Reviews
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Where's That Been? - The Brasher Doubloon
In The Brasher Doubloon (1947), private investigator Philip Marlowe (George Montgomery) ventures out of his familiar L.A. surroundings to Pasadena, where he's been summoned to the stately manor of dowager Elizabeth Murdock (Lucille Bates). Mrs. Murdock wants to hire Marlowe to locate the titular coin; a rarity (there are only two known pieces of the currency, the other owned by the Smi...
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Poor, poor Thelma.
Ouch. I can usually find something worthwhile in every movie, but other than the fact that Lilli Palmer is very attractive, I have nothing good to say about THIS turkey time-waster, a British film (The Door with Seven Locks) made by Pathé, based on an Edgar Wallace book (as all British films were, by law, in those days), and released in this country by Monogram (whom else?). I found it listed as a...
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Colorama: The Blood-Soaked Brilliance of Laurence Olivier's Richard III
In 2012, Richard III's bones were discovered under a Leicester car park. It's an irony that Shakespeare himself would appreciate, considering it's all due to him that centuries later we still pour obsessively over the Richard III legend. Of course, Shakespeare was the one that spun the legend into the version we know today, the story of a hunchbacked tyrant who connived his way to the English c...
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Where's That Been? - The Princess and the Pirate
Eighteenth-century cutthroat Captain Barat (Victor McLaglen) -- whose possession of an iron claw in his right hand has earned him the nickname 'The Hook' -- has just finished burying three years' worth of treasure and plunder on a deserted island...he then shoots and kills the crew member (Brandon Hurst) who drew a map to its location after the poor soul brags that he could recreate the map 'wi...
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Line Up For Your Death Kiss With Bela Lugosi
If you're looking for an actual street address for Hollywood's Poverty Row, we nominate 4516 Sunset Boulevard. Its history was grand: Reliance-Majestic Studio was built at that site in 1914, and D.W. Griffith filmed Birth of a Nation there. Within a few years, though, the property had been acquired by Tiffany Studios, a small production company whose big star was Mae Murray. When sound...
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I dream of Jean with light brown hair...
My guess is that Jean Arthur, William Holden, and Warren William aren't the first three names that you'd think of to star in a big, wide, sprawling Western epic. They weren't for me, either, but the film is good. Wesley Ruggles directs. Tucson, 1860, is little more than a small grouping of wooden shops held together by the town's semi-sober residents. Bill Holden comes through on his way to Cal...
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Three stars for Seven Gables
Pretty darn enjoyable Universal film from 1940 with the same cast (pretty much) and crew as that same year's The Invisible Man Returns. Do yourself a favor, though, and forget the Hawthorne novel, mmkay? 160 years ago a certain Colonel Pyncheon made a land grab by accusing the landowner of witchcraft; as the poor slob was hung, he cursed the family, and sure enough, Col. Pyncheon dropped dead t...
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The French Foreign Legion of the Air, sort of...
A small, shoestring-run airline delivers mail through a very dangerous pass in the Andes, and the pilots are misfits looking to run and hide (from dames, mainly) or make a quick buck and go somewhere else. Sig Rumann is the owner, Cary Grant is the manager, Thomas Mitchell is his best buddy, and John Carroll and Noah Beery, Jr. are amongst the pilots. They're all really stoic and fatalistic becaus...
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Travel South of St. Louis on Blu-Ray
United States Pictures was an independent company set up after the war by Harry Warner for his son-in-law, producer Milton Sperling; Warner Bros. financed and distributed the films, most of which are now part of the holdings to which Olive Films has access. There have been some gems in the pile, including The Enforcer (1951) with Humphrey Bogart, Robert Wise's Three Secrets (1...
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Where's That Been? - Ramrod
Rancher Walt Shipley (Ian McDonald) is making plans to raise sheep on his modest spread...but he's running into interference from two wealthy cattle ranch owners, Ben Dickason (Charlie Ruggles) and Frank Ivey (Preston Foster), who fear the additions to Shipley's Circle 66 will devour the grass they need for their own herds. Ivey, a ruthless and ambitious man who, despite the presence of a sheri...
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Jean Arthur as Myrna Loy (sort of)
The plot of this film isn't so much a crime-solving physician and his pushy ex-wife attempt to solve the murder of a jockey during a race so much as 'RKO borrows William Powell from MGM and Miss Arthur from Columbia and tries to make a Thin Man movie.' That's fine. Eric Blore is around as the put-upon butler to let us know this is an RKO picture; James Gleason is the detective on one wrong trail a...
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I love surprises!
Wow, so after all these years I finally catch up with the last of the 'Beach Party' films - and discover it's very funny and quite worthwhile, despite the lack of Annette in it. At an Air Force base, Frankie Avalon is a nebbish young airman and Deborah Walley is his pretty fiance; Avalon accidentally shoots himself into space with a chimp and when he returns, cosmic rays have transformed him in...
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Colorama: The Fatal Beauty of Blood and Sand
If there's a cinematic equivalent of 'all dressed up and nowhere to go,' it's got to be Rouben Mamoulian's 1941 bullfighting story Blood and Sand. Lord, this film is beautiful. Every Technicolor frame of it offers new delights to the eye. The contrast of color and shadow is phenomenal, giving weight and majesty to the familiar tale of how one man gains and loses glory. In fact, the fil...
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Given the choice, always take legend over history.
A daffy 'history' that I absolutely adored, a Boy's Book version of history that is nothin' but fun. Gary Cooper is Wild Bill Hickok, Miss Arthur is his girlfriend, Calamity Jane, James Ellison is Buffalo Bill Cody, and guys play Custer and Lincoln and people like that. Charles Bickford is the creep what's sellin' guns to the Injuns, including Paul Harvey and Anthony Quinn. Wild Bill is tryin' ...
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Where's That Been? - 711 Ocean Drive
Electronics whiz Mal Granger (Edmond O’Brien) is gainfully employed by the local telephone company, but even as a single man it's hard for him to make ends meet. That's why Granger plays the ponies in his spare time, and when his bookie Chippie Evans (Sammy White) makes the rounds at his place of business to pay off other participating employees (and take a few more bets), he asks Evans f...
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Hilarious & Romantic
Washington D.C., the war years, and a housing shorting that turns the town into a series of neatly-laid-out sardine cans. Miss Arthur has a spare bedroom so she decides to rent it out; she's hoping for a woman, but she gets pushy Charles Coburn, and say, is he in ALL of her movies, or all Columbia movies, or what? Anyway, after learning to live with each other for a whole day (which entails Mr. Co...
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The OTHER Fred Allen Movie
Fred Allen is the manager of a frightfully large but unsuccessful troupe of singers and dancers touring the sticks and attempting to get back to New York, where they're just as unsuccessful but the breadlines are better. At one such backwater berg, they duck into a political rally to get out of the rain and discover a hapless political candidate driving voters away in droves with his boring speech...
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Where's That Been? - White Zombie
Neil Parker (John Harron) and his fiancee Madeleine Short are a young couple newly arrived in Haiti and very much in love; they're also fascinated by their unfamiliar surroundings, in which ominous drums beat in the background as they're briefed on tales of voodoo and black magic. Their trip has been made possible by the generosity of plantation owner Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer); Beaumont ...
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Don't be a Fanatic about it...
Tallulah Bankhead, long in retirement, plays an old lady whose son was killed in a car crash; she invites his fiance, Stefanie Powers, out to the house in the country for a memorial service. Turns out that Steffie can't leave once she gets there; the old bat's cuckoo as a jaybird, whose religious mania leads her to 'cleanse' Steffie so that she can marry the son up in heaven. Pretty soon there's a...
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Bamboozled
The main problem with films of the late 1960s is that many of them were made in the late 1960s.This is a fairly good 1966 Cold War science-fiction thriller that's sunk in large part because it was made in 1966 (and not released until two years later; leading man Dan Duryea and special effects guru John Fulton were both dead and buried by the time this thing flew into the 3 or 4 theatres in which i...
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