Category: Movies

Tea and Sympathy (1956)

tea and sympathy bluray

The Hollywood Production Code did not allow for homosexuality to exist in their movies. Gay people were not acceptable. That doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. Clever filmmakers often included gay characters in their films. They just couldn’t come out right, and state it. But if you look closely, you’ll find all sorts of gay-coded characters hiding in plain sight.

Tea and Sympathy is a great example of this. Based on a play in which the main character is explicitly gay, the film was never allowed to call Tom (John Kerr) a homosexual, and he never shows any interest in men.  Instead, he’s just not “manly” like the other boys at his school. He likes poetry and art and listening to classical music by himself. When he’s caught sewing a button on a shirt while hanging out with a bunch of teachers’s wives instead of horsing around with the boys, things come to a boil.  

His only refuge is the housemaster’s wife (a wonderful Deborah Kerr), who seems to understand who he is, and who attempts to help. This is still a 1950s movie, and it is still entangled in that production code, but it is a surprisingly sympathetic and heartfelt little drama.  You can read my full review here.

It All Came True (1940)

it all came true bluray

Humphrey Bogart is my favorite actor. He made some of my favorite movies – The Big Sleep, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Casablanca, and so many more. But the thing I always have to remember is that he spent more than a decade as a second-tier star. He played gangsters and heavies for a long time. He was often the third or fourth actor billed on a poster or in the credits before he became the star that we know and love.

He is exactly that in It All Came True. Originally he was third billed. He plays a gangster causing trouble for top-billed Ann Sheridan. But not long after this movie came out, Bogart did become a big star. In subsequent rereleases, suddenly Bogart was top billed. They even changed the opening credits for him.

Which is kind of dumb because this is Ann Sheridan’s movie through and through. It is an odd movie.  Part of it is a fairly serious drama, but then they keep injecting magic tricks, show tunes, and vaudeville acts.  That makes it less than a great movie, but it sure is fun. You can read my full review here.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)

golden vampires poster

In 1974 Shaw Brothers Studio teamed up with Hammer Films to produce The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. On paper that sounds like a dream come true. Both studios are known for making terrific genre films with high production values on low budgets. Hammer was the king of remaking classic monster movies with gothic style and extra violence and sex appeal. Shaw Brothers mastered the art of kung fu style. Mixing them should have created an incredible film full of beautifully drawn castles whereupon kung fu masters battled vampires, werewolves, and other assorted demons.

Sadly, the actual film is rather dull and poorly produced.

The plot is a simple thing. Kah (Chan Shen), a Daoist monk, travels to Dracula’s castle in hopes that he can restore the glory of the 7 Golden Vampires who have ruled a small Chinese village for centuries, but when a poor villager killed one of them, their power was drained.

At first Dracula (sadly not Christopher Lee, but here played by John Forbes-Robertson) is like, “Nah, I’m good,” and “I don’t take orders from people like you; I make them my slaves.” But then he realizes he’s been stuck inside his castle for some reason, and the only way to get out is to take control of Kah’s body. Once that happens, he figures he might as well see what the whole Golden Vampire thing is about. Then he disappears for almost the entire film, only showing back up at the very end.

Professor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing, yea!) is lecturing at a Chinese university about vampires but gets the shrug-off by most of the intellectual community there. Only one kid believes him. Hsi Ching (David Chiang) is from the village of the Golden Vampires, and it was his grandfather that killed one of them.

He convinces Van Helsing, along with his son Leyland (Robin Stewart) and a rich blonde woman, Vanessa Buren (Julie Ege), who is financing the entire thing, to follow him and his martial expert six siblings to travel to the village and kill the Golden Vampires.

The journey is long and difficult and filled with many battles. Eventually they get to the village, fight the Golden Vampire, and then Dracula comes out to fight Van Helsing one on one.

So what went wrong? It was a troubled shoot from the beginning. They shot at Shaw Studios in Hong Kong with a British director (Roy Ward Baker), a mostly English cast (at least for the speaking roles), and a Chinese crew. Communication was difficult as most of the Chinese didn’t speak English and vice versa.

Baker had made some decent films for Hammer, but he doesn’t seem to know what to do with the kung fu aspects of the film. Eventually the Shaw Brothers people hired Chang Cheh to handle the action sequences because Baker was out of his depth with them.

Trouble is they shot most of the film outdoors on the rather barren, scrabble mountains near Hong Kong. Hammer Films is known for its great use of gothic castles, intricate sets, and bold color designs. You get very little of that by shooting outdoors in the sunshine. There are a few scenes indoors, and Baker really shines there, but there are far too few of them to make things interesting.

The kung fu scenes are mostly unremarkable as well. There is none of that jaw-dropping stunt work that made the Shaw Brothers famous. The story is mostly dull. Even Peter Cushing seems to be phoning it in.

Truth is Hammer Studios was running out of steam. Their glory days were behind them. Shaw Brothers would keep making numerous films well into the 1980s, but even though this was shot on their home turf, they seem to have been relegated to the second string.

In the end, this is a curiosity piece. If you are a fan of both studios, it is worth watching, but you’ll probably end up much like I did, wondering what could have been.

Westerns in March: From Dusk Til Dawn (1996)

from dusk till dawn poster

I first watched From Dusk till Dawn in the theater when it came out. I liked the first half a lot more than the second. It felt more like a Quentin Tarantino film with its interesting dialogue and stylistic flourishes. The back half was too goopy and gore-filled for my tastes at that moment. It had some fun dialogue, and I certainly wasn’t going to complain about that Salma Hayek dance number, but it seemed like a completely different film than the first half, and I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much.

I do remember immediately after watching it having long conversations with my buddies about the film. We loved that opening scene and those little stylistic flourishes, like how Richie Gecko (Tarantino) imagines Kate (Juliette Lewis) saying something crude to him, or how they do a little X-ray vision of the trunk of the car showing the kidnap victim inside. We all agreed that once the vampires show up, the film takes a dip.

I can’t remember if I watched it anymore during my college years, probably so, but then I took a very long break from it. I watched it again maybe ten years ago, and I didn’t like it at all. I felt the first half felt more like someone trying to write like Tarantino instead of an actual script written by him. It no longer thrilled. And the back half was even worse, just puerile horror that was more interested in goopy explosions than telling a story.

But Ryan Coogler was clearly influenced by this film, and I keep seeing people on the worst social media site basically saying that Sinners was a poor imitation of From Dusk till Dawn, so I wanted to give it another chance.

I think I liked it this go-around more than all the previous viewings. The first half does feel like Tarantino-lite. This was early in his career. He was paid to write this film in 1992 on commission. They say Tarantino took the best parts of this script and put them into Pulp Fiction. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but this is definitely not his best work.

The Gecko Brothers, Richie and Seth (George Clooney) are on the run after a daring escape from the courthouse where Seth was in custody. They’ve killed several people, including two cops, and have a hostage in the trunk of their car.

They stop at a hotel in El Paso, to plot how they are going to cross the (heavily guarded) border and into Mexico, where someone Seth knows will hide them until things cool down.

When Seth steps out to get a better view of what they are up against, Richie rapes and murders the hostage. Seth is a criminal who will not hesitate to kill someone when he deems it necessary, but Richie is a psychopath.

Salvation (or damnation, as we’ll soon find out) comes in the form of a loving family and an RV. Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel) is a former Baptist minister who lost his faith when his wife died in a car accident. He’s taking his two kids, Kate and Scott (Ernest Liu) to Mexico as a getaway from their grief.

There are some nicely tense scenes with the Gecko brothers forcing the Fuller family to drive them across the border and not get caught. Then they head to a skeevy biker/trucker bar called the Titty Twister. It is open from Dusk to Dawn and is the seemingly perfect place for them to hide out until the man can come and give the brothers safe passage.

After some minor confrontations and a pretty darn sexy dance, the vampires come. Things get wild and blood-soaked from there. Tom Savini plays a biker named Sex Machine. It doesn’t seem that he did any of the special effects/makeup work, but this is the type of thing he became famous for doing. There are lots of great practical effects. The vampires have grotesque faces, and they turn to slop when staked and sometimes explode.

It can be a bit much.

When this came out, I thought Quentin Tarantino was the bee’s knees. I saw Pulp Fiction in the theater and thought it was amazing. We watched Reservoir Dogs in the dorm room and went nuts. I also very much liked Robert Rodriguez (who directs this film; Tarantino just wrote it.) I thought Desperado was a lot of fun, and El Mariachi was brilliant for a no-budget film from a first-time director.

But I’ve since very much cooled on Tarantino. I think he is a very talented director but kind of an obnoxious human. I always watch his films and often enjoy them, but the days of them being an event for me are over. The days of me having to see them in the theater are long gone. I now think Rodriguez is a hack.

This feels like the best and worst of what a collaboration between Rodriguez and Tarantino could be. There is some clever writing from Tarantino (and I find it hilarious that he wrote his character as a foot-loving, psychopathic pervert), but it’s also sloppy and disjointed. Rodriguez is at his best when he’s able to let go and just have fun with all the vampire carnage. He doesn’t do nearly as well when he’s dealing with Tarantino’s more dialogue-heavy front end. The two are very good friends, and they seem to let each other indulge in some of their worst instincts. For example, Rodriguez once again uses a crotch gun, and Tarantino gets a scene where he literally sucks beer off of Salma Hayek’s toes.

This definitely falls into the category of movie where you just have to let go and enjoy the ride. I definitely did this time around.

I know this barely qualifies as a western. It takes place in modern times and no one wears a cowboy hat or rides a horse. But it is set in the barren landscapes of Texas and Mexico and its characters would certainly fit into the lawless wild west. So I’m counting it.

Once a Thief (1991)

once a thief uhd cover

I find that while I absolutely love the way John Woo shoots action scenes, I tend to find his drama and especially his comedy a bit too goofy for my tastes. Once a Thief leans heavily into the comedy, and I was mostly bored. But there are a few good action scenes, and the finale is absolutely brilliant. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

A Bridge Too Far (1977)

a bridge too far cover

A Bridge Too Far is an epic, star-studded war movie about the failed Operation Market Garden, where the Allies tried to secure a single road and several bridges across the Netherlands right to the German border.  It is pretty good, but also a bit too long and somewhat confusing. 

Kino Lorber just released a 4K UHD disc, and I’ve got your review.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Funhouse (1981)

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In a scene that is clearly aping the opening moments of Halloween (1978), our movie begins with a point-of-view shot of someone walking ominously through a house. There are horror posters hanging on the room and a torture chamber’s worth of weapons and devices hanging on the wall. A hand reaches out and grabs a knife. A teenaged girl takes off her robe and steps into the shower. 

From Halloween, our movie switches to Psycho with the camera inside the shower and a knife-wielding maniac seen in shadows through the steam. The curtain opens. The blade stabs. The girl screams.

Our killer is the girls’ young brother. The knife is rubber. The scene turns from horror to goof.

With the runaway success of Friday the 13th (1980), Universal Studios was looking to get into the teenage horror game. They hired Tobe Hooper, still riding high off the triumphs of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Salem’s Lot (1979). It would be his first film for a major studio.

That girl in the shower is Amy (Elizabeth Berridge), and she’s got a hot date. Her father warns her not to go to the carnival, for two kids were killed at one not that far away a few weeks ago. She promises she won’t, but her date Buzz (Cooper Huckabee) insists, and besides, they already told their two friends Liz (Largo Woodruff) and Richie (Miles Chapin) that’s what they were going to do.

It’s a pretty cheap and sleazy carnival with deformed animals and half-naked ladies on display. Our heroes have a good time, and Amy begins to fall for Buzz. They visit a psychic (Sylvia Miles, having a blast) but get kicked out of her tent for giggling too much. Meanwhile, Amy’s little brother sneaks out of the house and visits the carnival. 

Our heroes decide it would be fun to stay the night at the funhouse, so before everything shuts down, they find a place to hide. And have some sexy fun times. But before things get too heated, they hear something. Someone has come into the room below. It is the psychic and a large man wearing a Frankenstein mask. He’s nonverbal. She tells him if he wants it, he has to pay. He finds some cash, and she strips down. But our boy’s a little too excited, and he finishes before even getting his pants off. When she says there are no refunds, he kills her.

Yikes! Zoinks! Our heroes find that they are trapped inside this funhouse with no way to escape. Frankenstein’s (Wayne Doba) daddy, the Carnival Barker (Kevin Conway), scolds him, then beats him, knocking the mask off his deformed, monstrous face.

One of the kids drops a lighter, alerting our villains, and the rest of the movie has them chasing our heroes around the funhouse. 

Periodically we’ll find the little brother wandering around the carnival, oblivious to everything. The film hints that he’s going to be killed, even having him caught by some creepy-looking dude. But he turns out nice and calls the boy’s parents, and the boy is never seen again.  It is a nice little fake-out. The film does that a few times when the story will lean one way and then go another. 

It is a film best left with your brain checked out.  Otherwise you’ll find yourself wondering why a roaming carnival has a funhouse with multiple stories, a long hallway with a giant ventilation system, and a room full of killer gears and rotating hooks.  Seriously, that temporary funhouse is enormous.

But if you can push such analytical thoughts aside, you might find there is a lot of fun to be had in this film. Hooper dives into the goofiness of the carnival aspects. It comes across like a mix between classic 1980s slasher films with something even more classic from Universal with a dash of Freaks thrown in for good measure. Not a great movie by any stretch, but an interesting one.

The Bride! (2026)

the bride poster

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! is a big, bold movie that takes a lot of big swings. It didn’t always work for me, and it is a lot, I mean a lot, to take in, but what did work was amazing, and I’m so glad films like this still exist. 

In the original novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus the creature longs for a mate, a companion, someone he can spend time with and who will not be repulsed by him. Victor Frnkenstein begins creating a female creature but destroys it before he brings her life.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935), James Whale’s sequel to his classic adaptation of the story, ponders what would happen if his monster did get a companion. It doesn’t end well. The bride only shows up at the end of the film, and her screen time (played to perfection by Elsa Lanchester) is only a few minutes.

The Bride! lets her live and gives her a modernity not found in any adaptation of the story that I’ve seen. It begins with the book’s author herself, Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley), dead and stuck in some sort of purgatory. She decries that she had more of the Frankenstein story to tell, but death robbed her of it. So she does what dead authors often do: she possesses the body of a 1920s gangster moll, Ida (also played by Jessie Buckley). 

Buckley’s performance here (and everywhere) is magnificent. As Shelley possesses her, she swings from Ida – brashy with plenty of New York accent and attitude—to Shelly – reserved British accoutrements, but full of anger and resentment. At first she struggles with keeping her thoughts and voice under control. She repeats words and phrases and winds up spilling the beans on the mob boss.  This last bit gets her thrown down a flight of stairs to her death.

Enter Frankenstein (Christian Bale). Yes, technically he’s Frankenstein’s monster, as Frankenstein was the mad scientist. The film acknowledges this but still allows the monster to call himself Frank anyway.  He finds Dr. Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Benning), who has been working on the reanimating of dead flesh. He tells her he wants a companion. They dig up Ida and reanimate her.

The process leave her with blood stains across her face and her hair strays straight up in a way that makes her look vaguely like the Bride in James Whale’s film.

Frank is obsessed with an actor (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), and he takes Ida to see all his movies. After watching one of them, they go to a vaguely queer underground party that feels like it belongs in the 1970s or ’80s, something from Studio 54 perhaps, not 1920s New York City.  Or perhaps not. What do I know about underground parties in the 1920s? I know very little about regular parties of today. I’m such a homebody.

They dance wildly, and it is in these moments that I enjoyed it most. The early parts of the film have this wonderful energy about them. They feel joyous and electric. Later the film will get bogged down in its plot and its deeper meaning, and I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much. 

After the dance, Ida is assaulted by some dudes. Frank intervenes, brutally killing them. This brings police detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) onto the case, and with him, his assistant Myrna Malloy (Penelope Cruz). She’s really the brains of the outfit (and yes, her name is awfully close to Myrna Loy, the classic film actress, and that surely isn’t a coincidence. This film is stuffed to the gills with those kinds of things.)

Myrna is the real brains of the operation, but she can’t be a detective because she’s a lady. The film will use this to make several nods to sexism and the like, which mostly didn’t work for me. I’m pro-feminism and equal rights, but the film doesn’t really dig deeply into that angle. Instead it just sort of nods to it, and expects us to cheer when she does make detective, gets sneered at by a bunch of redneck cops, and still saves the day.  It is one of many thematic strands that don’t get much attention. The film is trying to do so much, and it just doesn’t have the time to give some of them the time they need.

Frank and Ida are now on the lam, crisscrossing the country, going wherever one of those movies is playing. When watching one of those films, Frank often imagines himself and Ida on the screen doing those dances, singing those songs.  

Bonnie and Clyde is the clear influence on this film, but it also references things as diverse as Wild at Heart, classic song and dance movies like Top Hat, the films of Ingmar Bergman, Thelma and Louise, Metropolis, and so much more. Gyllenhaal clearly has a lot on her mind, and she’s trying to do it all in this film. Amazingly, most of it works. And even when it doesn’t, I admire the ambition.

It does start to run out of steam toward the end. I had a lot more fun watching these two run around the country getting into trouble while pursued by the cops than I did watching them try and figure out who they are and what it means to be alive. 

I suspect this will be a film that will grow on me in time. Further viewings will allow me to take more of it in and enjoy it.  But until then I can say I loved how big it swung and how hard it tried.

Westerns in March: Valdez is Coming (1971)

valdez is coming poster

Based upon a book by Elmore Leonard, Valdez Is Coming stars Burt Lancaster as Bob Valdez, a Mexican constable who is tricked into killing an African American by a rich rancher named Frank Tanner (Jon Cypher) and then takes his revenge. 

Tanner accuses the man of murder, and his hired gun, R.L. Davis (Richard Jordan) has been shooting his hovel up for quite a while before Valdez shows up. There is a great moment when the accused man’s Native American wife walks out of the hovel and over to a creek to fetch some water. Davis keeps shooting at her (intentionally missing; he just wants to watch her squeal), but she fetches the water with absolute calm.

Valdez figures he might be able to talk the man out instead of killing him. And he’s just about able to. He explains the man will have a better chance if he tells his side of the story instead of shooting it out with those men. As the man begins to agree, he leaves the door open, and Davis shoots at him. The man (and I’m sorry, I don’t think the film actually gives him a name, and I can’t figure out who played him) thinks it’s a setup and starts shooting at Valdez, who then shoots back, killing the man.

Once Tanner takes a look at the dead man, he realizes he wasn’t the murderer but shrugs it off as if it were no big deal.  Valdez figures they owe the man’s woman an apology and perhaps a little money for the mistake.  When he asks Tanner for $100, he’s laughed at and shooed away. When Valdez insists Tanner get his men to tie Valdez to a wooden cross and drive him into the desert.

He eventually gets himself free and finds his way home. Then he loads up with ammo and finds one of Tanner’s men and tells him to issue the titular warning:

“Valdez is Coming.”

And come he does. He sneaks into Tanner’s complex, kills some of his men, and then kidnaps Tanner’s woman, Gay Erin (Susan Clark.) The kidnapping is sort of accidental. It wasn’t part of the plan, but when Valdez gets into a bit of a jam, he grabs Gay Erin and runs.

I think this is supposed to show that Valdez isn’t the type of guy who usually kidnaps women, but that in these particular circumstances he had no choice. It helps that Gay Erin doesn’t actually like Tanner all that much. A sort of romance eventually develops between Valdez and Gay Erin, though the film is smart enough to not let it fully develop.

All of this is the type of thing we’ve seen before. There are plenty of films where a seemingly unsubstantial man gets pushed too far, and it turns out he’s an old badass after all. Valdez Is Coming doesn’t do anything particularly new with this, but it does what it does fairly well. If you can forgive Lancaster for playing a Mexican, his performance is actually quite moving.

I’m a big fan of Elmore Leonard’s crime novels, though I’ve never read any of his westerns. I have a copy of this one and have read the first few pages a couple of times, but it has never grabbed me, and I get distracted. The film has definitely made me want to go back to it. They say the film changes quite a bit and that the book is better (isn’t it always?)

The film is pretty good, so maybe that means the book is great.  Time will tell.