Westerns in March Stars: in My Crown (1950)

stars in my crown poster

Jacques Tourneur directed one of the great Film Noirs Out of the Past (1947), and one of the eeriest horror movies of all time, Cat People (1942). I’ve seen a few of his other films and they are all good, so I was excited to see what he could do with a western. Stars in My Crown isn’t bad, but it’s not all that great either. It is a slice-of-life film that’s a bit too sentimental and feels like it borrows a little too heavily from To Kill a Mockingbird. Though that can’t be true as it came out years before that book was written. In fact, Harper Lee has noted that she was partially inspired to write her famous novel after watching this film. But she did it much, much better.

Joel McCrea stars as Josiah Doziah Gray who shows up in the little town of Walesburg just after the Civil War, walks into a saloon, announces he’s the new preacher, and starts his first sermon. When the saloon customers laugh at him, he pulls out his pistol and makes them listen.

Soon enough he becomes well-loved in the community. The film watches him as he gets married, has a child, and enjoys inviting the local atheist to church.

The town doctor dies just as his son (James Mitchell) comes back to town, having just graduated from medical school. He has none of his father’s bedside manner and feels people ought to just do what he says because he’s got the schooling to know what he’s talking about.

When typhoid breakout the preacher inadvertently passes it on to the schoolchildren and gets yelled at by the Doctor for not taking precautions (I’ll leave you to ponder how very familiar that sounds).

Later a free slave (Juano Hernandez) is harassed by some miners who are also Klansmen. This is where the film feels like a half-baked Mockingbird but it is much more sentimental than that story.

McCrea is enjoyable, in fact, everyone is good. The story is fine and the direction alright. It’s like an episode of Little House on the Prarie or some such thing. Fine enough to watch, but nothing particularly special.

My Week(s) in Movies: March 5-18, 2023

the little foxes poster

I seem to have forgotten to write a movie journal last week, which is ok because I didn’t watch that many this week as I wound up binge-watching a show. Still, I’ve got a lot of movies to get through which means’ I’ll just touch on each one briefly.

The Mystery of Mr. Wong (1939): There is a lot of talk these days about representation and appropriation and with movies like this it is perfectly understandable why. In the 1930s there were a number of film series about Asian detectives who were inevitably played by white dudes. The three main ones were Charlie Chan (initially played Warner Oland then Sidney Toler and later Roland Winters), Mr. Moto (played by Peter Lorre), and Mr. Wong (Boris Karloff).

I don’t have time to get into all the ins and outs of why this was a popular genre back then, so I’ll just move on to this particular film. As I say that I realize it has been so long since I watched it and the film was so unmemorable that I don’t actually have much to say about it. It involves a jewel theft and some murders which take place during a house party where some folks enact a bad play. I’ve seen a couple of Wong mysteries and none of them are great. Karloff plays the character pretty stiffly, unlike Waner Oland as Charlie Chan who is at least somewhat humorous.

Stars in My Crown (1950): A movie I should have already talked about in my Westerns in March series. Joel McCrea plays a preacher in a small post Civil War town. There isn’t much to it, just a slice-of-life kind of film that’s a bit sentimental but also sweet.

The Little Foxes (1941): A bitter, brutal little film about awful rich people who will do anything and everything to get even richer. It is based on a stage play and the filmmaking doesn’t really do anything to expand it. Better Davis plays the lead, a conniving woman who married for money and is willing to stab everyone she comes across in the back to stay that way. She’s terrific in it and the entire film is quite wonderful.

Major Dundee (1965): I did write about this one for my Westerns in March series, you can read it here.

Gone in the Night (2022): Winona Ryder is good in this undercooked mystery. She spends the film trying to find out what happened to her boyfriend after he disappears one night that they spent in a cabin in the woods. The mystery isn’t particularly interesting and the twists can be seen coming from a mile away. But Ryder demonstrates why she’s been a star for a decade and Demot Mulroney is also pretty great as a guy who helps her solve the mystery.

Hell of the Living Dead (1980): I wrote about this one in my Friday Night Horror Movie post.

Young Guns (1988): Also wrote about this one in my Westerns in March series.

The Magnificent Seven (2016): Gosh darn it, I have been slacking with my Westerns in March series. I’ll do better this week, I promise. This film is a pale imitation of the original The Magnificent Seven (1960) which was itself a pale imitation of The Seven Samurai (1954).

Disappearance at Clifton Hill (2019): A pretty good little mystery about a woman who tries to solve the kidnapping she witnessed as a little girl. The twists in this one are pretty good and it has a nice moody tone to it.

The Retaliators (2022): A not-very-good horror movie that I reviewed over at Cinema Sentries.

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022): A wonderful film from Martin McDonagh. On its surface, it’s about a guy (Brendan Gleeson) who is so tired of another guy’s small talk (Colin Farrell) that he’s willing to chop off his fingers just to get him to shut up. But really it is about the Irish Civil War and the true value of art. Gleeson and Farrell are terrific as is Kerry Condon.

The Bob’s Burgers Movie (2022): Bob’s Burgers is one of those shows that I love when I’m watching it, but don’t actually follow. I think it started about the time we cut the cord so it wasn’t something I’d sit down and watch every week and I believe it only streams on Hulu which is a station we only subscribe to periodically.

I had originally planned to not watch the movie until I had caught up with the series up to the point the movie originally aired, but decided that was dumb as this is not the sort of show you need to know everything about in order to watch the movie. The film is like an extended version of the film, but a little spiffier, all of which is to its detriment. It is still hilarious, but I found that it overstayed its welcome and the better-looking graphics only made it look weird.

Little Women (1933): I’ve seen multiple adaptations of the book by Louisa May Alcott, and even ran lights for a musical production in college. To tell the truth, I don’t actually love the story, but my wife does and so I periodically throw it on as something we both can watch. This one stars Katharine Hepburn as Jo and she’s delightful.

Final Destination (2000): A pretty dumb horror flick from the early 2000s. I wrote a full review here.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986): A completely nutso sequel to one of the all-time great horror movies. I wrote about it for my Friday Night Horror feature.

Piranha 3D (2010): I didn’t have high hopes for this film, but I liked director Alexandre Aja’s adaptation of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, and Crawl (2019) was kind of fun in a dumb way, but this was terrible. It might have been fun had I seen it in a crowded theater on a late Saturday night, but watching it alone in my bedroom I found it to be dreadfully stupid and an utter bore.

Cheyanne Autumn (1964): Yet another western I need to write about. This one was John Ford’s last western and it centers on the plight of the Cheyanne Indians and their harrowing flight to their homelands. It is overlong and rather dry, but I’ll have more to say about that soon.

The World’s End (2013): Every single film in Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy gets better with repeat viewings. This has long been my least favorite of the three, but it continues to grow on me. The beauty of these films, and what makes them work on repeat viewings is that the jokes build on themselves. Things happen early in the films that get payoffs later and that’s the sort of thing I don’t notice on first (or second, or third) viewings but that make me keep coming back.

Final Destination (2000)

final destination poster

A group of American high school kids boards a plane headed for Paris for a few weeks. One of them, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) falls asleep before the plane takes off and has a vision of the plane exploding mid-air. He awakens with a fright and freaks the heck out. One of his classmates, Carter (Kerry Smith) aggressively tells Alex to chill out and a fight ensues. In the aftermath Alex, Carter, and a few others including Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), Billy Hitchcock (Sean William Scott), and their teacher Mrs. Lewton (Kristen Cloke) are all kicked off the plane.

Sure enough, moments later the plane takes off and then explodes killing everyone on board. Since Alex told everyone the plane was going to explode before it did, the FBI thinks he must have been involved. Everyone at his high school just thinks he’s a freak. Only Clear Rivers believes him.

Soon enough some of the others who survived the explosion begin to die under mysterious circumstances. A visit to the morgue and a chat with Tony Todd reveal that when you cheat death, death comes at you. Surmising that the kids are now dying in the order they would have died on the plane (by using the seating plan and extrapolating where the explosion occurred) Alex figures out who will be next and tries to save them.

He’s not very good at it.

I knew this movie was gonna be dumb, but I had no idea what dumb depths it would dumb down to. I don’t usually nitpick movies over little details. I don’t mind small plot holes. But I was shaking my head over this one within the first few minutes.

The whole point of these movies (and there are a lot of them) is to create larger and more complex methods for the kids to be killed – call them Rube Goldbert deathtraps. I’ve not seen any of the sequels, but apparently, they get really ridiculous. Here they are pretty fun, but not particularly impressive. The last one goes over the top in a way I won’t spoil, but that I found really enjoyable to watch.

I don’t know why I’ve never seen this film until now. I was totally on board with the post Scream cycle of self-aware horror films and this came out at a time when I watched just about every movie that came to my local cineplex, but I must have missed this one. I’m glad I was able to catch up with it now, and I’ll probably eventually get to the sequels, but I can’t say I’ll be in a hurry to do so.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

the texas chainsaw massacre part 2

The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the best horror movies of the 1970s. It is gritty, dirty, and full of Texas sweat. Like a lot of films from that decade, it is documentarian in style, not realistic exactly but textile, you can feel it in your bones – the heat, the dirt, the blood.

In contrast, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is totally ’80s in every way. It is a neon, day glow, music video of a film that doesn’t take anything seriously except for its attempts to have serious fun with the material.

It stars Dennis Hopper as Lt. Boude “Lefty” Enright the uncle of two of the victims of the first film. The movie is set thirteen years after the original film and an opening scrawl informs us that the crazed chainsaw-wielding cannibals from the first film are still on the loose and on the move. We see them chase down a couple of frat boys driving recklessly on the highway and cut them up.

The boys were on the telephone with a local radio DJ, “Stretch” (Caroline Williams) when the attack occurs and she recorded the entire incident. She takes the recording to Lefty and the two of them go on the search for the killers.

Before long they are trapped inside an underground funhouse full of leftover amusement park junk, skeletons, skulls, and dismembered corpses.

Leatherface (Bill Johnson) falls in love with Stretch, while his family members chop up humans and turn the meat into chile to sell for the famous Oklahoma University vs Texas football game.

It is hard to explain just how over-the-top nutso this film really is. It is intentionally ridiculous, verging on camp. For the first twenty minutes or so I was really annoyed by it. I love the original film and this seemed like a terrible parody of it. Then I realized that was kind of the point and learned to sit back and enjoy myself.

More or less. It really is a bit too much. I can handle my gore pretty well, and I’m not opposed to using excess to create comedy. But eventually, it becomes boring. I was exhausted by the end.

At least Dennis Hopper seemed to be enjoying himself.

Last Weekends Pickups

photo of some books and dvds

We hit up a couple of second-hand shops last weekend and I got some good stuff.

The Retaliators was actually something that arrived randomly in my mailbox. Normally the review material I get for Cinema Sentries comes by request, but every now and again PR people will just send me random stuff in hopes I’ll cover it. I did write a review of this one and you can read it here.

Batman is probably my favorite comic book character (although I might also say that of the X-men). I’ve read more of his comics than any other line. Knightfall introduces Bane as an enemy and he immediately makes things interesting by opening Arkham Asylum up, releasing most of Batman’s Rogues Gallery onto the city. I’m about 1/3rd of the way through the book right now and so far I’m loving it.

Sometime in the late 1990s the American Film Institute released its top 100 list of the best American movies ever made. They did a big television show about it with lots of cool talking heads discussing why those movies were chosen.

I was in college at the time and just becoming a true cinephile so that show was like catnip to me. It introduced me to all sorts of films I’d never heard of. I printed out the list and began seeking out as many of those films as I could find and watching them.

Yankee Doodle Dandy came in at number 100 and it is one of the few films from that list that I still haven’t seen. I found it on sale for $1 and figured it would make a good blind buy.

Sports Night was the first TV series created and run by Aaron Sorkin. It isn’t as good as The West Wing but it has a lot of that show’s DNA in it. There is lots of great, sparkling dialogue and the actors are just wonderful. I’m not a sports guy but I still like this.

I think I’ve mentioned my love of Maigret, the great detective created by Georges Simenon before. Every time I go to a used bookstore I always look for more books from him. This time I found two.

What have you picked up lately?

Westerns in March: Young Guns (1988)

young guns movie poster

I was 12 or 13 when I first watched Young Guns. I can’t remember now if that first watch was in the theater or when it came out on VHS tape. Wherever it was, I loved it. I watched it many times after that first viewing as a young teen and even into my college years. It was probably the first western I ever watched. Me and my friends endlessly quoted it.

I remember my uncle, who was a huge western fan (he used to always tell us that we liked westerns too – because Star Wars was just a western in space) did not like Young Guns. He didn’t like it because it wasn’t historically accurate and it portrayed Billy the Kid as a hero and he was really an outlaw and a vicious killer.

At some point, I stopped watching it. Never intentionally, I don’t think, just one of those things. I bought it and the sequel on DVD but let it gather dust on my shelves. Somewhere in my cinephile film snob years I did rewatch them both and decided they were bad, that they were not good movies.

But this being Westerns in March month I decided to dust it off and give it another try. On a technical level, it isn’t great, but it is still a pretty fun ride.

My uncle was wrong. It is surprisingly historically accurate. At least on a plot level. Billy the Kid was taken in by John Tunstall and his regulators. Tunstall was murdered by the Murphy gang and this did cause a war between the two factions. The regulators were deputized for a time and then became outlaws. I’m not a historian and I’m sure there are any number of embellishments, but from what I’ve read it gets the basic story right.

The movie mostly comes from Billy’s point of view which naturally makes us root for him, and Emilio Estevez is too charming an actor to make him a villain. But it doesn’t shy away from his ruthlessness. When Billy and the regulators become deputies and are supposed to arrest the men responsible for Tunstall’s murder, Billy gets his revenge in blood. At one point he shoots a man at point-blank range and the camera moves in close to Charlie Sheen’s face (he plays Billy’s compatriot) as the dead man’s blood splatters all over it. Billy often seems unhinged and takes great glee in violence (his friends periodically note that he seems quite crazy).

As a teenager, I overlooked these things and will admit to finding him heroic. But watching the movie now I recognize the film doesn’t look away from his violent tendencies.

It is avery 1980s western. Some call it the Brat Pack western as it stars the aforementioned Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, plus Lou Diamond Phillips, Keifer Sutherland, and Dermot Mulroney. The soundtrack is filled with synthesizers and big guitars, and there are some bright filters used in the credit sequence. All of this feels quite dated and the writing doesn’t do it any favors (though it is quite quotable.)

So I guess I’ve come full circle on it. I loved it as a teenager, hated it as a younger adult and now I can recognize its flaws but also appreciate it as an enjoyable entertainment.

Poirot: Series 9

poirot series 9 blu-ray

I love a good cozy television mystery. There is something comforting about sitting down on the couch and watching a smart detective solve a murder week after week, episode after episode.

I’m not actually the biggest Agatha Christie fan, at least not in terms of actually reading her actual books. But I do enjoy many of the films and television series that have been based upon her works, and Poirot, the BBC series starring David Suchet is one of the best.

Suchet so perfectly embodies the Belgian detective I find it difficult watching anybody else play the role now I’m pretty sure Series 9 was the first time I really sat down and watched this series. It was definitely the first time I ever reviewed one (I’ve reviewed a few others since then.)

You can read that review here.

The Secret of Crickley Hall (2012)

the secret of crickley hall poster

As I’m slowly making my way through all the reviews I’ve written for Cinema Sentries I regularly find movies and television series that I have only the vaguest memories of ever watching. This is one of those things. I watched The Secret of Crickley Hall and reviewed it back in 2013, nearly 10 years ago. That in itself kind of blows my mind. I have a very fuzzy memory of receiving the DVDs for this, but I could not tell you the first thing about it.

Reading my review it seems I didn’t really like this series. It also makes me scratch my head because I begin with an admission that I don’t like ghost stories, and I love ghost stories. I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote that. I also didn’t know who Suranne Jones was at the time and I’ve since come to admire her as an actress (she’s fantastic in Scott & Bailey).

Anyway, you can read my thoughts about it from ten years ago here.

Westerns in March: Major Dundee (1965)

major dundee poster

Made between his more traditional western Ride the High Country (1962) and his revisionist one The Wild Bunch (1969) Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee works as a kind of bridge between the two styles.

It stars Charlton Heston as Major Dundee a Union officer who is relieved of his command and transferred to run a prisoner-of-war camp in New Mexico territory. When an Apache war chief slaughters a family of ranchers and steals their children Dundee gathers a rag-tag group of soldiers, Confederate prisoners, thieves, drunks, and a small group of black soldiers to hunt him down.

They say Peckinpah was drunk for most of the shooting causing all sorts of difficulties with the studio and with Heston (rumors have it Heston once threatened the director with a saber). His original cut was over 4 hours long, the studio took control of the film after that and knocked it down to just over two hours. Some of that has since been restored but the bulk of the “director’s cut” is now lost to history.

What’s left is a bit of a mess, but there is enough there to make it worth watching.

The film is less interested in what normally would be the main story – that of these men going after the Apache – and more interested in the rivalry between Dundee and Captain Tyreen (Richard Harris) an Englishman turned Confederate officer. The two have a history together and Dundee can’t understand why Tyreen would betray his country in this war, and Tyreen can’t fathom how Dundee would raise up arms against people he knows, his friends and family members.

Tyreen regularly tells Dundee that once they’ve captured or killed the Apache he’s gonna turn his sights onto him. Dundee says he’ll be ready for it and the two square off throughout the film while maintaining an uneasy alliance.

There is a version of this film in which Dundee is a megalomaniac in the vein of Captain Ahab, hell-bent on his mission all other considerations be damned. From what I’ve read that is exactly what Peckinpah was reaching for. But Heston is too likable an actor to make that come across. His version of Major Dundee comes across as a decent officer, trying to make the best of a difficult command.

In the end, the film never quite satisfies. Oh, it is watchable enough. Peckinpah is too good a filmmaker not to make things unwatchable, even when he is half in the bag. Heston does some of his best work here, too. But it never coheres into something truly good. One wonders what that 4 hours version would have been like. If Peckinpah’s original film was an epic masterpiece or an incoherent mess.

We’ll probably never know. What we’re left with feels like an interesting transitional film for the director. One where he’s leaving behind the influences of classic western auteurs like John Ford and Howard Hawks and creating something new and modern. But he’s not quite there yet.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Hell of the Living Dead (1980)

hell of the living dead poster

George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) was a huge international success. It made over $1 million in Italy alone. In 1979 Lucio Fulci made an unofficial sequel, Zombi 2 (Dawn was titled Zombi in Italy). It was quite successful as well and for the next few years, the Italians began churning out one zombie film after another.

In 1980 Bruno Mattei got into the game with Hell of the Living Dead, aka Virus, aka Night of the Zombies, aka Zombie Creeping Flesh, aka half a dozen other things. It is, well it is a mess, but kind of a glorious, ridiculous, god-awful mess. It’s also a lot of fun in a late-night weekend kind of way.

The plot, such as it is, involves a research facility in Papua New Guinea that accidentally releases an experimental gas called “Operation Sweet Death” which turns the recently deceased into flesh-eating monsters.

The government sends in an elite SWAT team to take care of business. Along the way they run into two reporters and together, they make their way through the jungle, battling hordes of monsters, to the research facility to…well it’s never exactly clear what their ultimate goal is, but there sure takes a lot of gore-filled violence to get there.

Most of the plot makes very little sense. The dubbed dialogue is hilariously bad, and the acting is atrocious. There is a ton of very obvious stock footage of animals and natives thrown in to boost the run time. The score is by the very excellent band Goblin, but all of it is recycled from various other films.

The characters make ridiculous decisions after ridiculous decisions. Though early on they figure out the only way to kill the zombies is to shoot them in the head, they constantly shoot them everywhere but the brain pan. One guy liked to taunt them and dance around them for some reason. Whenever a zombie attacks the other characters literally just stand there for the longest time watching them eat their friends until finally decide to act. Etc,. etc.

I’ve seen a lot of bad horror movies. I’ve seen a lot of bad zombie movies. This is one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen. And yet, under the right circumstance, in the right mood this film kind of works.