DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES (1962)

Alcoholic character study, smoothly played & intelligent, but ultimately limited by a lack of texture & one-track storyline that betray its roots in ‘Golden Age’ tv drama. Jack Lemmon & Lee Remick (in roles Cliff Robertson & Piper Laurie did on tv under John Frankenheimer’s direction) are mostly superb as the hard-drinking P.R. exec and chocolate-loving secretary who fall in love and then sink into alcoholism. He thinks he drinks for work and eventually climbs out; she starts mainly to keep up with him and then can’t stop. They each probably have one big hysterical scene too many, but are very scary when they both lose it at her old home under the eyes of Dad Charles Bickford. (Bickford played the same role on tv.) Lemmon’s even better once the wind leaves his sails in a pair of scenes against an all but lost Remick. The film, very well judged by director Blake Edwards forgoing his usual WideScreen format for intimacy, manages to avoid the stink of uplift & Good Works so often associated with addiction dramas. Instead, hitting a wall of its own making, with J. P. Miller’s adaptation of his own teleplay taking place under glass, like a docent giving a museum tour. But very fine as far as it goes.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Edwards and Lemmon, heavy tipplers in real life, pretty much quit the stuff a year or two after the film came out.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Unusually revealing (if spare) commentary track from Edwards on the DVD. The film’s sole fancy transition shot (an optical printer effect) gets a big thumbs down. ‘I wouldn’t do that today!’

LE VIEIL HOMME ET L'ENFANT / THE TWO OF US (1967)

You know the drill: WWII France; young Jewish couple with rambunctious 8 yr-old son; the boy sent off to live with a friend’s parents in the safe countryside, posing as a good Catholic (everything but the foreskin) so that casually anti-Semitic, gruff/kindly ‘Grandpa’ will accept him. One of those Life’s Lesson stories, revelations & redemption; heartwarming & a bit sticky, non? Actually, no. Or, as little as possible. Claude Berri, the very personification of a French bourgeois filmmaking auteur*, in his first feature, avoids one easy heart-tugging cliché after another, keeping things honest (it’s based on his own experiences), underplayed in high contrast monochrome (often in long one-shot domestic scenes) and about as sec as such a naturally sentimental childhood education can be. It holds up far better than you might expect or remember. With the great Michel Simon, pants pulled up to his armpits, as the memorable Grandpapa, and the rest of the cast, including Charles Denner as the nervous father, right on the mark. A pleasant surprise.  (NOTE: Another twice-reviewed title!  Oops.  Earlier one (a decade older), listed only under its English title: THE TWO OF US.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Berri, who went on to be far more artistically influential & adventurous as producer than as director, was the epitome of just the sort of ‘Quality’ French Cinema filmmaker New Wavers like Godard & Truffaut railed against in Les Cahiers du Cinema. (See his officially sanctioned/defanged version of GERMINAL/’93 for confirmation.) Yet, so well-liked & respected he became President of the Cinémathèque Française.

DOUBLE-BILL: Louis Malle made a tragic masterpiece with not dissimilar story elements in AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS/’87.

MOONLIGHT MURDER (1936)

This neat little murder mystery, a better than average programmer, especially for M-G-M where B-pics usually died of neglect, has Chester Morris (in his last pic under contract there) as a police detective investigating a baffling on-stage death at the Hollywood Bowl. Famed tenor Leo Carrillo, singing Manrico in Verdi's IL TROVATORE (the same opera M-G-M used for The Marx Bros. in A NIGHT AT THE OPERA/'35), expires on a high note. Whodunit? The fortune-telling Swami who predicted it; a lunatic composer; the alternate tenor; an over-possessive soprano or her dancer rival; maybe the harried conductor? More suspects than a 1-hour pic should be able to handle, especially when your first two reels are largely devoted to the opera production. All handled with aplomb by rising journeyman director Edwin L. Marin who keeps the story continuity clear; maintains a rattling pace and a pretty decent looking opera production; even works up a couple of striking trick camera effects. (Check out an out-of-control car maneuver as a prisoner escapes. Very cool.) The script lets things down in the last half reel, culprit and confession with hard-to-swallow squishy logic, but not enough to spoil the fun.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Morris is even better in his previous M-G-M pic, THREE GODFATHERS/’36 with underrated director Richard Boleslawski. It’s the same story made twice by John Ford; a lost 1919 silent, then a bit too gushy in 1948 TechniColor, but with a great tacked on third act. Best of all may be William Wyler’s Early Talkie beaut from 1929, HELL’S HEROES.

LES PLUS BELLES ESCROQUERIES DU MONDE / THE WORLD’S MOST BEAUTIFUL SWINDLERS (1964)

Exceptional, largely unknown Four-Part Omnibus pic serves up three winners, one toss-off and one gone missing.* The first two, from Hiromichi Horikawa in Tokyo and Ugo Gregoretti in Naples, have O’Henry-like twist endings as a young geisha thinks she’s taken advantage of a middle-aged gentleman after he dies back at his apartment and, over in Naples, a non-resident streetwalker marries a poor, elderly pensioner to gain a local work address. One of her clients, a shy law student thought up the scam, but it’s her possessive pimp who figures to collect on the legal trick. He just didn't think thru the ‘legal rights’ of a legit husband. Unexpectedly well-produced (the Naples segment, which wouldn’t shame De Sica, was shot by Tonino Dello Colli), neither outstays its welcome, something that can’t be said for Claude Chabrol’s silly short about a German Francophile who ‘buys’ the Eiffel Tower. Jean-Pierre Cassel & Catherine Deneuve play along (a favor to Chabrol?), but even at 15 minutes, this one-note fable is stretched pretty thin. (Hey, buy into this and I gotta bridge in Brooklyn that might interest youse.)  But then Jean-Luc Godard, back when he made movies instead of philosophy treatises, heads to Marrakesh with cinematographer Raoul Coutard, Charles Denner & Jean Seberg for a mesmerizing mini-masterpiece about a photo-journalist who meets a disturbingly wise political theorist on the street. Played out in witty non-linear style as Seberg nearly gets into a jam over counterfeit bills (initiating a ‘meet-cute’ with a police inspector), Godard’s control of the medium is so dazzling, easy & casual at doing hard things, it’s hard not to feel a loss at his latter-day navel gazing profundity.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *A title informs us that Roman Polanski ‘requested’ his segment be removed. Does it exist? You can see bits of it in the trailer included in the fine Olive Films DVD.

THE HALLELUJAH TRAIL (1965)

After Stanley Kramer scored on IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD/’63, everybody wanted to get in on overblown/overproduced RoadShow Comedy Packages. Premium-Priced Reserved Seating; Long Exclusive Runs; plus Overture, Intermission, Entr’acte & Exit Music for extra prestige (and to push the soundtrack album), why care that Epic Comedy was something of an oxymoron. How many classic comedies run over 90 minutes? Let alone 2½ to 3 hours? Three of these beasts showed up in ‘65: TRAIL; THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN THEIR FLYING MACHINES; and THE GREAT RACE. More adventure pic with comic accents, FLYING made the most dough. RACE, certainly the best of the lot, barely earned out after phenomenal cost overruns. And TRAIL? The Booby Prize. Heavy-handed & purposefully over-scaled, it's got comedy novices in nearly every position: director John Sturges, writer John Gay, even its All-Star cast - excepting third-billed Jim Hutton. Composer Elmer Bernstein also deserves a pass even though he reuses some of his own 1961 COMANCHEROS score. A faux-historical tale (ripe with ‘funny’ authoritative narration) about a 60 Wagon Booze Run to Denver, shadowed by alcohol thirsty Indians; temperance ladies; military escorts; Irish teamsters up for a strike; and investors in the caravan. The first act gets by on some handsome cross-country views, sheer momentum and flashes of Burt Lancaster’s big, beautiful teeth. But things hit a literal standstill after all parties battle it out in a blinding sandstorm. The waste alone would kill any comedy.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The poster advertises CINERAMA! Not quite so. The film's copy line, ‘How the West Was FUN!,' refers to last true CINERAMA feature shot in the tricky interlocked 3-camera system (a 2.89:1 frame ratio) and since retired. TRAIL used Ultra-Panavision 70, which gave it’s 65mm negative a slight anamorphic squeeze to resolve on screen to a 2.76:1 frame ratio. (The missing 5mm? Reserved for 6-track stereo.) Confusing, no? Anyway, films like this (and later 2001), were often shown in those specially designed CINERAMA Theaters on slightly curved screens for total visual immersion. RoadShow CINERAMA; the IMAX of the ‘Sixties.

COME TO THE SABLE (1949)

Loretta Young and Celeste Holm (recently Oscar’d as Best & Supporting Actress, and they’d get nominations in those categories here too) are meant to be irresistible as French Nuns come to New England to fulfill a wartime promise to build a Children’s Hospital. (Presented in the first shot as a sort of female version of The Three Two Wise Men.) Determined and conniving, they wheedle new-fashioned ‘indulgences’ from the faithful in a series of light comic set pieces to gain property, services & donations before their land option runs out. A big success at the time, and still much liked, unblinkered types may find it more insufferable than inspiring; aiming low, it scores in creepy sentimentality. Slackly produced as a prestige item (note how the brassy 20th/Fox opening fanfare goes missing for religioso music), it cozies up to Leo McCarey’s GOING MY WAY/’44 and especially BELLS OF ST. MARY’S/’45 (habit-wearing Nuns playing sports & driving stick shifts; a tough old codger shamed into donating land; ‘Pop’ song as plot device), but with director Henry Koster showing little of McCarey’s inexplicable ability to get away with schmaltz, coincidence & pious sentimentality.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: As mentioned above, try BELLS OF ST. MARY’S, the superior sequel to the generally (if mistakenly) preferred GOING MY WAY/’44.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: There’s a pretty satisfying trick ending here. But for some reason, the script gives it away a couple of reels before the end.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: A devout Catholic in spite of her secret out-of-wedlock child with Clark Gable (just like the movies, she took a break from Hollywood to come back months later with a new ‘adopted’ daughter everyone knew was hers), Loretta Young took her Catholic leadership role very seriously. A hypocritical scold, she insisted on the purest of sets, even keeping a ‘swearing jar’ to collect 50¢ per cuss word from cast & crew. So, the story goes . . . Ethel Merman & Celeste Holm, pals from when Holm’s BLOOMER GIRL and Merman’s ANNIE GET YOUR GUN were playing on Broadway, met up on the set when Ethel was in L.A. 

MERMAN: Celeste, what’s the ‘tipping jar’ for? 

HOLM: Oh, it’s Loretta’s thing. Not a 'tipping jar,' it's a 'swear jar.' Loretta takes the money to the Church.

MERMAN: (waving, then stuffing a Fiver in the jar; loudly) Hey, Loretta! Here’s five bucks . . . go fuck yourself.

WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD (1932)

With a reborn STAR IS BORN out, here’s a look at the original iteration, a sort of proto-STAR IS BORN with Constance Bennett as the fast-rising star (discovered while waitressing at Hollywood’s Brown Derby restaurant) and the role of fast-fading alcoholic/ romantic partner split in two for Lowell Sherman, superb as her doomed mentor/director, and Neil Hamilton, given little to do as a polo playing millionaire/lover who resents coming second to her career. Dividing this role makes everything less melodramatic, but also leaves less at stake. Conceptually, there’s something smart in having Bennett’s fall come out of public gossip on decent behavior toward a desperate friend. And the suicide itself is a remarkable bit of film legerdemain. (Apparently the work of montage whiz Slavko Vorkapich.) Technically, the whole film remains wonderfully alive, a first pairing for still new R.K.O. Production Head David O. Selznick & director George Cukor, fresh from Paramount. And Cukor comes thru, supported by Charles Rosher's cinematography, with his first film to feel freed from the stage floor. Bennett, usually glamorous & artificial, is very good here, but it’s Sherman’s pic. Funny, in a saturnine manner for the first half, he’s even more powerful in decline. And heartbreaking as he confesses to Bennett that there’s nothing left to save. Meanwhile, out in the real world, alcoholism leading him in two years to a premature death from pneumonia at 46. The film, even in its failings, is real deal Hollywood.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The story, largely from top Hearst news reporter Adela Rogers St. John, still has people guessing who it’s based on. So much drunk talent in Hollywood! Was it Mary Pickford director Marshall Neilan, just fired from her last film, SECRETS? Or John McCormick, producer/husband of hoydenesque silent star Colleen Moore. She’s the one who’d answer the phone ‘This is Mrs. John McCormick,’ giving A STAR IS BORN it’s famous last line. Ironically, McCormick's last credit, FOOTLIGHTS AND FOOLS/’29, co-starred Moore with a young Fredric March who would play the McCormick inspired fading star in 1937's A STAR IS BORN. And, of course, there’s Lowell Sherman himself . . . or his equally alcoholic brother-in-law John Barrymore to figure in. (Barrymore’s great friend, and eventual biographer, Gene Fowler co-wrote the screenplay.) Even this film’s blandly handsome romantic lead, Neil Hamilton, nearly drank himself out of a career long before finding new popularity in the ‘60s as Commissioner Gordon in the campy BATMAN tv series.

DOUBLE-BILL: Never been much of a fan of A STAR IS BORN 1937, but Cukor’s 1954 remake with Judy Garland, James Mason and those Arlen/Gershwin songs is, in spite of obvious flaws, a legit legend for all sorts of reasons.

DANCING SWEETIES (1930)

As long as it sticks to the Dance Hall, this Early Talkie programmer from Warners is a nifty Depression-Era slice-of-life, with journeyman director Ray Enright unexpectedly limber on the dance floor as couples compete for trophy cups. Back in the real world, the drama is warmed up tripe as Grant Withers (young, tall & handsome back then) and accidental bride Sue Carol (too cutie-pie sweet to sustain a career) find married life a challenge.* But that’s alright, since action on the parquet is the point here. And check out those opening credits with a series of hot-steppers doing their stuff between ‘Wipe Edits’ to bring on the next couple. In static shots from the waist down, it’s a fabulous unknown clip. Just part of the real Depression atmosphere in here, nicely caught by cinematographer Robert Kurrle, who belies Early Talkie stiffness with fluid camera moves. (Loaded with excellent credits, Kurrle is barely known having died in 1932, only 42.)

DOUBLE-BILL: Sydney Pollack’s Depression-Era Dance Marathon pic, THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY/’70, now looks overstated & effortful (typical Pollack faults), but has its champions. OR: *Next year’s BAD GIRL/’31, an Oscar-winner for director Frank Borzage, takes the struggles of early married life more seriously. A subject he’d previously done as light comedy in THE FIRST YEAR/’26.

SCREWY THOUGTH OF THE DAY: The film feels like a Two-Reeler that grew to Six which is just how the first All-Talkie pic, LIGHTS OF NEW YORK/’28, came about.

BRONENOSETS POTEMKIN / BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925)

Once ubiquitous in any self-respecting Film-101 class, the Sergei Eisenstein classic has lost a lot of cachet. But two generations on from Top Rank in the ‘Sight & Sound’ poll, perhaps now’s a good time for rediscovery. Especially with the superb 2007 restoration out on KINO, a roaring success that brings together excellent visual elements, the original Five Part structure, long censored materials and the superb score Edmund Meisel wrote (with input from Eisenstein) for the German release of ‘26, slightly rejiggered to synch with the original Moscow edit. What a pity the film is largely hauled out (if hauled out at all) as film-study assignment for its technique and/or politics. After all, it made its mark first & foremost as crowd-pleaser, often to illiterates. (‘Pre-literates’ might be the Stalinist word.) Structured less as a traditional narrative; more as a Visual Symphony in Five Movements (think Mahler 2, 3 or 8), the chapters move briskly & logically from PART ONE: Horrible Conditions at Sea to TWO: Insubordination & Mutiny; THREE: Martyr’s Legacy; FOUR: Cossack Revenge (with the Odessa Steps Massacre) and finally, FIVE: Brothers At Sea! Plus a coda to once again Raise the Red Flag!* The film hasn’t looked as convincing, as rabble-rousing, as easy to follow, as (dare one say it?) as fun for about two generations. Maybe never, since only now has the Meisel soundtrack been married to the original cut. Fit for Film-101 classes everywhere.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The new KINO edition offers recreated Russian Inter-titles (with optional English subtitles) or Inter-titles in English. The graphic look of the Russian alphabet should make it the obvious choice, if only some of the longer titles didn’t obliterate the English sub-titles, making a few all but unreadable.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *The DVD’s enclosed booklet proclaims that the stenciled coloring of the RED FLAG on the Potemkin hasn’t been seen on screen since 1925. Not so. Ann Arbor projectionist extraordinaire Peter Wilde was hand-coloring those frames directly onto his 16mm print back in the 1970s with a little Red Sharpie.

DOUBLE-BILL: POTEMKIN occurs during the proto-revolution of 1905. So too, Dimitri Shostakovich’s highly programmatic Symphony No. 11: ‘In the Year 1905.’ Once dissed as mere movie music posing as symphony, it’s not movie music at all, but a movie, a movie in sound. Quite a different thing. (Though that may explain why the ‘official’ 1975 Soviet restoration used Shostakovich music on its soundtrack, disastrously ‘stretching’ the image with double-printing to match sound to image.) For this Audio Double-Bill, try Stokowski’s spectacular 1958 audiophile account with the Houston Symphony Orchestra or a recent release from Boston under Andris Nelsons.

THE WHITE COCKATOO (1935)

Dopey fun. One of those Dark Old House Murder Mysteries starring the pretty (and pretty much forgotten) Jean Muir who’s waiting to meet a brother not seen in over twenty years. There’s a $2 million estate to split, but only if she can prove her identity. Then again, who will prove his identity? And why are so many guests at Hotel Navarre aware of her inheritance . . . and dying of the knowledge? Enter Ricardo Cortez, a new guest and a likely suspect in a couple of the murders. The complications are . . . er . . . complicated, but with the constant howling wind and creepy atmosphere (the design of the big set giving director Alan Crosland and lenser Tony Gaudio lots of visual opportunities), solving the mystery is less important than following shifting alliances & the secret motives & identities of some amusingly shifty characters.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Where Don Ameche smiled thru his roles, Cortez smirked. It should be irritating, but he’s so ineffectual, the effect is more harmless than menacing. Born Jacob Krantz, he’s in on the joke of a nice little career with a Rudolph Valentino inspired name: Ricardo Cortez. Ole! Even his brother Stanley (that’d be Stanley Krantz) took it up as Stanley Cortez, the great cinematographer of MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS/’42 and NIGHT OF THE HUNTER/’55.

SOME KIND OF HERO (1982)

Woefully unconvincing on every level, Richard Pryor tries on his distinct comic vibe in this largely serious story about a former Vietnam P.O.W. (grabbed by the enemy on Day One with his pants down; see poster) who comes home a default war hero only to see his life fall apart. Amateurville from script to direction, from supporting cast to production values (backlot Vietnam; blanket lighting; spacious P.O.W. cells for two). So while Pryor does his nervous comedy shtick, life spirals down with his backpay on hold from the army; a wife & child who desert him; a senile Mom falling behind on her nursing-home bills; and various attempts at robbery screwed up. Margo Kidder props him up for unknown reasons as a sympathetic hooker he can’t afford; and finally some last act action involving a ludicrous mob swap for a suitcase of negotiable bonds he’s grabbed by accident. (Almost worth seeing for Michael Pressman’s inept handling of the big fight.) How’d Pryor get sucked into this? He must have been stoned out of his mind.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: To see Pryor work a serious/social commentary drama (with a more darkly ironic than comic edge), try Paul Schrader’s BLUE COLLAR/’78.

THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE (1973)

Everyone’s at their best in this downbeat gem, especially Robert Mitchum, extraordinarily ordinary as a low-level Boston mob guy playing tipster to Richard Jordan’s cop in hopes of reducing an upcoming sentencing. Peter Yates directs without overdoing the usual Bean Town clichés & conventions, while real locations (exteriors & interiors) help to capture the gritty city, settings & characterizations of George Higgins’ crime novel. Paul Monash’s script lays out lines of action clear as a bell (a series of bank robberies; illegal gun sales; barkeep snitch working both sides of the law; a police sting), and offers great opportunities for the pitch perfect cast to make a mark without having to blow hot-and-cold showing off. (Compare to award-winning, heavily 'Baah-ston' accented pics from Scorsese, Eastwood & Affleck.) Here’s behavioral acting at its best, from the moment Mitchum orders a cup of coffee at a cafeteria no one puts a foot wrong. No one would dare. Painfully ignored on release, its current high rep fully deserved.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Jordan & Mitchum played for the same team next year as private detectives in Sydney Pollack’s THE YAKUZA/’74, as slick & polished as COYLE is down & dirty. (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/03/yakuza-1974.html)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Our Italian poster tries to sell this as an Actioner.  Hardly the case, but better than a Stateside poster that screams D.O.A.

WASHINGTON MASQUERADE (1932)

After winning an Oscar® on A FREE SOUL /’31, largely for his lawyer’s self-immolating guilt-ridden confession at the end, Lionel Barrymore repeats the stunt in lamentable fashion here. John Meehan’s script, no doubt, reverse-engineered from that rehash, works its way to the beginning with enough talk for three pics. Again, Lionel’s a widowed lawyer with a clinging daughter (this time a saccharine thing played by debuting non-starter Diane Sinclair) who switches careers to play Populist politics in the U.S. Senate. A babe-in-the-woods on the Washington circuit, he takes his cues from ultra-connected society swell Karen Morley as guide, consort & then younger wife, unaware he’s being played for a sucker. Meantime, she’s getting big money bribes and cover for a longstanding affair with Nils Aster. But it all starts to come apart when she overplays her hand, pushing Barrymore to quit his office and run legal errands for corrupt power manipulators. Fun to see such a Populist angle at conservative M-G-M, but the weak, unorganized screenplay & Charles Brabin’s laissez-faire megging only encourages Barrymore to overcompensate with tics & mannerisms, constantly fiddling with his lanky hair, pulling on his face as if it were taffy, his whole body a semaphore signal. A wasted opportunity on the only romantic lead M-G-M ever gave him.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Try WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND/’32 with Lee Tracy as a newbie Congressman trying to do the right thing in an utterly corrupt D.C.

BLANCHE (1971)

Bewitchingly strange. A Medieval courtly tragedy from sui generis director Walerian Borowczyk who got his start in Polish animation before tackling live-action eroticism in his adopted France. This film, apparently something of an outlier in his work, has a tone & style that blends the Robert Bresson of LANCELOT DU LAC/’74; stagy period work of centenarian Portugese master Manoel de Olivera and Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam. None particular favorites here*, yet somehow magically brought together in a fable about an elderly Master of a country castle (the great eccentric Michel Simon) and his beautiful young wife (Ligia Branice, occasional actress & wife of director Borowczyk) who attracts the attention of her handsome, grown Stepson; a vain visiting King; and the King’s loyal Page. It’s a recipe for disaster, especially when the King roams about at night wearing his Page’s cloak. Covering for his King, the Page puts himself in mortal danger. Has he debauched the Master’s young bride? Was she willing? Can honor be avenged by a Stepson who may be equally culpable? You don’t expect such a tightly wound, suspenseful plot in what is basically an eccentric art pic. But what a charge it brings to what elsewise would be award bait at some International Film Fest. The film takes a couple of reels to cast its spell, only improving as it moves along unexpectedly comic paths to a series of tragic denouements. Fascinating. Though its hard to imagine Borowczyk’s other films matching this even if you could find them.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Referring to late Bresson, his early work very much ‘favorites’ here.

CAREFREE (1938)

After a year’s break for separate assignments, Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers got ‘together again’ (see poster) for this not-quite musical, more Screwball Comedy with songs. Far less stylized than earlier entries (real exteriors/no Big White Set), this psychiatric farce has Dr. Astaire hypnotize commitment-phobic Rogers into marrying Ralph Bellamy just as she's falling for Fred. And vice versa though he won’t admit it. (Rogers falling first yet another formula reversal.) The comedy is plenty goofy, if not much fun, but the sparse numbers are terrific. Ginger gets a rare vocal solo in ‘The Yam’ before Fred joins the new dance sensation. (Again see poster. The dance short lived, but the number really swings!) Rogers in peak dancing form here (what line!); as is Fred in a nifty novelty golf number.* So too Irving Berlin with the inevitable hit song ‘Change Partners.’ (‘Must you dance; every dance; with the same fortunate man.’ No doubt sweating blood to find the perfect word in ‘fortunate.’) But with Ginger now RKO’s biggest draw, the series pretty much stopped when this one only broke even. Next year’s bio-pic, THE STORY OF VERNON AND IRENE CASTLE, a one-off period piece; and their somewhat accidental reunion for M-G-M’s THE BARKLEYS OF BROADWAY/’49, something of a curate’s egg. (This is a second-look Write-Up; now with poster. See below)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Katharine Hepburn pulls a similar stunt in PAT AND MIKE/’52, like Fred hitting a series of teed up golf balls to rhythmic perfection.

DOUBLE-BILL: For a better idea of how Fred & Ginger might have kept the series going, note the working-class set-up of FOLLOW THE FLEET/’36 slipped between the more typical ‘swells’ & professional entertainers they play in TOP HAT/’35 and SWING TIME/’36.

THE VAMPIRE'S GHOST (1945)

Screenwriting debut for the legendary Leigh Brackett, right before THE BIG SLEEP/’46 and various classic Howard Hawks projects before ending her career with an early draft of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK/’80. It’s a modest Voodoo meets The Undead story for Republic Pictures, strongly influenced by Val Lewton's poetic horror series @ RKO (CAT PEOPLE/’42; I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE/’43), but kept from hitting its potential by a tiny budget & unimaginative direction by Western specialist Lesley Selander. Atmosphere is sorely lacking (especially in some spic-n-span interiors), but it’s still a pretty fair watch. Character actor John Abbott, normally around to add Euro-flavor as town mayor, valet or forger, is not only UNDEAD, he’s also UNHAPPY! Stuck in an African port town and starting to look suspicious to the Natives after a series of blood-draining local murders. Hiding his true identity, he joins trader Charles Gordon on a hunt to find the responsible party (even though he’s the responsible party!), and winds up falling for the man’s fiancé (Peggy Stewart) who may just be the woman to spend eternal undead time with. No actual blood sucking, but much Native tom-tom drum-beating to pass the latest news from village to village. So specific, they must be using Western Union logs. With a fresher angle than most of these things, and lasting less than an hour, Brackett mavens won’t want to miss it.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Abbott must be the most sympathetic bloodsucker before Anne Rice’s INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE in ‘94.

DOUBLE-BILL: Can’t go far wrong with those Val Lawton titles, especially the one’s directed by Jacques Tourneur like CAT PEOPLE and ZOMBIE (see above).

BROADWAY HOSTESS (1930)

There’s no hostess in BROADWAY HOSTESS, a wan programmer that served as a last shot at leading lady status for Wini (Winifred) Shaw as a contest-winner who comes to New York to try her luck as a ‘torch singer.’ Glib publicist Lyle Talbot picks her up as manager, but keeps the relationship strictly platonic as he tries to break into more fashionable society wooing rich, glamorous Genevieve Tobin. Sounds pretty standard. But instead of wounded egos, phony rich types & finding happiness by ‘sticking-to-your-own-kind,’ all the usual tropes are tossed out the window. In this backstager, none of the characters end up with whom you expect, while happy mismatched endings abound (except for one trigger-happy ne’er-do-well trust fund swell). Why even comic relief man Allen Jenkins, a lowlife mugg gone goofy for Spring Byington’s rich Park Avenue ditz, gets what he wants. A fun idea. If only script & execution were up to snuff. Shaw, briefly on B’way in Rodgers & Hart’s SIMPLE SIMON (singing ‘Ten Cents A Dance’), tries hard for that whiskey-tinged Helen Morgan sound, but she flutters & falls off the note, and her acting's too eager to please. Newbie megger Frank McDonald brings nothing special though dance director Bobby Connolly (with loads of B’way credits) amuses with some fancy graphics & twenty girls swimming in a champagne glass. There’s also one really good song, ‘Let It Be Me’ (see poster), charmingly played & sung by Phil Regan as Shaw’s pining piano man. You might well skip everything else other than the nifty trailer which emphasizes all those flip-flopping story tropes.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Claudette Colbert going thru mountains of misery & crises in TORCH SINGER/’33 before reuniting with her lost child & man. (See below)

ROME ADVENTURE (1962)

Last of four consecutive Troy Donahue young love pics from producer/ director/writer Delmar Daves*, plainly running out of steam & ideas, goes on vacation in sunny Italy, as narrative yields to travelogue. Rome & Italy never looked so clean & uncrowded! Handsomely shot (though no longer in CinemaScope) by Charles Lawton, it hangs on a thread of a story. No coming-of-age sex? No out-of-wedlock pregnancy? Don’t blame Troy, willing, if more worried about his softening chin line. No, it’s movie newbie Suzanne Pleshette, looking for love & freedom in Italy after quitting a stuffy librarian job, she checks out two possibilities on the ship over: slick, older romancer Rossano Brazzi and tall, socially constipated student Hampton Fancher. Then finds dreamy Troy at her pensione, on the rebound from worldly sophisticate Angie Dickinson. Can Troy toe the line between second & third base to win Pleshette? Compared to the three earlier pics, that’s as far as this one goes.

DOUBLE-BILL/ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Also working all four pics, composer Max Steiner, who never found a Pop equivalent to match the Top-of-the-Charts Love Theme from A SUMMER PLACE/’59, first in the series.

AMERICAN GANGSTER (2007)

In spite of technical facility, Ridley Scott tends to come up short in Storytelling 101. It’s long been his Achilles Heel. Get the narrative on track, and everything else is negotiable. So it’s a kick (and a relief) to see Scott, working off a Steven Zaillian script, consistently hit his story marks in this fact-inspired late ’60s-mid-‘70s tale of Denzel Washington’s cool, calm, strikingly vicious Harlem-based drug lord who uses military connections in Vietnam to cut out the middleman and score with the purest/best-priced heroin on the street. Tracking him down is Russell Crowe’s ultra-honest, iconoclastic cop, given his own Fed-backed unit to work around the systematic corruption of regular NYPD Narcos like Josh Brolin. In spite of some fussy presentation & an over-curated feel to the period detail, the story practically tells itself. And what a difference that makes. Even if it’s like Sidney Lumet for Dummies!* With nods toward Coppola’s THE GODFATHER (scores settled via visual fugue as church services play pedal point; and Michael Mann’s HEAT (a long delayed mano a mano confrontation over coffee). But you’ll buy it, something that can’t be said for much late Ridley Scott.

DOUBLE-BILL: *The Lumet influence mainly from SERPICO/’73 and PRINCE OF THE CITY/’81.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Re-reviewed (after about a decade), this time off the shorter Theatrical Cut, which turns out to make a better impression than the Extended Director’s Cut.

THE FAMOUS FERGUSON CASE (1932)

Flavorsome Warners programmer, a cautionary Yellow Journalism fable that starts with a foreword (added late in the day as a sop to the press?) so we’ll know there’s good and bad among the ink-stained wretches of the world. Here, the main event is the murder of an important man in an unimportant town. Tom Brown, the sweet kid who runs the local rag (circulation 2117) with his best girl, has the first scoop of his young career. But come the dawn, and every two-bit big city reporter shows up. He knows all their bylines, heroes with jobs he’s dreamed of landing someday. But soon, they show their feet of clay, churning out gossip instead of news, drinking, gambling, forcing action on officials to keep a good thing going. Anything for circulation numbers . . . and a bonus. Joan Blondell’s one of them, but a straight shooter who’s been thru the ringer and tries to set the kid straight, especially when she spots her slick ex hitting on the boy’s gal. And that murder that brought them all to town? Reduced to a trial-by-innuendo circus that threatens to subvert justice; and only sorted out when the scales fall from Brown’s eyes and he returns to honest investigative journalism practices. Director Lloyd Bacon doesn’t try to oversell a script loaded with illogical jumps and plot holes. Though an extended, noble speech on idealized newspaper ethics (another sop to the press to bookend the Foreword) is nearly enough to flatten the tart & tasty action elsewhere.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: As the wronged husband, look for Leon Ames, then going under the name Leon Waycoff. His last credit 54 years later in Francis Coppola’s PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED/’86.

DOUBLE-BILL: Warners did a more serious Scandal Sheet pic in FIVE STAR FINAL/’31, with Edward G. Robinson & Aline MacMahon under Mervyn LeRoy’s direction.

WILD RIVER (1960)

A hidden gem among Elia Kazan films, an elegiac beauty on the price of progress as 1930s New Deal programs, in the person of TVA agent Montgomery Clift, bring social & cultural change taming the ‘wild’ Tennessee River with dams for Hydro-Electric Power and flood control. Paul Osborn’s superb script, working largely thru indirection, boils the conflict down to a single land-owning holdout, a stubborn old woman (Jo Van Fleet) surrounded by her layabout family & the small black community who actually work the fields. Isolated on a small spit of land in the middle of the river, Clift can’t risk forcing her off and losing political support, but he also can’t alter the timetable of dams and rising waters. Racial tensions, Jim Crow customs, Southern manners (good & bad), and a beautifully observed hesitant romance between Lee Remick, a young widow with two kids, Clift, and the gentle suitor she’s never loved but promised to marry are perfectly integrated into the broader story. Yet it’s one of the few Kazan pics where nothing feels dramatically forced. With glorious cinematography by Ellsworth Fredericks (CinemaScope/Deluxe Color), its attractive tight grain slightly over-processed on DVD, bringing autumnal warmth to match the growing relationship between the two leads*, and a fine, spare score from Kenyon Hopkins. Kazan made many louder films, but none better.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Remick reportedly found Clift distant, even unresponsive on set. But oh, the results! What an extraordinary actor he was. The tone of voice he finds to tell her ‘No,’ the kindly man she likes will never become a man she loves. Or the open manner she must have searched and searched for, with Kazan, to initially halt Clift’s interest, and later, force a reaction. And so lovely on screen, she never got the credit she deserved.

DOUBLE-BILL: Osborn’s other script for Kazan, EAST OF EDEN/’55.

THE FATAL HOUR (1940)

For a year or two, not long before CHARLIE CHAN got demoted from 20th/Fox to Monogram Pictures, MR. WONG did Poverty Row service as a cut-rate substitute. With little more than a pair of eye-glasses and a dusky shade of Max Factor, Boris Karloff played the ‘Oriental’ crime solver five times, aided by dyspeptic Police Captain Grant Withers and relentlessly perky reporter Marjorie Reynolds. Generally sleepy affairs, this may be best of the lot, a pretty decent murder mystery about a jade smuggling racket, a murdered cop and a neat fake-out with a remote controlled radio to confuse the crime time-line. Hack megger William Nigh (with over 250 credits) and lenser Harry Neumann (with more than 350!) let a lot of scenes play out in tedious ‘master shots,’ but squeeze the budget to add the occasional reverse-angle or camera move. Keeping you awake just enough to see that Karloff forgot the ‘YellowFace’ makeup on an exposed neck in his first scene. No reshoots at Monogram!

DOUBLE-BILL: The sixth and final Wong (PHANTOM OF CHINATOWN/’40, not seen here) starred Keye Luke as a younger Wong. An Asian actor playing one of the iconic Asian Detectives. What an idea! Rarer still, an Asian actor with top-billing. Something not seen in Hollywood since the silent film heyday of Sessue Hayakawa. (Anna May Wong was top-billed in TOLL OF THE SEA/’22, but that one-off was made to demonstrate the new 2-Strip TechniColor process.)

LINK: This youtube link has better picture quality than most Public Domain DVDs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhOX2mucY6o And here’s a LINK to Keye Luke’s PHANTOM OF CHINATOWN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Npnj8aBcoyo

BLACK FURY (1935)

Physically impressive, often quite moving, Michael Curtiz* makes something of an American GERMINAL out of this Pennsylvania coal miners/labor trouble story, touching on many aspects of Emile Zola’s film-ready, novel. (Sadly, French film adaptations of it have missed the mark, ignoring the politics and skimping on Zola’s wild flights of desperation & violence.) Paul Muni oversells his act as the upstanding Slovak coalman, an ‘everyman’ type & natural leader who naively falls in with anti-union agitator J. Carroll Naish, using him to split the union in half, abrogating a weak contract which only makes a bad situation worse. Soon, ‘scabs’ come in and long time workers, now on strike, get evicted from the company town. Hoping to make things right, Muni takes hostage of the mines and threatens to blow it all up. And if too many punches are pulled toward the end, you can still see the greater tragedy behind the uplift. It’s fascinating to watch as Muni, physically perfect but burdening himself with a thick, impenetrable accent, trims his sails as the film progresses.* (Or do we just get used to his outsized scale?) Fine support from Karen Morley, his fiancée whose desertion makes Muni easy pickings for Naish’s phony radicalism; and from John Qualen as the union loyalist who can’t quit his old best pal. Exciting stuff in here.

DOUBLE-BILL: Scripter Abem Finkel was Warners’ left-leaning go-to guy for labor issues, bringing sentiments similar with those found here to the hookers of MARKED WOMAN/’37; prisoners in ROAD GANG/’36 and the heavy-industry machinists of BLACK LEGION/’37.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Between the heavy accent Muni put on and the heavy accent director Curtiz couldn’t take off, communication on the set must have been difficult in the extreme.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *This fits right in with an anecdote from Tony Randall who worked with Muni on his Tony Award winning Clarence Darrow character in B’way’s INHERIT THE WIND/‘56. Per Randall, Muni was so over-the-top in early rehearsal it was embarrassing. Then, day by day, he’d scale back, leaving only the essence, and a bit of fat for flavor. You can see the process going on in films he shot in continuity. It’s particularly noticeable in Howard Hawks' SCARFACE/’32.

YOU CAN'T GET AWAY WITH MURDER (1939)

While still supporting A-listers like Cagney, Davis, Robinson & Flynn at Warners, Humphrey Bogart also got to play lead in B-pics. Or did till this sub-par prison drama gave most of the juicy bits and screen time to third-billed Billy Halop, a Dead End Kid being groomed for bigger things. (Note poster.)  Bogie must have felt he was moving backwards with this moldy programmer where everyone but cinematographer Sol Polito is barely going thru the motions. Halop, smart-ass kid brother of Gale Page, hooks up with Bogart’s small time hood only to wind up in jail on a robbery charge. They ought to in for murder, but a gun ‘borrowed’ from Page’s fiancé has sent the sap up for the crime.* If Halop doesn’t fess up quick, it’s the electric chair for the innocent guy. Bogart’s a flat-out louse in this one, and Halop doesn’t exactly build rooting interest either, weighed down by character flaws and a voice & vocal inflections just like mid-‘50s Jerry Lewis. Jerry in looks & build, too.

DOUBLE-BILL: After CRIME SCHOOL/’38; KING OF THE UNDERWORLD/’39 and this, getting away from journeyman megger Lewis Seiler must have been a top priority for Bogart. But redemption would soon call thanks to director Raoul Walsh who co-starred him against George Raft in next year’s THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT and again in HIGH SIERRA/’41 when Raft turned it down.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Pretty flimsy evidence for a Capital Crime/Electric Chair verdict, no?

WHEN LADIES MEET (1933)

Ann Harding, Myrna Loy & Robert Montgomery prove infinitely preferable to Greer Garson, Joan Crawford & Robert Taylor in this early version of Rachel Crother’s B’way play, making it look more substantial than it probably is, certainly less arch & more entertaining than in the 1941 remake. Loy’s a successful ‘modern’ novelist with a feminist slant currently letting longtime pal Montgomery twist in the wind while pursuing a serious affair with her married publisher Frank Morgan. (Morgan in serious mode, and very good.) Hoping to shake things up, Montgomery crashes a country weekend at the home of ditzy society type Alice Brady, there with fey, but panting boyfriend Martin Burton (a delight who soon disappeared from film), as well as Loy & Morgan. Loy, the smart novelist & Harding, the wise publisher’s wife find an instant rapport, unaware of their connection to the same philandering man . . . for a while. Their second act discussion of love, marriage & fidelity, built from Harding’s response to Loy’s new book, and presumably straight from the stage script, still dramatically effective & thought-provoking. Harding simply exceptional. Getting there requires a bit of forced comedy, and the resolution isn’t quite worked out. But Crother’s work at times has the feel of good Philip Barry; not so far off THE ANIMAL KINGDOM, his own alternate take on the set up in HOLIDAY. (Harding & Loy co-starred in ANIMAL KINGDOM last year.*) But all the playing is expert. Brady plays very broadly (her Pre-Code double-entendres a hoot), just the lift needed under Harry Beaumont’s unobtrusive direction. A real find.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *It’s likely that the play was optioned by M-G-M with Norma Shearer in mind. But after husband/Production Head Irving Thalberg had a major heart attack, the couple took an extended break and Harding was brought in from R.K.O. A lucky break as Shearer was always at her worst playing noble while Harding, a natural Philip Barry actress, pulls Crother’s writing up a notch or two.

DOUBLE-BILL: The 1941 remake makes for a fascinating over-polished comparison, though you have to will yourself thru a painfully twee new opening designed to let Crawford & Taylor coo at each other.

THE MAN I KILLED / BROKEN LULLABY (1932)

Ernst Lubitsch stepped away from his witty Early Talkie operettas for this devastating, if uneven, post-WWI drama. Taken from a play by Maurice Rostand (son of Edmond, of CYRANO fame), the script is by Lubitsch regular Samson Raphaelson who also wrote the equally underestimated ANGEL/’37 in addition to SMILING LIEUTENANT; ONE HOUR WITH YOU; TROUBLE IN PARADISE; MERRY WIDOW; SHOP AROUND THE CORNER; HEAVEN CAN WAIT. Critically lauded/commercially scorned (hence the title change), it opens superbly with a Paris montage celebrating the one-year Armistice anniversary: November 11, 1919. Parades and services, cannon fire and recovery wards. Stunning stuff. But little comfort to Phillips Holmes, a soldier who can’t get past his guilt over the man he killed at war’s end. In a fit of contrition, he visits the man’s home in Germany where he’s spotted leaving flowers on the grave. Meeting the man’s family & fiancé, he loses his nerve to confess, and lets them assume what they will: they knew each other in Paris, they were good friends, they played violin together. Dramatically, this ongoing misunderstanding is the stuff of farce, played here for emotion & tears, though Lubitsch tucks in some charming comic asides while also getting an exceptionally powerful turn from Lionel Barrymore as the boy’s father, ashamed of his own early enthusiasm for the war. If only the two leads, Holmes & Nancy Carroll as the fiancé didn’t play their scenes as if doing penance for the witty touches elsewhere. Made before films were underscored, you can see Holmes come to life in a scene set in the dead boy’s bedroom, now preserved as a sort of shrine, where a constant ticking clock supplies the missing music cue. And what a difference it makes! Suddenly Holmes has screen presence. Not enough to make the film a Lubitsch/Raphaelson classic, just enough to make it unmissable.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Wonderfully shot by Victor Milner (the poor man was moving back & forth between Lubitsch & Cecil B. DeMille at the time), watch for a few zoom lens effects, rare at the time.

DOUBLE-BILL: François Ozon’s fine if uneven FRANTZ/’16, an elaboration of the same source material, changes POV halfway along as the fiancé leaves her German village for France. (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/09/frantz-2016.html)

MARSHALL (2017)

Paint-by-the-numbers Great Man bio-pic covers an early case in the career of future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. It’s old-fashioned in a bad way, and so formulaic you feel like you’ve spent the last two hours reading story development notes. Split blame between director Reginald Hudlin (normally a pleasingly loose comedy megger, this period piece is more ‘30s Re-enactment than living drama) and neophyte father & son scripters Michael & Jacob Koskoff who’ve seen too many Perry Mason episodes. The case, uncomfortably similar with TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, sends Marshall (Chadwick Boseman) off to Connecticut where a black handyman/chauffeur has been accused of raping his white employer’s lonely wife (Kate Hudson). Needing a local lawyer to front him in a state case, Marshall 'persuades' struggling, slightly sleazy Jewish attorney Sam Friedman (Josh Gad) to reluctantly join. After that, conventional plot twists & turns allowing our Mutt & Jeff Odd Couple lawyers to bond into LEGAL LETHAL WEAPON teammates, overwhelming what ought to be the main event. Things perk up in the Third Act (it is a courtroom drama: last minute witness, flipped testimony, summation, verdict), just not enough.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Marshall’s most famous case, arguing desegregation in Brown vs. Board of Education was played by Sidney Poitier in an overly thoughtful tv pic (SEPARATE BUT EQUAL/’91) and later by Laurence Fishburne when his one-man stage show (THURGOOD) was filmed, both written by George Stevens Jr.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Having played Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Marshall & Black Panther, Boseman plainly needs to get out of the icon biz before it traps him. Already, three of those four pics are stolen by co-stars, here Josh Gad.

BRIGHT LEAF (1950)

Interesting, if not entirely successful Gary Cooper pic brings the Industrial Revolution to turn-of-the-last-century Jim Crow South in the form of a newfangled cigarette rolling machine. For Coop, it’s personal revenge against the old-school tobacco barons who ran his dad out of business, and allows him to finally take possession of Patricia Neal, the rich daughter of Donald Crip’s snobby tobacco grower, while genteel hooker turned dignified investor Lauren Bacall waits for Coop to see who’s really on his side before success siphons all the humanity out of his soul, leaving nothing but resentment, greed & blind ambition. Technically strong (Henry Blanke; Michael Curtiz; Victor Young; Karl Freund/Producer; Director; Score; Camera), and with excellent support from Jack Carson & Donald Crisp, the film promises more than it delivers. A rare case of an M-G-M style project going awry @ Warners. Coop works hard at what must be the least sympathetic character of his career, but it’s more of a Spencer Tracy vehicle*; while Patricia Neal goes all Bette Davis with her rich, coddled, revenge-minded vixen.* Fun watching the rather conventional set-up (good ‘bad’ girl/bad ‘good girl/prodigal orphan son) start to fray halfway thru, but Ranald MacDougall’s script bites off more dramatic equivocation than it can chew. Still, definitely worth a look.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Specifically, Neal’s like Bette Davis in CABIN IN THE COTTON/’32. And why not since Neal made her rep on B’way in ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST, Lillian Hellman’s 1946 LITTLE FOXES prequel, where she played a younger version of Regina Hubbard, Bette Davis’s character in the 1941 film.

DOUBLE-BILL: *You can see Tracy take on this sort of thing, and at just about this time, in Elia Kazan’s All-Star M-G-M dud THE SEA OF GRASS/’47.

THE POWER (1968)

After producing & directing a pair of appealing Kid-Friendly fantasies (TIME MACHINE/’60; 7 FACES OF DR. LAO/’64*), George Pal hired Sci-Fi & effects specialist Byron Haskins to helm this more adult-oriented project. A B-Pic with A-List talent behind the camera (script John Gay; score Miklós Rózsa; lensing Ellsworth Fredericks), it’s perplexingly feeble; a jumble of contrivance & misdirection laid out in Movie-of-the-Week trimmings. George Hamilton stars as the head of a Pain Research Institute where astro-wannabees are tested for NASA-ready toughness. But the company board, a roundtable of fading film stars & tv regulars, has come across a threat in the form of a ‘telekinetic’ power within the group. But who holds The Power? One by one, the department heads mysteriously die; while Hamilton, suspected by the police, goes on the lam with Suzanne Pleshette to find the real culprit. With flat staging and risible ‘60s period touches (a hotel party scene especially embarrassing), its hard to see how this could have worked even if the story added up. And we haven’t even mentioned what passes for acting. (Hint: Yvonne De Carlo & Ken Murray share The Booby Prize.) Hard to believe, but two months after M-G-M sent this into theaters, they released Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, pretty much putting the kibosh on films like this.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *With Tony Randall in various ethnic makeups, DR. LAO has become a tough sell. But it’s a real charmer.