'THE CATERED AFFAIR'..........PADDY'S BRIDE IDEA......

The Catered Affair (1956)  Hollywood loved to mine comedy gold out of families haplessly planning a wedding.....and the families involved were either the upper-middle classes of "Father Of The Bride" (both the the 1950 and 1991 versions) or the one-percenters of "The Philadelphia Story" and its musical remake "High Society.".  Characters may have griped about the costs of the nuptials, but nobody doubted their ability to pay for it all.....

          Leave it to celebrated playwright-screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, the Bard of the working stiff, to take a painfully honest look at a lower middle class family aspiring to throw a wedding bash for their only daughter. For Chayefsky's  plain spoken Bronx folks  who live from tiny paycheck to tiny paycheck, their daughter's impending marriage pulls off the thin band-aid covering the  frustration built up from a lifetime of self-sacrifice.

          No one knew this territory better than Chayefsky, who one year earlier in 1955 captured everyone's hearts with "Marty", the film based on his TV play about a lonely Bronx butcher who at last finds love. The film made a star out of Ernest Borgnine and established Chayefsky as the premier chronicler of middle class strife.

          "The Catered Affair" was another Chayefsky TV play adapted into a movie.....by of all people, that witty sophisticate Gore Vidal. This time the story centered on people who could very well have been Marty's next door neighbors, Tom and Aggie Hurley (Borgnine and Bette Davis, doing the most affecting, skillful work of her entire career). After a lifetime of scraping dollars together, cab driver Tom finally has enough money to buy a New York cab medallion, thereby owning and operating his own taxi cab. But Tom's tough, long suffering, blunt talking wife demands a wedding party for their engaged daughter Jane (Debbie Reynolds).......the agony of having to deny Jane a college education due to their limited savings has weighed heavily on both of them for years.

           Jane and her fiance (an oddly miscast Rod Taylor, trying to appear less hunky by wearing glasses) want a simple quick ceremony followed by a honeymoon road trip to California. But Bette Davis, at her most formidable and yet most subdued, won't be denied, dreaming of gifting her daughter with a lifelong wedding memory she herself never experienced. Bognine bellows in frustration at the expected costs of the wedding party.....it will decimate his taxi-medallion fund, forever ending his long held dream of being his own boss.

             Dramatic, heart-rending clashes ensue, but don't despair.....there's ample comic relief provided by the  Hurleys' live-in boarder, Aggie's aging brother Jack (Barry Fitzgerald).  Fitzgerald's lovable old Irish boyo seems dropped into this movie directly from "The Quiet Man", but he's an always welcome sight and considerably lightens up the kitchen sink angst.

             Warning:  the acting in the final scenes of this film will put a grip on your heart like few movies of today are capable of. There's a brief moment between Borgnine and Davis that's stunning in its powerful simplicity. Bette Davis, after a lifetime of over-the-top performances, controls her work here with subtle perfection......and ends up with a more unforgettable character than any of her previous scenery-chewing dames.  Even Davis herself agreed it was her best work.

             BQ says seek this one out wherever you may find it.....we'll wrap up five wedding bouquets for "The Catered Affair" (*****), a FIND OF FINDS.  Consider this post an engraved invitation....you don't even have to RSVP.....

         

QUATERMASS...........HE BLINDED US WITH SCIENCE.....

           Professor Bernard Quatermass, Great Britain's most unlucky rocket scientist, was the creation of the brilliantly gifted TV-Film writer Nigel Kneale.  In Kneale's BBC teleplays and in three feature films, Prof. Quatermass literally reached for the stars.....envisioning a future of pioneering space exploration and planet colonization......
            Here's where his luck ran out......Quatermass's daring, uncompromising attempts to explore the universe invariably invited gruesome repulsively slimy aliens to invade the earth.  Even after barely saving us all from being eaten by huge pulsating intergalactic blobs, Quatermass remained undeterred in his singular vision. He couldn't wait to blast off the next rocket.......while we quaked at the idea of what his next space probe would return with.....

            Quatermass's feature film adventures got off to a rousing start with The Quatermass Xperiment (1955).( aka: The Creeping Unknown)  Brought over from the U.S. to play Quatermass was weathered Hollywood veteran Brian Donlevy, at the down-and-out stage of a long career. Nigel Kneale vociferously despised Donlevy's interpretation of Quatermass........but as much the BQ reveres Kneale, we always got a kick out of Donlevy's brusque, no-nonsense, short-tempered Quatermass.  Donlevy (whom Kneale claimed was drunk throughout filming) barks out his dialogue, suffers no fools, and storms around the film as if he's late for another appointment.  His Quatermass is such a single-minded visionary he treats every near-apocalyptic alien invasion as a minor setback in his quest for the stars and pursuit of scientific knowledge.

             The Prof's first manned rocket has crash landed back on earth missing two of the three astronauts he sent up. The poor surviving astronaut (the astounding Richard Wordsworth) staggers out of the rocket infected by an invisible alien entity that dissolved the other two guys, leaving nothing of them but empty spacesuits. Donlevy huffs and puffs about, but the film really becomes a showcase for a simultaneously heartbreaking and terrifying performance by Wordsworth.......playing an physically agonized human being losing his humanity as the alien inside him transforms him into a slithering, tentacled, God-only-knows-what. It's one of the greatest, epic pieces of acting in all of cinema and not to be missed......

            As we pointed out, you can't keep Donlevy's Quatermass down and he returns several years later in Quatermass 2 (1957) (aka: Enemy From Space).  The Big Q has even bigger plans....a proposed moon base colony. And this time around, the government's even given him some infrastructure.....a control bunker and a launching pad. (In the first film, Quatermass and his browbeaten staff don't appear to have offices or headquarters at all.....they travel around together bundled up in a mini-van.)

            But Quatermass's science has gone awry.....the faulty engineering of his latest starship renders it nothing but a rocket-propelled bomb. And to add grievous insult to injury, his grand moon base has been stolen and and constructed in the countryside by alien-zombie-fied humans. They're using the moon base's huge pressurized domes (actually a Shell Oil refinery) to feed and grow their alien masters in the aliens' true form.....giant, ammonia-breathing,, shuffling blobs, festively decorated with ribbons of tripe.....they look like what would happen to a Big Mac if you let it sit for a few days......

           Consider the irony: Quatermass, who does nothing but piss off the authorities he needs to fund his dreams of space exploration, gets told to hit the books and re-learn his science. The aliens, who first arrive as gaseous blobs hiding in tiny spaceships, get all the funding they need for their project by zombie-fying members of Parliment......they may be from outer space, but they sure know how to lobby for the big bucks.

           So "Quatermass 2" has it all for you......Big slimy blobs and alien zombie-humans in one jumbo explosive package. (Speaking of explosive....in another wonderful twist, Quatermass deploys his defective rocket bomb against the aliens' outer space HQ, thereby finding a use for his failed technology and deterring any future alien theft of his moonbase blueprints) Many favorite BQ moments throughout the film: when Quatermass pumps lethal oxygen into the domes where the blobs reside, the dutiful alien-zombies stuff the pipes with human beings to stop the flow......and when things really start to go south for the blobs and their minions, the zombies' pronouncements on the PA system become increasingly frenetic and panicked, like Sean Spicer at one of his press conferences. As in the first film, the frenzied string section of composer James Bernard's orchestra gives the proceedings an almost berserk energy.

           Ten years go by before Prof. Quatermass makes his next big screen appearance, in "Quatermass And The Pit (1967) (aka: Five Million Years To Earth)  No more Donlevy....the Prof is now played by stalwart Scotsman Andrew Keir and unlike Donlevy, he has Nigel Kneale's seal of approval and blessing. No longer the cranky, monomaniacal wonk, Keir's Quatermass is far more civilized, humanistic and quite professorial. The government ministers still hate him for his starry-eyed idealism about travelling to the stars......but Prof's no pushover though,  and he defiantly rails against their attempt to militarize and weaponize his future planetary colonies.

            Just as they saddle an outraged Quatermass with a tightass martinet Field Marshall (Julian Glover), startling discoveries pop up in a London underground station under construction.......... .....skeletons of mutated Neanderthals with enormous skulls and a Martian spaceship populated with the corpses of dwarf, insect-like creatures. Armed with Kneale's superb, breathlessly paced script, Quatermass untangles a slew of monstrous, stunning revelations about these creatures and their purpose on earth.  The whole thing's a near perfect mixture of wildly imaginative sci-fi, horror and suspense. Unilke the first two films, capped by Donlevy's pithy, ominous quips, this one ends with an exhausted, disheveled Quatermass trying to catch his breath while the credits roll.

           The BQ heartily recommends all three of the Prof's exploits with 4 twinkling Milky Way stars (****) and we wish Quatermass better luck and solid funding for the next rocket he sends up.....and someplace good to hide from whatever it brings down......
         

         

'WHERE THE SPIES ARE'....A BOGUS BOND FINDS BEIRUT OF ALL EVIL......

Where The Spies Are (1966)  was another chunk of cinematic flotsam that washed in on the tidal wave of James Bond imitations that engulfed the world in the mid 1960's  (For those of you not around in those days, not only were American and British filmmakers jumping on the Bondwagon, the Italians commenced to pour out these faux-Bonds faster than IHOP pancakes on all-you-can-eat day. )

           But given its very British pedigree (led by its star, the ultimate Brit, David Niven), we thought we'd give "Where The Spies Are" a closer look.........and strangely enough, found it entertaining in fits and spurts.

          Like all of its fellow spy movies, the film makes a valiant attempt at the pendulum swinging tone of the Bond films.......veering back and forth from self-mocking parody to death-dealing action sequences that we're suddenly supposed to take seriously.  People get shot, stabbed, blown up.....and then it's time for some snappy dialogue zingers. This worked well for these movies, for a while,,,,,but the sheer volume of them quickly exhausted the formula and tired out the audiences. (And years later, made them ripe for distanced parody in the Austin Powers trilogy)

          Much humor is mined from David Niven's reluctant uppercrust spy, Jason Love, a classic car-loving doctor recruited by MI6 to seek out an agent who's gone MIA in Beirut. (Coincidentally, the opening scenes mirror Niven's role, one year  later, in the misbegotten, loony-tune version of "Casino Royale", where he played a retired Sir James Bond, scoffing at MI6 gadgets like exploding pens)

           So it's off to scenic Beirut.....yes, you heard that description correctly. 60's spy spoofs frequently cavorted all over Middle East locations before the region descended into a war torn terrorist hell on earth. (If there's ever a revival of these movies, producers will have to settle for somewhere outside of Vegas to duplicate their exotic locales....)

            As expected, Niven cheekily quips his way through assassination attempts, torture bouts,and the trickery of the requisite femme fatale, a fashion model-spy played by Francoise Dorleac. (Tragically, Dorleac, Catherine Deneuve's older sister, would make only one more film, the spy caper "Billion Dollar Brain", covered in a previous BQ post. She died at age 25 in a car accident.)

             Watching a movie like this from a distance of fifty years or more, you have to take for granted its cavalier attitude toward death.  Characters in spy spoofs were instantly disposable, like pop-up opponents in shooter video games. Early on in the story, the Russian bad guys blow up a Beirut-bound plane, thinking Niven's on it. To its credit, the script has Niven briefly agonize over the 60 or so innocent souls who lost their lives as collateral damage......but that's extraordinarily rare moral complexity for any 1960's tongue-in-cheek wanne-be Bond movie.

             The unflappable Niven is always a breezy pleasure to watch and he's bolstered by a large supporting cast, most of whom had small roles in Bond films at one time or another.  As a prize specimen of its long lost genre, we'll spy with our little eye 3 stars (***) for "Where The Spies Are".....or we should say were......any spies working the Middle East today would need helmets and kevlar vests instead of radio-watches and decoder rings......
         

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF OUR LEAST FAVORITE THINGS.......

Rep. Devin Nunes  Is this idiot for real....or is he an escapee from a deleted scene in "Dr. Strangelove?"  It's dawned on everybody that you can't have a Trumpanzee in charge of congressional committee investigating Trump. As a spy, Nunes behaves like he's in "Casino Royale"....not the one with Daniel Craig.....the one with Woody Allen and Peter Sellers. This guy combines Austin Powers and Mini-Me in one hilarious package. We weep for the United States.....

The "Justice League" trailer  Oh joy.....more pissed off DC comics superheroes hurling each other around like CGI rag dolls. If it was a choice between watching this and red hot needles driven through our eyes.......we'd have to think it over.......

Taco Bell  Go away. Now. Forever. That includes your restaurants and ads......disappear off the face of the earth and allow real estate developers to use the land for something useful.....like Burger Kings or independent bookstores.......

Weather on Network newscasts..... When did Scott Pelly, David Muir and Lester Holt start working for the friggin' Weather Channel?  When did half the nightly news become about hailstorms and rain?  Yes, catastrophic storms that cause untold damage deserve coverage, but you guys now breathlessly report on rain like you never laid eyes on it before.  Why do you think the weather's so crazy these days?  How 'bout more climate change investigative stories to look into it?   The Trumpkins won't care....not until all of Disney World becomes the '20,000 Leagues Under The Sea' ride......

'BRIDGET JONES'S BABY'.......THE MIDDLE AGES IN ENGLAND.......

Bridget Jones's Baby (2016) This is something the BQ would normally wait for til it hit basic cable at 3 in the morning, right after a 'Law And Order:SVU marathon.

           But since we had a leftover free movie coupon from our local library combined with a soft spot for Renee Zellweger.....why not?

           We won't waste any time belaboring the previous two Bridget Jones movies, cause frankly, we barely remember anything about them. The popular consensus deems the first film a great rom-com and the second one a dreary, unfunny suck-fest. Okay, we'll take everyone's word for it. Here's all we remember:  Renee put on enough weight so she looked like a live version of a Mrs.Butterworth pancake syrup bottle and did one hell of a Brit accent for someone originally from Texas. Also, she fell down a lot and suffered through a barrage of humiliating incidents that would drive any normal human being to either suicide or five pints of Haagen Dazs..

             Good news: this third movie brings the funny back. As you wild and crazy internet kids say, we LOL'd frequently. Bridget's a TV news producer now, which affords her and her staff the opportunity to perpetrate numerous news segments gone embarrassingly awry......youtube fodder for those hungry for epic fails. And within the space of a few days, she falls into bed with repressed tightass love-of-her-life Mark Darcy (Colin Firth)......and also humps it up with a billionaire internet matchmaking guru Jack Qwant (Patrick Dempsey)  Rendered pregnant by one of these encounters, Bridget's forced to romantically juggle her two rival, potential  baby-daddies,..... much to the dry bemusement of her sarcastic Ob-Gyn...(the movie's MVP Emma Thompson, stealing her scenes and also punching up the script with who knows how many killer gag lines.)

           What struck us about the movie most:  holy mid-life crisis, everyone in this movie has aged way past the typical mid-20's to mid-30's expiration date for rom-coms. Why, they're all.....dare we say it......middle aged!  And the three leads are unashamedly unafraid to look their age.  As an autumnal baby boomer, we automatically warmed up to "Bridget Jones's Baby", but we doubt the movie's going to kick off a trend.......not here in the U.S. anyway, where Bridget's box-office tanked. The movie did find more favor in the U.K. and Europe, so who knows....maybe we'll see some foreign-produced romancers with actors who've been around the block a few times.  Maybe a remake of "Notting Hill" with Dame Judi Dench and Patrick Stewart......

             BQ never expected much from this film, so the amount of genuine laughs we extracted from it took us by surprise. Comfortable, familiar stuff, smoothly delivered (along with a baby) by a winning cast. 3 & 1/2 stars (*** 1/2) And riotous jokes at the expense of Hugh Grant, who doesn't even show up in this one......

         

'THE BEGINNING OR THE END'......"THIS ATOM BOMB IS DYNAMITE!"

The Beginning Or The End (1947)  In this post's headline, we couldn't resist paraphrasing what MGM mogul Sam Goldwyn supposedly said about the studio's patriotic, ambitious docu-drama on the making of the atomic bomb. There's loads of these mythic 'Goldwynisms' attributed to Sam, our personal favorite being...'a verbal agreement isn't worth the paper it's written on'. We'll leave the dedicated film historians among you to debate whether he actually made the A-bomb remark......

               If you take note of the year this film was made, then you'd know at once that it's going to be carefully crafted rah-rah, hooray-for-us propaganda......solemn, deadly serious, self-important, and deeply reverent and respectful in its depiction of all the real-life figures involved. By the time the final inspirational music swells up at the end.....MGM has taught you to learn to love the Bomb...and everyone who pitched in to think of it, fund it, make it and drop it.

             The movie goes right off the self-importance scale at the start (which we can't love enough)...with the entire cast glumly assembled at Redwood National Forest to bury a copy of the movie in a time capsule scheduled for opening in 500 years. The BQ tingles at the very thought of the Redwood park peppered with buried MGM movies........we only wish modern science could keep us alive until 2517....so we can watch park employees (no doubt hovering over the ground with jet backpacks) break open capsules holding copies of "The Green Slime", "Harum Scarum" and "Where The Boys Are"....

              Thankfully, MGM allows us to see the movie before it's interred deeper in the ground than Donald Trump's credibility.....

               FDR whistles in astonishment (and First Pet Fala gravely barks) when told of the Bomb's potential 2 billion dollar price tag. That blank check gets turned over to Gen.Leslie Groves (Brian Donlevy) and we're off to the atomic races with impressive montages of men and machinery building Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. (At one point, Donlevy buries his face in his hands, chuckling with grim irony over the millions he's spending. We doubt if the famously taciturn Groves ever did this, but it still stands as a strange, fun moment in the middle of all the deathly urgent bomb-making.)  All of these goings-on are narrated by Dr.Atomic himself, J. Robert Oppenheimer, as played by Hume Cronyn. Cronyn's Oppie appears as a calm, gentle-hearted soul here.....so nobody should hold their breath waiting for him to mutter "I am the Destroyer of Worlds" after the bomb goes off......

              In its spirit of American can-do optimism, the movie glosses over the tortuous trials and errors of the Los Alamos scientists......though it does stage its own greatly sanitized version of a true post-war incident in which a Chicago scientist fatally irradiated himself to stop an accidental nuclear chain reaction. The MGM guy here,a pacifistic  newlywed played by perennial boy-next-door Tom Drake, politely expires with a few beads of sweat on his forehead. (This incident gets a much more realistic take in 1989's "Fat Man and Little Boy",fully displaying John Cusack's agonizing radiation death throes...)

              Then it's off to that round trip to Hiroshima on the 'Enola Gay'.......and it's here that the film wisely drops all its somber pontificating, posturing and preaching and simply shows the world's first atomic warfare attack and its aftermath (or at least as much of it as MGM felt it could allow a l947 audience to stomach) 'Enola Gay' crew members gaze in stunned horror as the plane flies over the devastated, mostly vaporized Japanese city. Seventy years later, this sequence still maintains its dramatic power.

               The BQ's always been fascinated by atomic bomb history (and rest assured, we'll get to "Fat Man and Little Boy" in a future post)......so we're willing to forgive and overlook the traditional 1940's Hollywood schmaltz that heavily coats "The Beginning Or The End". Of course it justifies the bomb and its use on Japan......and but it's smart enough to know that civilization will have to make that choice inherent in the film's title.  Therefore we'll cautiously detonate 4 stars (****).......yes, the movie's a product of its time, but the core (not the meltdown kind) still resonates. Sam Goldwyn was right.....it's dynamite.

           

           

'THE FLIM-FLAM MAN'.....A FUNNIER VERSION, BEFORE IT ALL CAME TRUE...

The Flim-Flam Man (1967)   For your consideration, good visitor, we plucked out another 1967 gem approaching its 50th birthday.....

           First, because it reminded us of that wonderful, long ago time when movie studios produced lots and lots of medium budgeted movies each year......in as wide a variety of subject matter as possible. They weren't 180 million budgeted CGI behemoths designed to pound you into jelly with explosions and special effects. They didn't live or die based on their first Friday night box office receipts. They didn't attempt to establish a franchise series, threatening you with four or five more identical, monstrously awful sequels.

           The movies we speak of, modest in their budgets and ambitions, simply wanted to tell you a good enough story to make you want to spend a pleasant two hours watching it....

          And that's what we have in "The Flim-Flam Man", a breezy, rambunctious little rural comedy energized by George C.Scott's play-it-to-the-rafters work as the title character and Jerry Goldsmith's flavorful, slyly cornpone score....

          Scott is Mordecai Jones, a wily old codger who's spent a lifetime running elaborate scams on backwoods suckers in the deep South. He also usually ends up running for the nearest freight train, one step ahead of the county sheriff and the outraged rubes who've been finagled out of their cash. You can tell that Scott's having a grand time with this role, outfitted in ridiculous 'old guy' theatrical makeup  complete with bushy, flyaway eyebrows. And the film's best asset: its glorious line-up of character actors playing Scott's victims and foils......Harry Morgan, Albert Salmi, Slim Pickens, Strother Martin, Woodrow Parfrey,Jack Albertson and Alice Ghostly.

         Mordecai finds a new partner-protege in Curly Treadaway (Michael Sarrrazin) a young Army recruit gone AWOL after punching his damn Yankee drill sergeant.  To the old con man's delight, Curly has a gift for improvising scams himself,  But the boy proves ultimately unqualified for a criminal life.....he's afflicted with a streak of decency, a guilty conscience, and newly found love with the beautiful daughter( Sue Lyon, Kubrick's 'Lolita') of a family whose car he and Scott stole and destroyed. (This slapstick getaway sequence, directed by veteran stuntmaster Yakima Canutt, is the film's showstopper, with Scott and Sarrazin comically demolishing both the car and the small town they're racing to escape....we like that it doesn't exhaust you with massive destruction, the scene just wants to make you laugh.)

             That brings us to the second reason "The Flim-Flam Man" floated back into the BQ's memory......in its lengthy, witty sequences where the fast talking Mordecai bamboozles his  naive, willing victims into parting with their money. Funny stuff.....until we began to see it as a microcosm of what happened for real last year, to the entire country. Only instead of one or two townsfolk sucked in by a blustering, elderly con man, millions got taken for a ride.........

          .  The showpiece of the movie's  shakedowns was a marvelously complex 'lost wallet' deception perpetrated on a gullible farmer played to perfection by Slim Pickens. As we watched George C.Scott, with Sarrazin's help, work his snaky charm on Pickens, tempting him with a phony fat check found inside the bogus lost wallet........we couldn't help thinking of Pickens as the quintessential Trump voter, promised the moon and the stars, but left with nothing but the hot air expelled in all the false promises made. Though fifty years separates us from this movie,a gibbering con man is still a con man.....whether he sports sprouting eyebrows in a movie....or a glowing orange face in the White House.

            But politics aside, by all means enjoy "The Flim-Flam Man" for its basic, simple pleasures....George C.Scott's lovable rogue, the equally brilliant supporting cast chasing after him and Jerry Golsmith's twang 'n harmonica music as cake icing. We'll sneak in 4 stars (****) for the character who bills himself as the "Master of back stabbin', cork screwin' and dirty dealing".....come to think of it, that same phrase could apply today to a more recent con man............
     

         

'99 HOMES'.....ATTACK OF THE SHANNON-ATOR....

99 Homes (2014)  So glad we plucked this one out of the "I gotta get around to watching this someday" pile of DVDs we've been accumulating forever.....we wouldn't want to miss another riveting addition to the gallery of dangerous characters played by Michael Shannon.

          Shannon's a hoot in everything....he internalizes seething rage and then lets it radiate out of him. No current actor equals him this regard. He can turn on the barely controlled malice and practically make himself glow in the dark with it.... you view him anxiously, never sure what he's going to do next. Nominated several times, this guy has an Academy Award in his future.

         "99 Homes" a hellish, you-are-there tour through the housing market collapse and its collateral human damage, provides Shannon with another spectacular villain to portray.  As Rick Carver, a predatory Orlando real estate broker, he swoops down on the poor middle class souls who've defaulted on their mortgages. With the help of two cops and crew of handymen, Carver orchestrates and supervises the crushing humiliation of throwing families and their belongings out their houses and on to the street. The movie unflinchingly depicts these public foreclosures in every embarrassing detail.

           As Steve Carver, Shannon invokes far more fear and loathing than he ever did when he played General Zod in "Man Of Steel"  He doesn't have to waste time hurling superheroes into buildings here.....in this movie, he owns the buildings.   And he's an equal opportunity scumbag - Carver shafts the government worse than the homeowners whose lives he destroys, charging Fannie Mae to restock the homes with appliances he's already stolen.

            Such a perfect Devil should have a poor sucker to play Carver's Faust, and the movie finds him one in Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield, now looking and sounding like a grown-up after duly serving out his two film sentence as Spider-Man). Nash, a unemployed construction worker whom Carver foreclosed on, figuratively signs his name in blood and accepts contracting work from Carver.  Desperate for money and eager to reclaim his house, Nash ends up as Carver's foreclosing minion, conducting the same soul-crushing public shaming of defaulting homeowners that he himself endured. And that job from hell also includes being complicit  in Carver's government-bilking scams.

           Both compelling and infuriating, the film's like watching a series of horrible traffic accidents where you know who's at fault. Garfield does have the tougher role here, playing a fundamentally decent man whose moral compass has been thrown off course by his seduction into evil.  But it's Michael Shannon you never take your eyes off of........he's not just a bad guy, he 's a walking talking abyss of greed, driven only by money. (You could say we're all living in this movie now, having placed a Steve Carver in the White House....)

          After the docu-drama-like re-enactments of hapless people losing their homes, the movie loses some of its immediacy in its need to dramatically wrap up the Devil-Faust storyline between Carver and Nash. It's satisfactory for an audience, we suppose, but it smacks of contrived screenwriting 101 in its inevitability.

          But don't let that keep you from the film.....it's still a gripper from first minute to last and any movie that allows the Shannon-ator to wreak havoc is okey-doke with us. So the BQ will sign the settlement papers for "99 Homes" with 4 stars. (****)  We're sold.

         

'IN LIKE FLINT'....A SUPERSPY MEETS WOMEN WHO PERSIST....

In Like Flint (1967)   The BQ isn't really celebrating this movie's 50th anniversary.....truth is, it's a tedious thing to sit through, a way-too-campy, slack sequel to the sharper, funnier "Our Man Flint" which rode the crest of the imitation James Bond spy spoofs in 1966.

             Having first seen this as a young 'un, we didn't even get the joke in the film's title, a play on the phrase 'In like Flynn' which referred to legendary, horny swashbuckler Errol Flynn and his ability to skate past statutory rape charges. As for the movie itself.....well, if nothing else, its cartoonish, tongue-in-cheek antics inspired all three of Mike Myers 'Austin Powers' romps.....

            We turned our attention back to this negligible 60's bauble for its unique set of mastermind villains confronting James Coburn's super-guy Derek Flint........a triumvirate of high-powered, middle aged women executives, titans in their fields of publishing, fashion and other media. With an army of hot-babe minions, they've set up their HQ in the Virgin Islands under the guise of  the "Fabulous Face" spa. The women 'FF' clients have their hair dried and brains washed simultaneously by subliminal messaging pumped through their hair dryers. But the Gang Of Three running the show has even bigger fish to fry (or hair to dry).....replacing the President with an actor-imposter and dominating the world by nuclear arming a female-staffed space station orbiting the earth.

           Luckily for the male-dominated 1960's world order, we deploy master spy and all around Renaissance man Derek Flint, once again wittily played by James Coburn with a self-effacing wolfish grin, shake of his head and dismissive wave of his hand. The film pokes along for an hour until Flint finally infiltrates Fabulous Face to confront the Power Trio and their platoons of Playmates-Of-The-Month.

           Flint's astounded at the audacity of their plot ("An actor...in the White House?" he exclaims, not realizing how much funnier and prescient this line would become decades later) He counsels the women to simply sit back and wait for the world to inevitably fall into their hands.....but the Fabulous Facers are having none it. They're no longer content as the real powers behind the men......they demand full visibility as masters of the universe, nameplates and everything.  And they correctly perceive that hanging a nuclear sword over our heads will seal the deal....

          Derek Flint takes a long incredulous pause here, trying to take it all in.......before impatiently blurting, "Ladies.....forget it!"  Before the women barely have time to sputter their outrage, their entire operation is hijacked by their principal male co-conspirator, U.S. Army General Carter (Steve Ihnat), a dead-eyed martinet who brings along his own male army to overpower the ladies.

          Fear not, America. In true 1960's spy spoof fashion, the Fabulous Face-ettes launch "Operation Smooch", which consists of kissing General Carter's troops into a semi-sexual coma, then karate-chopping their misogynistic asses.......and that pretty much encapsulates sexual politics in mid-60's Hollwood moves....

          More lunatic goodness follows when the real U.S. President, liberated by Flint from his Fabulous Face holding cell, scolds the three Arch-Villainesses for daring to seize control of the world. ("Ladies....I hope you've learned your lesson..." he gently chides. Evidently this forgiving chief executive considers threatening the world with nuclear annihilation no worse than accumulating too many speeding tickets...)

            At that little moment, "In Like Flint" might have been ahead of its time.  After having their wrists slapped by the Prez, the formidable Fabulous Face trio merely break into knowing Mona Lisa smiles......one way or another, they're still going to rule the world.

             And somehow we doubt if Derek Flint will even care if they succeed, since he finishes the movie marooned in outer space with two nubile, female Russian cosmonauts.....continuing the battle of the sexes on both earth and the heavens above.  For that reason alone, the BQ will graciously add an extra star to a routine dopey pseudo-Bond caper, bumping it up to 2 stars (**)

           

BROWN PAPER PACKAGES TIED UP IN STRINGS.......AND A FEW MORE OF OUR LEAST FAVORITE THINGS....

Where the hell do all these Wal-Mart movies come from?    Stopped in to peruse Big W's video shelves.....who in God's name produced all these DVDS that neither we nor anyone else in the known civilized world ever heard of?  And we couldn't help but notice  more than few of them have big stars....which shoots down our theory that Wal-Mart employees produce these movies out in the parking lot during their breaks. For actors who crave steady work....more power to 'em.....starring in Direct-To-Wal-Mart movies might well have replaced summer stock and game shows as career picker-uppers.....

Who still thinks it's still a viable idea to make crappy movies out of 1970's TV shows that were never that good to begin with? Yes, we get it....the idea is create a hip re-invention that simultaneously lampoons the original material while updating it with state of the art raunchy gags and loads of CGI explosions.  How 'bout this for an idea......spend all that money and creative energy on an original idea instead of decorating the corpse of an old television show....Just sayin'........

Memo To Movie Studios - Re: Multi-Plex Trailers  If you force feed  us six trailers in a row that are essentially identical.....breaking news, idiots, we tend not to remember any of them, their titles or what the hell they were ever about. The only thing we remember about them is nudging whoever we came with and whispering, "....wait for Netflix...."

Memo To Publishers - Stop Referring To Every Thriller As 'The Next Gone Girl'  Oh my God....you mean that character was lying to us all along??  We haven't been that surprised since......since the last ten books we read......

Divine guidance for all producers, writers and directors of faith-based films.... Your local Barnes and Noble has a section that carries all sorts of manuals and guides on how to make films.....buy some, go home and crack them open. You need to understand the difference between communicating with a film audience as opposed to preaching to the Sunday morning congregants.  Hint: the film audience expects to stay awake. And stop casting the supporting roles with people who didn't get picked to bring the potato salad to the Church picnic.....

To the singing pig from "Sing":  Go away. Now. And forever....

To "President" Trump:   See memo above regarding the singing pig..... and as for all your poor minions who go out every day and twist their tongues into knots defending you......jeez, at least dress them up in those spiffy red jumpsuits..... like the Blofeld hench-people in the Bond films.

To Rachel Maddow: For once in your life, don't take twenty minutes to make your friggin' point....life is short....spit it out already, while we're all still young....

Whew.....the BQ feels much better now.....until we rant again.....

'RED PLANET MARS'......MARTIAN JESUS VS. THE COMMIES....THE WAR OF THE WORDS

Red Planet Mars (1952   Nothing floats the BQ's boat like exhuming the gloriously demented films of our baby boomer childhood........and this little nutty Mars Bar is one of our all time favorite guilty pleasures.

           It's l952....the Godless russkies have The Bomb and they're spreading over the world (and infiltrating the US.) like a metastasizing cancer. Hollywood movies take up arms with the premise that faith and Christianity will have the same effect on communists as a bucket of water thrown on Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch Of The West.

          And coming to the rescue of us all is "Red Planet Mars", an explosively crazy concoction (even for the 1950's ) of science fiction, religion and anti-communism.......the movie never leaves earth but floats high above the atmosphere in its own self satisfied state of delirium....

          A husband and wife scientist team (Peter Graves, Andrea King) have established radio contact with Mars. They've accomplished this unprecedented feat with a 'hydrogen tube', technology left behind by a fleeing Nazi war criminal. (Herbert Berghof)......so revving up their phone booth to Mars requires enough incendiary hydrogen gas to refloat the Hindenburg or Rush Limbaugh.

            While Peter Graves is gung-ho boyish about dialing up the Martians, the wifey-poo has apocalyptic mood swings on the subject. Within a single line of dialogue, she goes from warm, loving helpmate to screaming out stuff like "you're sending us to oblivion!"  She's like a bipolar Doris Day.

           To everyone's surprise, the Martians finally pick up the phone to chat (in numeric code) and as in all science fiction, they're light years ahead of us in everything........extracting pure energy from the cosmos, feeding thousands from one acre of food and enjoying a life expectancy of 300 years....(Unlike NASA in the Matt Damon starred "The Martian", Graves and King only have to wait a few minutes to hear back from Mars....evidently they've got a better T-Mobile plan..Plus, they've got a 50 inch flat screen TV over their fireplace.....we can only surmise it was a 'welcome neighbor!' gift from the Martians,so advanced that they already have Best Buy and Amazon....)

            Now at this point in the movie, you really have to check your brains in a closet to continue watching. All this Martian Lifestyle good news(and the idea of any of it coming to earth) sends the Western world into a tizzy of a downward spiral.....industry collapses at the very thought of the uselessness of coal mining, oil drilling,  or farming. (If this happened today, we imagine the 300 year life-expectancy news would provoke Regis Philbin to demand immediate reinstatement as Kelly Ripa's co-host....)

          Meanwhile, those evil Russian commies rub their hands in glee......high up in the snowy Andes, decoratively parked underneath the Christ The Redeemer statue, the commies have installed the original Nazi Radio Guy, a champagne guzzling slime who's monitoring the U.S-Martian communications on behalf of his new employer Mother Russia......Herbert Berghof has a fine old hammy time with this role, performing it like he's doing a one-man dinner-theater 'Springtime For Hitler'

          You think this can't get any wackier? Ha! To the communists everlasting horror, the Martians start sending faith-based homilies lifted directly from the King James bible. Yes, boys and girls......just like on earth, God's on Mars too. This sends the Soviet populace into open revolt, digging up their treasured, long buried bibles and braving the withering machine gun fire of their Kremlin masters . (a Boris Badenov bunch led by the suave-voiced Marvin Miller, whom all us Ancient Mariners will remember as the guy who used to hand out the checks on "The Millionaire" TV show)  A Joseph McCarthy fever dream ensues, with the communists overthrown and replaced with a presumably benevolent church Patriarch.

          For those who may not have encountered this gem, we dare not go further into the plot....since it unveils a triple-whammy of surprises that forever enshrine 'Red Planet Mars' as a bonkers milestone in 1950's cinema.  It may be one of the oddest artifacts of its era, but BQ loves watching it anyway.....like viewing vintage footage of those early catastrophic attempts at airplanes. It doesn't fly, but oh what fun are the crashes......

          So we'll unashamedly lift our eyes skyward and pray for 3 stars (***) for "Red Planet Mars", an out-of-this-world, out-of-its-mind experience like no other......Mars, can you hear us now?

         

         

'HANDGUN'.......A COLT-HEARTED RAPIST AND HIS VICTIM.........

Handgun (1984)   Back in the Jurassic Age when the BQ toiled in various video emporiums, we came across thousands of obscure movies that through some convergence of miracles.....got made. And we dutifully watched them (our job, after all)........the hidden gems, the unforgivable sludge, the impossible-to-describe oddities (although we'll eventually describe them in this blog) and all the lurid, bullet-riddled, chainsawed,kung fu-d, blood-soaked genres (the stuff that so inspired Tarantino during his servitude among the racks of tapes and discs.)

            For one reason or another, some of these films stay permanently lodged in our heads and this is one of them........released in 1984, financed by a British company and produced, written and directed by Tony Garnett, a prominent, distinguished BBC producer.  And originally titled "Deep In The Heart", since these Brits went deep in the heart of Texas to make a docu-drama blending any number of  incendiary issues together......American's gun culture, the objectifying of  women and the horror of date rape. Loaded with compelling, memorable sequences and performances, the movie ultimately loses its way in the end, unsure of whether it's exploiting its subject matter or simply chronicling it.

            The shining star of this effort is actress Karen Young, playing Kathleen Sullivan, a lonely, painfully innocent Irish Catholic school teacher cast adrift in her position at a Dallas high school. As she pines for her loving home and family in Boston, she finds herself respectfully wooed by Larry (Clayton Day) a courtly lawyer and antique gun collector. Young instantly pierces your heart with her deer-in-the-headlights vulnerability.....which make what comes next even worse.

            We know early on that Clayton Day's smooth-talking, gentlemanly Larry is in reality a  misogynistic sleaze. We catch him ogling cheerleaders and slobbering along with his law firm buddies as they attend a nightclub's 'Foxy Boxing' night - with bra-less young women pounding each other with over-sized boxing gloves.  After tricking Kathleen into his apartment with the offer of wine and conversation, Larry drops his fake human mask and rapes her at gunpoint.....twice. Director Garnett fades to black on the actual rapes, but Karen Young's wrenching portrayal of a victim's agony,fear and humiliation is stunning to behold. There's nothing in the work of the last few Best Actress Academy Award winners that comes anywhere to close to this.....

            The established institutions Kathleen relies on offer her little comfort, solace or justice. The cops tell her that prosecuting Larry is strictly a he-said-she-said waste of time.  Her priest counsels her to forgive Larry and welcome his potential child into the world in case he's impregnated her....

            Her response? Full woman warrior mode.....Kathleen chops off her long hair, joins Larry's gun club, buying and learning to expertly wield a 357 Magnum......a served up cold dish of revenge seems likely.

           And here's where the movie went astray. Tony Garnett's British studio expected a soul-satisfying  Charles Bronson 'Death Wish' finale. But Garnett shot the movie with a documentarian's cold, distanced eye.....with a cast comprised almost entirely of Texan non-actors,  filmed as if they're all appearing on a six 'o clock local news channel story. Vacillating between bullet riddled closure or a more realistic take befitting the movie's tone,  Garnett settled for a limp half-measure......Larry, the Southwestern Cosby, suffers a fate more suitable for a romantic comedy villain than an odious date-rapist.

           "Handgun" wanders all over the cinematic map, bouncing around issues that haven't lost their hot button status.....it takes lurching 360 turns in its acting, from Karen Young's astounding work to the live-as-it-happened cinema verite observations of Dallas high schoolers, gun enthusiasts and knife-loving survivalists. A mixed bag.....but the BQ couldn't stop watching. For Karen Young's work alone, we'll take aim and fire off 3 stars..(*** ).....it's somethin' to see, alright, sure as shootin'.....

           

NETFLIX'S 'LOVE'.........THE UN-ROMCOM

Love (2016), producer-writer Judd Apatow's Netflix series perversely takes all the tropes of "Annie Hall" and reflects them back through a warped funhouse mirror, in which the once clever adorable hipster couple are now monstrously obnoxious. Their many flaws no longer come off as precious and endearing. Instead.....these people are just goddamned annoying and we practically revel in the cringe-inducing moments they inflict on each other. You won't hear Apatow's would-be sweethearts swap clever one liners........more often, they'll blurt out horribly wrong things to one another at the most inappropriate moments.......then go off to lick their wounds from the emotional pain.

            Apatow's been plowing this field in feature films for a while now, but in the two seasons of "Love", he boldly pushes human embarrassment and awkwardness to epic levels, daring you to not to turn away. Imagine 'La La Land' with no music and taking place in a more hellish version of Los Angeles, the L.A. we truly imagine, populated with supremely self-absorbed idiots all trying to break into the movies and TV......"Day Of The Locust", only minus the apocalyptic stampede.....

            Our lovebirds are Gus(Paul Rust) a painfully neurotic aspiring screenwriter reduced to tutoring a wickedly precocious child actress and Mickie (Gillian Jacobs) a self described 'sex and love' addict, an alcoholic who's left behind as many toxic relationships as empty liquor bottles. They shouldn't be anywhere near each other.....Jacobs exudes sexual danger and Rust looks like a comic book caricature of a hopeless nerd. Normally, you'd want to root for this relationship to work....the nerd-beauty combo never failed to warm our hearts in countless 80's and 90's romcoms.

            But that's not Judd Apatow's game here......he indulges wantonly in Mickey and Gus's dysfunctions and invites you to dislike them.....and he doesn't make it hard.  Mickey's a one woman self-destructive tornado and on the surface, Gus appears as a stammering, good-hearted soul.....but stay with him for more than a few episodes and you realize he's a weak-willed, self-pitying whiner with a deep streak of condescending arrogance that erupts at the worst possible moments for him.  No sweet-natured nerd.....he's more of a hip Uriah Heep.

            If you can stand to watch these two damaged souls flail around as they attempt a relationship, you can extract some creepy, uncomfortable laughs. Jacobs and Rust are completely fearless in bringing these blighted people to life......you feel simultaneous empathy and disgust  for Mickey as she suffers through her bad choices and you almost raise your fist in triumph when Gus (in one of the show's most brilliantly written scenes) implodes his own fledgling TV writing career.  You have to admire these actors' guts......no 'very special episodes' to make you cry here....only cringe. (Special mention to the episode where Gus takes Mickey on a disastrous date to his favorite place, L.A's famed "Magic Castle"......we briefly fell back in love with Mickey for her overall contempt of magicians' shtick....)

          "Love" sure isn't for everybody.... but the BQ suggests you dip your toe in a few episodes, to see if it's something you'd want to experience.  Just remember that these people will definitely not morph into Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan somewhere down the road......we'll hand out 2 & 1/2 hearts.(** 1/2).....in this show, you always hurt the one you love.....


         

'LI'L ABNER'.......THE COUNTRY'S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS......

Li'l Abner (1959) might best be viewed as if it were exhumed from a 58 year old time capsule.....so you don't have to politically correct yourself and wince at its unbridled, downright cheerful 1950's objectifying of women. (Daisy Mae, the voluptuous leading character is usually greeted with "And how is your well-proportioned little self doing today?" BQ doubts anyone today would try that on the current Wonder Woman)  Come on, it's simply too silly to take offense......and keep in mind, the men in this movie are largely depicted as clueless numbskulls.....equal opportunity.

          On the other hand, you can marvel at how contemporary "Lil Abner"  remains......since the entire movie functions, like the celebrated Al Capp comic strip it's based on, as a jabbing political satire......

         At the height of its popularity, Capp's nationally syndicated strip was the "Saturday Night Live" of its day, regularly poking gentle, but nevertheless pointed fun at politicians and celebrities. And Capp exercised  utter control over his large cast of characters (none of them could leave for movie careers), since they all sprung from his imagination and inkwell.  (In what you could consider an ironic twist of fate, Capp, the nation's dis-truster-in-chief of the Establishment, turned on the 60's counterculture and anti-Vietnam war movement, viciously lampooning them. )

          In the comic strip, Capp's population of primitively innocent,  deep-in-the-backwoods hillbillies invariably become targets of double-talking Washington DC bigwigs, which also served as the plot of the successful Broadway musical. Naturally the puffed up blowhards who so busily mismanage the government underestimate the wily resilience of the residents of Dogpatch, who aren't anywhere near as dumb as they behave....

        While most movie studios tinkered extensively with their adaptations of stage musicals (opening them up from the stylized proscenium arch to the real wide world), Paramount didn't have to go to such trouble......after all, the source material was a comic strip and the characters were broadly drawn cartoons. So "Li'l Abner" arrived on film exactly the way it looked on stage......with its cast prancing around massive,, brilliantly painted autumnal backwoods backdrops.  During some of the musical numbers, you can even spot the soundstage lights hanging over the edge of the blatantly artificial Dogpatch sky.....

        But the artifice fits the film perfectly......the seasoned cast, almost all of them brought over from the stage show, rip into their performances like it was opening night with all the critics in attendance.  Led by treasured comic tenor Stubby Kaye (who, as he did in 'Guys and Dolls', regularly, galvanizes the proceedings with showstopping numbers) , the actors have the time of their lives doing flesh-and-blood versions of outrageously funny cartoon characters.  It's an actor's dream come true.....in that.there's no limit to overdoing it. No wonder Jerry Lewis shows up for a brief cameo.....but he's still out-mugged by everybody else.

          Ah yes, the plot. The government scalawags, having decided that atomic bomb testing in Nevada might cause the Vegas crap tables to glow in the dark, decree that Dogpatch, the most 'useless, unnecessary place on earth' can best serve the country by being nuked to smithereens. Stubby Kaye and the Dogpatchers consider it an bestowed honor, still patriotically trusting our government (remember, this is pre-Vietnam, pre-Watergate)......and fervently launch into the show's signature song, "The Country's In The Very Best Of Hands"   Listen to the lyrics.....and you can hear a blistering indictment of political chicanery that could be sung today and ring true without a single word changed.

           Our sweetly naive hillbillies almost get swindled and duped by the evil, greedy General Bullmoose, who's like a template for a Trump cabinet appointee......he employs a chorus line of sycophants who routinely chant, "What's good for General Bullmoose...is good for the U.S.A.!" Bullmoose tempts Li'l Abner with the favors of his va-va-voom live-in secretary, Apassionata Von Climax, (Abner asks her, "Does that mean you get bed and board, ma'am? She replies, "Extremely.")

         And that brings us to what we first mentioned in this post....the women of "Li'l Abner", all of them created as inflated caricatures of the era's pin-up sex symbols. There's Stupefyin' Jones, who apparently is either robotic or created in a test tube, (we couldn't figure out which)  Moonbeam McSwine, a pig forever tucked under her arm, the previously mentioned Miss Von Climax and Li'l Abner's own beloved Daisy Mae, who's worried she' over the hill, still unmarried at age 18. You'll have to decide for yourself how much of this came from Al Capp's sardonic satire of the popular culture of the the day........we tried to forget that in his later years, Capp's reputation became severely tarnished by various women's accusations of Trumpian groping.

          Capp himself had nothing directly to do with the movie musical.....so BQ just enjoy it for what it is.....a cotton-candy colored bouncy confection in the best tradition of Broadway,  with dozens of funny actors singing catchy songs and hurling themselves into strenously brilliant dances (based on the choreography of Michael Kidd)    We'll give it four full jugs of the movie's muscle-building Yokumberry tonic. (****) Yeeee-hah......

         

'DARBY O'GILL AND THE LITTLE PEOPLE'......SEAN AND BEGORRAH! WE'D LIKE TO THANK ALL THE LITTLE PEOPLE WHO MADE THIS POSSIBLE......

Darby O'Gill And The Little People (1959)  In l952, director John Ford traveled to the Emerald Isle to make his quintessential Irish masterpiece "The Quiet Man", recruiting much of his supporting cast from the legendary Abbey players.  Seven years later, Walt Disney, our tour guide, curator and ringmaster of Americana fantasy, didn't go abroad to make his smilin'-Irish-eyes epic.  Uncle Walt simply imported Ireland to Burbank.  Fresh off the boat (or probably Pan Am plane) came his Irish-Scottish cast, including a thick-eyebrowed young boyo named Sean Connery. And for his sumptuous Irish landscapes, Disney relied on his genius special effects artist Peter Ellenshaw......meticulously painting on clear glass placed in front of the camera, Ellenshaw conjured up a warmly embracing Never Never Land Ireland fit for our dreams....or Disneyland.

            So today, let's raise a glass to all the players who made 'Darby'  our favorite childhood Blarney stone.....

            Uncle Walt  Yes, in the disillusionment of adulthood, we know Walt Disney was every bit as ruthless as the rest of the Hollywood moguls......empire-builders aren't teddy bears. But on TV's 'Wonderful World Of Disney' he was our genial Uncle Walt.....even when he rapaciously cross-marketed his theatrical movies to us. (And he went all out with 'Darby', devoting an entire episode to personally shmoozing with the movie's Leprechaun king....) Hilariously, former Disney CEO Michael Eisner once foolishly attempted this,  turning himself into an avuncular 'Uncle Michael'' on TV......he reminded us of one of those tutu-wearing crocodiles in "Fanstasia", in search of his next meal....

            Sean Connery  Only a few years away from Bond, but radiating magnetic charm. And much to his discomfort, forced to sing a lilting ditty with co-star Janet Munro. He's really not that bad a singer, having started his career as a chorus boy in 'South Pacific'......and even in 'Dr. No', he croons a few bars of calypso to Ursula Andress.....

            Janet Munro  Almost indescribably cute....a girl next door from across the Pond. And Disney wasted no time signing her up for more films like "Swiss Family Robinson". Tragically, she led a troubled young life, plagued by alcoholism and heart disease.....she passed at only 38.

           Peter Ellenshaw  One of Disney's premier wizards, accomplishing the startling combination shots of full sized actors along side  tiny leprechauns by filming them at different distances from each other.  These shots required such massive amounts of lighting, the production blew out the Burbank power grid.  And Ellenshaw, as already mentioned, functioned as the studio's in-house Rembrandt,creating the  glass matte artwork that turned Disney's back lot into storybook Ireland. For the epitome of Ellenshaw's art, BQ recommends "The Island At The Top Of The World".

           Albert Sharpe  Disney couldn't secure Barry Fitzgerald, his first choice for Darby O'Gill, the wily old estate gamekeeper who matches wits and wishes with the leprechaun King......so he brought musical comedy veteran Sharpe out of retirement.  And Sharpe couldn't have been more perfect (or more Irish) for the role.

           Jimmy O' Dea  The Dublin comedian recruited to play Sharpe's foil, King Brian of the Leprechauns.....he and Sharpe go at like they've been doing a vaudeville act for decades....together, they're a pure pot of gold......

          The Banshee  Disney films have had their share of unsettling moments (oops, there goes Bambi's mom...) but nothing quite scared the childhood crap out of us like the wailing, glowing wraith who comes swooping down on Darby and later does a 'gotcha!' pop up to collect Darby's injured daughter.  A lifetime later, we don't mind telling you.....the Banshee's still one scary creature....

          We understand that most people prefer to cozy up with "The Quiet Man" on March 17th....and that's a fine choice any day of the year. As for the BQ, we raise and toast 5 full pints to Sir Sean, Janet, Albert, Uncle Walt and all the other folks who gave us  "Darby O'Gill" (*****) A blazing green FIND OF FINDS.

'THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS'......SIT DOWN, YOU'RE ROCKIN' THE BABY......

The Light Between Oceans (2016)  We loathe spouting cliches, but this post comes to you directly from the Department Of "The-Book-Was-Better"......

           Yes, we fell hard for M.L.Stedman's 2012 novel, a brutally heartbreaking romance set somewhere off the western Australian coast, right after World War I. The operatic plot, which sounded like it came from a soap opera writer running a high fever, leveled a universe of woe upon the novel's star-crossed, storm-tossed couple......Tom Sherbourne, a stoic emotionally scarred war veteran and his adored bride Isabel.  When Isabel joins her husband in his isolated life as a lighthouse keeper on rocky, remote island, multiple tragedies afflict them, followed by an amazing Godsend. Or so Isabel believes. Still mourning the deaths of their two unborn children from miscarriages, the couple rescues an infant girl from a washed ashore rowboat whose only other occupant is a dead young man. Reluctantly, Tom gives in to Isabel's imploring that they keep the child and raise it as their own.

           This....as they say in stories like the one we just described.....does not bode well.

           Stedman's novel completely sucked us into this melodramatic stew and despite our best efforts to remain aloof and dismissive......damn, if we weren't aching and sniffling along with the characters. The baby girl, as you might have already figured out, belongs to a heartbroken widow from the town on the mainland......the stiff in the rowboat was her husband, the baby's father, a German harassed by the townsfolk for his country of origin.

          The 2016 film adaptation arrived staffed with top-of-the-line talent....with Tom and Isabel played by Michael Fassbinder and Alicia Vikander, two actors who excel  at conveying internalized torment. And,let's be honest here, they also make one pair of good lookin' movie stars, , which doesn't hurt if you're filming a weeper that requires a box of tissues next to the butter popcorn.  The film's screenwriter-director Derek Cianfrance certainly knew how to push emotional buttons....ask anyone who sat through "Blue Valentine", his corrosive examination of a crumbling marriage with Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. Want more prestige?  How about Rachel Weisz as the grief-stricken real mother of the castaway baby......award nominations seemed guaranteed.

            The book, despite its reputation as an overblown potboiler, became a steady best seller, engaging and gripping its readers. The movie, gorgeously photographed and acted with expected brilliance from its sterling cast, sank faster than a two ton anchor hitting sea bottom. As far as awards season went.....the movie never happened. So what did happen?

             Here's the BQ autopsy......director Cianfrance caught a bad case of  'scenery-itus', which for a movie director, is worse than the Shingles or an STD. This malady usually hits directors in the autumn of their careers (prime example, David Lean's "Ryan's Daughter").......storytelling takes a backseat to pretty pictures, the running time gets padded out with endless sunsets, high tides,forbidding mountains, windblown trees....yada yada yada. And liberally drenched, like chocolate sauce on a Sundae, with a film composer's lush, insistent score. (Alexandre Desplat does the honors here.)

             This story begs to yank tears, but Cianrfrance stages his actors' numerous suffering in the same brooding, moody low gear as his travelogue camera work. While we felt deeply for the book's characters, we could only casually observe their cinema versions.   The movie should have been unafraid to grab us by the throat slap us around a little,  shake us up. Instead, it settles for sitting around like an over-sized coffee table book of scenic full color National Geographic photographs.....waiting to be admired. By the time Cianfrance reaches the story's resolutions, he's wasted so much time pointing at rocks and surf, the wrap up feels hasty......especially in his rendering of the book's final, affecting epilogue.

            The BQ will unashamedly burst out in 4 full tears for M.L.Stedman's novel (****) but we can barely squeeze out 2 of them (**) for the movie.  Stick with the book.

'COMING THROUGH THE RYE'......HOLDEN ON TO TEEN ANGST.......

Coming Through The Rye (2015) not surprisingly, isn't the first movie in which a teen wanna-be Holden Caulfield, obsessed with "Catcher In The Rye" goes on a quest to meet the book's famously reclusive author, J.D.Salinger.

           The BQ barely remembers 2003's "Chasing Holden",  other than it starred young professional oddball DJ Qualls as Holden-boy.......who never does get to meet Salinger. Oh, and we vaguely remember the movie's cynical attempt to wring phony tears by having the girl who tags along with Qualls succumb to terminal illness. And that's about it, ......other than it was direct-to-video and dead on arrival, deservedly so.

           "Coming Through The Rye" is an infinitely better rendition  of this idea, based on writer-director James Steven Sadwith's own infatuation with 'Catcher In The Rye' and his own youthful, Quixote search for Salinger.

             Sadwith's fictional stand-in, Jamie Schwartz (Alex Wolff) is an ultra-sensitive, artistic 16 year old, regularly bullied and ridiculed  by his prep school classmates. In "Catcher In The Rye",
he sees a mirror of  his adolescent torment and in the book's Holden Caulfied, he sees a soulmate, a kindred spirit. Since theater's his passion (the bullies hurl foreign objects at him as he portrays Mercutio in 'Romeo and Juliet'), he writes a stage adaptation of  'Catcher' as a class project,  hoping to perform it with a girl he's crushing on.

             Thinking he needs Salinger's personal permission to stage the play, Jamie make futile attempts to contact the author's agents and publishers. The perpetual bullying finally hits the boy's breaking point......so he packs a bag, escapes the school and embarks on a quest for the elusive J.D.Salinger, with the help (and car) of  sweet local town girl Deedee (Stefania Owen) who's nursing her own unrequited crush on Jamie.

              We rolled our eyes a bit at the movie's opening moments,plagued with typical annoying stuff thrown in to impress film festival judges......the camera does a swooping tour through the prep school campus and the background action freezes up so Wolff can deliver faux-Woody Allen asides to the audience.  Fortunately, Sadwith comes to his senses and settles down into gimmick-free storytelling as Jamie and Deedee motor through New Hampshire (played scenically well by Virginia) in search of J.D.

             And in the film's best written and performed scenes,....our two leads stumble on to Salinger, ably brought to grumpy life by Chris Cooper. Cooper creates a Salinger we could easily believe real.....irascible, guarded, fiercely protective of not just his own privacy, but the literary privacy of his characters, as beloved to him as flesh-and-blood children. To the everlasting consternation of screenwriters, playwrights and movie producers, Cooper-Salinger declares his 'Catcher' creations will live their immortal lives only in the book.....unmolested by any other writer..

             It's to Chis Cooper's credit that in his first confrontation with Alex Wolff's Jamie, we found ourselves leaning on Salinger's side. (Wolff really turns up the whiny, self-pitying teen angst to borderline obnoxious levels.....we readily feel Cooper's impatience and exasperation with him...) But the script later regains our empathy for Jamie's inner turmoil.....which has everything to do with the story's being set in 1969. Of that, we'll say no more.....

            Next to Cooper, the movie's second MVP is Stefania  Owen,  who works luminous wonders with the role of the too-good-to-be-true girl next door. It could have been a thankless, dopey character.......but she breathes life into it and your heart aches for her as she tirelessly supports her distracted, clueless, potential boyfriend. (We know of very few young actresses who could accomplish one of those awkward sexual initiation scenes while appearing angelic and horny at the same time....)

             The BQ realizes we're never likely to see any stage or screen adaptation of "Catcher In The Rye" (Chris Cooper accurately voices Salinger's contemptuous disdain for all the would-be adapters who've come a-courtin'....).so we'll have to content ourselves with the occasional movie that circles around the subject like this one....we'll throw 3 stars (***) to this tale of 'Catcher'.......

         

         
       

'ADVISE & CONSENT'.......THERE OTTO BE A LAW.....

Advise & Consent (1962)   There's two ways you can add to your enjoyment of this sprawling U.S. Senate soap opera directed by Otto Preminger. If you're a student of history, you can make a game of identifying the real life politicos and incidents the movie references......Allen Drury, author of the bestselling novel it's based on, concocted his fictional senators and their scandals fresh from the headlines. (Aha! The horny young junior senator from Rhode Island looks a little Jack Kennedy-ish.....and he's appropriately played by Kennedy family in-law Peter Lawford.   Aha!  That slow drawling Southern-fried senator from South Carolina, a bullfrog, cornpone Jabba The Senator overplayed by Charles Laughton.....sounds like Strom Thurmond, doesn't he?)

          But if it's all ancient history to you, you can amuse yourself applying current events to the serpentine, Machiavellian plot twists unraveling in Preminger's 1962 Washington. (Don't waste your time, though,  searching for any character here who approximates Donald Trump.....no writer or director in his right mind could have envisioned a Trump presidency.......except maybe novelist Sinclair Lewis.....refer to the BQ's post on "It Can't Happen Here")

         'Advise & Consent's President (Franchot Tone) has a crisis....his term isn't expiring, but he is. In rapidly failing health and wanting to continue his foreign policy of even-handed, peace-keeping negotiation, he nominates a prominent left-wing liberal senator (Henry Fonda) for Secretary Of State. That doesn't sit well with Fonda's most virulent Senate enemy, an ultra conservative,  anti-communist super-patriot.....that would be none other than Charles Laughton, doing his slow-motion Foghorn Leghorn shtick as the South Carolina buddha. In his last film appearance, the only thing Laughton leaves out of his performance is snicking his tongue out to catch passing flies...

          Let the games (and the back room back stabbing) begin......Laughton draws first blood, armed with the scoop on Fonda's brief fling with communism while teaching in college. The senate majority leader (Walter Pidgeon) marshals his forces to save Fonda's nomination. But to everyone's great distaste, the pro-Fonda allies include a wild card....a rabid dog junior senator (George Grizzard) eager to make a name for himself at any cost. This little Nixonian twerp flits around in the far corners of the Panavision frame until serving a crucial role in the final scenes.

           In the lengthy film's episodic structure, Fonda and his communist crisis fall off the radar and the story focuses on the woebegone young senator (Don Murray)  who's chairing the sub-committee on Fonda's confirmation. Trapped between ruthless opposing sides, devoted family man Murray finds himself blackmailed for a homosexual affair he had in the army.

           And here's where Otto Preminger renewed his credentials as a oh-yes-I-did cinematic ground breaker.....having shocked audiences in his previous film 'Anatomy Of A Murder' with its court testimony about ejaculate-stained women's panties.  Don Murray sneaks off to New York in search of his old army lover.....and recoils in horror at the sight (and first official Hollywood depiction) of.....gasp!!..... a gay bar. Murray races for a cab as if he's seen Dante's Inferno itself, shoving his onetime partner into a gutter puddle.....how's that for dramatic punctuation. (You can see how far movies have travelled......from this film's take on gays as hidden abominations all the way to a prominent singing, dancing gay character in Disney's 2017 "Beauty And The Beast" remake)

           Before all this melodrama kicks in, Preminger always serves you a five course movie meal.....a cast teeming with beloved, familiar faces (Will Geer, Lew Ayres, Paul Ford, Burgess Meredith, and the still stunning Gene Tierney (star of the Preminger classic "Laura") as a Washington hostess)

             There's gladiatorial goodness galore in the thrust and parry of the Senate floor fights......at one point Betty White takes the floor as the lone female Senator.....and recipient of a lame crack about her using her fairer sex as an advantage. The movie nimbly dances around its political duels, the dialogue carefully crafted with the usual vague tropes that simulate cautious diplomacy (in Fonda's Jimmy Carter-like subcommittee testimony) and hardcore, hawkish conservatism (Laughton's referring to Fonda's worldview as 'alien'  to American values). Feel free to pick your own side. (Interesting side note:  a few years later, a President played by Frederic March adopts much the same views as Fonda, in "Seven Days In May"......and March almost suffers a military coup......)

              In more civilized, normal times, we might have judged 'Advise & Consent's breathless, surprising climax (involving the role call on Fonda's nomination) as far fetched and ridiculous. Not anymore......with the reality of an unhinged psychopath in the White House, Preminger's fictional upheavals seem downright comforting.  The country survives.....no one tells ludicrous lies about the previous President.....and Gene Tierney's still beautiful.  So BQ casts a 4 star vote (****) In Otto's Washington, they may be shifty.....but at least nobody's crazy.

'THE GAZEBO'.....MURDER, HE WROTE....OR: HAVE YOU BLACKMAILED A FORD LATELY?

The Gazebo (1960)  Dark-humored mysteries that combine corpses and gags aren't the easiest thing to pull off.......Hitchcock tried it in 1955 with "The Trouble With Harry". American audiences scratched their heads.......it resembled the martini-dry, tongue-deep-in-cheek humor of British comedy-murder romps....and Mr. & Mrs. USA moviegoer weren't havin' any.  (But like all other Hitchcocks, its reputation grew as the decades flew by....and its autumnal Vermont scenery is still to die for...)

              MGM took a shot at this tricky genre in its adaptation of a Broadway comedy by Alec Coppel, one of the "Vertigo" screenwriters. Alfred Hitchcock himself  gets tossed into the frantic proceedings, but don't excite yourself.....he only pops up as a running gag, an offscreen character.

              First of all, let us heap a ton of BQ love on the film's lead Glenn Ford, that criminally under-appreciated, underestimated and under-awarded movie star. Never an actor-ish actor, he basically played the same decent, likable guy( a version of himself)  in over a hundred movies. And he did it all, jumping effortlessly from genre to genre.....dramas, thrillers, musicals, westerns and comedies.

             For screwball comedies like "The Gazebo" he especially had the chops.....playing a harried, close-to-a-nervous-breakdown writer-director of live TV murder mysteries.  The sweaty turmoil afflicting Ford doesn't come from his ulcer-inducing work of directing live television. No, it springs from his entrapment in a mystery of his own -  he's the victim of a blackmailer, a voice on the phone who's systematically draining Ford's bank account, threatening to release embarrassing photos of  Ford's wife, a Broadway musical star (Debbie Reynolds)

              With barely concealed hypothetical questions designed to help him out of his dilemma,  Ford picks the brains of his district attorney best friend (Carl Reiner), a smarmy sort who covets Debbie. Reiner, thinking Ford's spitballing a future script, suggests murder as a possible solution to rid oneself of a blackmailer.......an idea that Ford takes to heart.

              At this point in a comedy-mystery, you either go with the flow or bail out, since this is where characters start making choices no one in their right mind would consider, unless they were in a movie.   Being in such a movie, Ford decides to lure the blackmailer to his suburban home, shoot him dead and park his corpse underneath Debbie's newest, prize addition to their backyard.....an antique gazebo.  And not much later, a frenzied Ford resorts to dialing up Hitchcock, desperately seeking advice from the master of suspense.   Funny?  Strangely....yes. And for this movie, that's a good thing.

              For those of you who haven't discovered this little gem yet, we'll stop saying anymore about the plot, other than the pure enjoyment you'll have watching the storyline twist, turn and finally wrap it all up with one last snappy gag.

              More of a smiler than a laugh-out-loud comedy.....playwright Coppel and screenwriter George Wells don't exactly Neil Simon-ize you with the nonstop one-liners...... but Ford's rising panic and Debbie Reynolds' gift for physical comedy (watch her try to dial a rotary phone while tied to a chair) keep the chuckles flowing. And for dessert, there's that classic scene stealer John McGiver, slyly mumbling his way through his role as Debbie's landscaping contractor...(constantly referring to the garden ornament as the 'Gayz-bo'....) Fresh from their 'North By Northwest' villainy, you'll also spot Robert Ellenstein and Martin Landau, both using 'Guys 'n Dolls' New York accents.

              Our favorite sight gag....and the simplest to achieve.....Debbie Reynolds stuck in the middle of a car's front seat, her tiny frame squished in between two thugs on either side of her.......

              And a BQ best avian actor award (along side the seagull who dive-bombed Tippi Hedren) to Herman the trained pigeon. You may well wonder what the hell purpose this pigeon serves.....but hang in there. Herman surprisingly comes through as the film's MVB...Most Valuable Bird.

              Best consumed on a rainy afternoon, (and a perfect double feature with "The Trouble With Harry"), we'll cozy up to this cinematic cozy mystery with 4 stars (****) And hopefully, someone will investigate a "whatever happened to..." for Herman The Pigeon.......

'MOMMIE DEAREST'.....THE HORROR....THE HORROR...

Mommie Dearest (1982)  With another episode of "Feud: Bette and Joan" looming, the BQ dared to once again encounter this notorious attempted recreation of life with the most toxic mother-child relationship in film industry annals.....  Joan Crawford and her adopted daughter Christine.....

           We'd like to believe that during the early stages of this film's conception, its makers aimed for a higher purpose.....to craft a riveting, compellingly serious drama based on Christine Crawford's best selling memoir,  this saga of a legendary, deeply flawed woman and the unspeakable lifetime of abuse she heaped on a child she chose to raise as her own. They secured the participation of Faye Dunaway, who sat at the very top of Hollywood's A-List.....an actress greatly admired by Joan Crawford herself.

           So what happened?

          The resulting film unfolded like an alternate universe remake of "Whatever Happened To Baby Jane".....with Dunaway's Joan Crawford now playing the Bette Davis role, a shrieking, eye-bulging harpy from hell, unhinged and prone to bursts of violence. The Joan Crawford role in 'Baby Jane', that of the cringing, cowering victim, transferred over to Christina Crawford (Diana Scarwid).  And as did 'Baby Jane', 'Mommie Dearest' wallowed in its lengthy Halloween Funhouse tour of vicious intimidation and jawdropping physical abuse.

            In other words....a horror movie.....a freak show designed only to provoke head-shaking and nervous laughter from its viewers.

             In her interpretation of Crawford as a pure monstrous id run amok, Dunaway was more than an equal to Bette Davis's Baby Jane Hudson. In place of Davis's massive layers of white pancake makeup,  Dunaway smeared her face with cold cream, screaming as she crawled around on all fours. Like Baby Jane, Mommy Crawford attempts starving her designated victim....(only the revolting food of choice changes, with Baby Jane's dead parakeets and rats replaced by Crawford's plate of raw meat) While Baby Jane wields a mere ordinary hammer, Crawford's weapon of choice becomes the movie's touchstone, much like Leatherface's chainsaw and Freddy Krueger's claws.....wire hangers. All the better to beat you with, my dear.....

             Critics howled, audiences (what little there were) laughed out loud......Christina Crawford was appalled at the results, the torment of her life reduced to a 'Rocky Horror Show' midnight-only special. Dunaway, who probably dreamed of an Academy Award nomination, recoiled from the film in deep embarrassment. She would never speak of it in public again.

              Whatever the original intentions of the filmmakers were, the Paramount marketing department knew precisely what they'd inherited. They quickly revamped the film's ad campaign from prestige drama to grindhouse scare-fest, making use of Dunaway's signature rant ("No wire hangers!") and a killer slogan. ('The biggest mother of them all!') A camp classic was born....attendees brought their own wire hangers...

              Blame game?  We weren't invited on the set, so who knows. Director Frank Perry came to this film with a background of unusual, distinctive quirky little movies that always featured memorable, award-worthy acting. ("Play It As It Lays", "Diary Of A Mad Housewife", "The Swimmer") But BQ always thought the overall tone of his films floundered about, suffering from Perry's lack of any firm grip on his material or how to present it. He clearly had no grip on Dunaway as she tore through her role like she was performing for the upper decks at Yankee stadium. The deadly combination of Perry's barely-there control and his actress's Grand Opera theatrics reduced the film to a grotesque caricature, a movie that randomly bounced from cardboard melodrama to lurid horror.....a movie brazenly inviting ridicule.

                Wait a few more years......and there's bound to be a TV mini-series with some actress  portraying Faye Dunaway in the ripe, rambunctious story of the making of 'Mommie Dearest'. As for the movie itself, the BQ hangs up only 2 wire hangers....(**)  The biggest mother of 'em all' coulda been a contender......