Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 8, 2020 11:36:14 GMT -8
Let’s start with Johnny O’Clock from 1947 starring Dick Powell who is running a gambling operation along with his partner, played (well) by Thomas Gomez. Other than Lee J. Cobb playing the cop looking into the murder of a corrupt cop who had ties with the casino, the movie is almost totally unwatchable. And it has thrown me out of ever coming within ten feet of another Dick Powell movie. I’ve never seen the appeal of Dick Powell. In this one he plays to type: He talks a lot. It doesn’t help that the dialogue is dull and full of cliches. But I think he would have flattened good dialogue had there been any. In a touch of the horrible, Evelyn Keyes is as awful as you get as Nancy Hobson, sister of the deceased Harriet Hobson played with some spunk and personality by the much more competent Nina Foch. But her role isn’t large and doesn’t last long. Awful stuff. Almost bad enough to watch as so-bad-it's-good.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 11, 2020 15:39:18 GMT -8
This one isn’t awful as much as it is just a bit boring: The Ex-Mrs. Bradford. This 1936 film stars William Powell as a doctor who gets involved in a murder investigation because of his screwball-comedy wife played by Jean Arthur. If you’ve seen any of the Thin Man pictures, this is much the same thing but without so many references to drinking. But, hey, at least this is William Powell not Dick Powell this time. He’s got a little charm going for him. But the dialogue is just rat-a-tat-tat, a boatload of mostly forced humor. I didn’t laugh out loud once. Way too much attitude going on with both of these characters. I think the speed of the movie is so that you don’t slow down and notice how thin the material is. As one reviewer aptly put it: “dialogue that tries hard to be funny and light and amusing but succeeds only in being tedious and dull and heavy-handed.” I can’t argue with that. Wish I’d said it.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 11, 2020 21:32:33 GMT -8
Yes, William Powell was excellent as Doc in Mr. Roberts. He did his best with the lame script in The Ex-Mrs. Bradford but it wasn't enough. In that picture Jean Arthur was more annoying than she was clever. Had they pared this movie down to just Powell getting caught up in a murder investigation, they might have had something. But there was zero chemistry between Powell and Arthur. She floated through nearly ever seen with no effect.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 11, 2020 21:55:02 GMT -8
Although it was a particular busy day for me (a rarity given this stupid lockdown), the idleness does tend to take its toll, including a higher tolerance for mediocre movies. I mean, you gotta watch something, right? But you don’t have to watch Diary of a Chambermaid. If I told you this was a French film, that would probably be enough. Oddly enough, it starts off promising. A Parisian woman signs on to be a maid in what the synopsis calls “a middle-class rural estate.” She’s obviously a woman of the world and knows that every male in any household she works in over the age of 15 is going to come on to her. And here it is no different. She (and the viewer) slowly learn the ways of the somewhat bizarre household. The matriarch is fussy, but seems otherwise the sanest of the bunch. The rest are a cast of cardboard cut-out characters borne not of imagination but seemingly of boredom. After the movie sets the stage and you learn the somewhat bizarre routines of the household, and you watch Céléstine’s (the maid) reaction to them, that’s about all this movie has to offer. They throw in a murder of a child as well as some political stuff. But watching this tonight was further evidence of just how strange the French are. If you could call Americans vulgar because of the movies they watch, you’d have to call the French a strange people. This film eventually goes nowhere. Whatever window-on-the-world we see initially through Céléstine’s eyes gives way to cinematic nihilism. I think the French, particularly the filmmakers, have delusions of adequacy.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 16, 2020 20:57:23 GMT -8
I didn’t want to have to put this movie on the dung heap, but 1940’s Arizona with Jean Arthur (as a sort of an Annie Oakley character) and a very young William Holden misses the mark. It makes some attempt to be an epic history of the Arizona Territory. And occasionally it is interesting in that regard. The colonists are on their own. Then they have the American army. Then the Army pulls out to fight the Civil War. The Confederates move in for a while. Then they can’t spare the manpower either. Later the American army returns. In between times the Indians were a severe threat. But it has only enough material (and depth) to make a halfway decent 75 minute John Wayne serial Western. At 2:05, this thing goes on way too long. Jean Arthur is interesting playing a man-like woman on the rough frontier of the Arizona Territory, more than holding her own with the men. (Anything can happen in the movies. In real life, she’d likely be gang-raped and left in the gutter.) But her performance is all in good fun and it works. Holden plays the love interest. He’s okay, but the material is not. Edgar Buchanan is noteworthy as the drunken, somewhat corrupt, Justice of the Peace, Judge Bogardus. Had they had more elements like him, it might have worked. But what they end up doing is basically playing a cycle of Black Bart (in the guise of either Lazarus Ward or Jefferson Carteret — or both together) stepping in three or four times and harassing Pheobe Titus. Rinse and repeat. It’s difficult for the actors to shine with such dog-food for a script. There are moments here and there worth watching. And I have no doubt that if you cut this down to about an hour and a quarter, you might have something.
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Post by timothylane on Jun 16, 2020 21:18:32 GMT -8
Maybe they should have done a movie on the Baron of Arizona, James A. Reavis. That's a really interesting story, of a con-man and forger who overreached with the usual consequences.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 17, 2020 7:19:56 GMT -8
I wonder if Jefferson Carteret was a stand-in for that guy. Although I reluctantly didn’t like Arizona, I actively and passionately disliked the truly awful Affair in Trinidad. It starts out well enough. Rita Hayworth plays Chris Emery, a nightclub singer. She does a number at the start (dubbed by Jo Ann Greer) which wasn’t particularly good. Her husband is killed. Someone tried to make it look like suicide. By coincide, the brother of the dead husband, Steve Emery (Glenn Ford), flies in to meet his brother. The bad guy, Max Fabian, is played with zero personality by Alexander Scourby. But he’s the sophisticated and rich crime boss who deals in stealing international secrets. When the police apparently won’t do anything, Steve Emery sets out on his own to get to the bottom of his brother’s murder. This setup is solid enough. Where it falls apart is death by a dozen or so dumb plot points, minor at first, but then they get larger as the movie progresses. But the main stinker is this absurd McGuffin of Chris Emery (Rita Hayworth) being asked by the police to go undercover (this is a nightclub singer, remember) and see what she can find out about Max Fabian. The police, meanwhile, just sit behind their desks and do nothing while Boom-Boom does their job for them. Fabian, as the rich guy on the island, had always been interested in Boom-Boom (as had every other man on the island). Now Chris Emery feigns interest in Fabian in order to find the dirt on him. Meanwhile she is getting to know her husband’s brother, Steve Emery (Ford). Out of nowhere, sparks begin to fly and they fall in love. It’s all rather lamely done. But the police have told her to keep her undercover work secret. So even though there would be zero harm in telling Steve Emery of what she was doing (and would probably help), she doesn’t. And this is the dreadfully artificial conflict created between them that then plays out in the rest of the picture…until the end when things (almost entirely off camera) are suddenly patched up and we see the pair of them sailing off into the sunset. It’s hard to imagine a movie I’d want to scratch off my resume more than this one. All of Rita Hayworth’s spark is phony and wasted. Ford is in one of his worst movies. It’s not even a good Noir from a filming standpoint. This seems like a sound stage, not Trinidad (which it surely wasn’t). Even the stock footage is false. The trivia section at IMDB notes: “The distant island seen under the opening credits is actually Moorea as seen from Tahiti, 11 miles away.” The main lesson to be drawn from this film is: If the cops have to depend on nightclub singers to do their work, it may be time to defund them. No, that’s not Colonel Klink to the left of Hayworth.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 17, 2020 8:37:04 GMT -8
I'm pretty sure I've seen Gilda. Offhand I don't remember much about it. But it had to have been better than Affair in Trinidad.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 17, 2020 20:47:34 GMT -8
I really wanted this next one to show up on the balanced side of the ledger. Unfortunately, Shockproof is not schlockproof. I will say that it’s filmed well and has a nice Noir look. Cornel Wilde plays parole officer, Griff Marat. He is assigned Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight) who is on parole for murder. I’ve always thought of Cornel Wilde as not the guy who stands in for a movie when Bogart is otherwise engaged. He’s more of the third tier down who stands in for the guy who isn’t available to stand in for Bogart. He’s done some okay stuff and some hilariously bad stuff. Put Shockproof into the category of “hilariously bad.” Still, it started off reasonable enough if you swallow down a few premises. One of them is that the ultra-straight-laced Boy Scout of a parole officer would take Jenny Marsh under his wing to the point that he gets her a job taking care of his blind mother and staying in his own home where he lives with his mother as well.I’m sure this was before the Parole Officer Book of Ethics had been updated and revised. There’s no indication that he has a crush on this bleached blond, at least to begin with. He’s just such a nice guy, so innocent and pure, that he can’t possibly think there’s anything wrong with bringing his parole client home to live with him and pay her out of his own pocket. Okay, we’ll swallow that down. This is obviously a b-movie after all. We can’t expect too much. It starts as an interesting psychological drama/morality play. It’s obvious that Jenny is just trailer trash. And even if she wants to go straight, her judgment regarding men is so poor, she’s an accident waiting to happen. She can’t, for instance, shake off Harry Wesson (played nicely by John Baragrey) with whom modern audiences would say she has a codependent relationship. If Harry isn’t actively a criminal, he runs with the wrong crowd all day long in his gambling profession. But she looooves him and feels so committed to him because he waited for her to get out of prison. Yes, at some point Boy Scout parole officer Griff Marat does fall in love with Jenny Marsh. But is Jenny Marsh reciprocating his feelings or is she (at the suggestion of Harry Wesson) simply playing Marat so that she can get the restrictions on her parole eased and then Harry and Jenny can run off together? For a while there, this is an interesting movie because we’re pretty sure that Jenny Marsh is just playing Marat. But then — wham — she tells Harry at some point that she has fallen for Marat. And, oh by the way, we secretly got married. (Parolees are apparently not supposed to get married, although our Boy Scout goody two shoes parole officer figured that it’s okay if she marries him.) Griff Marat’s ethical lapses are never believable and the absurdities of the plot as it nears the end are compounded and constant. The movie becomes laughable. After Jenny shoots Harry (who was going to turn in Griff for bad acting, if not also being a bad parole officer), Griff can’t bring himself to turn in Jenny so he and Jenny go on the run, heading for the border and Mexico. But, of course, all of the newspapers in America suddenly have no other story on the front page except the story of Harry Wesson being shot. So they remain on the run, always having to move on because their pictures continue to be in the paper. No other major news apparently having occurred for weeks on end. One reviewer noted that he read that the studio had two directions in mind with this movie and the executives chose the one we see. They obviously chose badly. The movie does seem to shift gears about 3/5 in and goes from a morality play to whatever the hell it was that I just watched.Eventually being on the run is too much for our Bonnie and Clyde couple and they decide to turn themselves in. I would have as well. Griff Marat went from being a nice-guy Boy Scout to a man with a foul temper. Why? Oh, why the hell not. He’s no longer such a Boy Scout but Jenny Marsh is finally growing a sense of right-and-wrong and recognizes that Marat has become the kind of corrupt man she used to run with. But Harry Wesson (the guy that Jenny Marsh shot) had meanwhile pulled through. One of the last scenes is Jenny and Griff being brought into the hospital room for Harry to identify Jenny as the person who shot him. But he suddenly changes his story and says the shooting was an accident. But…but…but…, one of the officers noted, what about Jenny going on the run for two months? Isn’t that serious? No prob. She was with her parole officer. You have to give Harry some credit. He knew he was defeated so he wasn’t going to let a thing like attempted homicide get in the way of this loving couple. If you think I’m making any of this up, you need to watch this movie. Watch it with a friend. Share some laughs.
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Post by timothylane on Jun 17, 2020 21:17:41 GMT -8
Granted that I'm no judge of acting, bad acting can be a crime. In Stan Freberg's "St. George and the Dragonet", St. George not only charges the dragon with maiden-devouring out of season, but after the dragon's over-the-top response to the charges adds overacting to the rap sheet.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 18, 2020 7:04:55 GMT -8
Oh, Cornel Wilde isn’t that bad. In fact, he’s the perfect actor for a script that is a bit lacking and somewhat corny. He’s proportional to it so it’s all a better fit. He played the concerned, Boy Scout parole officer just fine in the early going.
It’s interesting that Cornel Wilde and Patricia Knight were real-life husband and wife (which apparently didn’t last). I can’t say that comes across on the screen. The script is a mess. But as one reviewer noted, “It MIGHT have worked if Wilde had played a dishonest p.o. from the outset--not the super-officer he was supposed to be.”
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Post by artraveler on Jun 18, 2020 8:51:49 GMT -8
St. George not only charges the dragon with maiden-devouring out of season, but after the dragon's over-the-top response to the charges adds overacting to the rap sheet. I recall a 70s book by Gordon Dickson I think it was The Dragon and the George that satirically views the entire meme. It was great fun. Dickson's Dorsi novels are actually studied in War Colleges, especially the Tactics of Mistake.
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Post by timothylane on Jun 18, 2020 9:42:07 GMT -8
The Dragon and the George was indeed a fun book, "george" being the dragons' term for the knights who fought them -- as when one warned about facing "a george in his shell with the horn pointed at you".
I've read a lot of Dorsai books and stories. The Tactics of Mistake was probably first, when it was serialized in Analog. This was supposed to be a series of books -- historical and contemporary novels as well as future science fiction -- looking at the archetypes of soldier, priest, and philosopher. These were represented in his future by the societies of the Dorsai, the Friendlies, and the Exotics respectively.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 24, 2020 19:44:54 GMT -8
Those who have been following my Sabu-athon will definitely want to halt it before moving on to 1940’s The Thief of Bagdad. This is horrible in so many ways, some of which are new to me. Yikes. It’s hard to say “worst of all.” But vying for that title was the Kraut, Conrad Veidt (an outstanding actor in other things) playing an Arabian prince — with his thick German accent and all. He didn’t even try for anything authentic. But there is something worse than that. It’s the goofball, John Justin, doing an even worse impression of an Arabian prince. I’m not the one to beat the drum of “cultural imperialism.” But I kept thinking, “What is this white guy doing in this film? All the big things are wrong as well as the little things. One commenter was completely apt in mentioning the “prepubescent mustache” that Justin is wearing. This movie is best forgotten. And I will try to.
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Post by timothylane on Jun 24, 2020 20:00:54 GMT -8
I saw that decades ago at a RiverCon here in Louisville. It seemed decent enough to me, but I've already said I'm no great judge of acting.
This sounds like the reputation for Tony Curtis's famous "yonder lies the castle of my father" or some variation of that. Incidentally, that line is NOT from The Black Shield of Falworth. Elizabeth watched it once and I was surprised not only that the line didn't appear, but there was nowhere it could have. In his memoirs (Elizabeth is a fan of his) he said it was Son of Ali Baba. That makes it appropriate to mention here. I've never seen the movie, so I can't judge whether he actually was able to sound like the character should have.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 24, 2020 20:06:36 GMT -8
There's a 1961 version. Maybe I ought to see if I can find that. But a better prospect is the 1924 version with Douglas Fairbanks as the Thief. I gotta believe this is better.
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Post by artraveler on Jun 24, 2020 20:58:24 GMT -8
It is not that there are a bunch of rich white Christians playing Moslems. It is no worse than John Wayne playing Ghenjus Kahn. I think the title was the Barbarian. That would be my vote for one of the worst movies ever made. But Thief of Bagdad has to be in the running. Neither one is Plan Nine From Outer Space, but at least that is laughably bad. One thing to consider, since Thief was made in 1940 it lacks the anti communist subtleties of the Cold War movies and it is in Technicolor a big box office plus in the 40s. Remember the first talkie came out in 29 and there are no apologies to Islam, although they make it as relatively harmless. According to IMDB it had a decent box office of about $250,000 at .25 a head that is a million paid admissions in a country of 130,000,000 people. Not awe inspiring but respectable.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 25, 2020 7:05:20 GMT -8
June Duprez as the Princess was bland as well. Pictured below is some of her best work in the film. Even grading on a curve of old-movie, old-style Saturday matinee fare, the story and characters are extremely bland. You jump from Technicolor set to Technicolor set, but the people are mere props. There is zero chemistry between the prince and princess. He comes across as some college-boy doofus. And, I mean, if you’re going to take your shirt off as a hero in a swashbuckling movie, try to look at least like the “after” photo in the Charles Atlas advertisements. This guy looks as if he just got out of an Arabian dungeon after five years. All I saw was a scrawny actor with way too much eye makeup on. If you wanted to emasculate your star, they did a good job of it. I think the kid could have easily taken him.
Play “caption this” with this photo: “Man-up, Sahib. She’s way out of your class. And if your perm is set, take the curlers out.”
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Post by timothylane on Jun 25, 2020 7:25:54 GMT -8
Elizabeth once rented Plan 9 From Outer Space at a video store (I think she got something like 3 movies, but I don't recall the others). It's so famous as a humorously bad movie that she figured we out to see it once for ourselves. I don't recall the details much (the title comes from alien invaders who were working on their 9th plan for conquering Earth, the previous 8 having failed, and that's about all I really remember). That's probably a mercy. I think I remember more of The Ice Pirates, even though I saw that when it came out, well before I even met Elizabeth.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 25, 2020 7:32:22 GMT -8
I don’t know whether I’ve seen Son of Ali Baba with Tony Curtis and Piper Boom-Boom Laurie. One reviewer says The Prince Who Was a Thief is a better movie. That also stars Tony Curtis and Piper Boom-Boom Laurie. It’s hard to find these films. You can get a DVD version The Prince Who Was A Thief of Amazon for $14.99. Son of Ali Baba can fe found on Blu-ray for $17.99. But it seems clear that the former movie is the one to watch.
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