment cinema, in this case the result is so much fun and so sympathetic to ordinary human emotions that it is always enjoyable to watch. The result is a movie that deserves about 7.7 on the IMDb scale.

Canal Zone (1942)

Classic Word War II low-budget commercial propaganda film

[6/10 · 18 August 2023]

This is a fairly classic example of the kind of B-grade film studios turned out during World War II to support the war effort. (The story of that endeavor all by itself rates its own movie, though I doubt we are ever going to see it; luckily, though, you can find a documentary or two addressing it if you look around.) The thrust of such movies was often to single out some particular aspect of the operations our gallant boys were engaged in at the peril of their lives, with their wives, sweethearts, and mothers waiting back home in all anxiety, and tell their collective story. Thus, while other films, such as Warner Brothers's ACTION IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC or FIGHTING SEABEES focused on the merchant marine or the Navy's corps of SEABEES combat construction teams, respectively, this film sought to highlight the efforts of government-employed civilian ferry pilots who delivered aircraft to the Old World for use by military combat airmen in the Mediterranean and greater European theaters of operations during the war.

At that time, certain parts of the United State turned into giant mass production factories for airplanes such as the world had never known before, with the country producing a total of more than 300,000 new aircraft for war service. To put that in perspective, that was surely more airplanes than had been produced by every country in the entire world put together up to that point since the day the Wright brothers flew the first one in 1903. And thus it involved a similarly monumental effort to get them where they needed to go for fighting.

The methods varied depending on the type of aircraft and where they were needed. Few if any had the range to fly all the way across the Atlantic (let alone, the much larger Pacific) non-stop on their own. Thus, many were partially broken down and stowed on cargo ships for transshipment over the ocean, then reassembled at their destination (the disassembly/reassembly might seem inefficient, but it had to be done that way because of the tight shortage of available shipping that prevailed for most of the war). Others might fly over the North Atlantic by stopping at points in Canada and at Iceland. But this movie focuses on the ones that flew the extended route from the continental U. S. down to Brazil in South America, then crossed the South Atlantic at its narrowest point to intercept the hump of West Africa, proceeding after that to wherever they were needed, mostly, by the time this movie was shot, in North Africa, with Egypt being the usual destination. This route also figures, if only momentarily, in the much more famous movie THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951), when one of the flier characters compares flying in Alaska with the torrid atmosphere of Accra (what is now the capital of Ghana in the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa) that he had endured during this war; evidently he too was some kind of veteran of the ferry route in this movie.

As is typical in these kinds of movies, the thrust of things is on emotional melodramatics rather than wartime operations. Its treatment of operations is laughable, but that is 100% normal in this genre. They are always laughable in these movies. The melodrama also involves the absolutely standard tropes typically encountered: a self-impressed protagonist who needs a reality check and cutting down to size; the hard-nosed, no-nonsense instructor co-protagonist who will do that; the love interest who forms the apex of the inevitable love triangle; one sympathetic supporting character who dies to remind everybody of the sacrifices of war; & etc., etc. In this movie the BMOC-type is essayed by an Errol Flynn stand-in while the others are classics of the types they are playing; thus there is nothing unusual to see there, either. One thing that is interesting is to see some actors in lesser supporting roles who later became household names and faces but at this point were in their career infancy, including Lloyd Bridges, Forest Tucker, and Hugh Beaumont. The leads are actors best known to fans of old B-movies, such as Chester Morris, who may have been cast in this after having done the better film FIVE CAME BACK in 1939, with then-hottie dramatic actress Lucille Ball, John Carradine, and Patric Knowles. That also featured airplanes in the jungle.

One thing you will not see in this movie is the Panama Canal Zone. You will not see even a single stock-footage shot of the Panama Canal nor a single ship of any kind. Panama City is referenced repeatedly but you won't see a single shot of it nor so much as hear the mention of any single place inside the Canal Zone itself (Panama City being outside of the Zone). The choice of title is to be wondered at, even in spite of any publicity value it might have had. The movie has absolutely nothing to do with the Panama Canal. The understanding given by the movie is that pilots are being brought down there to be trained in ferry service -- or something (the purported flight training in this movie is difficult to reconcile with the context of the plot premise) -- on the Pacific Side in the Canal Zone. Why this would occur like that is not obvious from the film. While Panama is about due south of Florida, it does not figure on any map of the south Atlantic ferry route I have ever run across, as still being rather out of the way for trips culminating in Africa. It does not show up in the Canal Zone lore I have been exposed to connected with my own prior residence there (and my own grandfather was a Canal employee during the war). The well-known fields operating there during the war were the Navy's near Coco Solo on the Caribbean side (which was too far from Panama City to have anything to do with this movie), and the army's Albrook Field (which wouldn't have a naval officer in charge, as shown in the movie), along with some subsidiary fields further away and out in the provinces. Instead the field in this movie is referred to as "Ginger Bar", and even Google can't locate anything like that in Panama during the war. "Ginger Bar", being horse-drawn carriage distance from Panama City in the movie, doesn't comport with any other field I ever heard of or could find anything about online in preparing this review. While, knowing the government to be the way it always has been, it is not inconceivable that somebody might have set up a training program to teach pilots techniques particular to flying over mountainous jungles, I have heard nor could find nothing about this. I'm still waiting to learn of the basis for this aspect of this movie.

This movie might be worth viewing for typical wartime schlock early in the war years. I think it is one of those movies that today serves better as a document of its times than for strictly entertainment value.

House on Greenapple Road (1970 TV Movie)

Plot-driven Whodunit Procedural with some Unusual Features

[7/10 · 12 August 2023]

Over the years I have gotten into the habit of focusing on such crime dramas as are character-driven and dialog-oriented to the exclusion of sophisticated plots. Given that this movie was effectively a pilot for a TV series later named *Dan August*, i.e., named after its main character, when I recently ran across it on Youtube I was expecting more of the same. At the same time, I remembered that this series didn't last long on TV before cancellation, so I was not expecting an especially effective effort, and would have given it a pass if I had anything deeper in consideration for viewing that night. But being on a kind of nostalgia binge lately (actually, being on a prolonged binge of wanting to be anywhere but the 21st century anymore, anywhere actually familiar, with characters with recognizable and even sympathetic values systems) I wound up watching this for no better reason than to go back to 1968 (the year it was shot) for a couple of hours.

The result, however, was to be surprised. First, in spite of the name, it wound up being a whodunit, a genre I often find tedious as a repository for stereotyped character development. And like whodunits normally are, this movie is plot driven, but here with a wrinkle: in this case, it incorporates the unusual device of quite a lot of its run time being spent on red herrings handled in police procedural mode, i.e., on investigation angles that aren't getting anywhere. This keeps following the plot lively in comparison with a lot of more straightforward whodunits. The plots of the Dan August TV series this movie piloted were more intricate than the usual hour-long police drama typically exhibited, incorporating as much complexity with as many suspect characters and twists and turns among them as the writers could come up with. One added trick also prevalent here was to use in exaggerated form the classic old-fashioned police procedural trope of officers running bluffs on suspects, only here practically instinctively on almost every potential suspect they meet, keeping the audience constantly a little off base as to what the police themselves may really be thinking as the investigation proceeds, something further complicated by having multiple senior officials also disagreeing with each other and the title-role character as a standard device, so that foreseeing the plot resolution can turn into an exercise in deciding which cop is going to turn out to be right after all. All this keeps things especially complicated compared with more usual offerings in either the whodunit or police procedural genres.

On the other hand, this devotion to plot complexity results in almost no meaningful character development at all among the police officer characters, with even the title-role hero being as one-dimensional and cliched a detective character as you can see anywhere. I was and still am frankly surprised that the show was named after the character when so little attention was given to writing him as an actual personality. That's not the way that kind of thing normally works, and the thing that can compensate for that sometimes, having an especially charismatic actor in the lead role, does not occur here either. Even when a young Burt Reynolds took over this part from Chris George after this pilot, there was never enough punch to the title character's screen presence to overcome the uninteresting main character.

There is one other very unusual feature to this drama, and that is how very, very far ahead of its time certain elements of this presentation are, anticipating the cable TV era by a good ten years or more. Rampant, over-the-top sexually excessive behavior by one of the main antagonist characters here is a central theme, and never from any major network TV offering of this vintage can I remember anything so obtrusively in-your-face regarding that kind of subject matter as what we are exposed to here; only until certain 1980s sitcoms do I remember anything so unsubtle. This extends to the language used, where at one point a certain sexually pejorative word is thrown about in liberal doses, a particular word I cannot remember ever seeing used on American commercial major broadcast network TV at any time in my entire life to this day. In fact, it is a word I cannot even repeat *here* for purposes of this review, because the IMDb thought police computer robot evidently found it so impolite that it warned me not to use it when I tried to type it here originally. (Esteemed Sherlock Holmes creator Conan Doyle once got around the same kind of word issue for purposes of the Victorian-era magazines in which he was published by substituting the phrase, "the vilest name that a man could use to a woman".) And finally, there is certain visual material that was so graphic that it was considered cutting edge in only the edgiest theatrical-release movies of the era. It was so unusual to see on broadcast TV that when I saw it here, I found myself jumping up bolt upright in my seat in surprise, actually saying, "whoa!" out loud.

Thus, while a modern audience in 2023 won't find anything especially shocking in this piece by current so-called standards, if you decide to try this out realize that it is way beyond the norm of 55 years ago. It is only because of this unusual trait that I gave this as high a rating as seven stars, in other words, something worth seeing if only for that feature alone, because otherwise the cliched protagonist treatment I think ought to drag it down to a six. The truth is simply that regardless of the carefully intricately plotted narrative, and the appearance of as an appealing an actress as Janet Leigh in a new twist on her established bathtub scene fame (if you are an Alfred Hitchcock fan, as soon as you see that bathtub you know what is going to happen, more or less), the heroes are just plain dull.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

Mixed Feelings . . .

[7/10 · 29 June 2023]

I was in the Navy (albeit as a submariner), devoured all the Horatio Hornblower books when I was younger (and even one or two O'Brian books, later), and finally was able to join the crew of an actual square-rigged ship for three years when I was around 30. With that background, this movie is a mixed bag for me.

In terms of "look and feel", this movie evidently aims to be the DAS BOOT of sailing ship movies, and in that, it succeeds with flying colors. Never in any film have I seen anything close to the level of detail you get of what it might be like to be on a man o' war in the golden age of sail. When I saw that the art department was in fact nominated for the Oscar for this I was not surprised, and was initially stunned to learn it did not win; surely, that is because the Academy did not realize what they were seeing. The depiction of the alcohol-fueled raucous wardroom dinners (and corresponding downtime of the crew in the 'tween decks) was also much appreciated for its atmosphere.

But after that the quality of this starts to coast downhill. The modern tendency in film acting to practically mumble lines indistinctly is a significant drawback in this movie, especially where so many of the lines are spoken in what is supposed to be English working-class dialect hard on an American ear to begin with. The movie won an Oscar for sound editing but because of this flaw I find it difficult to understand just why. I was also unimpressed with the cannonade sound effects as not nearly deafening enough to approach the same level of realism as all of the other effects.

The writing also does not keep up with the various effects. Dialog noticeably does not necessarily conform to action seen on the screen, and more exposition is needed to make the action fully comprehensible to audience members not raised on Hornblower stories. More significantly, the story is too melodramatically contrived in places to pass the willing-suspension-of-disbelief test. Oftentimes it reminds you of the "interpersonal drama" angles of World-War-Two-era propagandistic dramas. And in this case, too many unlikely things are going on at the same time for a single cruise to digest absent more compelling emotional impact or at least faster pacing to get you through these rough spots. While described as character-driven by some, the problem is that the characters are too frequently too soap-operish to elevate this to a top flight character story. To reach the kind of height in characters it needs to match its production design aspects, it needs the writing of a MISTER ROBERTS or maybe a Billy Wilder production. Unfortunately, it doesn't get into that ballpark.

Lastly, I will at least quibble with the combat action. From what you read in both real history and the Hornblower novel series the action overall is not quite believable. And in that regard, among many other points, it is difficult to conceive of the French ACHERON being what is apparently supposed to be an American Joshua-Humphreys-built 44-gun frigate, which at the time were an innovation built for the US Navy which were the most formidable warships of their kind in the world, basically the pocket battleships of their day.

In sum I give this movie the highest possible marks for its look and feel -- HMS SURPRISE is a glorious reproduction probably unequaled in the history of the movies, so that if you want to experience that, this movie is must-see material -- but too much else was a let down that falls short of the mark as must-see entertainment.

Columbo (1971–2003)

In A Class By Itself

[9/10 · 26 May 2023]

Years ago there was a documentary series on the Discovery Channel called WINGS, which each week profiled a different famous type of airplane. Each episode began with a brief teaser where the voice-over announcer came on lavishing superlatives on that week's subject, with insightful references to performance, versatility, ruggedness, reliability, and the like. That is, until the week they covered the B-17 Flying Fortress. The announcer simply said, "The B-17 wasn't an airplane. It was a Legend."

The same thing should be said about the COLUMBO television series. It is in a class by itself. While certain aspects -- the photography, music, production values generally, and the like, were typical of high-end network television detective shows of its era, the writing and acting, particularly of the lead, Peter Falk in the title role, were simply unique and really have never been equaled. There has never been anything else like it (NBC's recent streaming effort "Poker Face", comparisons of which to this series being thoroughly overblown, included -- that show, at best, owes far more to THE BIG LEBOWSKI or even the PULP FICTION genre than to COLUMBO).

Thus, while this series was as plot-hole-ridden as anything that ever succeeded on television, you almost never noticed during its initial, pre-home video / broadcast only run. You sat down to watch (most typically, on seemingly random Sunday nights) something you always new would be special.

I suppose I could wax on rhapsodically at some length about the details of how these shows worked -- I have written as much elsewhere, before -- but it is just easier at the moment to summarize by saying that if you want what is literally some of the best fiction ever broadcast on television, you won't be disappointed by this.

Titanic (1997)

A shameful exploitation of an infamous tragedy . . .

[4/10 · 23 May 2023]

No amount of filmmaking technique (alleged filmmaking technique, anyway) can make up for the way this movie, part publicity stunt, part soap opera, part grade-B teen romance, so extravagantly disrespects the tragedy the memory of which it abuses here. Like the vast majority of TITANIC movies ever made, it posits a fundamentally silly interpersonal drama against one the most horrific historical disasters of modern times. Like the vast majority of TITANIC movies ever made, it is eminently forgettable. Instead of an evocative and fitting tribute to the subject matter, we are subjected to a lot of ridiculous cliches, adolescent actors, and even geeky nerd humor, entirely and utterly inappropriate to the gravity of the core event. Under the circumstances, I felt it difficult to award it as many as the four of ten stars I condescended to give it here in reflection of whatever purely technical merits it might have.

If you want to see the movie that gives the telling of this catastrophe the justice it deserves, screen the Rank Organization's *A NIGHT TO REMEMBER* (1958), personally recommended - repeatedly - by no less a critic than real-life TITANIC survivor Eva Hart, recipient of an MBE from Queen Elizabeth for her contributions to recounting and memorializing the disaster.

Charlie's Angels (1976–1981)

Summary: Once Upon A Time There Was One Bad Writer . . .

[5/10 · 23 September 2022]

Someone started one of these reviews with the words, "once upon a time there were three bad actresses". That is unfair. It would be much more fair to say, "Once Upon A Time There Was One Bad Writer . . . " Just exactly what they were thinking in putting this thing together is hard to say. GILLIGAN'S ISLAND was a more effective vehicle than this -- vastly more. Here, the premise seemed to be, if we get three pretty if mostly terminally skinny actresses (critics in the 1970s lamented the trend toward predominantly stick-like girls on TV and that trend is on full display here) and give them an ample budget to go blow on clothes on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, we don't need to do anything else but show up with a couple of cameras once a week and start shooting. The stories -- seemingly universally written by the same guy, week upon week -- were usually profoundly weak, most commonly yet another variation on "who's trying to wreck the art show/fashion show/beauty contest/dance competition/cruise ship/car show/roller derby/monster truck pull/illegal moonshine industry in West Appalachia . . . " which will be solved by having the characters go undercover and then promptly blow their cover by all standing around in a group in public chattering like the world's oldest group of high school reunion classmates, talking in full voice all about the case. Indeed, Eavesdropping and the failure to take into account the same is one of the most prominent thematic elements of this show, right after the selection of bra-less tight-fitting tops for the title-roled stars (at least in the earlier seasons). Either that, or one of the Angels will start asking a few basic questions of one of the one-dimensional bad guys, who then invariably suddenly grows an extra cerebral lobe and retorts, "hey, wait a minute, you ask an awful lot of questions for a librarian/dance instructor/drive-in carhop/bikini salesgirl/television news reporter -- you must be a cop!" The bad guys themselves were usually some of the most one-dimensional in the history of television, the kind who almost universally will murder anybody at the drop of a hat for no story-worthy reason other than to drive these torturous plots along. Similarly, the sense of menace to the safety of the Angels that is supposed to propel a lot of the usual drama in a detective show was also most often so lightly attempted that you had more fear for the castaways on Gilligan's Island the time they were captured by Vito Scotti dressed up as a Japanese midget submarine sailor who didn't know the War was over than anything that usually happened here. Yea, verily, the action sequences also must have been some of the worst-executed, if not also conceived, ever recorded for an action show on TV; most of the time, *Charlie's Angels* represented a giant leap backward in the female action hero on TV, in comparison with much more successful predecessors like Mrs. Emma Peal and Honey West fully ten years earlier. Ironically, it was only in the last couple of seasons after the ratings had slipped into fair-to-middling territory and everybody said the series had jumped the shark that you finally started sometimes seeing some drama like that audiences had grown used to in every other detective drama on TV ranging from Hawaii Five-O to the Mod Squad, but by then I guess it was just too late. Concomitantly, the characters were so poorly written that they failed to develop distinct personalities until very late in the game, most notably with the (finally) aggressive treatment given to the controversially-cast Tanya Roberts, whose hard look and raspy voice clashed obtrusively with the sweet presentation of all the previous actresses cast as Angels.

And finally, another reviewer pointed out that, "(i)t's (sic.) very nature is tongue in cheek (but) that it tries to act seriously . . . (makes) . . . It dysfunctional and laughable." I couldn't put it better myself (after editing). More successful series have handled the tongue-in-cheek premise very successfully by acknowledging the humor inherent in it but mostly that was never the tone set here.

Well, if you are an old man who would like to liven up your lonely apartment after work with some pretty, usually utterly mindless fluff from some always pretty, always nice, sweet girls usually with sweet feminine voices, you have a reason to screen this series. It does have certain advantages over reruns of Bob Ross.

P. S. Way too much has been made of the "jiggle" aspect of this show. I can recall exactly one instance of clear, unequivocal jiggling in all five seasons of this show (and I was paying attention). No, at least until Tanya Roberts showed up, the actresses were just too skinny for that.

Police Story: Prime Rib (1977) Season 4, Episode 22

The Joseph Wambaugh Touch

[8/10 · 21 January 2021]

The plot description given here ("Marty Lacayo and Glenn Talbot are street narcs, meaning they are given the task of busting nickel-and-dime users and hustlers; Shep, one of their users, gives them a tasty lead on a big distributor, but they are forbidden by Lt. Hagedorn from pursuing him . . . ") doesn't begin to do this episode justice.

It leaves out the fact that Talbot (Robert Goulet) is a kind of wild-man instigator "optimistic" to the point of risking professional suicide, paired with a worrier's worrier and born pessimist of a partner whom he dragoons into this adventure kicking and screaming (actually, more like moaning and groaning), while their lieutenant boss is an absolutely no-nonsense by-the-book curmudgeonly stickler for rules and procedures with absolutely no sense of humor at all. If that were not enough, the whole time they are working this case that they have been expressly ordered not to work at all, no less than Cheryl Ladd and a girlfriend are left waiting in suspenseful anticipation of spending a weekend fling with them at a resort in Palm Springs. In other words, though I can't say for sure from the credits just exactly who really wrote this installment of one of the very best cop TV series ever made, it has famed police realism novelist (not to mention, cynical humorist) Joseph Wambaugh's characteristic style in story, characters, and wicked ironic humor written all over it, like a Wambaugh novel in micro. And although I have never been a fan of the hammy acting of Robert Goulet, here his over-the-top tendencies made him perfect for this part, and his performance of the shamelessly extroverted Talbot is beyond criticism. Thus, if you ever get a chance to see this (I caught it at about 2 am recently on the "H&I" or "Heroes and Icons" network) don't pass it up. (Hell, you even get to see Cheryl Ladd a year before she showed up to replace Farah Fawcett on *Charlie's Angels*).

The Ghost & Mrs. Muir (1968–1970)

The Original "Girl Making It On Her Own" (Warning: There is More Here Going On Than Meets the Eye)

[7/10 · 5 January 2021]

In this show the producers took on the task of adapting a 1945 romantic novel and its 1947 movie adaptation, about a lovely but independent-minded young widow and the ghost of an alternately crusty, shrewd, playfully humorous, commanding, and roguishly charming 19th century sea captain whose former house she leases, to a late 1960's network television half-hour sitcom. To put that in perspective, it started the same year as LAUGH-IN and the year after THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS. All-color network prime-time TV was only a year or two old. The president was a guy named Lyndon Johnson who shocked everybody when at the last minute he announced he decided to pass up running for one more term in office, while the country's little kids were more taken with asking their parents what it was going to be like when the astronauts finally got to the moon. Meanwhile, back on Earth, the Credibility Gap (actually pawkily referenced in one episode) was in full swing and any viewing of the evening network TV news would convince anybody that we were looking at The End of Western Civilization As We Know It (". . . and that's the way it is . . . "). The times, they were a-changin', and that was the hurdle the makers of this show sought to straddle for the two seasons and 50 episodes it was produced.

One challenge to overcome was taking what in novel and movie form was a discrete drama with a beginning, middle, and end (all played out in about an hour-and-a-half or so, total) and turn it into an essentially never-ending 1960's-style comedy with no end but a whole lot of middle lasting just as long as they could secure renewals for new seasons, and all broken up into 23-minute bites. This naturally entailed some very basic changes to the original format. Two in particular come to mind.

The original was a tightly-written traditional story focusing on the two main characters (i.e., The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, themselves) and their perpetually unrequited, unrequitable romance (or so it would seem), with supporting characters employed only for the purpose of assisting as needed the development of that plot line. But for weekly, endlessly recurring TV in 1968, where the target was a mass broadcast audience of recurring viewers spanning literally from 6 to 60 (and them some, if you were only moderately optimistic), that formula was going to have to be altered, and so it was. The supporting characters took on greater roles and the whole thing began to take on more the nature of an ensemble, not entirely unlike a host of other offerings of the period ranging from Andy Griffith and The Beverly Hillbillies to Gilligan's Island and Green Acres.

This meant that the ongoing bitter-sweet romance and battle-of-the-sexes dynamic that dominated the original became noticeably diluted with stories about lost dogs, meddling relatives (the merest subplot in the original), trouble in school and the little league, and all the usual soft-core fare of any 1960's family sitcom. The end result was too frequently not all that different from BEWITCHED, which boiled down to supernatural magic powers being imposed to solve the mere mortals' problem-of-the-week with the twitch of a hand (or other appendage), with the role of the supernatural captain largely limited to that. In the process, there was a lot of the sillier pratfall-based comedy and other tropes that were standard devices of the TV sitcoms of the era, and these look as dated as the rotary-dial telephones (to say nothing of the pastels and plaid costumes) in comparison with, say, FRASIER, SEINFELD, or CHEERS. A fair amount of classic stereotyped New England local color humor also became evident, and the very silly largely physical comedy of Charles Nelson Reilly, in the guise of the modern owner of the captain's house, became prominent. Indeed, they even threw a trained dog act into the mix. Thus, only some episodes managed to stay dedicated to the core story here, that of the personal relationship of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, while the writers, with apparent awareness of the task they were faced with, strove mightily to always weave that dynamic into whatever else they found themselves about throughout the first season. Regrettably, with a move from the NBC television network to ABC for the second season, the captain's role most often came to be rather marginalized and whenever that happened the romantic angle seemed to disappear entirely, with Mrs. Muir taking on classic 1960's TV mom form -- albeit with a not-insignificant twist.

For the other major change they made is especially notable and particularly central to the themes the show explored. The original is set in England, opening in the year 1900 or so, on the cusp of the Victorian and Edwardian eras (Edwardian was just Victorian with newfangled gadgets like Wright-Brothers-style aeroplanes, cars like Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, gramophones, very early movie pictures without sound, and the TITANIC), and ends probably in that same year 1945 when the book was published. On the other hand, the TV version is contemporary America right up to the minute (or as contemporary as you can get in a quaint New England coastal village), right down to transistor radios, the 25-inch television set in the living room, and the inevitable 1969 Dodge station wagon parked out front.

More to the point is what happened to Mrs. Muir. The crux of the character was always that of a "high-spirited", independent woman (and it is this characteristic that sets up her relationship with The Captain -- she has "spunk"!), but how that comes off looking when viewed through the lens of the year 2021 is-- well, prophetic in the extreme. She comes off largely as a classic 1960's TV mom, but on steroids, powerfully presaging where women's roles would be going in decades hence. With the addition of two little kids with significant parts in the show, their dog, various repairmen and vendors seeing to the now 100-year-old cottage, and most especially the world's most archetypically terminally cheap, avaricious, petty, self-important, and craven landlord, the TV Mrs. Muir takes on less the romantic aura of angelic beauty radiating from a gilded pedestal that was central to the Victorianesque original, and more the surprisingly realistic exasperation of a professionally talented and respected but perpetually harassed single mother trying to pay never-ending bills, make a living, pick up kids from school, tend to her career, keep the dog fed, be active in her community, and not the least, constantly battle the landlord. These matters are by no means incidental to the show, but are central to very many of the plotlines.

Even more, the dynamic between the two main characters becomes a vehicle to show the basic contrast between Victorian formality and mores that, while beginning to fade, were still inherent in American society in the 1960's, and the changes in mores and values among the more contemporarily-oriented members of society that were taking hold at that time. In this the series concept was extremely timely; in fact, so timely, that this aspect by itself may well have been the element that suggested bringing this story to television in the year 1968 in the first place. With various voices then seeking "social relevance" in television, this settup was perfect for the era. Thus, the battle-of-the-sexes dynamic developed in this series is not just Him versus Her, but Victorian Him versus Modern Her, contrasting not just the sexes, but also two different values systems in conflict at the time the series was made (and to some extent to this very day). And, much as in all the other TV other series addressing this kind of culture clash at that time, in any given story the conflict between the traditionalist and the more modern character is resolved with the more old-fashioned character winding up modernizing His attitude about whatever the subject of that story was by the time you get to its end, while in this show the Modern Woman will often get to experience the charm of some of His more traditional conceptions.

Thus, while the Captain's character is admirably reprised here by Edward Mulhare as practically a carbon-copy of the original essayed by no less a worthy than Rex Harrison (who once played, for example, Julius Caesar opposite Elizabeth Taylor), Hope Lange acted her way to two Emmy Awards with her portrayal of this now all-too-familiar female archetype beginning two full years before the creators of the MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW could start publicly patting themselves on the back for their "groundbreaking" show about the young, childless Mary Richards "making it on her own" and accidentally showing a little "spunk" to her own crusty boss in 1970. It was was fully seven years ahead of Bonnie Franklin and ONE DAY AT A TIME which was similarly billed as groundbreaking on the subject of single-motherhood on American TV. This is something for which surely this series has never gotten the attention it deserves. Moreover, while the main male characters can be summed up with a handful of select adjectives each, her character comes off to as practically as mysterious as any woman I have ever been attracted to. Perhaps it is a basic flaw in the writing (or perhaps it is writing that is just TOO realistic), but after two years of episodes, I still don't feel like I really know Mrs. Muir.

The bottom line here is that this was a show with a premise with a lot of promise, with often notable execution by the standards of its time, and as such has attracted its own little dedicated fan base over 50 years later (there is even at least one fan page for it on Facebook), and any fan of the television of that era would do well not to pass this up. (Given the changes in emphasis found between the two seasons, probably the best way to view this series, once the new viewer has plowed through the episodes in chronological order on a first screening, is to watch them by alternating between seasons thereafter.)

The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969)

So Italian it hurts . . . LOL

[10/10 · 2 September 2020]

If you want to know what it means to be Italian, watch this movie. LOL. (*The Godfather*? Fuggedaboutit . . . bunch o' bums . . .) The big thing the other reviewers are missing (I guess they are not Italian) is how this captures so beautifully the spirit of the Italian heart and soul. For one thing, Italians have a great sense of humor. And they have their values system straight. They know what is important and what is expendable, and all that is on display under the direction of no less a director than Stanley Kramer, one of the great auteurs of Hollywood history. It kind of amazes me that this was originally written by a guy named "Crichton" (who knows - maybe his mother was Italian) because the feel of it is so right. That is really the great strength of this film -- the nicely nuanced portrayal of the Italian peasant ethos in all its glory. This makes for a rich (as well as generally very funny) emotional experience that far outweighs any simple recitation facts the way that poor, pathetic northern European stock from their cold, frozen climes bereft of garlic, oregano, and olive oil too frequently perceive life (and frankly, I think this dichotomy is pointedly visible in some of the other reviews).

If you want to know the plot, read the other reviews. There is no point in repeating it again here. It's not the plot that drives this but the embellishments which clothe its bare framework. It took the masterfully rich arrangements of Robert Russel Bennett to bring Richard Rogers's simple piano melodies for the score of *Victory At Sea* to life and what you see here is a masterpiece of cinematic orchestration. You get that not only in the performances of Anthony Quinn (who was actually Mexican, by the way, even if my father, God rest his soul, was always was sure he just HAD to be Italian) in all his subtlety and only appropriately over-the-top moments and Hardy Kruger in his own similarly nuanced scenes, but throughout, right down to the vast cast of local country people extras who give a texture to this, along with its location, that lets you know what you are seeing is always essentially real. You get it in the various little incidents and accidents that real life is actually made of, which don't necessarily make a coherent narrative, but which if done right, if seen through the right lens, can make a greatly entertaining story.

Thus I had to give this TEN-star rating. Mere technical considerations aside, I have yet to see the movie that develops these themes like this one does.

10 (1979)

Don't misunderstand this film

[7/10 · 11 July 2020]

I debated writing a review of this film until I read quite a number of others and realized the negative ones generally seem to have come from people who didn't understand it.

When at least many, many guys are pretty young a girl is very typically something very, very exciting, but as the years roll on that kind of feeling steadily diminishes. By the time you are, say, 42, this may have reached the point that, just as you can look at a recent picture and see just how far your hairline has receded in the past two decades (and just how far your belt line has done the opposite), you may get an opportunity to suddenly discover just how far those feelings have declined when unexpectedly you see somebody that suddenly reawakens that excitement. For the first time in literally ages, you instantly feel not just better, but vastly better, the best you have since you graduated from college. That's what happens to George Webber (Dudley Moore) in this movie, and what others dismiss simplistically as an "obsession" or "middle-aged lust" (whatever that could possibly be) is the simple fact that he suddenly feels a lot more alive again than he has in many, many years.

So, naturally he pursues this. In reality, it's not about lust, but one character's Ponce de Leon story, where in fact, as far as he feels, he has actually discovered a fountain of youth. But alas, just as with Ponce de Leon, there is no such thing. Reality rears its ugly head when the awesome power of the imagination is overwhelmed by the plain reality of actual life, and as soon as the starry image inspired by the pretty form of his supposed object is dissolved by the stark fact of an actual encounter, the whole thing is revealed as an illusion in his mind, and he is left to deal with what he has rather than what his imagination had briefly teased him with instead.

The good news is that somehow out of this he emerges at least rejuvenated enough to make amends with his real life and get back to more promising personal business, as I suppose anyone would do who doesn't wind up doing themselves to death with drink or worse.

The tale is a Blake Edwards one which means it has to be told as a "bedroom" farce, with plenty of the usual kind humor you would expect from that source, and from Dudley Moore himself, as well. Being as it was made in 1979, Edwards probably had little choice but to push the envelope further than he would have in OPERATION PETTICOAT (his first such venture, in 1959), lest too large a chunk of the self-styled and only allegedly "cool" people in the late 70's audience pan it as old-fashioned. In this vein he and his leading lady and own wife Julie Andrews were expected to aggressively shed her Mary Poppins image, however ridiculous that effort might seem 40 years later. But the viewer has to remember those days to understand the impetus for this; even theretofore gentle sweetheart singer Olivia Newton-John was doing the same thing in the same time frame as a gushing entertainment press exalted her "new image". Against that backdrop the modern viewer needs to cut Edwards, et al., some slack.

This movie has a lot of very funny humor, both situational and physical, and if I had any complaint about it, it was that the dialog seemed somewhat lazy, not at all as witty as what was needed to get a really first-class effort (this again seems an attempt to employ what was "with it" for the times, ignoring the fact that practically nothing about what was with-it in 1979 was either very good or the least bit memorable). But unlike a pure comedy, it also had a very serious side that can wear on a viewer if you can identify with it too well. In that regard, in some ways it is not far from a tragedy at times. And as at least one other perceptive reviewer here has noted, the pacing is a bit leisurely, something that becomes more prominent with repeat viewings. And finally, I guess it would be out of place not to mention that if the movie is about a "10", then they found the ideal figure to play her in Bo Derek, who was a rare, even unique, knockout among women seen on the screen in the Hollywood of that era. Her physical appearance lent an ethereal quality necessary to make her believable as George Webber's fantasy woman that the average beautiful actress normally does not have. The bottom line is, given all these considerations I gave it a 7/10, meaning that if you get a chance to see it, I don't recommend passing it up.

Soylent Green (1973)

Doesn't live up to its potential . . .

[6/10 · 17 April 2020]

As I watched this, I found myself thinking, what a pity this wasn't made by Stanley Kubrick (or even Stanley Kramer). It might have been yet another one of their masterpieces. The basic story is not bad, decently-enough constructed for what it is, with touching ironies, fitting dramatic segues, and touches of symbolism in the right places, and yet you get the feeling something is missing, and emotionally it doesn't quite come to together for the impact it could have and should have had. The whole time I watched it I couldn't escape imagining what it would have been like to read this story in novel-form, where I could just picture how much more emotional impact that could have had then what I was seeing. What could have been evocative like Orwell's *1984* or Bradbury's *Fahrenheit* 451 fell well short of any such mark.

Trying to figure out the cause, I came up with two things to begin with: Cinematography and casting. Recently I ran across some film professional (probably reviewing the original 1962 version of ON THE BEACH) lamenting the demise of black & white photography and how that development essentially ruined certain kinds of films, and this movie would be one of them. There are certain Twilight-Zonish contradictory juxtapositions here that just don't work with the same power that black & white could have brought to bear. Even without black & white cinematography, a washed-out color or some other surrealistic technique was needed to create the bleak mood needed to achieve the impact you would expect this story to be looking for, and it simply is not there, and so too neither is the appropriate emotional impact. Instead, it is filmed in a way essential hum-drum for an early 1970's action picture.

And that leads me to the casting. Charleton Heston was not the best actor for this kind of story, as it should have been told. He was not just miscast, but fundamentally miscast. What the story behind this movie needed was an everyman-hero actor, not an action hero de jure with the strongest melodramatic instincts in the movie business. Similarly, although Edward G. Robinson is one of my favorite "Golden Age" actors, and it was great to see him at work again, he came off as about as ethnically New York Jewish as Sam Elliot, and not only did not even attempt the dialect needed for some of his lines to work properly, but he repeatedly proved himself unable even to properly pronounce "l'chaim". Without this kind of texturing this movie cannot but fall short of any kind of greatness, however much potential its story had.

Moreover, the sex and violence were poorly employed in this movie, distracting rather than enhancing of the point of the story. This is not to say that sex and violence had no place in this story; those themes certainly could be employed to enhance the main theme, but here not just any violence but the sex in particular came across as more gratuitous than anything else, just a sop to the masses for low-grade entertainment in place of something that enhances the sense of the degradation of human life that is fundamentally the basic theme of this movie.

The result is that this movie does not pay off as it could have and should have because (not unlike any number of other movies that don't pay off when they should have) it is schizophrenic; it can't make up its mind what it is, and so it winds up being a jack of all trades and master of none. It comes off as trying to combine a heavy theme of the degradation of not only the planet, but the human race in general, the cheapening of human life to the level of garbage, with a much shallower action-movie thrill-ride, and in the end accomplishes neither goal completely. Therefore, despite an otherwise heroic try, I can only give it my normal idea of a 6-star IMDb rating: not incompetent but not a must-see effort either.

Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Still Looking for My Socks (A Lawyer's Perspective . . . )

[9/10 · 10 February 2020]

I had originally intended to title this review, "A Lawyer Movie for lawyers", and before writing it I was careful to read a lot of the other reviews to see what the non-lawyers were getting out of it. The first time I saw it I was still a non-lawyer, and also comparatively young, and I remember left feeling it was a bit flat, a fairly standard old black & white melodrama with a courtroom setting with a lot of loud jazz music and typical old-Hollywood histrionics. The main draw for me was simply that it was a courtroom drama, and a "vintage" one at that. It did not offer the delightful English character actor performances or cleverly-drawn plot twists of WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION or even the relentless, irresistible, and authoritative hammering of Raymond Burr in PERRY MASON. Moreover, the courtroom antics struck me as decidedly unrealistic, since they conflicted diametrically with my grand total of two days over Spring Break while in junior high school in California of watching what I would eventually learn was the extremely subdued trial presentation of an otherwise fairly sensational murder case.

Thus, I was disappointed when some years later I asked a law school professor with a penchant for this kind of thing what the most realistic classic courtroom or lawyer movie was and he came back with this one.

The next time I saw this movie I was a either a law student or a very newly-minted lawyer in an insurance defense (i.e., personal injury defense) practice and with the smidgen of professional experience I had acquired by that time could begin to see his point. But it wasn't until I saw this recently, after 29 more years in harness in general practice, that I could really appreciate it for at least part of its true merit.

This is very likely the most realistic lawyer movie ever made. Surely there are few others that could begin to compare. It is no exaggeration to say that I did not detect a single instance of anything in this movie that could not plausibly happen in real life, and in fact, there was so much that was so classically typical. "Juke joints" and county jail lockups. A basically trashy defendant (however well he might turn out in the uniform of his country, although one thing I have always wondered is why is he only a lieutenant after about nine years in the Army) and his complimentarily hot-to-trot trashy wife (as one venerable judge in our "family law" courthouse used to say, "2's do not marry 7's"). The wonderful ambiguity inherent in the RV-park where they live in a large-sized Airstreamesque camping trailer. The locally-flashy small-town prosecutor who must have made a better smiling, glad-handing, provincially Clark-Gablesque candidate for District Attorney than Jimmy Stewart's quirky, essentially iconoclastic character, whom he defeats for reelection, even while his amount of actual legal acumen is seriously questionable. The self-impressed, condescending expert-from-out-of-town lawyer who knows perfectly well what he is doing in the courtroom and doesn't make any particular secret of it. The judge was completely believable as a real, utterly competent "visiting" judge handling another judge's docket and this particular trial with these particular lawyers in particular (if he had a weakness, it was only the gentleness of his voice, even when he is reading the lawyers a 100% accurate version of a judge's riot act). The unpaid yet staunchly loyal legal assistant, personally invested in the matter up to her armpits (and I'd still like to know how much damage was done to her car and how that was eventually ameliorated). The old lawyer who is basically a decent old fellow but has fallen on hard times and lost a lot of his self-respect (surely every courthouse has at least one of these). And a main character who who looks decidedly abnormal with his fishing (not to mention fly-tying) hobby exaggerated to the level of a personality quirk. He comes complete with a home-based office and a two-or-three-generations-past body-style car that has obviously seen better days (one can easily envision the studio car shop banging a dent in the passenger side door on one side while another crew is changing the driver's side door for an old used one that doesn't really match on the other). About the only thing he lacks is a saggy old hound dog. He is the type of lawyer (at least on this occasion, now that he no longer commands the hammer of the prosecution, but is only a lowly criminal defense lawyer, begging and pleading) who decides to lavish exhibitions of melodramatic emotion on the court with all the usual results that kind of thing will get you if you are foolish enough -- or simply caught up enough -- to try it. Such types do actually occur in nature (or at least, at a courthouse near you).

As another reviewer on here (self-identified intriguingly as "tightspotkilo") observed in 2005, practically every single act seen and every statement heard in this movie absolutely realistic (or at least 101% plausible). The story was written by a lawyer from the "upper peninsula" of Michigan, where it is set, and the director, Otto Preminger, who made a lot of impressive Crap after this, apparently was wise enough in this case to reproduce it just the way it must have been written originally. In the movie's trailer, he appears with the author and they exchange comments to the effect that every single thing that appears in the film was cleared by the lawyer/author first. I believe this because, when I see the film now, it could not possibly be any other way. What I would not give to do the commentary track on a DVD issue. The hardest part of that would be getting all the logical comments in within the run time of the movie.

Thus, the repeated comments of non-lawyer reviewers about all the shades of gray and ambiguity in this picture make me laugh out loud. What they seem to laud as a sublimely-inspired, meticulously and no doubt painstakingly-crafted example of the the screenwriter's art is in fact, nothing more than just plain fact. Yea, verily, if this movie is to be offered as any example of the cinematic art, it is in how it makes what could be a documentary into an emotionally-involving drama. Indeed, it is what the better trial counsel almost always try to make happen in a real courtroom. It amounts to a sort of monument to the adage, "truth is stranger than fiction".

If there is one thing in this piece which makes me cock an eyebrow, it is Jimmy Stewart's reluctance to take this case in the first place. Now, the lawyers in this picture might well have been dead by the time I started practicing law (certainly, actors Stewart and George C. Scott were at very advanced ages by that time). Moreover, Stewart plays a small-town lawyer, which could readily factor into this attitude of his, while my own experience is largely big-city-oriented. In other words, maybe there is a fundamental difference between his circumstances in 1959 and any I have encountered since 1990. That said, in the film Stewart is seen hesitating because he is afraid he can't win the case at trial. In my experience, this is a very unusual thing for a defense lawyer to do. Normally, a defense lawyer has a stack of bills, both occupational and domestic, to pay, and will sign up anything with any money attached to it. The very best and most sought-after might turn down something because they are just too overloaded with other cases to handle it, but that doesn't describe the vast bulk of lawyers. (At the risk of digressing, it is identical to something Humphrey Bogart said in THE MALTESE FALCON in 1940: he told Mary Astor that his detective agency took her case not because they believed her story, but because they believed her $200.) In agreeing to defend somebody, you sign them up first and worry about how to handle the case second.

In that regard, you know that the state usually has plenty of good evidence that the vast majority of your clients are as guilty as the year is long, and those clients will wind up pleading guilty in exchange for a known (hopefully) sentence in what is technically known as a plea bargain. In this movie, the "in" expression in the upper peninsula of Michigan in 1959 for this kind of thing apparently was "copping out"; today, and at least in other places, it is called pleading out, taking a plea, or even taking a deal (just to name the ones I've heard in my particular neck of the United States). While this movie seems to suggest the competitiveness of courtroom lawyers via this device, it isn't really necessary because there is plenty of other material here to show that without it. Maybe the author thought it necessary as exposition, or to enhance the drama. If so, it would be about the only unrealistic bit in the movie. Either that, or maybe that was really the way it was for some lawyer who lost his DA reelection bid in the back woods of Michigan in 1959, and maybe thought he had something to prove.

In that vein, from a modern perspective, at least, it is also unusual that he neglects financial matters generally, and in fact doesn't seem concerned about money at all. Most private practitioners I know are always thinking, if not actually worrying about money, because they really don't want to find themselves living in their car (even if it were an early 1950's Chevy convertible; ironically, today that same car in reasonable condition would be worth a years' worth of paychecks to some people). Of course, even us newer older lawyers know that, prior to the 1980's, the legal business environment was much more favorable then than it has been for our generation.

What is suggested by all of this, in modern parlance, is a clinically depressed lawyer, and it would seem that an underlying, if overlooked, theme of this movie is that of a defeated man like Stewart's character reclaiming a critical measure of self-respect via this trial experience, a theme accentuated by bein

Hawaii Five-O: Deep Cover (1977) Season 10, Episode 9

I gave this an 8 out of prejudice, even though it is probably more like a 7

[8/10 · 17 November 2019]

Here we have another perfectly serviceable episode of Five-O, this time, one of those with a Navy slant. As fans know, main character Steve McGarrett was a US Naval Reserve Officer, and here he once more he dons his commander's uniform to solve yet another glitzy law enforcement conundrum, this time, naturally enough, a caucasoid spy ring intent on stealing naval secrets. As noted in the credits, this episode wouldn't have been possible the way it is shown without the generous cooperation of the United States Navy, through its lending numerous personnel and some of its more fun Hawaii-based training training facilities to liven up this installment.

As a result, I gave this an 8 out of prejudice, even though it is probably more like a 7, because I was just beside myself with glee to be surprised to see not only a bit of a real damage control flooding trainer exercise but the old Pearl Harbor submarine escape practice tank in operation, through both of which they appear to have actually put the guest-starring actor at the center of this drama, but also the FBM Dive Trainer, where he also gets his feet wet as a Chief of The Watch (even though he was WAY too senior for that, but should have not been doing but standing there giving orders). Even so, it was great fun to relive a jam-dive casualty (of the stern planes) in the trainer after nearly 40 years. It was all the better because it came as a total surprise. One does not expect to see a real multi-million-dollar (roughly $1.5 million in 1964 dollars) submarine training device like that in an episode of even as glamorous a cop show as Hawaii Five-O. The end result is that this installment came off looking a bit like a "public affairs" (Navy for "P.R.") promotion, but so what. No viewer will be hurt by it, and it relieves the monotony of the usual retinue of sleezy-smooth organized crime bosses, lowly hoods and thugs, beach bums, and even spies that form the normal fare of this program.

And that's not all. Yet equally noteworthy was the leading female guest star. The rest of the show would be standard for what you normally expect from this series, except for the presence of a real-live genuine Bond Girl (yes, THAT "Bond"), Maud Adams of MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN fame, looking as striking as ever. I won't spoil things by going into any detail just what she does in this episode (although I see nothing wrong with divulging that she does get a beach scene in a bikini, and what else?).

Given these high points it is easier to excuse some of the usual kinds of of flubs endemic to weekly TV show production, such as overlooking that naval officers have their fingerprints on their Navy ID cards, the fact that no experienced submariner calls a submarine a "sub" (he would call it a "boat"), and the mysterious mid-episode promotion of Lieutenant Commander Harner to full Commander. I also still have to wonder about the admission of a pure civilian to a Navy or other military hospital; and I still have to wonder about the nurse's uniforms, which are not the way I remember them.

All that said, needless to say I highly recommend this episode to any other ex-submariners out there (as well as to all you "non-quals, too).

Red Planet Mars (1952)

An Odd Failure

[5/10 · 12 November 2019]

This is a very odd movie. It looks like it is yet another one whose story might have been told compellingly had there been a major screenplay overhaul before shooting started. It comes off as though it was intended to be another 1950's sci-fi epic such as THE WAR OF THE WORLDS with a strong moral message along the lines of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL but flops with it's blunt, heavy-handed treatment of the thematic material, too strong even for 1952.

Many old movies tackled religious material successfully by handling it with some subtlety, grace, and sentimentality (an excellent example of which being THE BELLS OF SAINT MARY'S, released in 1945), but with its incessant Bible-quoting this one come across as so evangelically strident that it looks like it would have been custom-made for the "Christian Sci-Fi Network" had there been any such thing at the time.

Another oddity of this film was its pointed treatment of the Soviet Union in particular, something else you don't see even in Cold War spy flicks of the same era. Usually movies and TV tap-danced with indirect or at least infrequent references to anything definitively identifying the adversary, whose identity was instead made abundantly clear primarily by laying it in between the lines, including having antagonist actors speaking with vaguely Eastern European sounding accents and wearing vaguely Russian-style uniforms. But here you have the only example I have ever seen of using the word "Soviet" itself for this period of movie, and no shot of the Kremlin and Red Square is spared, something that you didn't really see in movies until satires after 1960. (As an excellent example of this point, have a look at the Cold War classic THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE of1962, with Frank Sinatra (and NOT the recent Denzel Washington one).

The bottom line is that this movie fails to deliver on its theme. What might have been a very clever sci-fi concept development instead turns into in effect a hammy propaganda film that might have been sponsored by the John Birch Society. A serious disappointment, considering its potential.

Space Cowboys (2000)

Flawed and Ultimately Disappointing

[6/10 · 21 October 2019]

This initially intriguing effort ultimately winds up as a light-weight space yarn not worthy of its acting talent. Promising in its truly impressive guy-movie ensemble cast consisting of nothing less than Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, James Garner, and Donald Sutherland (I mean, really, who makes movies like that anymore), it really needed a script overhaul before shooting and if nothing else shows that if Eastwood is looking for any more empty chairs, he need look no farther than than his own in terms of judging this ready to go the way it was written. The story is emotionally off-balance and thus ultimately unsatisfying in the end. Seeming to start out as the story of older men trying to prove to themselves that they aren't finished being young yet, it never really develops that theme fully or even effectively before changing directions and becoming just another comparatively weak, explosion-based, conspiracy-oriented space-opera techno-drama devoid of serious dramatic content. What began looking like a worthy sequel, perhaps, to the vastly better 1983 movie THE RIGHT STUFF, quickly descends to the level of tepid fluff. The lost youth angle retreats from being a major theme to the degraded status of a mere gimmick, just an excuse for a geriatric Clint Eastwood to play a tough-guy astronaut at this advanced stage of his real life.

And once it reaches that point, it grows weaker still. The typical expository dialogue necessary to convey the action clearly is all but absent, distracting the viewer from whatever the movie might be accomplishing otherwise while he is kept busy trying to figure out what is going on with the plot. And considering that the film takes place in contemporary times with all the familiar trappings of the then-current state of the American space program (it is NOT science fiction), the script indulges in ever more silly lapses of verisimilitude (and without any attempt to rationalize its overreaching) to the point it winds up looking as dumb as the episode of the hackneyed *Walker, Texas Ranger* episode where the audience is supposed to believe non-pilot Chuck Norris could make a successful emergency landing of a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet airliner after taking a grand total of about two flying lessons in a Cessna 172. One's willing suspension of disbelief is long gone by the film's climax when characters are performing amazing feats of derring-do which practically nothing in the previous two hours has prepared the audience to believe that they might ever conceivably be able to do. Finally, the ultimate conclusion of the film is just a collection of loose ends, punctuated at the finale by an emphatically tacky (if not positively juvenile) shot that trespasses over the line of sentimentality into just plain bad taste.

I began writing this with a vague sense that it suffered from inadequate writing but as I continue thinking about it while writing this I simply can't help but wonder whatever the hell happened to the talents of professional screenwriters in the late modern period who can't seem to grasp basic story-telling elements that were the norm in movies not only great but also often very small prior to the final conquest of the world by the baby boom generation. It's difficult to believe that these guys could have passed writing 102, much less sold this interim draft for enough money to live on well for at least a year. In the final analysis, the only thing I really wound up liking this movie for was the opportunity to see classic screen personalities like Tommy Lee Jones, and especially Sutherland and Garner (badly underutilized as the latter is in this movie), and all together at that, as well as a repeat of RIGHT STUFF visual effects and some admittedly pretty decent dialogue in some places; an added bonus was the scene shot in (and in the parking lot of) the late Outpost Tavern near the Johnson Space Center in the Houston area of Texas, a popular hang-out with astronauts and other NASA personnel before it closed forever in 2009/2010. I still miss it personally.

P.S. One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how you will find long authoritative-sounding reviews on IMDb where the reviewer expounds with the air of the Dean of a film school and yet he gets basic facts of what happened in the movie just plain dead wrong. In this movie, James Cromwell's character was NOT a project director who canceled Project Daedalus and thus sacked Clint Eastwood in 1958. "Project Daedalus" in the movie was a fictional stand-in for the United State's REAL plans, under development in the 1950's, to eventually put Americans into space with some sort of space plane operated by the United States Air Force. However, that plan was ultimately canceled in favor of the rocket-and-space-capsule approach done by the civilian agency NASA in response to the unexpectedly sudden spectacular developments of the Soviet (Russian) space program in that time frame. The movie explicitly recognizes this historical fact (in a rare bit of exposition that actually does appear in this movie), and in fact Cromwell, who is but a lower-level military officer something like 470 layers down the organizational chart from the Oval Office at the White House where that decision was actually made, is merely the last and least guy in a string of messengers bearing the bad news to Eastwood's team. Additionally, the incorporation of the chimpanzee was merely a heavily oversimplified dramatic flourish that reflects that with NASA taking over manned space flight from the air force, the first advanced life form they sent into space was a chimp named HAM (and not, "Marianne"), something that was dramatized to vastly better effect in THE RIGHT STUFF, which was also vastly better written.

The Winds of War (1983)

History In Disguise . . .

[7/10 · 16 July 2019]

*** SPOILER ALERT *** This is a television miniseries adaptation of the late (he died only about a month before I wrote this, at age 103) Herman Wouk's rather vast novel, THE WINDS OF WAR, written in the 1960's and here brought to life dramatically in about five years of filmmaking starting in the late 1970's. Wouk himself also authored the screenplay, and adapted it about as faithfully as possible from the original. It begins in the Spring of 1939 in the period leading up to the opening shots of World War II and ends in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor in the last days of 1941. From the first time I saw it, and still later when I finally read the original book, I saw it as pretty clever application of the aphorism that, "a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down." Wouk's focus was the history of this period (about which he was able to say quite a bit more in print form than here, by the way), and what he did was to find a way to inform even the most history-class-averse audience about these momentous historical events and their causes by cloaking them in the guise of this lengthy soap opera. In essence, here he tricks the audience into learning something about the origins of the European and primary theater of World War II, whether they like it or not.

Wouk, a former United States World War II naval officer (and of Jewish heritage) himself, therefore creates his fictional American Navy family, the Henrys, who along with various in-laws, friends, and acquaintances (ranging from European Jews to Southern Aristocrats from the Redneck Riviera), manage to find at least one or the other of them in just about every key nook or cranny of the momentous happenings that led to the greatest single secular event of any kind in the history of the human race.

Some reviewers on here I think have missed the key point that Wouk was meticulous about telling this history, and that he was surely learned enough in the subject to teach a college course in it. (To date, his explanations from the sequel to this story, WAR AND REMEMBRANCE, of the Battles of Midway and Leyte Gulf, are better than any actual history of either I have ever run across.) Thus, his principal plot device, casting his central character, the patriarch of the clan, Commander (and later, Captain) Victor "Pug" Henry, as an unofficial errand-runner for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ("FDR"), was no mere dramatic device, but something completely plausible within the context of true history of that presidency, and anything but a series of Forest-Gumpesque accidents. As his historians know only too well, FDR is practically notorious for his cultivating a network of informal advisors and sources of information, just as Pug Henry is dragooned into being here (indeed, observant viewers will note that Henry is not the only informal Roosevelt emissary to appear in this story, either). One advantage FDR would have had with a naval officer like Henry was that, unlike some of his other unofficial agents, here he could order Henry to go when and where he needed him, rather than having to ask for any, however hard-to-withhold, favors. And proving himself to be "a good hound who runs silent" (or at least, silently enough), he winds up getting used in that role much more than he ever would have liked. Arguably, this played out better in writing than it does on film, but nevertheless, it is by no means as unlikely, let alone impossible, as it might seem to the historically uninitiated.

Thus the strength of this miniseries is its writing, and in particular its treatment of history and historical figures. I was especially impressed with his depiction of Franklin Roosevelt. At the time I read the novel, I was simultaneously reading a history of the Roosevelt and his presidency for the same period, and the two mirrored each other so well that Wouk could have used the history text as his basic research material, had it not been that the history was written at least 25 years AFTER this story.

At the same time, the melodrama is completely competent, as good as anything you would be likely to see on TV and better than probably most of it. I especially thought that Wouk's writing of his characters showed plenty of nuance, if, as with all fiction, the consumer is experienced enough to pick up on it. The acting itself was never any worse than fair-to-middlin' TV offerings any place else, and in general the parts were well-cast. Robert Mitchum certainly projected all the gravity necessary to be the serious-minded, ever-responsible, straight-laced, rock-solid American naval officer he portrayed (my own father was a career naval officer, and and there was a very great deal there I recognized). In this regard, I'll add that while many thought the cast the wrong ages to play they parts they had, I have to wonder how they never noticed that if that is some sort of disease afflicting this program, it is a chronic one afflicting countless Hollywood productions of the greatest merit from across the generations, from CASABLANCA to THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE and back again (with side trips ranging from BONANZA to FRASIER). Rather, the rule in Hollywood isn't how old an actor is, but how old they can play, and certainly that principle applies here. Jan Michael Vincent may have been a lot older than Byron Henry, but he could play immature-kid-needing-a-swift-kick-in-the-pants as well as anybody ten or fifteen years younger.

And while practically everybody hates Ali McGraw in this, I couldn't imagine in my own mind how there was any other way to play what was written for her as any more likeable or any less annoying. The truth is, there is more than a suggestion here that this character actually HAS to be annoying because she is really of a very particular type readily familiar to many residents of South Florida (where she actually comes from) and the greater New York area (where her parents undoubtedly came from) in particular, and such women in real life are ALWAYS annoying practically by definition. I also took her constant selfish, ego-gratifying manipulations of her two paramours as something, being young testosterone-filled bucks (more or less), they were simply blind to (anybody experienced enough with the fair sex should be readily familiar with that concept) and simply did not know that this is somebody you don't just walk away from, but run. Meanwhile, most of the other characters are never shown to have enough screen time interacting with her to see her as much other than a very pretty Jewish girl and the screenplay in fact very carefully keeps their comments about her to about that level (Pug Henry's line that "she has eyes a man could get lost in" is especially well-conceived in this regard).

Indeed, when reading this novel and its sequel, I thought Wouk's development of his female characters seemed especially thoughtful, for a male writer, and if there is anything wrong with this character it might only be that Wouk wrote it a little TOO thoughtfully, to the point where he lost sight of maybe what he really should have been doing with it dramatically. At the risk of spoiling anything, I might mention at this point that if the viewer or reader soldiers on past this story through its double-parted sequel, WAR AND REMEMBRANCE, the Natalie Jastrow story becomes, like any good tale they teach you to compose in Creative Writing 101, one of transformation, in this instance from a spoiled manipulator playing mind games to satisfy her female ego to a mother fighting what is very literally a battle of life and death for her family. Indeed, all Wouk's characters are compelled to undergo personal transformations, for one reason or another, as the saga proceeds from this story through to the end of its sequel, just as you would expect for a competent novelist's work.

Probably the other strong point of this series were a lot of its production values, which were often elegant enough for GONE WITH THE WIND and included at times some notable scenic location shooting in places like the world-famous Colosseum in Rome. And I have to disagree with the reviewer who criticized the music. For the time and place this was made (about 40 years ago, now), the audience it was directed at (about all on Social Security, now, assuming they still live at all), and the subject matter it covered, it was perfectly conceived, and carried the dramatic moments just as it was required to do. (I really have to wonder if that reviewer would likewise complain about the voice-over narration used in key spots, asserting that it, too, was "dated".) Given the vast quantity of similar music for similar material spanning at least a 20-year period it seems difficult to understand any such criticism.

In conclusion, probably the worst thing about this is that it is actually only the first act in a three-act play, and unless you proceed on to digest the two-part sequel, you won't get to the end, not only of the War (even though there is probably at least a fighting chance you already know the outcome of that), but of the characters' story arches as they are commenced in this first installment. Suffice to say, that they are rendered with comparable quality to this first installment, both in print and on film.

Logan's Run (1976)

Soylent Green is made of People!

[5/10 · 18 March 2019]

***SPOILER ALERT*** (WARNING!) This is yet another one of these 1970's fantasies that hasn't stood the test of time -- any time. I don't remember the "wildly popular novel" that is supposed to have inspired it (though now that I think of it, maybe I just DID see it peeking out of some kid's school book bag here or there, back in the day, and in paperback, of course), but the movie itself suffers from a surfeit of mid-budget 1970's production values (and even special effects miniatures that look like a 1959 World's Fair exhibit - and after a while, I could never see one of those monorail trains without expecting to hear the jingle of the trolley music from MR. ROGERS' NEIGHBORHOOD) and a look and feel of that shag carpeting and pastel polyester style that seemed too much even then and not surprisingly vanished after only a few years. Farah Fawcett (credited as Farah Fawcett-Majors, in the middle of her year-long non-marriage to Lee Majors, no less) and her trademark billowing cloud of hair appearing here as the World's Absolute Dumbest Dirty Blonde Ever (in her character's case, it was evidently her IQ that was not allowed to exceed 30), predictably could not do anything but contribute to these feelings, and even the appearance of Special Guest Stars like Roscoe Lee Brown and no less a luminary than SIR Peter Ustinov (the only time I ever heard him with a remarkably uninteresting flat American accent, however else he characteristically strove to ham this up) were insufficient to effect anything like a meaningful save. The whole effort seems to be nothing more than an especially mechanical, consciously formulaic, paint-by-numbers cobbling together of by-then shopworn sci-fi movie cliches that should have seemed to the filmmakers well past their best-by date even in 1976. Even then this film garnered the reputation of being especially only just so-so.

The story starts with the obligatory purportedly casual but necessarily exposition-packed conversation intended to inform you that you are Not In Kansas Anymore, Toto (which is thus supposed to engage you by intriguing you, but is so obviously obligatory that it doesn't), and then proceeds on to a rousing round of Can-You-Name-That-Shooting-Location-(Hey-Wait-I-Was-There-Three-Summers-Ago-On-Vacation-And-Even-Bought-These-Sneakers-At-That-Shopping-Mall). The sci-fi cliche festival continues apace from there, whether it is that "There Is No Renewal!" (and if that were not enough, even, "There Is No Sanctuary!", a la "Soylent Green is made of People!", only not just once but TWICE, as if you missed it the first time), or having the whole thing end with the destruction of the oppressive antagonist regime in a chain reaction of explosions starting from deep in the Secret Control Center Of The Evil Bad Guys (a la Bond, practically any, JAMES Bond, movie) triggered entirely inexplicably by the main character causing the Controlling Computer ("I can't do that, Dave", i.e., 2001) to melt down by tormenting its subroutines with The Truth ("I . . . am . . . Landru . . . Sterilize . . . STERILIZE!" (You can say Captain James T. Kirk, Federation starship ENTERPRISE, can't you? Circa 1966-69? Sure you can . . . and on at least FOUR different occasions before this movie was even a gleam in these writers' eyes). There is even a sequence depicting the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in ruins that blatantly channels the denouement of PLANET OF THE APES, 1968 (Ohhh Myyyy Godddddddd!!!), complete with portrayal of a house chamber in the Capitol building filled with deteriorating portraits and books (surely there would be somebody in the audience who hadn't seen ZARDOZ, released in 1974).

The bottom line is that movies are about stimulating a willing sense of disbelief, and I never found this one doing so. It reminds me of, lacking a budget or anything like expertize, some of the work-arounds we used to attempt in 8th grade summer school film class in San Diego (I still remember the lengths we went to to get a portable classroom building at at a junior high school to look like the train station in Dodge City in the Old West). Whatever they were trying to do (and in some spots that was not all that obvious), all too often and just in general it just didn't work. Whatever its thematic aspirations (or pretensions, for that matter), it is no FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966). (It is not intended to be a parody, so it is no BARBARELLA, 1968, either.) The only thing I really appreciated on a recent screening at the advanced age I now find myself approaching all too rapidly were the filmy costumes which adorned (except when they didn't quite, or even had to be removed altogether once or twice for some reason involving no objective logic whatsoever in regard to the plot, at least) the ample quantity of comely female extras (as well as the leading lady when she first appears), and which in yet one more exhibition of true short-lived 1970's style, made so much of the apparent proposition that in the year 2274, not only have the human race forgotten there could be such a thing as old people, they have also forgotten there could be such a thing as the manufacture and use of the bra.

(P.S. Yes, I realize that some might think that in a world where no one survives past age 30, the continued proliferation of bras would not be inherently necessary in any case. My own experience, however, has been that such a thought would be a mere middle-aged misapprehension. My memory is holding up much better than my eyesight (among other things). Also, be sure to read the review of IMDb member "ace-150", entitled "Euthanize Me Now". It made me LOL.)

Burke's Law (1963–1966)

Ambitious, Stylish Whodunnit

[7/10 · 8 February 2019]

I would love to run across the "Archive of Television" interview series that explains just what they were thinking when the eventually legendary Aaron Spelling and company put this together for the fall, 1963, television season. It had been back-door piloted two years earlier in the DICK POWELL THEATER anthology series, but Powell was a 1950's noire tough-guy actor while this series presented the most suave, debonair actor on weekly television, Gene Barry. The thinking seems to have been to take the venerable fantasy of the "whodunnit" and modernize it in the most smart, up-to-date style with generous helpings of contemporary American TV wit surmounted by gobs of Camelot-era glitz and glam.

Not only were the likes of doughty Miss Jane Marple or fussy Hercule Poirot updated to a smooth, handsome lady-killer in a perpetual tuxedo who was designed to make James Bond envious, but the protagonist police detective was the heir to a fortune of at least seven million dollars (probably more like 70 in today's money) and except for his job, fully lived the dream, complete with Hollywood mansion, extravagant chauffeur-driven luxury sedan, and what might be the largest (or at least one of the most appealing) retinue of sex-starved babes in the history of television. And although in the better episodes they did manage to hit some of the better heights of weekly television drama, mostly the emphasis was pretty lightweight, focusing in perhaps equal parts on light humor and action.

With that much to contemplate the reviewer knows scarcely where to begin. Under the circumstances, then, maybe it would be best to begin at the beginning. I first saw this show at about age 11, and I can't remember now just what all appealed to me about it so strongly then, except for one thing: the most curvaceous, most gorgeous thing I'd ever seen in one whole decade of living, and of course I'm referring to Burke's Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud sedan. This car was practically a character in the show. Probably never in the history of television has an automobile been so strongly emphasized - not even Don Johnson's or Tom Selleck's Ferraris; not even, of all things, the Batmobile (the only exception that comes to mind would be shows where the car explicitly was a character, such as in Knight Rider or My Mother The Car - but I digress). Shot after shot was set up to emphasize it. It even had its own theme music (which was the big, bold, brassy jazz theme song of the show itself, and nothing could have been better - surely, the composer was looking at footage of the car doing its thing as he worked).

The idea seems to have been not only to continuously rub the protagonist's sumptuous fantasy lifestyle into the viewers' eyeballs, but in fact the car actually functioned as the unifying element in the plot development of the episodes. While in the traditional whodunnit the various suspect characters are typically united by geography - e.g., they are all together in an English country house during a gale, or on a Nile River excursion steamer, or the fabled Orient Express passenger train caught snowbound in the Balkans outback - here, in the car-crazy culture of early 1960's Southern California, it is this regal motor vehicle which takes the detective to the crime scene and then back and forth among the characters as he puts the pieces together to solve the case, often finding cause to interview them while riding inside of it (especially if they are female and under 35; on one occasion, when guest-star Elsa Lanchester didn't quite fit that formula, the interview occurred afoot during a stroll down a country road with the car following prominently behind in full view for several minutes' screen time). Councils of war among the hero and his staff are regularly held within it; and moreover every episode's opening credits begin with Amos Burke and his Filipino man-servant, Henry, rushing in classic action-hero form to the car while the rousing, booming, boisterous opening notes of the theme crank up in perfect synchronization to the car's emergence from the driveway, and every show's ending credits roll with a shot of it parked once again back in the circular drive in front of Burke's mansion, dutifully awaiting its next foray into the world of criminal detection.

And that leads us to the part I could not appreciate quite so well at 11 as I could later. As one might have guessed by now, the pre-credits teaser of every show naturally features our hero right smack in the middle of romancing some comely female, only to be interrupted by the obligatory dreaded telephone call summoning him to yet another inevitable crime scene. This was one of these shows where a large cast of name-brand guest stars was required every week, and the litany of the actors who appeared would probably look like an early-1960's Hollywood telephone book. In particular, probably never was any show so heavily populated with young television starlets (generally on their way up) which makes this a delight to watch as no amount of Connolly leather upholstery and sheet metal under thirty coats of hand-polished paintjob ever could. A partial list (simply from memory) includes such luminaries as Elizabeth Montgomery (can you imagine her playing high on Absinthe?), Barbara Eden, Lola Albright, Nancy Kovack, Zza Zza Gabor, Eva Gabor, Annette Funicello, Anne Francis, Debra Paget, Suzy Parker, Antoinette Bower, Glynis Johns, Jill Haworth, Nancy Sinatra, Dana Wynter, Dawn Wells, Tina Louise, Dina Merrill, Carolyn Jones, Jill St. John, Jayne Mansfield . . . And if somebody a little more grown up is to your taste, there was also Ida Lupino, Gloria Grahame, June Allyson, Ruth Roman, and even Vera Miles, Mary Astor, Dorothy Lamour, and Gloria Swanson . . . (and I imagine a female reviewer enthused with the period could come up with a list of male guest stars that would amply complement this list; certainly it bulged with well-known comedians and character actors). Probably the only things missing were Linda Evans, Sally Field, and Mary Tyler Moore (but they did manage a cameo of David Niven, of all people).

If this show had any fault it may have been that it was trying to do so many things at the same time that it couldn't expect to do all of hem consistently well every week, and sometimes the dialog just didn't pay off. Moreover, a good bit of true talent was wasted. At times Barry showed hints of a lot of talent that was barely tapped but which would have markedly enriched the show had it been, while veteran co-stars like Regis Toomey and Leon Lontoc were usually badly under-exploited. Lontoc in particular was a very funny natural comic and when actually given something to do never failed to entertain, and it is disappointing that more was not made of the sort of Rochester/Benny relationship his character, Henry the man-Friday, had with Barry's Burke. One supporting actor who was not underused was Gary Conway as the boy-wonder apprentice detective, Tim Tillson, the youthful prodigy who had everything but rank and experience. This also meant that, in order to know every conceivable useful fact in a case and never miss a single trick in checking out leads, and in direct opposition to his own leading-man good looks, he was what nowadays we would call a geek or a nerd, something he pulled off with aplomb (I especially like the time he was grossly disappointed he could not get the evening off because it was the night the grunion were running - true story).

In sum, Burke's Law can be relied upon to offer an always entertaining look back at Kennedy-era cool.

Moon (2009)

Overblown

[5/10 · 8 January 2019]

What a lot of the other reviewers here have said about this movie is at least partially true; this is good old-fashioned morality play sci-fi like you used to see back in the good old days, with classy production values and garden-variety dramatic acting in an essentially traditional mold.

What they are not telling you is that it has plot holes so big the plot itself as a whole could be regarded as a plot hole. I don't know that it would be anything more than gratuitous to describe them in detail here, but suffice to say that one monumental improbability is piled on after the next to where your "willing suspension of disbelief" (google that, sometime) is easily challenged past the breaking point before you are much more than maybe halfway through the picture. Along with transparent sponging off 2001, A SPACE ODYSSEY and you will easily find yourself wondering midway through, where are they going with this, and can they even get there? The answer, of course, is not for this viewer, at least.

Much of this could have been avoided by a fairly minor amount of script doctoring, but that doesn't seem to have occurred to the decision-makers behind this effort (or lack thereof). Even the title itself seems rather lame in indicating practically nothing about the story (or was there some deep symbolism intended here that is in fact too deep for any ordinary viewer to solve its riddle?) And if that's not enough, even the dramatics are lacking in that the "aha!" plot-transition moment this movie's plot needs isn't "aha!" enough to satisfy either. Moreover, the main character himself is portrayed in classic modern-day "realistic" (almost documentary) style, entirely lacking in the kind of almost sugar-coated romanticizing that was normal before the 1960's anti-traditional movement declared such treatments "uncool" and contrived, with the result that he is not sympathetic enough to evoke the kind of gut-crunching emotional reaction the movie needs to succeed in what it needs to do (to say nothing of getting the audience past the plot holes.) An average sci-fi enthusiast in junior high school writing for 8th grade English class in 1965 would have probably put more into it (to say nothing of what a few violins in the right places would have accomplished in even an Irwin-Allen-style treatment). In fact, there was even an episode of Star Trek ENTERPRISE which actually dealt with the theme central to this movie with vastly better emotional content and for emotional payoff it was truly memorable, unlike this movie.

Given all this, I have to doubt I'll ever be watching this again.

Lost in Space (2018–2021)

Here we go again . . .

[5/10 · 7 January 2019]

Why is it that nobody, I mean NOBODY, seems to ever get this genre right anymore. Space exploration and colonization could be very exciting and thrilling in a positive way, or even merely thought-provoking, but instead, time and time again, we get hokey "interpersonal drama" (and in this case even hokey dysfunctional-family hokey melodrama) with introspective, negative, downbeat, self-absorbed, overwrought characters against what is practically a horror movie backdrop. I mean, it seems a crime to spend so much money doing so much creative art department work just to blow it all as though the writers and producers had skipped Storytelling 101 (not to mention, 102, 201, 202 . . . ) in school, but instead think that glomming together a series of impossible cliffhangers and a few sci-fi nuggets on top of such unlovable characters is going to be compelling entertainment. So, once again I found myself starting yet another off-network TV series which I know I will give up watching before the first season is through.

Flat Top (1952)

I will be watching this again . . .

[7/10 · 4 July 2018]

While other reviewers rush to relegate this movie to B-movie status and criticize its then-characteristic (for 1952) sloppy use of stock footage, I expect to be watching this movie again from time to time. This is truly one of those they don't make anymore.

The point no one else on here seems to have noticed is the 1950's era docudrama undertone it has that you typically won't see in the more story-focused A-list movie, and how much that quality adds to this movie. It might easily have been subtitled (with a drum roll), "Your United States Navy Aircraft Carrier In World War Two, And Today" ("Hand, SALUTE!"). While the plot and characterizations are thin, shopworn, cliched, and not particularly realistic bits of trite melodrama (there is some really classic corn here; and could the ever-stolid Sterling Hayden playing a hero ever do anything else?), the real story here is to give you some sense, however light, of aircraft carrier operations in the last year to year-year-and-a-half of the war, and in this it could be worse.

The plot commences by introducing the squadron members, with the evident aim of showing the slice of American life represented by the new pilots deploying for their first combat roles. From there it moves to a treatment (albeit, very light-weight) of operations and life aboard (including, significantly, the sometimes ample downtime these guys could experience, ranging from card games to the inevitable mail-call; it makes the point that life on board a ship is most often more than just eat-sleep-fight-repeat).

The light losses the ship and squadron experience are also believable for this period, since the vast majority of Japan's most skilled pilots had by then been killed in previous battles, most notably in the loss of no less than four big-deck carrier loads of their best naval aircrew at the Battle of Midway back in 1942, followed by their losses in the Solomon Islands beginning later that year and in 1943. Unlike the United States, Japan did not devote sufficient resources to training new pilots for combat, so that by the time our heroes in this movie show up, the average Japanese pilot was lucky to be able to take off and eventually make it back to safely land at his home field without injuring himself, with the question of being effective in air combat against a decently-trained and well-equipped enemy being something they could not begin to answer adequately. (Indeed, it was this aspect of Japanese military aviation which contributed to the adoption of "Kamikaze" tactics about the time this movie takes place; it was far easier in time, effort, and increasingly-scarce aviation fuel to teach a raw recruit how to take off and fly someplace, and then crash himself into something, than to make a real pilot out of him. With Kamikaze tactics not only did you not need to teach a guy how to fight his airplane, you didn't even need to teach him how to find his way home, and then land. To the contrary, such training would actually make him a less motivated Kamikaze, because he might then decide he had an option to crashing his plane against an American target, to his immediate and irrevocable death.) This state of affairs also explains the incredible toll of Japanese aircraft in the "Marianas Turkey Shoot", also depicted in the film, where hundreds of Japanese planes were shot down in a single day, losses which in normal World War II air battles would have been more like ten times less even on the worst of days.

Best of all is the use of all the genuine stock footage seen in this movie. While the casual cutting turns the film into a veritable continuity error festival, to plane-spotters that is all the better, because you get to see just about every American naval combat aircraft in the inventory at one point or another, in actual wartime operations and better still, in color. While many of the clips used have been used repeatedly over the ensuing decades in television, movies, and innumerable documentaries, until recent years they had been copied over (and over again) in black and white, and to see all these color originals must have been very unusual and a special treat back in 1952.

(At this point it might be worth mentioning that the use of F4U Corsairs in this movie is a significant anachronism. The Navy never deployed this kind of plane on carriers before Okinawa in 1945; surely the reason you see them in this movie is that by 1951 when it was shot, they would have been the last propeller-driven World War Two fighter aircraft the Navy still used, and so to get fresh, exciting, cinematic-quality footage of flight deck operations they would have to be substituted for the F6F Hellcats these pilots would have really flown in 1944 and before Okinawa in 1945, at a minimum. This is also the reason why all the rear-projection shots of squadron members in flight show F6F's in the background, a cinematic mixing of metaphors if there ever was one.)

Anyway, for these qualities I give this movie a seven out of ten; its plodding plot and characters are balanced out by getting a glimpse, however Hollywoodized, of carrier onboard life in the latter part of the war and post-war periods.

Tripoli (1950)

Classic 1950's/60's TV rerun fun . . .

[6/10 · 22 February 2018]

This is a classic 1940s/50s lightweight action adventure piece, with all the classic elements: a historical tie-in, small-unit military action, horses, an expedition through a wilderness, a leading man in a classic romanticized leadership mold (here, a U.S. Marine), and of course the love story of two people who get the hots for each other but can't figure out what to do about it except circle and maybe even hiss at each other until a sudden dramatic kiss seals their engagement in the last five seconds of the film. (There was also a certain amount of comic relief, centered in large part around a comic actor or two brought in just for that purpose, as Howard Da Silva, Connie Gilchrist, Grant Withers, and even Lowell Gilmore are here.) It's essentially a formula that was followed countless times during the period, and while the producers could move the setting to anywhere from Louisiana (see, e.g., THE FIGHTING KENTUCKIAN, John Wayne, 1949) to, well, the Shores of Tripoli, for variety, most of them were just westerns, usually set in the Southwestern United States. And for Hollywood in those days, any classic romanticized villain would do, whether it was the Barbary pirates, the staid British Empire in the Battle of New Orleans, or even crooked home-grown American land speculators ready to cheat whoever had money and was handy. This kind of thing was rerun ad infinitum on television when I was growing up and any true TV junkie of the 50's or 60's had seen probably what seemed like at least a couple hundred of these things by the time they finished high school. That's all this movie is or was ever intended to be, and it delivers right down the middle like a strike in bowling alley. As others have observed, the production values and especially the location shooting are excellent for the day, and if you like the late Maureen O'Hara (may she R.I.P.) and John Payne, so much the better. If you are in the mood for such old-fashioned mind candy it is just about perfect, and the only reason I gave it only a six is because by more challenging movie standards it lacks the "edge of the seat" quality needed to bump it up another star. What surprises me is how many of the reviewers on here seem to have no experience with this kind of thing and instead try to analyze it as if it were something made in a much more recent era.

I might also add that until the modern (i.e., very modern) era of post-World-War-Two (that means, after 1945, less than 100 years ago) strife broke out in the middle east, there was no particular prejudice against or hatred for Moslems in America or Western Europe generally (at least not for several hundred years, at any rate), who were rather typically regarded as merely different, if not actually exotic or even fascinating. Indeed, as another, especially clever reviewer of this movie on the IMDb suggested, Europeans thought enough of Arabs to adopt their system of numerals (i.e., 1,2,3,4,5, etc., not mention the whole concept of "zero") from them, along with algebra, averages, algorithms (for you computer junkies out there), the name of every star in the sky you could see without a telescope that was worth naming (e.g., Aldebaran, Altair, Deneb, Fomalhaut, etc., etc.) along with any number of words (alcohol, alchemy, admiral, alcove, alfalfa, albatross, azure . . . ) and certainly, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962), an extravaganza about an Englishman who practically tried to turn himself into an Arab during World War One would never have been the immense hit that it was only about 50 years ago. The current trend among a truly ridiculous number of people today towards branding any Moslem as evil is less than 25 years old and is the result of a concerted propaganda campaign straight of of George Orwell's book *1984* -- to get people into line, you first give them a common enemy to hate. (Unfortunately for theses propagandists, too many of us live in a fact-based world, and know that the .001% of the world's 1+ billion Moslems that are terrorists are only a minority of a minority of a minority at best), but then there are always the gullible, the fearful, the paranoid, the hateful, the low, the trashy, and the stupid who will believe anything in order to indulge their appetite for enjoying getting angry.) That kind of mentality had nothing to do with this movie when it came out in 1950.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

And the Modern Movie Continues To Decline . . .

[5/10 · 5 November 2017]

(Spoiler Alert?)

Where to begin? Let's start with the rating. At the time of this writing - November, 2017 - it stands at 7.9. 7.9??? Indeed? Just look and see what REAL movies have gotten a 7.9 on the IMDb, and then ask yourself whether this Cartoon comes anywhere near close. Admittedly, it is easy to understand why the Loser demographic might see it that way, and it would not be the first time a movie designed like this so appealed to 15-year-old future non-achievers (as well as those still living in their parents' basement at age 27), but it is completely out-of-line with the broad spectrum of movies made since The Great Train Robbery became the world's first feature film in 1903. Maybe the IMDb should have a dual ratings system: one for real movies, and another for Star Wars / Star Trek spinoffs.

Essentially, this movie is a predictably unsuccessful attempt to merge the now-venerable Star Wars genre with the more modern explosion-and-grunge-fest genre where the stars are flashes of light and smoke that go "boom", and the Awards at the end of the year get handed out only to the special effects department. These are two different genres that this movie proves do not blend well (even if the explosion-fest offered anything to anybody other than a zit-faced adolescent male with a C-average). The former genre was light, breezy, optimistic, good old-fashioned melodrama; classic action-adventure with the the can-do spirit tone of classic action adventure. It eschews the need to tangle with much if any moral ambiguity, something the original Star Wars was noted for as a breath (actually, more like a WIND) of fresh air in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, post-1960's-mayhem world of 1977 when it was first released. The second genre is perpetually moody, downbeat, apocalyptic, oppressive, and frequently overwhelmed with moral ambiguity. Nobody is ever very calm or confident; the actors are scruffy if not utterly grungy; and even the girls are never really very pretty, either. (I have to wonder if this genre appeals to certain people because they, too, are perpetually downbeat and hopeless in their overall outlook, and such movies are something they can relate to.) Thus, the main characters here are almost utterly devoid of humor, much less any kind of love of life, as well as much external beauty. The result is that they are not compellingly likable, nor compelling in any other way. One could be forgiven for rooting for the villains, here; at least they were true to their warped souls and they certainly believed unambiguously in their own values, such as they were, as well as themselves (not to mention being impeccably well-groomed!)

Perhaps worse still, basic story-telling gets lost in all the noise and smoke. With this movie, I don't know what happened, except that the good guys get what they are after in the end. But I can't tell you just exactly how they did that. The frenetic scene-shifting is just too fast and frantic for that. And in that, the movie fails utterly. The purpose of nearly any movie is to tell an entertaining story. Being "entertaining" means getting you emotionally involved. Here, the story gets too muddled to follow completely, and when that happens, it loses its dramatic (i.e., emotional) grip on the audience, and what should be a powerful, compelling, even epic story becomes a gigantic, expensive "so what?" While this movie does a creditable job of aping interesting combat moments from modern war movies from *Apocalypse Now* to the present, it doesn't matter. It is hard to get emotionally-involved enough to care what is happening on the screen for too much of it. Whatever deficiencies the George Lucas movies may have suffered from (George Lucas did NOT make this one), he never lost sight of that.

And thus, in those parts where this movie stays true to its Star Wars roots, it has some of the classic Star-Warsian features that were so significant to elevating the franchise to the lofty heights of popularity it has enjoyed. The secondary characters are often very interesting and there are a number of clever lines and plot devices that showcase that; in point of fact, they are often more interesting than the main characters. The way they are included here also evokes a certain *Magnificent Seven* quality which is welcome even if it is not a classic Star Wars flavor. If there was anything wrong with them it was that in combination with the main characters and other supporting characters, there were too many of them, with too little time available for focusing adequately on each one.

Moreover, the movie has the now-classic Star Wars look and sound (if mostly lacking in its feel). The music was not bad if not as prominent as is characteristic of the earlier films. The special effects were as good as they should have been. Appropriate cameos by major story arc characters and actors necessary to graft this story, which is after all a subsidiary one to the main arc, now drilled into the audience's collective memory with the power of over forty years' retelling, onto the main story line, is present. And in that vein the ending was of a kind that was was never so welcome as it was here, finally returning to and regrounding you in what a Star Wars movie should be all about in the first place (dare I say it: a prominent, upbeat and unambiguous tone of "Hope").

Thus, I rate this at 5/10 stars: not a compelling should-see (7/10) nor even a completely technically competent yet slow or dull effort (6/10), but simply an expensive, epic bad idea.