Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

A one-armed stranger (Spencer Tracy) arrives in a tiny, remote town asking about a farmer. The locals are none too keen to city slickers poking their noses where they don’t belong, but this Macreedy fellow doesn’t take hints.

The war had just ended and back at the beginning something bad happened at Black Rock. This film acts as an unconventional mystery. We understand the broad strokes but can’t be sure exactly what. Who knows, who was involved, and who can be trusted.

Set in 1945, war vet Macreedy is played by 54-going-on-100 Spencer Tracy, and this stretches credibility more than a little. The studio recruited Tracy hard who wasn’t initially interested. Making his character crippled seemed to have cinched the deal. The studio threw every talented character actor on the payrolls into this vanity project. Robert Ryan and Lee Marvin play principal antagonists, Anne Francis was adorable, Ernest Borgnine in an early role, Dean Jagger as a toothless sheriff, and Walter Brennan to argue politics with Tracy.

Bad Day at Black Rock isn’t actually a mystery but like any good film the details unfold over time. What specifically happened is less of a question than what Macgreedy’s backstory and motivation is, which isn’t explained until the final minutes. But this is an engaging story and an impulse watch. It came on right when I wanted to see something new (and not the dozen or so films I’ve already recorded), and I had never heard of it. Very progressive for it's time, I found it a pleasant surprise. AMRU 4.

“I believe a man is as big as what'll make him mad. Nobody around here seems big enough to get you mad.”

8½ (1963)

Movie director Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) is working on his latest film but nobody seems to know what it is about. Guido deals with studio people, difficult actresses, his mistress, wife, and a rich fantasy life.

8½ is a masterpiece. Everyone says so. But the problem with a subtitled film (especially one with overlapping dialog) is that you spend more time reading and less time observing the context of the conversation. And at two and a quarter hours, this dance becomes tedious. I may have napped.

In a perfect world I would watch each film twice, several days apart, preferably with someone to discuss it with. I have no such luxury. Many films would have benefited from this tact, 8½ in particular. It is hard to take in all that is going on, but what I did take in was bizarre. Guido has these issues, personal entanglements, and demands on his time. He slides seamlessly into and out of fantasy, and sometimes it’s hard to determine which is which. All the while, the film doesn’t appear to be getting any closer to completion.

Guido is Federico Fellini. This was an examination of his life and his creative process. Maybe an indictment of both, hard to say. Second billed Claudia Cardinale was radiant and barely in the film. Old friend Barbara Steele had a small role as someone else's trophy girlfriend.

I didn’t actually miss any of the film, having stopped it prior to my snooze. 8½, though, must have a second viewing. There it so much to take in. I felt each conversation had context and nuance I wasn't 100% picking up on. I will watch it again. I may still not completely understand it, but I'll get out of it what I can. AMRU 4.

Star of Midnight (1935)

A lawyer (William Powell) helps a buddy find a lost love, gets a pretty woman (pretty Ginger Rogers) out of trouble with a gangster, deals with a disappearing stage star (of the Midnight variety), and solves a murder that happens in his living room. Personal complications complicate things. Don’t worry. It’s not as simple as I’m making it out to be.

If a witty and urbane Powell solving mysteries with a beautiful sidekick sounds familiar, it’s because RKO wanted to clone The Thin Man using the same star. Nobody will mistake this for the genuine article but it works and did make money. Despite this no sequels were made.

Reliable Gene Lockhart played in a ton of films. Here he played Powell’s put out butler. Our paths have crossed four other times and I’m sure they will again. J. Farrell MacDonald was amusing as the police inspector. Our paths crossed only seven or eight times which is surprising because the dude appeared in almost three hundred feature films. Many of them the classic Hollywood bulk B films, and frequently uncredited, but better stuff as well.

Ginger Rogers is delightful as the Myrna Loy stand in and they had genuine chemistry together. She is twenty years Powell’s junior and has been badgering him to marry her since she was eleven. The less we speak of that the better.

Star of Midnight succeeds as a fun, clever mystery, but it’s central problem is that the story is unfocused. There are too many characters, some of which are never seen, and I sometimes found myself confused who Bill was talking about. A second viewing would definitely clear things up but I’m not certain it deserves the time. AMRU 3.

“Now, listen Tim, you're free, white, and twenty-one. You can do as you choose.”

Deathsport (1978)

Authorities from a city capture “guides” to compete in a thing called Deathsport because, but these guides have competing story elements like mutants, talk in cryptic circles, and boy does this movie stink.

I didn’t come into this film with any great expectation, but it was the follow-up to Death Race 2000 so I was hoping it was a little fun. David Carradine returns as our hero and had it not bombed, the trilogy would have rounded out with Deathworld. While it featured some gratuitous nudity, it was completely lacking in humor. There was an attempt to save this film with reshoots and clever editing, but it failed. What we have is an overly complex story that makes no sense and goes nowhere.

Let’s talk about Claudia Jennings. She was a Playboy playmate that went on to do a string of cheesecake films during the 1970’s. She did pretty well, I thought, considering her pedigree, but apparently she had to be removed from the set once because she was coked up and unruly. She would die in a car crash shortly after the film’s release. Drugs, it would seem, were not involved.

Filming a convincing fight scene is difficult. The audience needs to know who the combatants are and how the fight is going for them, all the while being compelling to watch. Jackie Chan was the master at blocking a fight. So many of these low budget films do it poorly and Deathsport is no exception. And sadly, there are a lot of fight scenes.

Deathsport is a movie that started filming with little more than a premise. They hired a straight from film school director who was promptly fired. This stands as his only directorial credit. Allan Arkush was brought in to fix it, but the soup was already spoiled. The viewer is never sure what is going on, what the character’s motivation is, and why they should care. It’s just a string of pointless and poorly shot action scenes, tedious motorcycle chases, and punctuated with terrible dialog. No humor, no point, and no fun. AMRU 2.

Gigi (1958)

Gaston (Louis Jourdan), a fabulously wealthy man about town, is bored with the Parisian nightlife. He goes to fabulous parties with fabulous women (Eva Gabor) whom he showers with fabulous gifts, and is simply bored with it all. His creepy uncle (Maurice Chevalier) has no such problem. Thank heaven for little girls ...

He is friends with an older woman of Paris (Hermione Gingold) who is training her granddaughter (Leslie Caron) for the same … profession? As Gaston grows closer to Gigi, well, let’s just leave that here.

In a modern context, maybe Madame Alverez would be picked up by the FBI while Gaston would have been suicided in prison. But Gigi has a moral out. Set in 1900 Paris, the setting is distinctly not here and not now. This passes the judgement off to another culture. And as we are further from 1958 then 1958 was from 1900, another separation is in place. Should we judge the film harshly?

Leslie Caron was absolutely charming as the playful teen. The ripe old age of 26 while filming, she was entirely believable as a teenager. This is no small feat. Her body language was spot on. And this presents a problem. Is the character fifteen? They never say, but she is in the source material and seems every bit of it. So what we are left with is a budding romance between a teenaged girl and a rich, bored man pushing 40. And this is all ok because her grandmother (and great aunt) were training her to be a courtesan all along. It’s ok to feel dirty here.

Much of the descriptive dialog is intentionally vague, clipped and stilted to appease the production code. The audience is forced to make up our own mind what the situation is. Maybe Gigi is being groomed to be a proper lady rather than a woman who shares a rich man’s bed in exchange for lavash dinners and fancy jewelry. But, nope. The latter.

I find myself comparing this film with My Fair Lady, which has a similar theme of a old rich man grooming a too young girl. A big difference is that both characters here are more likable than in Lady. While Lady’s Higgins was unkind and lacked a proper character arc, Gaston was clearly a good person. He is looking for someone who is interesting and fun to be around. Someone who doesn't bore him. He is kind to Gigi and when he realizes his feelings, the moment is impactful.

I am somewhat embarrassed to say I enjoyed Gigi. I liked the characters and rooted for them. I can't side step the grooming of an underage girl aspect (and a family friend, no less), but my reaction is what it is. The musical numbers, while not super memorable, were much shorter than in Lady. AMRU 3.5.

Hands of a Stranger (1962)

A great concert pianist loses his hands in an accident and has the Hands of a Stranger grafted on. Sound familiar?

This is the second remake of The Hands of Orlac I’ve reviewed. There is yet another and now I feel obligated to watch it. Can’t be worse. Here everyone monologues in an overly melodramatic way, except for a cop that monologues in an overly snarky way. The dialog is so thick and awkward it would make George Lucas cringe. And it doesn’t let up. All 84 minutes of it. Each character grandstands emotionally at another followed by an unusual number of face slaps. It feels like it was written by a teenaged girl with a thesaurus. It was exhausting.

I focus on this because we get the premise. Will he ever play the piano again? Whose hands were theses? Was he a killer? Will he become a killer? Is he going insane? These questions are addressed gracelessly. For the record, no, don't know, don't know, yes, yes.

Sally Kellerman (you know, MASH, Back to School) has a small role. She was a cutie. Some of the cast went on to appear in films and not suck at acting, while others did us the favor of retiring. Anything else to report? Well, the opening credits feel like a made for TV movie. It sat on the shelf for two years before release maybe because it was terrible, but more likely because the other Orlac remake came out at that time.

A more generous me would say the acting and dialog style was a stylistic choice that simply didn’t work, but so many other choices were terrible as well. I mean, we never find out the identity of the stranger. Spoiler alert! AMRU 2.

Mighty Joe Young (1949)

An oversized ape is brought to America by a greedy promoter. Things go poorly. Sound familiar? Depictions of African rituals are handled with amazing accuracy and sensitivity.

Sixteen years after King Kong, RKO brought back much of the same team to make Mighty Joe Young. They even reused Fay Wray's screen. Here, a rich little girl on an African plantation buys Gorilla Joe as a baby and they grow up as great friends. And Joe grows to a great size, between eight and twelve feet, depending on the situation. Much larger than real gorillas but tiny compared to Kong’s fantastical 18 to 60 feet, depending on the situation. Pretty Jill is convinced by the promoter (Robert Armstrong) to bring her friend to America for fame and fortune, so no need for gas grenades here. While it was easy to sympathize with the monster Kong, Joe is intended entirely as a sympathetic character.

This was Ray Harryhausen’s first job as special effects animator, and there are a lot of effects on display. Not just Joe, but lions, people, cars, and a climatic building fire. It is easy to criticize the end result (visible wires, overlaid scenes sometimes shake) but this stuff was very new at the time and the effects took fourteen months to complete. I would guess that some sort of special effect was on screen for the majority of the 84 minute runtime.

Ben Johnson played the awe-shucks cowboy sent to Africa to rope the wild animals. He did a lot of westerns so our paths haven’t crossed much. But he was very memorable in The Last Picture Show. Less so in The Outlaw. Many familiar contract players appeared, particularly in the night club scenes. Specifically Ellen Corby (Grandma Walton) and Irene Ryan (Granny Clampett). Charles Lane had appeared in 241 feature films, this being the eleventh I’ve seen him in. He died thirteen years ago at a hundred and two, and somehow has a short film coming out soon.

It is mentioned that Jill’s contract was not legal because she was under aged. Maybe that meant she was under 21 (actress Terry Moore was twenty when the film was released) but in 1949 I suspect that means under 18, which makes the 30ish Johnson going off with her a bit suspect.

Mighty Joe Young isn’t a bad film and the effects were fun, but it comes off as sappy, especially when compared to the masterpiece. It felt targeted more for children. AMRU 2.5. In lieu of a good quote, I’ll leave you with one of Terry’s:

“I hate silicone, because now everyone can have what I have.”