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June 13 movie: The Fortune Cookie. Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau's first movie! Lemmon plays a sports reporter who gets knocked down during a game, and Matthau is his sleazy brother in law who convinces him to fake a serious injury. There are a lot of funny moments. One that stands out for me is near the end. I don't want to give it away, so I'll just say it's about getting the killer shot.
"What's your exposure?"
"I'm wide open."
"Okay, stop it down to f4. And check your focus!"

Trust me, it's funny.

June 11 movie: The African Queen. I really love this movie. With almost the entire movie taking place between only two characters, it stands on the strength of the acting. Bogart and Hepburn both knock it out of the park. The characters they create are so vivid and real. There's a standout moment where they're yelling at each other about who's going to take a risk, and Hepburn suddenly stops and says "We're having our first argument." She genuinely sounds startled by the novelty of it, like someone who just realized they are having their first lover's quarrel -- ever. Like she's stricken by disagreeing with him, and at the same time wanting to savor this new experience.

June 11 movie: 49th Parallel. Really interesting war movie by Michael Powell about a crew of Nazis who come over on a submarine and end up in Canada. Made during the time after the war had begun, before the US had gotten involved. And I have to say, here in the US we have this jingoistic idea that Europe was helpless against the Nazis until we rode in and saved the day for them. And certainly, the American contribution to the Allies was invaluable. But I think we tend to forget that we stayed out of the war until we were forced in, and we also forget that our neighbors to the north got into the war much sooner. (Actually I don't know enough about Canadian history to know if they were compelled to treat an attack on the UK as an attack against themselves. Still, the Canadians did join WWII years before we did.)

So anyway, this movie is about a crew of five Germans who get separated from their sub and stranded on Canadian soil. The purpose of the movie is to reach out to isolationists in the US and encourage pro-war sentiment. Though they do a good job of softpedaling the message, and (mostly) keeping the movie from getting too preachy. Most of the movie is a sort of travelogue as the Nazis make their way across Canada. It's structurally interesting because the Germans are the one constant in the movie: the Canadian characters pass in and out of the movie as the Germans move on across the country. The Germans mostly seem like decent guys who happen to be on the wrong side, except the one officer is a Nazi true believer.

There are a few stars: Laurence Olivier, Leslie Howard and Raymond Massey all play Canadians who interact with the Germans. My favorite actor was Niall MacGinniss as a German whose encounter with a simple religious community (similar to the Mennonites) makes him question his purpose in being there.

Spoilerish comments behind a cut.

June 10 movie: Star Trek. This was great! So good I burst into spontaneous applause at the end. They did such a good job of capturing the spirit of the original series. Great action, really fun, and when it was stupid (let's have a brawl on the bridge! In front of MPs who will just stand there! Now I'm declaring myself Captain!) it was stupid in exactly the same way as Classic Trek. All the actors did a good job of bringing the original characters back to life, without relying on cheap mimicry. And when they did vary the characters, for instance Scotty seemed much more comic, it was a good change I thought.

We saw it with our old friend Charles and his partner Zac, who are big Star Trek fans. Afterwards they filled us in on the references we'd missed -- for instance the thing about the Admiral's beagle, we never watched Enterprise so that went completely over our heads.

This movie made me excited about Star Trek again for the first time since ... well since the best years of Next Generation. I actually found myself wondering how long it will take them to come out with another movie, and wanting them to hurry up so I can see it. Well done!

June 8 movie: The Big Heat. They must have been doing Fritz Lang day on TCM because I recorded & watched three of his movies in rapid succession. This was maybe the most famous of the three & probably also the most well-made. Really intense drama about a cop (Glenn Ford) seeking revenge against the gangsters who killed his wife. It's interesting because Ford is a "good guy" who's completely unsympathetic. He's relentless and courageous, and also self-righteous, needlessly violent, careless of the feelings and even the lives of others, in fact not caring about anything except his vendetta.

Sometimes when the main character is so, ah, complicated, I end up thinking "what, am I supposed to sympathize with that asshole?" and turning it off in disgust. I couldn't take my eyes off The Big Heat. Which had at least as much to do with Lee Marvin, the main gangster, and Gloria Grahame, his girlfriend. Marvin and Grahame have a white-hot intensity. Both turn in extraordinary performances. There's a scene of violence between them (spoiler: he throws a pot of boiling coffee in her face) that was so extreme I could have sworn it happened on camera, even though it didn't.

I highly recommend this movie if you like crime dramas, antiheroes, and good acting.

June 8 movie: The Blue Gardenia. Fritz Lang again, this time a noirish drama about a young woman (Anne Baxter) implicated in a murder and trying to clear herself. It sounds grim, especially since she was defending herself against attempted rape. Believe it or not, the tone here is lighter than most noir.

I watched the movie because Nat King Cole appears, singing the title song at a nightclub of the same name. There's an overhead mirror behind him to show his hands on the piano. I read on IMDB that he must have forgotten that, because he plays a totally different arrangement than the music we hear (the single version he recorded at another time). I don't know enough about piano to recognize the music just by watching the pianist, so I wouldn't know. There is a bit of unintentional hilarity in the same scene: apparently the Blue Gardenia is sort of a tiki bar, and Baxter's date, trying to get her drunk so she won't resist later, plies her with a tropical drink called a Pearl Diver. It's one of those big fou-fou drinks with all kinds of garnishes sticking out the top. Baxter cooes, "Ooh, it's strong!" and then the two of them both stop talking and lock eyes in an intense look -- while sucking Pearl Divers through their straws. They look idiotic. All I could think of was my old friend Charles telling me that no one looks cool drinking through a straw.

Charles had tons of handy little bits of advice (like "Don't ever squint with your mouth open, it makes you look like a moron") which I still remember today. His best advice ever was how to adjust to driving an automatic car, when you've used to stick shift. To wit: "Remember everything you learned about driving? Well forget all of it. All you have to know is the left pedal means stop and the right pedal means go". It sounds crazy but the first few years I was driving, if I ever had to drive an automatic I found that advice incredibly helpful. I would find my left foot thumping on the floor for a clutch that wasn't there, and if I felt at all disoriented or confused I would just think "left pedal, stop; right pedal, go" and then I'd be okay.

June 8 movie: Escape from Fort Bravo. Western starring William Holden as a son of a bitch running a Union prison camp, and John Forsythe as a Confederate soldier who tries to escape with help from Eleanor Parker. There's a great exchange from late in the movie: "Why did you run off the horses?" "If you'd ever been pinned down in the desert with a dead horse, you'd know."

June 8 movie: Hangmen Also Die. Fritz Lang movie about Czech resistance against the Nazis. Brian Donlevy plays Reinhard Heydrich's assassin, and Anna Lee is the Czech woman who doesn't even know him but helps him escape. (She didn't know he was an assassin, just that he was in trouble.) The Gestapo find out she was involved and her father Walter Brennan is taken hostage, along with hundreds of Czechs.

It's a compelling movie, intense and intensely violent. Particularly difficult to watch is a scene in which a Gestapo officer tortures an old woman. The Nazis in this movie might have been a touch cartoony, or maybe a lot. But come on: the movie was made in 1943 by Lang and Bertolt Brecht, both of whom had fled Nazi Germany. I think they had a right.

June 6 movie: Hollow Triumph / The Scar. I'm not sure exactly what the deal is with the title of this movie. TCM called it Hollow Triumph but the opening credits called it The Scar. In any case, it's a noir starring Paul Henreid in a dual role. He plays a smart, talented man who could have made something of himself, but chose a life of petty crime instead. While hiding out from the local mob, he discovers a respectable doctor who is a doppleganger of himself and resolves to use the doctor's identity to conceal himself.

It's a nice little movie, well plotted and engaging. Strains credulity a bit, but not the worst I've ever seen by a longshot. There are some interesting questions about whether the people in your life really know you at all, and a nice irony in Henreid's character trying to scam his way into the life he could have had on his own merit. The scar of the title is a scar on the face of the doctor, which the gangster must recreate on his own face.

June 6 movie: Nat King Cole Soundies and Telescriptions. A collection of soundies (performance videos from the 1940s) featuring the King Cole Trio. A few of them were actually a bit later, and showed the Trio playing along with Cole's string-heavy hits like "Too Young" and "Mona Lisa." Mostly it was the early, jazzier songs which I like best.

June 6 movie: Machine Gun McCain. Italian mob movie -- by which I mean, a mob movie made by Italians -- starring John Cassavetes, Britt Eckland, Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands. The movie is flawed in some ways. Like for instance, Cassavetes and Eckland have crossed the mob, and are on the run, so what do they do? Go back to LA and walk into his old friend's place in broad daylight? Good idea! But I can't dislike this movie because the acting by Cassavetes and Rowland is so good, and the movie as a whole has such great style. Eckland wears this one dress to the casino that just blew my mind. I spent the whole scene trying to figure out how the dress was constructed. In truth, I'm complaining about the movie now but I really got into it at the time. I think Machine Gun McCain is going to be the standard by which I measure all other mob movies.

June 1 movie: The Wrong Box. This is a wonderful, hilarious, deeply misanthropic movie starring Ralph Richardson, Michael Caine, Peter Sellers, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. It's kind of a "who's who" of 60s British comedy.

June 1 movie: Duck Soup. This is one of those movies that I've seen so many times that I have nothing to say about it. Except, how does it make me laugh every time? I know all the jokes, have seen them all over and over, and still I laugh out loud.

May 30 movie: Action in the North Atlantic. Enjoyable wartime drama about the Merchant Marines. Like maybe wartime movies, it's largely a propaganda piece, which is not a complaint: it was interesting to see a movie about the Merchant Marines. I particularly liked the scene where they join a convoy, and sailors from all over the world call out to greet them in a variety of languages. Starred Humphrey Bogart and Raymond Massey, and also Alan Hale!

(Warning: A kitten dies in the first five minutes of the movie, when their first ship is sunk. At least it doesn't happen on camera.)

May 30 movie: Duke Ellington in Hollywood. This was a series of clips of Duke Ellington. They weren't identified very well but it stands to reason that these were movies Ellington appeared in. Mostly performance videos though there were a couple of clips of him acting as well. The biggest surprise was a couple of songs Ellington did with vocals by Mae West. I wish I had thought to rip those while I had the DVD.