Movie Monday: Hyde Park on Hudson

This week's Movie Monday is the historical drama Hyde Park on Hudson!

I generally don't review current films for Movie Monday, preferring to stick to more obscure (or, at the very least, vintage) fare. But ever since I first heard of this movie--my favorite actor playing my favorite President--it remained at the top of my "must see" list. And now that I have seen it, I felt like I should give the film it's due here.

Hyde Park on Hudson takes place over a very concentrated period of time in our nation's history--the week or so in 1939 when President Franklin Roosevelt, and the country, awaited a visit from the newly-crowned King and Queen of England, on the eve of another world war.

The film is told from the point of view of Daisy (Laura Linney), a shy, withdrawn distant cousin of the President's. Living in a small, beat-up house with her mother, her life is a universe away from that of Franklin's. So she is shocked when she receives a call from one of FDR's people that he wants to see her at his retreat, aka Hyde Park.

At first, Daisy is looked upon by the people surrounding FDR (his wife the First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, his overbearing mother Sara, his "assistant" Missy LeHand) as an intruder. But the President wants her there, and he treats her with tender care, showing her his precious stamp collection among other thihgs. We soon learn, however, that Daisy has been brought there for more than just simple companionship--despite their familial connections, Daisy is expected to provide certain...physical comforts to the President, which she does obligingly.

Amid all this family drama is, of course, the impending visit by the King and Queen of England (Samuel West and Olivia Colman). They have their own issues--utterly befuddled by American customs, not to mention a little thing like Germany threatening to gobble up all of Europe. They show up at Hyde Park, and are shocked at the informality that passes amid the "ruling class" in America (the First Lady doesn't live with President, for instance). The Queen mostly holes herself up in their room while the King, knowing what must be done, tries to make the best of it, embracing local customs like eating hot dogs.

I cannot fully explain how much I was looking forward to this movie. I am an unabashed fan of FDR, having read a number of books on the man, even going so far as to making him a recurring character in Ace Kilroy. Considering his titanic importance to U.S. history (he is the only President to serve more than two terms) I feel like he has generally been underserved by the movies; there really hasn't been a FDR movie since 1960's Sunrise at Campobello, and even that movie didn't focus at all on his life in office. So a movie all about FDR--played by Bill Murray, of all people--just seemed to aimed right at my wheelhouse.

So it's really disappointing for me to report that Hyde Park on Hudson is...well, a disappointment. A big one. Bill Murray is effective as FDR, pretty much disappearing into the role. He doesn't really imitate the man so much as offer an alternate version of him, one that perhaps no one but those closest around him got to see (I don't recall a single scene with him alone). But Murray isn't done any favors by the screenplay: a lot of time, FDR comes across as a loathsome creep, and while it's certainly possible he was like that some of the time, it felt sordid watching a whole movie focused on this aspect of the man. After all, this was a guy who served four terms as President, helped steer us out of the Great Depression, and helped win World War II for Pete's Sake, and what are we watching? FDR getting a handjob from his cousin. Yick.

Another problem with the movie is that, even though it's Daisy's story and she narrates from beginning to end, we barely get to understand her as a person. She seems so meek, so out of her depth, that it's hard to picture her surviving in the pressure cooker situation she was thrust into. Yet she, um, grasps--and goes along with--the whole giving-her-cousin-a-handsy bit with a nary a word spoken between them. Then, later, she's totally shocked to learn that FDR is sleeping around with other women! This leads to an almost ridiculous scene of Daisy running through the woods, chased by Missy LeHand. Olivia Williams (Murray's co-star in Rushmore) appears briefly as Eleanor, but she gets the short shrift along with her husband, in favor of more scenes with Daisy looking doe-eyed.

Additionally, the two characters we seem to get the know the best are the King and Queen of England. Considering these two historical figures got their own movie (The King's Speech) less than two years ago, it seemed like an odd decision to keep cutting away from FDR to give us more scenes with the visiting royalty, where they even cover the King's stuttering. Haven't we seen this story somewhere before?

By the end of the movie, we watch the press waiting for FDR to be carried into his car, like a helpless child. Then they are given the okay sign, and they start snapping pictures, complicit in the cover-up of the President's handicap. In the narration, Daisy longs for the Good Old Days, when we, as a people, could still keep secrets. This is immediately followed by a coda that explains that this whole story was discovered via a box of letters found after Daisy died at age 100. Ah yes, secrets sure are a nice thing--except when they make good fodder for a movie, then it's bombs away!

One final detail that bugged me while watching Hyde Park on the Hudson: as you might expect, there's lots of period music in the movie. Unfortunately, the three main songs are the same three tunes that you hear in every movie set in the pre-WWII era: "Moonlight Serenade" by Glenn Miller, and two Ink Spots songs: "I Don't Want to Set The World on Fire" and "If I Didn't Care." I know that there was a lot less entertainment for people to avail themselves of back then, but surely there were more than just those three songs in existence? It felt the whoever chose the music for the movie did an iTunes search for "1930s hits", picked the top three most downloaded songs, and then went on vacation.

I really hate being so negative about the movie, because as I said, I love FDR as a subject and I think Bill Murray acquits himself well as the 32nd President. The scenes with him and the King are the best in the film, and it's in these brief exchanges we get a sense of how charming and crafty FDR was--a hint at how he was so successful as President, and Murray pulls it all off. He rarely stars in movies anymore, so when THE Bill Murray chooses a lead role you figure it's because he saw something really special. Too bad that movie didn't get made.

Movie Monday: The Boogie Man Will Get You

This week's Movie Monday is the Karloff/Lorre horror/comedy The Boogie Man Will Get You!

I had heard of this movie but never seen it, so when TCM ran it one afternoon, I moved my day around to watch it (TCM is pretty much the only channel that I watch "live"): 

I didn't know much about this movie going in, but I couldn't pass up the Karloff/Lorre combination. At the same time, the fact that this film is (relatively) obscure made me think it wasn't all that great--after all, if it was a horror/comedy classic on par with, say, Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, there'd be all sorts of DVD/Blu-Ray editions of it available.

Anyway, the film opens (and takes place entirely) in a small town, where Prof. Nathaniel Billings (Karloff) owns a small in, which he has put up for sale, not being able to keep up with the mortgage. Living there with him is his dottie housekeeper Amelia (Maude Eburne) and weirdo Ebenezer (George McKay).

A stranger arrives, interested in the property. It's a nice lady named Winnie Layden (played by Jeff--yes, Jeff--Donnell), who wants to turn the place into a hotel. She seems not a whit concerned with how dilapidated the inn is, and is ready to write a check. Billings is thrilled, but mentions there is one small hitch in selling the place: that he be allowed to stay there and continue his...experiments:

Yes, of course, Billings is a Mad Scientist, who has filled the inn's basement with all sorts of equipment picked up at a Frankenstein Yard Sale. In the opening scene, we see Billigs and one of his guinea pigs, who promptly dies after Billings turns on the contraption the guy has been placed in. Billings seems sweet if spacey; but he seems not to even give it a second thought that he's just murdered someone!

Winnie's ex-husband Bill (Larry Parks) arrives, and is against the sale. Winnie doesn't seem to care, so Bill decides to stay at the inn for a couple of days to see if he can change his ex-wife's mind. That night, Bill finds the dead body in the basement, reporting it to the town's Mayor/Coroner/Notary Public (and a few other things), Dr. Arthur Lorentz, played by Lorre:

As weird as Billings is, Lorentz is weirder: in addition to carrying cats around in his jacket pockets, Lorentz has a bit of a long-standing adversarial relationship with Billings. But when he learns what's going on, he wants in on the racket! They at first want to experiment on Bill (I'd be for that), but when that doesn't work out, they try out a traveling salesman (Maxie Rosenbloom):

There's a whole lot of running around, pratfalls, and other shenanigans when Karloff and Lorre aren't on screen. None of it particularly funny, or interesting; luckily our two horror titans do get a fair amount of screen time. Lorre in particular is great; he's such an odd figure to be found in a Norman Rockwell-esque small town that you wonder how he ended up here. (Indeed, the town seems to be a magnet for weirdos, in addition to Billings, the traveling salesman, an escaped Italian saboteur named "Jo-Jo" wanders by, with plans to steal Billings' equipment)

Anyway, the cops are finally called, and we find out that Billings has numerous victims piled up in the basement (all of them traveling salesmen--"They seem so lonely", Billings muses)! But it turns out that none of them are dead, just in suspended animation. Billings' dream to create an army of supermen (to aid in the war effort) was a tad misguided, you might say.

The cops drop the murder charges, but decide to send the everyone involved to the nearest sanitarium. No worries, Lorentz assures Billings, he's on the hospital's board! And with that, our wacky little story concludes.


Even at a brisk 66 minutes, The Boogie Man Will Get You wears out it's welcome. Karloff and Lorre and clearly enjoying themselves, and their scenes are a lot of fun. Lorre keeps bugging out his eyes at what Billings has been doing, then quickly goes along with it. In his black frock coat, Lorre looks great, like some weird Riverboat Gambler version of Death.

But the rest of the movie is so silly and uninspired that it leaves all the heavy lifting to Boris and Peter, so when they're off screen the movie pretty much grinds to a halt. There are some nice and/or unusual bits--at one point the housekeeper Amelia takes a walk right into a wall; a nice bit of slapstick. Also, it's rare to see a main female movie character be divorced--sure, her and her husband seem to spend a lot of time together, so it's like they are still in a Production Code-approved capital-M Marriage, but it's an odd little detail.

Basically, if you're a fan Karloff and Lorre, The Boogie Man Will Get You is fun. The gleam in their eyes is infectious, and even when the movie is mediocre, it's a blast watching two masters at work.

Post Script: I didn't mean to cover two Peter Lorre movies in a row, it just worked out that way. We all could do a lot worse!



(Thanks to Jabootu's Bad Movie Dimension for the stills!)

  

Movie Monday: The Man Who Knew Too Much

This week's Movie Monday is Alfred Hitchcock's 1934 thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much!

I recently finished reading Alfred Hitchcock: A Life In Darkness and Light, an excellent history of the man, focusing primarily on his legendary career. Arguably the most famous movie director of all time (maybe, at this point, he's been surpassed by Spielberg?), Hitch carved out a identity for himself and his films that remains unmatched.

The main takeaway I had from the book was wanting to either watch--or in many cases re-watch--all of his films. I had seen almost everyone from the 40s and 50s, with bigger gaps in the bracketing decades. So I've decided to rectify that, and so every so often--about once a month or so--I'm going to devote a Movie Monday to one of the man's films.

I didn't want to start with the silents--not only are they really hard to find, but I just have a very tough time, still, watching silent films. So I put those Hitchcocs aside for the moment, deciding to start with a story of which I was familiar, but had not seen this version of: The Man Who Knew Too Much, from 1934: 

The film opens in Switzerland, where a young British couple, Bob and Jill Lawrence (Banks and Best), are on vacation with their young daughter (the wonderfully named Nova Pilbeam). Jill is an expert marksman (already we're in odd territory), participating in a clay pigeon shooting contest.

They befriend a French man staying in the same hotel, and at a party that night, Jill dances with the man, only to watch him be assassinated in front of her very eyes:

 

Turns out the man in a spy, and in his last moments he passes some secret information to her, which he says must reach the British Consul. The assassins in question are led by the creepy Abbott (Peter Lorre, who else?), and to make sure they don't talk, they kidnap young Betty:

 

At the same time, if Bob and Jill do not deliver the information, an important diplomat is scheduled to be assassinated, as well. Feeling they are on their own, the Lawrences return to England, following the only clue they have as to their daughter's whereabouts, a secret message hidden in the spy's room.

There are so many scenes in the film that are what would become known as pure Hitchcock that I can only imagine how they came across to an unsuspecting audience: a scene set in a dentist's office (featuring Bob and a friend of his) starts off with a shot of grotesque teeth, slowly panning out to reveal they're just a prop sign:

 

There's another scene, set in dark room full of Sun worshippers(!) that feels goofy and creepy at the same time. These people aren't a threat, exactly, but they're so odd that it gives you the creeps, even when Hitchcock indulges in near-slapstick during a fight scene.

Bob finds out that Abbott is the ringleader, and is also taken hostage. Bob's friend though escapes, telling Jill where the assassination is to take place--the Albert Hall. While she sits in the audience, trying to decide what to do, Abbott and his men (plus his girlfriend, Nurse Agnes) listen to the concert on the radio, knowing that when a certain note is hit, the shot will be fired.

Apparently at this point in his career, Lorre knew almost no English, having learned all his lines phonetically (!!). Nevertheless--or maybe because of that--Lorre is dynamite in the movie. Always looking like he's about to burst into laughs, he never overplays and while he always seems threatening, it's a kind of laid-back threatening:

 

There's a final shootout between the police and the gang, ending with Jill's sharpshooting skills coming back into play (women are doing it for themselves!). The film ends with the family being reunited, but there's something haunting about this "happy ending": take a look at young Betty in the final moments. She looks absolutely shell-shocked, like a zombie. Sure, everyone is back together, but you get the sense that this young girl is in for years, maybe a lifetime, of therapy having gone through this experience.


At 75 minutes, The Man Who Knew Too Much moves at a lightning pace, and features some truly amazing scenes. Hitchcock's mastery of tension is already completely in place: the scene in the dentist's office is as unsettling in it's own way as the more famous sequence from The Marathon Man ("Is it safe?"), just less graphic. The penultimate scene at the Albert Hall is Classic Hitchcock: a horrendous scene of anticipatory violence happening amid a crowd of people who don't know what's going on.

I will admit, the film suffers a bit from it's age--the bits of comedy don't work as well, but that was simply the style back then. There might be creepy murderers and spys running about, but you also had stiff-upper-lip British guys phumphering around and getting laughs (or at least trying to). And Nova Pilbeam (that name!) seems a little too old to be playing a precocious, Shirley Temple-type tot. Maybe putting someone younger through some of the scenes would have been considered bad taste, so they had to go a bit older (Pilbeam was 16 when she made this).

But those are minor complaints--overall The Man Who Knew Too Much is a blast, and a great way to start my run, any run, of Hitchcock films. If you like the Master's work and haven't seen this one, I unreservedly endorse seeking it out.

Movie Monday: Three Bad Sisters

This week's Movie Monday is the 1956 sex thriller Three Bad Sisters!

This is one of those movies you find while absent-mindedly browsing through the Netflix WI queue. I had never heard of it before, but the title was enough to draw me in! Let's go, daddy-o!

Three Bad Sisters opens with news that a business tycoon named Marshall Craig has died in a plane crash. The report comes over the radio, and a blonde bombshell named Valerie (Kathleen Hughes) hears it, along with her quasi-boyfriend. We learn within the first two minutes of the movie that Valerie ain't right, because A)she's the tycoon's daughter, and she barely bats an eye at the news, and B)her boyfriend slaps her hard across the face, and instead of being angry, she seems to get kinda turned on:

 

Valerie quickly hatches a plot with the pilot of the plane (who escaped, though not without his professional reputation up in smoke--too soon?) to get her father's money. You see, one of Valerie's sisters, a nice lady named Lorna (Sara Shane) has been made executor of their father's will. So she sends Jim Norton (John Bromfield, who thrilled us all in Revenge of the Creature) to seduce Lorna and either convince her to change the will, or simply commit suicide, a trait that runs in this crazy-ass family:

 

But of course, the film isn't called Two Bad Sisters, so there's still one more to go: Vicki (Martha English) Craig, who seems to spend a lot of time in pin-up poses, just waiting for someone to come by and paint her I guess. The minute she gets her eyes on Jim, she wants him for herself, using come-on lines like "I graduated summa cum laude from Embraceable U."

 

There's a whole lot of gabbin' (including a scene where Norton gets a professional dressing-down, which I bet was added solely to creep the film over the 70-minute mark), and it takes too long to get all the three sisters together, where you assume sparks will fly. And you would be right...sort of.

 

(See? Tell me Vicki isn't just waiting for Robert McGinnis to wander by!)
 

The whole which-floozy-gets-the-dough plot comes to a bit of a head--or a face, more precisely--when Valerie and Vicki get in a cat fight and Valerie climbs atop her sister, and thwaps her in the face with a whip about half a dozen times. Valerie does this while looking right in the camera, a nice effect, and Val looks like she's ever-so-lightly getting off on bringing the pain like this. It's by far the movie's most lurid scene, the kind of transgressive bit that makes these little Bs so fun.

Unfortunately, after Vicki emerges and looks in the mirror, all she has is a couple of bloody cuts on her cheeks. If she had really taken the whipping we saw her get, her face would like a piece of hamburger. Sure, they could only get so graphic in a 1956 movie, but after such shocking piece of violence, seeing what looks like not much more than some papercuts really exemplifies that the filmmakers weren't all that interested in getting down in the muck, despite the title.

Speaking of the title, it's really a misnomer: there's really only two bad sisters here. Lorna is troubled, but she's not bad (their pistol-packing aunt, played by Madge Kennedy, is more like the other two). There's a whole lot more talking, ending with a car crash that looks like it's going to end in twisted, fiery death, yet the car has a big dent in the front and that's about it. As the great Del Griffith once said, "They'll be able to buff that out no problem."

So I was hoping to report that Three Bad Sisters is a juicy, obscure little piece of B-level trash that flew under the radar and is great fun. And while it is that, in parts, even at 75-minutes or so mark it gets a bit tedious and by the end I was just waiting for it to wrap up. Sorry ladies!

Movie Monday: Twilight Zone: The Movie

The final Movie Monday of the year is 1983's Twilight Zone: The Movie!
 
As people who I'm friends with on Facebook can attest, I've been systematically going through the entire original Twilight Zone series, in order, episode by episode, and then putting up brief, one or two sentence reviews of each as I work my way through the seasons. There are a lot more Zones that I have never seen than I thought, so it's been really, really fun exploring the show all over again.

So to wrap up the year of Movie Mondays, I thought I'd revisit the infamous Twilight Zone: The Movie, released two decades after the show went off the air. I remember seeing it in the theaters during it's original run, and caught it on cable once or twice, but otherwise haven't seen it in probably close to another twenty years. Does it hold up? Did it ever? Let's see:

The film opens, sans credits, on a dark road. We hear some music, but it's rock and roll, something never heard on the original show. It's...Credence Clearwater Revival?

We meet two unnamed guys driving along that dark road, singing along. The guys are played by Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brooks, passing the time during the lonely drive:

They start singing TV theme songs to one another, which turns into a discussion about some of their favorite shows, including...The Twilight Zone! After trading some of the more memorable episodes (one of which is actually an Outer Limits, as Brooks points out), Aykroyd asks if Brooks "wants to see something really scary." Brooks agrees, stopping the car. Aykroyd turns around, and when he turns back, he's turned into some sort of demon! He attacks Brooks, and the camera pans up into the sky.

We then heard a familiar voice...not Rod Serling, but that of Burgess Meredith, who of course was also very associated with the original series. He provides the classic narration, and then we find ourselves in a cruddy bar, where three working stiffs are having a drink. One of them is Bill Connor (Vic Morrow), who is angry that he didn't get the promotion he wanted at work. Real angry. So angry he loudly denounces all the "others" that supposedly run America over the more deserving whites, which attracts the attention of the other, non-white patrons. After his friends try to calm him down, he storms off into the night, only to find himself in...Nazi Germany?

Connor, understandably confuses, begins an ugly journey through world history, where he is mistaken for the type of people he denounced so loudly just a few minutes ago. After escaping the Nazis, the Klan, and the American forces in Vietnam, Connor wakes up in a train, alongside other victims of the Nazis. He sees his friends come out of the bar, and he screams for help, but they can't hear him as he is driven away to a concentration camp. His screams are unheard as his drinking buddies wonder where their friend disappeared to.

This segment, known as "Time Out", is probably the most famous, because of what happened: due to a series of miscommunications and rule-dodging, lead actor Vic Morrow and two child actors (who do not appear in the final film) were killed during a helicopter crash. That scene was supposed to represent the character's evolution, which would presumably lead him to some sort of happy, or at least less angry, ending. But with all that material removed, the segment ends on a totally downbeat note (not sure the whys or hows of it being filmed, since it's clearly Morrow and not a stand-in), which seems a little harsh by Zone standards. Sure, Connor is a total racist a-hole, blaming all his problems on others (thank the Lord we've all moved on from that, eh?), but it's not exactly clear that he deserves this level of comeuppance.

Sure, some of the original shows were this nasty, but they were pretty rare--usually Serling and his writers liked to offer some sort of redemption. Instead, this first segment ends on a supremely down note. Not that any story, no matter how good, would be worth the life of three people, but it seems all the more tragic that a story this...pointless made its participants pay such a heavy price.

We move on to the second story, "Kick The Can", set at a retirement home, where most of the participants are lonely and sad, ignored by their families. A Mr. Bloom (Scatman Crothers) arrives, offering the residents a chance at youth. But not the metaphorical kind: during a game of the aforementioned Kick the Can, the elderly people suddenly become children again!

After frolicking in the yard and getting a chance to relive their childhoods, the former seniors realize that they'd be giving up their entire lives if they stayed this way. They all return to their former selves, except for one: a British man who decides to leap out the window, off on a whole new life. Mr. Bloom leaves, heading off to another retirement home.

This segment, directed by Steven Spielberg, is almost universally considered the weakest of the four, and it's easy to see why: most genre fans, heck, even most people, do not want to see stories about old people. The reasons are obvious, and watching all these nice folks be so sad and lonely is tough to watch. Spielberg is in Full Schmaltz Mode here, and this story, coming as it does right after the very dark "Time Out", is jarring. It's not as bad as I remember it being--my memories was that it was interminably long, but it actually moves pretty briskly. Still, it's just too mushy to really click, which was the same problem a lot of the Zones had when they went for a similar tone.

Third is "It's A Good Life" directed by Joe Dante. A young woman (Kathleen Quinlan) befriends a little boy at a greasy spoon she stopped at while on a cross-country drive. She accidentally hits him with her car, and offers to take him home. When they get there, the young woman notices this is a really, really, really odd family: the parents and siblings are creepily cheery, catering to the young boy's every whim: TVs playing cartoons are nearly everywhere, and the dinner they eat is all candy and ice cream. When she gingerly suggests that a growing boy needs nutrition, the whole family follows the kid's lead when he agrees that yeah, maybe, candy all the time isn't a great idea.

Things shoot into the stratosphere of weird when the boy's uncle (Kevin McCarthy, another TZ veteran) is forced to do a magic trick, which ends with him pulling a giant monstrous rabbit out of a hat. The boy, you see, has magic powers, and has been keeping all these people trapped in this house for years: they are not his real family, but some of sort of nightmarish copy. She tries to leave, but the young boy begs her to stay. Suddenly the boy goes from sweet to monstrous, like banishing his older sister Ethel into a cartoon, where she is eaten alive (the sister is played by future Bart Simpson Nancy Cartwright, which gives the whole bit an even creepier, if unintentional, vibe). The boy's powers grow out of control, but he is brought back to some sort of sanity by the gentle commands of the young woman, who doesn't treat him like a monster. The story ends with the two of them going off together, a surprisingly gentle ending for such a scary story.

And it is scary. Joe Dante does an amazing job bringing cartoons to life, but through a hellish, terrifying prism. This kid can literally do anything, but he lacks the imagination, and probably the inner rot, to become a serial killer or something like that. Still, what he is capable of doing is creepy enough: I remember having the crap scared out of me seeing what he did to his other "sister": the only shot we see of her is sitting in front of a TV, staring dead-eyed at the screen in a dark room. She doesn't say much because, well, she doesn't have a mouth anymore. *shudder*

The final segment is a remake of the classic "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", directed by George Miller and this time starring John Lithgow. Lithgow's character, John Valentine, is not the best flyer in the world: our first shot of him is holed up in the airplane bathroom, gulping sedatives and sweating like a pig. Of course, things are only to get worse for our Infrequent Flyer: there's a man on the wing of this plane!

After a two mediocre segments and one very good one, "Nightmare" delivers on the promise of a big budget Twilight Zone movie: Miller, Lithgow, and company take a classic Zone segment and ramp up the tension a hundred fold. With the help of some superior effects (this is an actual slimy gremlin as opposed to some day player in a onesie, like the original), this final segment is one long gut-punch, and it ends the movie on an exhilarating, genuinely frightening series of notes. Lithgow, sometimes given to chewing the scenery unmercifully (hey, no wonder they got him to replace Shatner!) is perfect here: he knows there's no creature on the wing of the plane, and also knows he just shouldn't even look out the window. But he just can't help checking one...more...time...

The final shot of the movie ends where it began, sort of, with John Valentine being carted off in an ambulance. As the airplane crew marvel at the deep, claw-like tears in the side of the plane, the ambulance driver--Dan Aykroyd again--puts on some CCR and asks his passenger if he "wants to see something really scary." Rod Serling's voice is then heard, and we pan back up into the skies...



Like almost all anthologies, Twilight Zone: The Movie is judged via individual grades. "Time Out", I'd say, is two stars, "Kick The Can" is one star, "It's A Good Life" is three stars, and "Nightmare" is  four stars. The wraparound stuff is fun, too--using famous comedians like Aykroyd and Brooks to deliver laughs then horror was a great idea. I grew up on SNL, and I can distinctly remember being completely unnerved when Elwood Blues himself turned into a monster!

Overall, the movie is worthwhile because the last two segments are so good that they make up for the general weakness of the first two. The film does have a darker, nastier feel to it than the series ever did; for every dark, dark episode like "And When The Sky Was Opened", you had half a dozen more gentle ones like "Mr. Dingle the Strong." Rod Serling, for all his cigarette smoking grimness, I'd argue was mostly an optimist, about human nature at least, while the movie feels like a typical post-Watergate downbeat exercise in nihilism. Poor John Valentine, deemed a crazy man, isn't even going to get a break once he's on the ground!

There's been rumors of a new Twilight Zone movie; but once I heard that the plan is to just feature one story I got the sense that it's just a cash-in, a way to make a horror/sci-fi movie and slap a recognizable "brand" on it. I guess we'll see. For this movie though, I'd say if you haven't seen it and are a TZ fan, it's worth seeing at least once. And then go back and watch "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" again.

This post has been submitted for your approval. See in 2013!

 

Movie Tuesday: White Christmas

This week's Movie Tuesday selection is the 1954 holiday classic White Christmas!
 
I'm posting a special Christmas-themed "Movie Monday Tuesday" column, focusing on a holiday movie that I discovered earlier in the month and completely fell in love with: Michael Curtiz's White Christmas.

Now, of course, it's kind of absurd using the word "discovered" when talking about a movie like this, as if it's some rare artifact, when it couldn't be further from reality: White Christmas was the #1 box office hit of the year, starred one of the most legendary singers of all time, featured a title song that is still the second biggest-selling song of all time, and directed by one of the most successful movie directors in Hollywood history (in this case, the aforementioned Curtiz, who also helmed a couple of films you might have heard of, like The Adventures of Robin Hood, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and Casablanca). White Christmas is considered by pretty much everyone a bona-fide movie classic. But, until this Christmas season, I had never seen it. How is that possible?

I guess that's because, of all the movie genres out there, the Musical is one of the last left for me to embrace. I usually find the music to be unappealing at best, and the whole idea of people breaking into a song, then going back to traditional dialogue, off-putting. When going through AFI's list of the 100 Greatest Films of All Time, checking out the couple of dozen I had not ever seen, I put off The Sound of Music for last, knowing it would be the film equivalent of eating brussel sprouts. And I hated every minute of that film's 473-minute running time (approximate). So I generally always attributed the Musical as something I just wasn't interested in.

But, for whatever reason, I started appreciating the artistry behind some of the genre's best more and more. I reviewed Vincent Minelli's The Band Wagon for this very column, and while the music still didn't do much for me, I really loved how visually beautiful the film was. I had a similar experience with the movie version of The Tales of Hoffmann, a filmed opera that no less than George Romero credits as the reason he got into movie-making! Clearly I was missing something.

So when my better half and I started our yearly tradition of watching nothing but Christmas movies between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I wanted to expand our playlist a bit, and when I saw that White Christmas was on Netflix WI, I thought why not give it a shot?

 

The films stars Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye as two Army buddies, serving under the gruff-but-decent General Waverly (Dean Jagger) overseas in 1944. Crosby is Bob Wallace, a famous singer, and he and Kaye (playing Private Phil Davis) are putting on a Christmas show for their fellow G.I.s, who all long to be home. Waverly is being transferred to a new command, but when a new commander demands that the Christmas show be cancelled--this is a war, after all--Waverly gets him purposely lost just long enough for the show to go on. Waverly's men are fiercely devoted to him, even composing a song for the show in his honor.

 

Soon after, the unit comes under fire, and Phil saves Bob from being crushed by a falling brick wall, getting hurt himself in the process. Later, in the hospital, Bob thanks Phil for saving his life, and Phil uses the opportunity to pitch himself as a singing partner for Bob. Bob initially refuses, but finally relents when he reads a top-flight song Phil has written. Cut to a montage of the newly-christened "Wallace & Davis" becoming a hugely popular singing/comedy act.

 

The boys meet two sisters, Betty and Judy Haynes (Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen), who also have a singing act. They fall in Instant Like, and after helping them out of a jam, they all head for a Vermont lodge where the Haynes Sisters are planning to perform. Except, the inn is a giant flop; there's no snow, meaning no customers. At the same time, the boys learn that the inn is owned and run by the former General Waverly, now retired and looking to make this business venture work. Assisting him there is his grandaughter and assistant/clerk Emma, played by the incomparable Mary Wickes.

 

Bob and Phil decide they want to help their former top kick, but how? Along with Betty and Judy, they plan to throw a live Christmas Eve show at the inn, filling it with paying customers. Of course, there are lots of complications: while Phil and Judy acknowledge how much they like each other and essentially run (dance, really) with it, Bob and Betty have a little more trouble, leaving the other two to scheme to get them together. Also, they have to keep General Waverly in the dark about their plan, because he's a proud man and might not want their help.

The plot works just fine--it's sweet and warm, the perfect kind of story for a patriotic Christmas movie--but obviously what the film is most famous for is the music. White Christmas is stuffed to the brim with numbers, many of them classics: Bing's "White Christmas" opener, the Haynes' song "Sisters" (which Dan and Phil have a go at as well, featuring a couple of flubs that director Curtiz chose to leave in), a torch song called "Love, You Didn't Do Right By Me", the annoyingly-catchy "Snow", "Choreography" (a parody of Martha Graham), and about half a dozen others. 

One of the revelations in this movie to me (other than how awesome it is generally) is Vera-Ellen, by far the least known of the four stars. She was primarily a dancer, not an actress or singer, so she takes the lead during the numbers that require the most intense hoofing, and man oh man does she pull it off. There's a song called "Mandy" ("Mandy/There's a minister handy/And it sure would be dandy/If we'd let him make a fee/So don't you linger/Here's the ring for your finger/Isn't it a humdinger?") that is mind-boggingly complex, with her in the lead:

 

She is simultaneously sweet, funny, and very sexy in the movie, no easy feat. Vera-Ellen didn't have much of a career after White Christmas; she appeared in just one more film before retiring.

As you might guess, everything ends up all right in the end. The movie ends with the show going on at the inn, featuring yet another classic tune, "Gee, I Wish I Was Back in the Army", featuring our fantastic foursome singing the praises of life in the service:

(There's an almost meta moment in this song; the original lyric featured a mention of Bing Crosby; his name was replaced in the song by Jack Benny, presumably because it would have seemed odd to have Bing singing a lyric about himself).

Growing up, I had hard time considering older film comedies to be worthy, since the humor tended to be so dated (I made an exemption for Abbott & Costello, whose films I adored from an early age), but of course over time I realized how wrong I was. And White Christmas is very, very funny: Crosby and Kaye have a great chemistry (so much so I'm amazed they never did another movie together) and there's a greater amount of sarcasm than you'd typically associate with a big Hollywood musical.

Reading back over this post, I realize I'm rambling. That's because I cannot coalesce all the things I love about White Christmas into a coherent whole. It's funny, has great music, is very sweet, and, thanks to Michael Curtiz's sharp eye for composition and the gorgeous Technicolor, it looks like gangbusters.

I don't think a day has gone by since Thanksgiving that I haven't watched the movie; and I don't think I'm going to stop even after the holiday season passes. White Christmas really is every bit as good as it's reputation.

Movie Monday: Santa Claus

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 1985 holiday classic Santa Claus: The Movie!
 
Okay, I'm purposely being kinda Scrooge-like in sarcastically referring to this movie as a "classic"; actually, Santa Claus: The Movie was a fairly notorious flop, coming from the blockbuster producing team of Alexander and Ilya Salkind, who of course gave us the Superman movies. But I wanted to do something Christmas-y for Movie Monday this year, and I had never seen the movie, and it was on Netflix WI, so...

Santa Claus: The Movie (I love how awkward that "The Movie" part of the title is) opens in the 14th century, focusing on a woodcutter named Claus and his wife, who regularly deliver toys to the children of a local village with the help of their reindeer. One night, the Clauses get caught in a particularly bad snowstorm:

It looks as though the nice couple and their reindeer are about to freeze to death, when they are rescued by...elves? Yes, elves, led by Patch, played by Dudley Moore:

The Clauses are taken to a glowing castle at the very top of the North Pole, filled with other elves. They are told it their destiny to provide the world's children with toys every Christmas Eve, which the elves will make. On his the eve of his first trip, Claus is renamed "Santa Claus" by the oldest elf of all, known as the Ancient One (Burgess Meredith):

Time passes, and of course Santa Claus becomes a legendary figure. When we find him again in modern times, Santa is growing increasingly tired, his workload now massive because of the world's ever-growing population. Two of the elves, Patch and Puffy, compete to become Santa's assistant. Patch has built a machine that makes toys at a faster rate, and wins the job, with no one knowing that the toys produced are shoddy.

Speaking of shoddy merchandise, around this time a toymaker known as B.Z. (John Lithgow) who is the subject of a congressional hearing over his dangerous, cheaply made toys:

When a bunch of Patch's toys fall apart on Christmas Day, he grows depressed, and leaves Santa's workshop. He ends up in New York, where he meets B.Z. and agrees to help him, not realizing B.Z. is only doing this to make a buck.

B.Z. is thrilled with Patch's inventions, like a lollipop that allows kids to fly (the Salkinds loved making people fly in their movies) and decides to market these items in March, in an attempt to create a "Christmas 2", which he will be face of--not only will it rehabilitate his image, but it will make him rich. Rich, I tells ya!

Patch invents a flying craft called the Patchmobile, which he plans to use to deliver his toys. Thanks to two scrappy kids who befriend Santa, he regains his faith about kids needing him, so he chases after Patch to stop him from distributing some magic candy canes that which will burst into flame if heated. Wait, what?

Santa catches up to Patch, with the help of some amazing flying acrobatics by the reindeer. All is forgiven, and Patch agrees to come back to Santa's workshop, along with one of the kids, Joe. Since Joe is an orphan, he is adopted by the Clauses and will live with them.

Meanwhile, B.Z., attempting to escape the police, eats some of the flying candy canes, which cause him to uncontrollably take off into the sky, and eventually into space:

...as B.Z. dies a slow death from asphyxiation*, Santa Claus: The Movie comes to and end. Merry Christmas everyone!

I was fourteen when Santa Claus: The Movie came out, feeling a bit too mature (hollow laugh) to see what was clearly a kids movie, so I didn't buy a ticket. But I remember being curious about it, simply because it was being done by the men who did the Superman films, which loomed large in my imagination (still do). Over time, the film's rep (along with the Salkind's) fell precipitously, so I basically just forgot about it entirely.

It's easy to see why: Santa Claus: The Movie is a gaudy mess. It's heart is in the right place, but it's simultaneously too dark and too silly to ever work. Who the hell wants to see a movie featuring a Kris Kringle riddled with self-doubt? David Huddelston (as Santa) does okay with what he's given, but the whole "inner life of Santa" angle seems misplaced. And at the other end of the movie is Lithgow, who is chewing the scenery as if all of it is made of gingerbread. He's sweaty, mean, and unpleasant, and having him essentially die at the end of the movie (*I was kidding about the asphyxiation of course; he'd mostly like freeze to death before suffocating) seems to violate every rule of Christmas movies, where the bad guy (Scrooge, the Grinch, etc.) has a change of heart and gets into the spirit of the season.

You could see why the Salkinds thought this was a good idea: they brought The Three Muskeeters successfully to the screen, topped that by taking on the Superman story...so what was next? Who's "bigger" than Superman? Santa Claus is one of the few fictional(?) characters who is more widely known than the Man of Steel, and there were no rights fees to pay. A match made in heaven! 

Unfortunately, I think when you look back at their work, it's clear that when they hired a highly skilled director (as they did with Richard Donner), their throw-money-at-the-screen bombast could work. But when they tapped someone a little less talented, their movies just sank like stones. Santa Claus: The Movie was directed by Jeannot Szwarc, who also helmed the insta-turkey Supergirl. Considering how badly that film flopped, you'd think the Salkinds would not have been so ready to hand the keys of another big-budget franchise to him; but they did. So no Santa Claus II for anyone!

Fun Fact: To further underscore how off the rails the Salkinds could be, apparently they originally approached John Carpenter--John Carpenter!--to direct Santa Claus: The Movie. Amazingly, he didn't turn down the offer immediately, even offering his choice of Santa (Brian Dennehy). But he and the Salkinds couldn't come to terms, and he left the project.

Just as odd, the Salkinds also offered the role of B.Z. to Harrison Ford! I simply cannot picture Han Solo himself playing a Donald Trump-esque evil toymaker, so I'm guessing they just went for the biggest movie star of the time, which Ford arguably was in 1985.

The mind reels at some alternate universe version of Santa Claus: The Movie, directed by John Carpenter and starring Harrison Ford. Kids living in that other dimension probably got to enjoy a truly bizarre Christmas classic.

For those who are gluttons for punishment, you can learn about this film's comic book adaptation (yes, there was one!) over on my blog All in Black and White for 75 Cents!