Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957)

 

INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN  (1957)  ¢ ¢

    D: Edward L. Cain

    Steven Terrell, Gloria Castillo, Frank Gorshin,

    Raymond Hatton, Lyn Osborn, Jason Johnson,

    Douglas Henderson, Sam Buffington, Russ Bender

Early on in this movie, a couple of teenagers get in a car and take off for Lover's Point, to do what you'd expect teenagers to do at a place called Lover's Point. The night gets more exciting than they anticipated when a UFO touches down in a nearby woods and little green men start running around. You don't get a real good look at the little green men. That's partly because they're in a forest, and partly because it's night and it's dark and the movie's in black and white. And, anyway, what grownup is going to believe a couple of teenagers who claim they just saw a monster out by Lover's Point? If they didn't believe Steve McQueen in "The Blob", they're sure not going to believe these kids here. 

One Million B.C. (1940)

 

ONE MILLION B.C.  (1940)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Hal Roach, Hal Roach Jr. 

    Victor Mature, Carole Landis, Lon Chaney Jr.,

    John Hubbard, Nigel De Brulier, Mamo Clark,

    Inez Palange, Edgar Edwards, Jacqueline Dalya

The classic caveman epic starring the Great Victor as Tumak, a young warrior in a prehistoric tribe of Stone People. When he's kicked out of the clan following a dispute with his old man (Lon Chaney Jr.), Tumak floats downstream like Moses and ends up with the Shell People, who are as civilized as the Stone people are uncouth. With his rude disposition and penchant for violence, he doesn't fit in at first, but then he gets to know a Shell girl named Loana (Carole Landis) and learns about music, laughter, spearfishing and table manners. There are giant lizards and wooly mammoths and an erupting volcano and a bear and a snake, and it's just one life-or-death thing after another. The scene where Tumak and Loana exchange names and introduce themselves echoes the scene in "Tarzan the Ape Man" where Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan did that, and suggests that Victor might've missed his true calling by never playing Tarzan. The effects and production values are decent, and this is one case where colorization actually helps, creating a look that's something like an old hand-tinted postcard. The remake with Raquel Welch came out in 1966.

The T.A.M.I. Show (1964)

 

THE T.A.M.I. SHOW  (1964)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Steve Binder

T.A.M.I. stands for Teenage Awards Music International, a clunky acronym if there ever was one. The movie's a series of period rock-&-roll acts performing abbreviated versions of their hits on stage at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in 1964. Jan & Dean are the hosts and the lineup includes the Beach Boys, Lesley Gore, the Supremes, Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones, but the show stopper is soulmaster James Brown. Mick Jagger later admitted that the prospect of going on after James Brown terrified him, and you can see why that might be the case. Still, the young Stones pulled it off. A real time-capsule documentary, voted into the National Film Registry in 2006.

The Naked Runner (1967)

 

THE NAKED RUNNER  (1967)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Sidney J. Furie

    Frank Sinatra, Peter Vaughan, Derren Nesbitt,

    Nadia Gray, Edward Fox, Inger Stratton,

    Toby Robins, Michael Newport, Cyril Luckham

Frank Sinatra plays an American living in London, hoodwinked by a wartime colleague into performing a hit on an informant who's being whisked off to Moscow by way of Copenhagen and East Germany. Sinatra's company produced this, and it fits in with other amateur spy movies from the period like "The Defector" and "Torn Curtain", except that the protagonist here isn't really an amateur. He was a sharpshooter during the war. The plausibility rating is low. It's the kind of movie where Frank can cross international borders (even across the Iron Curtain), board international flights, and even be arrested and held in police custody, while carrying a rifle in a suitcase, and nobody ever takes away the suitcase or looks to see what's in it. Furie's use of extreme closeups is effectively unsettling, and Peter Vaughan as a British spymaster and Derren Nesbitt as his East German counterpart really know how to get on your nerves. 

Duck Soup (1933)

 

DUCK SOUP  (1933)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Leo McCarey

    The Marx Brothers, Margaret Dumont, Louis Calhern,

    Raquel Torres, Charles Middleton, Edgar Kennedy

The Marx Brothers go to war. What could be more insane than that?

Notfilm (2015)

NOTFILM  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Ross Lipman

"I've never trusted films about film," is the first thing director Ross Lipman says in this documentary, which is an odd start to a movie that's not just about film, but about "Film", the 20-minute, avant-garde experiment Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton worked on together in 1964. There's more abstraction here than most viewers will be able to absorb, or want to, and "Film" remains as baffling as ever, but "Notfilm" at least provides a few clues about what's going on in it. Kevin Brownlow, Billie Whitelaw, Leonard Maltin and Haskell Wexler are among the witnesses, and the archival footage includes clips from Dziga Vertov's "Man With a Movie Camera" and numerous Keaton films.

Day of Anger (1967)

 

DAY OF ANGER  (1967)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Tonino Valerii

    Lee Van Cleef, Giuliano Gemma, Walter Rilla,

    Ennio Balbo, Lukas Ammann, Andrea Bosic,

    José Calvo, Giorgio Gargiullo, Nino Nini

A crafty old gunfighter and a hotshot young one take over a corrupt spaghetti-western town. Van Cleef's steely-eyed presence and some interesting camerawork are the main draw here. Riz Ortolani's score is makeshift Morricone, and the rest is formula pasta. If some of the sets look like the ones in the Leone films, they probably are. 

A Bridge Too Far (1977)

 

A BRIDGE TOO FAR  (1977)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Richard Attenborough

    Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, 

    Robert Redford, James Caan, Elliott Gould,

    Maximilian Schell, Hardy Krüger, Liv Ullmann,

    Laurence Olivier, Dirk Bogarde, Ryan O'Neal,

    Gene Hackman, Edward Fox, Jeremy Kemp

Richard Attenborough's massive recreation of Operation Market Garden, the failed Allied assault in which 30,000 paratroopers were dropped behind German lines to secure a series of bridges and pave the way for an invasion of Germany from Holland. The movie is sprawling and episodic and tends to get lost in its own bigness, but a few moments stand out. The transport planes releasing the troops with their parachutes as if they were excreting them. A soldier on the ground risking his life to retrieve a canister filled with much-needed supplies and finding out too late that all it contains is berets. An old woman with dementia, shot in a bombed-out street while trying to hail a nonexistent taxicab. And the most bizarre: the inmates of an insane asylum wandering through a forest, lost, while an allied general played by Sean Connery wonders out loud, "Do you think they know something we don't?" It's based on a book by Cornelius Ryan, who wrote "The Longest Day". William Goldman wrote the screenplay. Geoffrey Unsworth did the cinematography, which shouldn't be in color and is maybe too beautiful for its own good. Hopkins and Caan stand out in the all-star cast. 

Certain Women (2015)

 

CERTAIN WOMEN  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Kelly Reichardt

    Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart,

    Jared Harris, Lily Gladstone, James Le Gros,

    Rene Auberjonois, Sara Rodier, John Getz

Three short stories set in Montana, about three women whose lives peripherally intersect. Laura Dern plays an attorney with a client who's angry and out of control. Michelle Williams plays a wife and mother hoping to buy a load of sandstone from an old man whose mind is no longer tracking very well. Kristen Stewart plays a lawyer teaching a night class where she attracts the attention of a solitary rancher played by Lily Gladstone. The stories are as spare as the landscape, and the acting and execution are masterful, the revelation being Gladstone, whose beautifully contained performance captures the quiet agony of somebody who knows that what she's after is out of reach, but can't help longing for it, anyway. Reichardt's sense of place is exquisite, reflected (often literally) in Christopher Blauvelt's camerawork. Montana in all its lonely, windswept vastness isn't just a geographical connector here. It's the heart and soul of the film. 

Black Friday (1940)

BLACK FRIDAY  (1940)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Arthur Lubin

    Boris Karloff, Stanley Ridges, Bela Lugosi,

    Anne Nagel, Anne Gwynne, Virginia Brissac

Karloff saves a friend's life by transplanting a criminal's brain into the man's skull. Why is it that every time Boris does something like that, something bad happens? A minor entry in the archive of Karloff/Lugosi collaborations, more like a Monogram crime thriller than a Universal horror. Bela has a relatively small part as a gangster, which makes you wonder why he's not playing the Jekyll-&-Hyde character - the mild-mannered professor with the murderous new brain - instead.

End Title / Take 2

Cloris Leachman 

(1926-2021)

Cicely Tyson

(1924-2021)

Hal Holbrook

(1925-2021)

Christopher Plummer

(1929-2021)

Dust to the wind.

The Crossing (2000)

 

THE CROSSING  (2000)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Robert Harmon

    Jeff Daniels, Roger Rees, Sebastian Roche,

    Steven McCarthy, John Henry Canavan, David Ferry

Washington crosses the Delaware to attack the Hessians at Trenton, and Jeff Daniels breathes a little life into the man behind the face on the dollar bill. Unlike Grant and Lee in the Civil War, Washington didn't have the advantage of being photographed, and his image is more or less fossilized in old paintings and engravings. He's always formally posed in them. He looks impassive. At the same time, he was the American Revolution's indispensable man, the charismatic field commander whose leadership kept the cause alive when everything else was falling apart. His decision to attack Trenton at Christmas wasn't just desperate and daring, it was (according to most of his associates) insane. That he pulled it off, after a year's worth of disastrous defeats, was a military miracle. It altered the course of the war. This made-for-TV movie does a nice job of capturing that, along with some colorful language from Washington as he's getting into the boat that will take him across. We sure never got that in our fourth-grade history books. If we had, maybe more fourth graders would take an interest in history.

The Greatest Show On Earth (1952)

 

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH  (1952)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Cecil B. DeMille

    Charlton Heston, Betty Hutton, Cornel Wilde, 

    James Stewart, Dorothy Lamour, Gloria Grahame,

    Henry Wilcoxon, Lyle Bettger, Lawrence Tierney

DeMille's Oscar-winning circus extravaganza is part documentary, part melodrama and part sawdust spectacle, with jugglers and acrobats and trapeze artists and wild animals and Charlton Heston bossing everybody around and Jimmy Stewart as a clown who never takes off his makeup. Also, there's a train wreck.

The Lure (2015)

 

THE LURE  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Agnieska Smoczynska

    Marta Mazurek, Michalina Olszanska, Kinga Preis,

    Jakub Gierszal, Andrzej Konopka, Magdalena Cielecka,

    Zygmunt Malanowicz, Magdalena Kowalczyk

Seductive strangeness in a disco punk horror musical fantasy from Poland about a pair of mermaids who leave the sea and land jobs as nightclub entertainers. It's a flashy, splashy, trashy, fairy-tale nightmare world out there, but sooner or later, a mermaid's gotta do what a mermaid's gotta do, so be careful. The photo shoot in fishnets and bunny ears is eye-catching, but nothing compares to those long, sleek, spiky, slimy tails.