more movies

January 9: A Scandal in Paris. The wonderful George Sanders stars as a gentleman thief in pre-revolutionary France.

January 9: The Caine Mutiny. Another one of those "can't believe I hadn't seen this until now" movies. Unlike Mutiny on the Bounty this was not based on a true story, rather a novel by Herman Wouk, which I understand ends somewhat differently. Excellent acting all around, including of course Humphrey Bogart, Robert Francis as the naive young officer (sadly, the actor died soon after making this movie), Van Johnson as the hero, Fred MacMurray as a louse, and especially Jose Ferrer as the attorney for the defense. Lee Marvin also has a very small part as a sailor named Meatball or something.

January 10: Mister Roberts. Movie about the Navy starring Henry Fonda, James Cagney, William Powell, and Jack Lemmon. I did not enjoy this. I found it both too stagy, and way too preachy. Maybe it wouldn't have seemed so clumsy and obvious if I hadn't just watched a powerful and complex movie like The Caine Mutiny the day before. Your mileage may vary.

January 10: Dodge City. Errol Flynn and Alan Hale clean up a rough Western town. Also stars Olivia de Havilland and Ann Sheridan.

January 10: Back to Bataan. Excellent movie starring John Wayne and Anthony Quinn about the Philippine guerrilla war against the Japanese during WWII. Too many wartime movies treat local populations as passive, helpless victims who sit around waiting for the Americans to show up and save them. Back to Bataan is a welcome exception: the Filipinos are portrayed as heroic in their own right, not just as a reflection of the American soldiers. Now, if the hero of the Philippine resistance had been played by an actual Filipino actor instead of Anthony Quinn, then we'd really be getting somewhere.

January 10: The Fighting Seabees. Another good John Wayne wartime movie. In this one Wayne is the leader of a group of construction workers who end up joining the Navy. There's a sequence in the middle of the movie which illustrates that some hot-shot barging into the middle of a conflict without paying attention to the chain of command can do more harm than good -- not the typical message for a John Wayne movie.