AS THE EARTH TURNS (1937)

In his twenties, he worked concept & special-effects on Golden Age Disney animation, then took to the air for his WWII service, returned for mostly non-theatrical, then won the 1950 documentary Oscar® with THE TITAN: The Story of Michelangelo.*  But what Richard Lyford is now remembered for are his amateur films, made as a teen film enthusiast.  Particularly his last, a forty-five minute sci-fi/mad scientist (chamber) spectacular.  How’d a kid in the Pacific Northwest do this?  And on a dime.  (Ever wonder what Ed Wood might have done if he had talent as well as moxie?  Here’s your chance.)  Spiffed up with decent restoration and a good music track by Ed Hartman, Lyford acts, directs, edits, shoots & produces this 45" b&w cautionary about the search to find Mad Scientist Pax who’s threatening world destruction unless peace breaks out on Earth.  Luckily, girl reporter Barbara Berjer has a lead on Pax and a mentor with pull in senior reporter Arther Verill (Alan Hoelting, not bad among the all-amateur cast).  Heading North by NorthWest to track the guy, the daring twosome surmount obstacles thru action-packed chases and adorable miniature special effects to reach Pax’s mountain cave lab.  There’s only one bad sequence (Berjer's kidnapping in the forest), but the rest of the film is what you always hoped a good Poverty Row Monogram feature would look like.  Great fun, legitimately exciting at times, and weirdly prescient in all sorts of ways.  The film’s been tagged as Early Indie or Experimental.  It’s not; more like the prize-winning amateur club fan entry of 1937.  Had Lyford’s momentum in commercial cinema not been stopped in its tracks by the war, who knows what he might have given us.  Watch with tolerance, but watch.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *TITAN, itself repurposed from an earlier release, available free on various platforms.  (Alas in pretty rough shape.)  It too was cribbed for a one & a half-reel intro that was in the RoadShow presentations of THE AGONY AND HE ECSTACY/’67.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/06/agony-and-ecstasy-1965.html

PANDORUM (2009)

Magpie doesn’t begin to do justice to this End-of-Days/Brave-New-World mash-up from co-writer/director Christian Alvart, a regular burgoo of ‘borrowed’ tropes from Noah’s Arc/Space Frontier stories, all seriously overdue at the DVD library.  Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster wake from hyper-sleep capsules on The Elysium, a huge vessel carting thousands of Earthlings on a long-distance/multi-year trip to colonize a replacement planet.  So where is everybody?  Searching for the control room on this Cruise Liner of a space-ship, Foster gets lost, then waylaid by various survivors and challenged by mysterious monsters.  It’s the ‘pandorum’ virus doing the dirty work, turning people into Cos-Play Zombies.  And should they survive these vicious SPLAT machines, the ship gets locked into oblivion countdown.  The best gag in the pic is how fit everyone looks!*  Those sleep pods work better than Ozempic and a free gym membership.  Meanwhile, back in the dark and grungy ship corridors, our lost brigade pretend they’re remaking THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (different sort of ship) a zillion miles from Earth. (Though a late twist does land them in hot water.)  Meanwhile, Quaid makes like Captain Nemo at the control panel; good guy or bad?  With feral fighting female Antje Traue for Foster to favor when not mourning his apparent widowerhood.  Oh, let’s not forget everyone’s least missed racist ‘80s cliché, the disposable Person-of-Color supporting actor.  Also on display, cut & paste action editing laid on with a trowel so you can’t tell action figure A from action figures B-thru-R, smothered in a propulsive/percussive score goosing up the pace like NFL highlights.  Nonetheless, secret happy ending: the film flopped badly enough to put the kibosh on two planned sequels.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  You wonder how post-millennial audiences handle the mesmerizing slowness of something like 2001/’68 when they’ve been inundated with ADHD speed in their space operas?  That distinctive slowness, one of things that made Kubrick’s masterpiece stand out and play in a believable manner, now hard to imagine getting a positive rating from influencers.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/08/2001-space-odyssey-1968.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *One more good joke in here . . . but was it intentional?  You know those Emergency Light Sticks all the hardware stores stock?  You probably keep one in your closet for a power outage?  The ones where you shatter the interior glass tube and it glows with a greenish light?  Turns out, they’re standard issue for space travel two-thousand years on.

THOMPSON’S LAST RUN (1986)

Back when it was something of an event when an old-time movie star hit the small screen, Robert Mitchum splashed-down in Dan Curtis’s WWII maxi-series THE WINDS OF WAR/’83 and its follow-up WAR AND REMEMBRANCE/’88.  Mitchum’s disengagement growing steadily over the nineteen episode run.  Turning seventy between all that heavy-lifting prestige, he’s more engaged and far more animated in some of the tv pics he started to embrace.  None more so than this modest ‘find,’ tonally something of a  partner to THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE/’73.*  Here, he’s in prison for his safecracking ways when a surprise visitor comes by; niece Kathleen York, his only living relative other than her little boy.  Unaware he’s about to be transferred to Texas on a life sentence, and desperate for a new start (she’s been turning tricks to get by, she steals Mitchum from Wilford Brimley, the about to retire Sheriff handling the friendly transfer.  These two geezers with a long history between them, the inevitable cat-and-mouse chase nicely structured by writer John Carlen and believably staged by director Jerrold Freedman.  Even a neat double-helix bit of crisscross justice right at the end.  Keep expectations in check and swallow hard at some contrivances in the first half of the third act, and you just might be pleasantly surprised at how satisfying this is.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *EDDIE COYLE no modest/pretty good surprise, but a full bore masterpiece that holds its cards close to the vest and speaks quietly.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-friends-of-eddie-coyle-1973.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  A foot race at the end features a lot of stunt doubling for a wheezing Brimley; whereas Mitchum appears to be doing all his own running.  No slow-cranking fakery for Bob!  What a pity no one thought to steal the scene from GUARDIE E LADRI / COPS AND ROBBERS/’51 that sees Robber Totò totally running out of steam just as Cop Aldo Fabrizi also runs out of steam, their chase continuing on foot, but at a slow, exhausted crawl.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/12/guardie-e-ladri-cops-and-robbers-1951.html

SLEEP, MY LOVE (1948)

Now in her mid-forties, Claudette Colbert was just off THE EGG AND I/’47 (that alarmingly successful city-folk-go-hayseed comedy that not only birthed Ma & Pa Kettle, but eventually GREEN ACRES), when she made this transparent ripoff of GASLIGHT/’44.  (One of many, GASLIGHT itself a remake.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/05/gaslight-1944.html)  ‘Presented’ by Mary Pickford, though husband Charles ’Buddy’ Rogers takes screen credit, it’s impeccably produced in all ways but the one that counts: the screenplay.  Again, there’s a ‘caring’ husband (Don Ameche in the Charles Boyer role) ‘gaslighting’ wife Colbert to drive her nuts & grab an inheritance (Ingrid Bergman’s spot), while Robert Cummings takes on the Joseph Cotten role of guardian angel.  Knowing the audience is going to be ahead of the action, this iteration reveals the villain by reel two, but has more than enough juice left from cast & crew to hold interest.  (Supporting players include Raymond Burr, George Coulouris, Key Luke, Rita Johnson, Ralph Morgan and a stellar Hazel Brooks.)   Plus director Douglas Sirk covering studio sets & exteriors like a curious crab.*  (Influenced by George Cukor’s use of vertical tracking in the 1944 GASLIGHT?)  A tricky shoot-out climax especially fine.  Shot with noir trimmings by Joe Valentine, a Hitchcock regular at the time.  All good. If only the script knew when to tighten the screws and when to loosen up.  Poor Claudette has to go ON or OFF crazy more often than 'La Sonnambula’ in Bellini’s opera.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:   *Sirk & Colbert had better luck with THUNDER ON THE HILL/’51.  And Colbert got closer to GASLIGHT in THE SECRET FURY/’50.       https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/12/thunder-on-hill-1951.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-secret-fury-1950.html

BURNING / BEONING (2018)

With just seven features over three decades, Korean writer/director Lee Chang-dong  has a buzzy new film out (POSSIBLE LOVE/’26 - not seen here), his first since this award-winning creep-out from eight years ago.  At once straight-forward and nuanced, it moves like a daydream following the affairs of a lonely/longing young man (Yoo Ah-in), living by himself at his fast emptying rural family farm close enough to Tokyo for his warehouse job, while considering himself a budding writer.  (William Faulkner his favorite.)  On a work delivery, he bumps into an old acquaintance (Jeon Jong-seo), one-time neighbor who went to his grade school a few years behind him.   Then it’s chat, drinks, bed.  Yoo Ah-in only looks shy; Jeon Jong-seo a bit of a flake.  And while they’ve only just been reacquainted, and she’s off the next day for a dance/music course in Africa, perhaps he could watch her cat while she’s away?   But when she returns, she’s partnered with a smooth operator (Steven Yeun), a rich guy with an odd, indiscriminately seductive vibe.  The rest of the film, which involves disappearance and maybe murder, invokes metaphor, a term discussed by the literate threesome; one you’ll grasp long before anyone on screen does.  And that’s a problem as the film feels stretched out of all proportion.  Two and a half hours for something that might have fit in a half-hour anthology format.  Pretty thin gruel.  It would have worked better as one of those tri-part portmanteau films that seem to have gone out of fashion.*  It’s well done by all; and has a finish both obvious and satisfying.  Perhaps a period setting was needed to add social heft and the difficulty of breaking etiquette between classes, giving reason to reticence.  Perhaps Lee Chang-dong’s new film lives up to the buzz.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *With current financial  models governing theatrical releases, are the days of portmanteaux pix gone for good?  Back in the 1950s, Somerset Maugham alone had three (ten stories worth); while in Italy, Vittorio De Sica was likely champ.  Three or four of them on his own (plus another in English) and multiple contributions to ones with multiple directors.

MARS ATTACKS (1996)

Tim Burton functions best when the budget is tight and content pushes him past his comfort zone.  (In other words, not one of his ALICE films.)  So why is MARS ATTACKS so much fun?  The exception that proves the rule?  It could lose a reel or two, but you’ll be giggling too hard to mind.  Based not on a book (comic or otherwise), but on a series of TOPPS Chewing Gum Trading Cards*, story and tone largely inspired by ‘50s Sci-Fi (think THIS ISLAND EARTH/’55; WAR OF THE WORLDS/’53*).  With a huge, unnecessary All-Star cast showing who can get their laughs within the agogic Burton rhythm (Jack Nicholson, Michael J. Fox, Martin Short, Rod Steiger, Tom Jones, Lukas Haas, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, and especially Sylvia Sidney can; everyone else can’t).  But the film’s propulsion doesn’t come from smart dialogue, dumb gags or narrative inertia, but from its elegant high-concept design and lo-fi execution.  Particularly out in space when enemy space craft ominously orbit Earth.  Twenty years after STAR WARS, these may be retro toy models, but grandly purposed and displayed like the imaginatively painted box the scale model kits came in.  Commercial artwork that both ignited and ultimately limited the Burton æsthetic.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/LINK:  *The idea man behind the TOPPS card series, Len Brown, isn’t properly credited on screen, but did recently get this excellent NYTimes obit.  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/arts/len-brown-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1

DOUBLE-BILL/SPOILERS/LINK:  *Just as WAR OF THE WORLDS had the aliens defeated not by weapons of mass destruction, but by ‘the little things,’ viruses and such, so here, where they are felled by a double dose of sub-operatic kitsch: Rudolf Friml operetta sung by Grand Old Opry’s Slim Whitman.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/10/this-island-earth-1955.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/war-of-worlds-1953.html

THE REPLACEMENTS (2000)

In a film full of mostly bad surprises, the first is that it took 13 years for Hollywood to turn the 1987 NFL players’ strike, and the brief series of games using semi-pros & amateur ‘replacements’ into a film.  Such a 'can't-miss'  idea.  The second is that, while the template follows 1974's THE LONGEST YARD, at core this is a PRO-scab celebration.  (And you assumed Hollywood was purely closed-shop/Pro-Union in thought & deed.)  Third is: Who knew A.I. was writing major motion pictures in 2000?  (Even scarier, it’s not bad.  Grade it a ‘Gentleman’s B.’*)  Faceless journeyman director Howard Deutch should have been just the guy for this, but his on-field completion rate is low, and the cast either works the gags too hard (see Jon Favreau) or carbon copies past triumphs without background seasoning.  (Jack Warden & Gene Hackman knowing a lost cause when they see one.)  As a once-promising quarterback, Keanu Reeves went to the trouble of putting on enough pounds to unchisel his facial structure, but is ultimately defeated by a zero chemistry girlfriend.  And yet this ain’t a ‘can’t miss’ idea for nothing; the damn thing more or less gets by on field goals or punts it's way out of trouble.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Grade inflation has upped the old Gentleman’s C to B.  (Actual scripter Vince McKewin, last of his three feature credits.)  ALSO: Attention wandering?  Decide if sportscaster Pat Summerall or John Madden is the worse actor.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *Not always the case with ‘can’t miss’ football pics.  Eight years on, George Clooney fell on his ass with a look at the early days of pro-football, LEATHERHEADS.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/07/leatherheads-2008.html

THE GANGSTER, THE COP, THE DEVIL / AKINJEON (2019)

Slick, ultra-professional crime thriller from South Korean writer/director Lee Won-tae (just optioned for Stateside remake*), a dandy slice of violent police procedural mayhem that lifts off when a brainy serial killer (your standard super-ego sociopath) chooses  the wrong guy as his latest victim since inside the pricey car he regularly targets, no thick-set CEO to stab at will, but a thick-set mob boss who fights back.  Injured, but alive after the killer takes off, it means the cops already on the case at last have an eyewitness to interview.  If only the survivor weren’t also a wanted criminal, a top player in the city’s gangster scene.  Played by vet villain Ma Dong-seok (shades of old-time movie star Wallace Beery, he reluctantly winds up playing ‘down-low’ partner to cock-of-the-walk police detective Kim Mu-yeol (shades of now-time movie star Brad Pitt.  Both men outstanding, each with his own reasons for finding the serial killer first.  They also have lots of backup and lots of rivals to fend off.  A neat set-up, and Lee Won-tae directs the hell out of it, much helped by Se-Seung Park nighttime lensing.  For once in one of these things, you can really follow the plot along with the elaborate fights.  Too bad Won-Tae is so addicted to over-editing, as the film's flow would benefit from a few one-take/two-shots to vary pace, especially when the leads are working out who’s gonna get what out of this unusual collaboration.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *A cleverly satisfying have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too ending begs for a follow-up.  No doubt visions of franchise helped set-up remake rights.  Did they try a sequel in Korea?

HER HIGHNESS AND THE BELLBOY (1945)

Beautiful as ever at 31 (with ravishing portrait shots from cinematographer Harry Stradling); the acting a bit more animated than usual; lucking out with fast-rising Robert Walker as co-star, stepping in for a just drafted Mickey Rooney; and getting a solid hit* out of the standard issue Euro-Royalty meets Stateside Commoner playbook; yet for Hedy Lamarr at M-G-M, the writing was already on the wall and her contract wasn’t renewed.  (She only made two more A-list pics: C.B. DeMille’s SAMSON AND DELILAH/’49 and Bob Hope’s MY FAVORITE SPY/’51 before her acting career began to fade away.)  It's directed by M-G-M company-man Richard Thorpe, but family-friendly producer Joe Pasternak pulls the strings behind this sentimental corn that sees NYC hotel bellboy Walker ditch bedridden girlfriend June Allyson once he mistakes visiting Princess Lamarr’s friendly manner at the hotel for love.  Pasternak being Pasternak, there’s a big musical sequencer so Allyson can get off the couch where she paints porcelain figurines (really!) to sing and dance in her dreams.  (Nothing physically wrong with the lass, she just needs a proposal from Walker’s distracted bellboy to receive a ‘love cure.’)  Loaded with ill-used M-G-M contract players (Agnes Moorehead as a chilly royal relative; Carl Esmond as designated fiancé, slow-witted ‘dese-dems-dose’ Rags Ragland for comic relief) . . . and the damn thing goes on for nearly two hours.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  You’d think these impossible Royalty/Commoner romantic dramedies would have died off ages ago.  But no; still being made today. ROMAN HOLIDAY/’53 (Wyler; Peck, Hepburn) still the ideal.  Best from M-G-M: THE STUDENT PRINCE.  Worst from M-G-M: THE STUDENT PRINCE.  See LINKS for details.  (Hint: the bad one directed by this film’s Richard Thorp and produced by this film’s Joe Pasternak.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-student-prince-in-old-heidelberg.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-student-prince-1954.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Keep in mind, just about anything made money in 1945, the last year of the war seeing Hollywood’s all-time highest attendance numbers.