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January 18 movie: Die, Die My Darling. Whoo-ee, talk about stinkers made by legendary actresses late in life. This was almost the final film role for Tallulah Bankhead. Who was actually more of a theater star than a film star, and was in hardly any movies. She's probably best known for Lifeboat, though my favorite is the Depression-era Faithless. Anyway, I read that as she reached a certain age, appearing on stage every day became too physically demanding. She was offered this script for a Hammer film (called Fanatic in England) and agreed to do it because other actresses like Bette Davis were doing cheap horror movies, why couldn't she?

Bankhead stars as a religious fanatic (thus the title) mourning the death of her young son. Stephanie Powers, the son's fiancée, visits Bankhead, they clash over religion and morality, and Bankhead decides that she has to protect her son's immortal soul by locking Powers in the attic and tormenting the sin out of her.

I think religious fundamentalism must be somewhat different in England. When you hear "crazy religious fanatic" in a Hollywood movie you expect a certain type of character, which Bankhead's Mrs. Trefoile was not. She reminded me a lot of the preacher in Cold Comfort Farm. Except that guy wasn't eeevvvill. But the habits, the way they speak and the way they read from the Bible, fairly similar.

January 18 movie: Finishing School. Another pre-code drama, this one stars Frances Dee as a new student at, you guessed it, a finishing school. It's a snooty place concerned not with providing a genuine education or building character in the students; just with appearances and the school's reputation.

Dee is dumped off at the school by her selfish, frivolous mother, Billie Burke (the most negative character I've ever seen her play). Dee is immediately corrupted by her roommate, smart-mouthed party girl Ginger Rogers. Rogers sneaks Dee out of school one weekend and takes her to a hotel party where some guy tries to rape her. She's rescued by Bruce Cabot, a medical student working as a hotel waiter. Dee and Cabot start spending time together, fall in love, and she gets pregnant. The finishing school headmistress (Beaulah Bondi) and Dee's mother are horrible about it, concerned only with how it will reflect on them, Dee considers suicide, then Cabot rides to her rescue. Did I mention this movie was pre-code? There's also a hilarious scene of Dee and Rogers rolling around on the floor of their bedroom, wrestling over a bottle of bathtub gin. The pre-code equivalent of a pillow fight I guess.

Even for a pre-code movie the morality of Finishing School is surprising. The only people who condemn Dee's pregnancy are the villains. Of course Dee and Cabot agree to get married at the end, but they don't express any regret about having sex first. I read reviews complaining that the plot was so vague as to be incomprehensible, though I don't think that's true. No one ever says the word "pregnant" but it's clear what they mean. I think to a 1934 audience it would have been completely obvious.

January 17 movies: Broadway Melody of 1936 and Night Nurse. Two that I never miss an opportunity to watch. Broadway Melody of 1936 is a silly bit of fluff, most worth watching for Buddy Ebsen's first movie role (and, I think, the only one for his sister Vilma). Night Nurse is a pre-code sleazefest starring Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable and Joan Blondell. Both are great fun.

January 16 movie: Battleground. I love this movie. Van Johnson leads a terrific ensemble of infantrymen during the Battle of the Bulge. This time I paid attention to James Whitmore who played the sergeant. It was a really good performance. All the actors are really good. My only complaint is that I wish the characters had had a little more depth instead of being the usual cast of cliches. It's still a great movie.

January 16 movie: The Big Cube. Oh, lordie! This was one of the best "so bad it's good" movies I've ever seen. Lana Turner stars a rich widow being driven insane by her horrible stepdaughter and the stepdaughter's sleazy drug dealer boyfriend. They want her money, so they dose her with LSD and make her freak out and it's so trippy, man! Acid is groovy, kill the pigs!

The Big Cube is so bad I don't know where to begin. The depictions of acid trips are ludicrous (and yes, I know what I'm talking about). The stepdaughter's best friend is one of the worst actresses I've ever seen. The drug dealer is played by George Chakiris of West Side Story and is 15 years too old for the part. The stepdaughter has a mystery accent, Eastern European maybe? which no one else shares and is never explained. Lana Turner, who was still under 50 years old, is filmed through a hilariously thick filter (think Liz Taylor in the "these have always brought me luck" White Diamonds ad). Also, Turner wears the partial wig/hairpieces which were fashionable at the time and they don't match her hair. The wig and the hair are totally different shades. I wonder what other hair & makeup flaws I would have seen if the lens hadn't been covered with Vaseline.

Basically this movie is Reefer Madness for the 60s. I enjoyed it immensely. The only fly in the ointment was seeing a star of Lana Turner's stature in a movie like this. Lots of golden age stars did these horrible movies late in life, and it always makes me sad. You know, it's conventional wisdom that mass culture in our era is youth obsessed, but it does seem to me that there are better parts available for older stars today. Jane Fonda isn't doing Trog, is what I'm saying. I'm just glad The Big Cube wasn't Lana Turner's last role. I think she ended up playing the matriarch on a nighttime soap. Falcon Crest maybe.

In brighter news, my doll eyes arrived! Six pair of 18mm blue eyeballs. You wouldn't think it would be so hard to find eyes for dolls and stuffed animals. At least, I wouldn't. I was surprised to discover the selection in the big craft stores so poor. They all have tons of googly eyes, and maybe, possibly, one size of brown stuffed animal eyes. If you want doll eyes or cat eyes or a different size of animal eyes, forget it.

The Pat Robertson voodoo doll got delisted again. Looks like this time the problem was that he claimed the doll contained the actual soul of Pat Robertson. He relisted the doll (third time now) with a much shorter description that quotes the policy against selling "intangible or invisible items" and stipulates that he can't prove the existence of the soul.

I was thinking this evening that if the problem is the charities are offended, then I could do it by not going through the "Ebay Giving Works" thing. I could just list it as a regular sale and state that 100% of the proceeds after Ebay fees would go to a charity benefitting Haitain relief of the buyer's choice. That way it wouldn't be associated with any particular charity. It would just be a sale, followed by a (large, I hope) donation.

But, it may be that Ebay simply isn't going to allow the auction of a voodoo doll that looks like a specific person. In which case, maybe I shouldn't make my Robertson voodoo doll. The whole point is to raise money and I certainly wouldn't want to be stuck with it in my house. I don't even have room in the house for cute amigurumi that I like. It's too bad because the design I has in mind would have been pretty cool. I was going to make it so you could open up his suit and look inside the chest and see his shriveled black heart.

A few days ago I heard about a brilliant fundraising idea to benefit Haiti: a Pat Robertson voodoo doll being sold on Ebay. How clever!

With a cute handmade doll and a funny description, bidding was already above my budget by the time I saw it. So I wrote to the seller and asked if he minded if I made a similar doll and also auctioned it for charity. I feel like I've had enough practice with crocheted toys that I could design a person pretty well, and I had some ideas that would distinguish mine (like, I could print copies of Robertson's sermons off the net, shred them, and stuff the doll with the paper. Also knit a shriveled, blackened heart and sew it inside, photographing it first so people would know what they were getting).

The seller said sure, just asked me to wait until his auction was over so that people would feel like they were getting something unique. Totally reasonable, so I said okay and bookmarked his auction. I've been watching it every day, watching the bidding shoot up higher and higher and wondering if these were really legitimate bids and how much money he was going to raise by the end of the auction. It was over $1,200 when I looked last night.

Until just now, when I checked and discovered that the auction had been delisted at the request of the charity. He relisted it with a new charity (it was originally the Red Cross, now it's Habitat for Humanity). He also added a note that he's not advocating violence, and please don't try to hurt the real Pat Robertson. I wonder if the new auction will last or if Habitat will also object.

So I wonder if I should make my doll or not. I had just finished the design and was planning to get supplies this evening and then start working on it tonight. But I promised the guy that I'd wait until his auction is over, and now the clock has been reset to 10 days. And if the charities all object, then it might end up being wasted effort.

I only need a couple of yarn colors, mostly I can use what I already have. So I think I'm going to go ahead and get the yarn. Then wait a day or two and see what happens to the current auction. I guess I can understand why a charity wouldn't want someone raising money in their name by mocking multiple religions and attacking a public figure, even one as vile as Pat Robertson. Still, it was a lot of money. Where's their sense of humor?

Excellent article on how to help and how not to help a disaster from a distance.

January 16 movie: The Shout. This is a weird movie, about a guy (Alan Bates) who lived with the Australian aborigines and learned their secret magic. Including the power of The Shout. The Shout means he stands there and shouts, and everyone who hears The Shout dies. The Shouty guy invites himself into the home of an unhappy couple (John Hurt and Susannah York), seduces the wife, talks a lot, acts all broody, does The Shout, and that's it really.

The movie isn't really scary, more atmospheric and creepy. Also fairly vague and ambiguous. Hurt's character is an experimental musician who spends his time using a synthesizer to distort sounds like scraping a tin can, a wasp crawling over the mic, smoking, etc. The movie is beautifully filmed and acted; besides Hurt, York and Bates, Tim Curry is also in it. Also Jim Broadbent is credited but it's only a bit part, as one of the cricket players in the movie's framing device.

When I read the info description I thought this movie was going to be unintentionally funny, but it was well filmed and well acted enough to avoid "bad/good" territory. Well, it is funny at one point: when Bates does The Shout. The camera is down on the ground looking up at him shouting, and you can see right up into his mouth and he had terrible teeth. Tons of metal fillings. It's supposed to be the most intense moment of the film, the demonstration that his powers are real, and all I could think was, dude. They're called crowns. They had crowns back in the 60s didn't they? Even in England.

January 14 movie: The Mercenaries (alternate title: Dark of the Sun.) Rod Taylor stars as a mercenary in the Congo in 1964. He and buddy Jim Brown are sent on a mission ostensibly to rescue a European community about to be overrun by rebels, actually to "rescue" the cache of diamonds hidden in the community. It's an action flick, well made though I'd call it a B movie. Along with Taylor and Brown are the typical action movie ensemble: there's a "frenemy" they need and can't trust, a former Nazi who wears an Iron Cross; a drunken doctor who gets a chance to redeem himself; a woman (Yvette Mimieux) they rescue on the way, whose job is to fall in love with Taylor; and many African soldiers who mostly are not given distinct personalities. I guess in a movie set entirely in Africa, one African who was an actual character was considered enough.

The movie was made in 1968, soon after the events it depicts, and I have to say it is far and away the most violent movie I've ever seen from that era. I would be unsettled by that level of violence in a movie today; forty years ago it must have been unheard of. Early in the movie two children are shot in cold blood as suspected spies. Most notorious is a sequence where the rebels (called Simbas) capture one car of the train full of escaping civilians. The rebels are shown gleefully torturing and killing the civilians. Women and men raped, a person dragged behind a motorcyle while gasoline is poured over him, a flaming torch shoved in someone's face, it's a stunning level of violence. Not gory, it wasn't a splatter film, but extremely graphic. There are also a couple of very violent fight scenes that are more conventional action movie fights (though one features a chain saw, and trying to crush someone's head under a train!) and not so high on the scale of man's inhumanity to man.

I read that the movie took a lot of criticism at the time for being so violent. The director said that when he researched the real situation in the Congo, the violence he learned about was so much worse than what he showed in the movie. Though as Georg says, that's really no answer to the charge that the movie was gratuitous. I'm not sorry I saw it, but I would caution anyone who's sensitive to that sort of thing. This movie is not for the faint of heart. I read that Tarantino was a big fan of The Mercenaries and used a couple of pieces from the soundtrack in Inglourious Basterds.

I just got a spam comment for Sita Sings the Blues. The weird thing is they don't seem to be selling anything themselves. The spam comment links to Amazon. So strange.

January 13 movies: Comrade X and Ninotchka. TCM is doing a feature on movies about Russia this month. These movies are very similar. In each, an American (Clark Gable or Melvyn Douglas) woos a dedicated Soviet (Hedy Lamarr or Greta Garbo), warms her heart and wins her over to the decadent ways of the bourgeoisie. I think Ninotchka was first and Comrade X was made because of Ninotchka's success. Both are hilarious, well worth watching. Ninotchka is a better movie, but I adore them both.

Both include Felix Bressant, Sig Ruman and Oskar Homolka in very funny supporting roles. I guess they were the go-to guys for playing comic Russians in the 1930s.

January 12 movie: Get Smart. Georg wrote a review with pretty much everything I wanted to say. So I'll just add that I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this. I got it from Netflix figuring it might have one or two decent jokes. (Like for instance, the Bewitched remake. Which as I recall was terrible, except for the completely hilarious opening credits for the show-within-the-show. One brilliant gag in the middle of a weak sauce movie.) And I was very glad to be proved wrong.

I also liked how the movie rose above some staple gags -- for instance when Max says he had recently lost a lot of weight, I groaned inwardly, oh lord, here come the fat jokes. And there were a few, but mostly the jokes were about how Max is now a carb-obsessed jerk who's terrified of food. Even the fat joke set piece (where Max dances with a very large woman) turns out to be more about how well they dance together, and the other couple trying to keep up with them.

The Doomsday Clock people gave us another minute.

(Also, they have a bad link in their own press release. Their website is TurnBackTheClock.org not TurnBlackTheClock.org. Oops!)

January 11 movie: 36 Hours. Thriller starring James Garner as a US intelligence agent with prior knowledge of the landing at Normandy. He's captured by the Germans just before D-Day, and scientist Rod Taylor creates an elaborate psychological ruse to get the information out of him.

It's an excellent movie. I've seen it several times and was happy to see it come up again on TCM. Much of the movie is from Taylor's point of view, which creates an interesting tension. His character is presented as a scientist working for his country rather than a Nazi true believer. Also and most delightfully, the movie features both Sig Ruman and John Banner! Lucky they never appear on screen at the same time. We might have had a Sgt. Shultz Singularity or something.

There are a few implausibilities -- first of all, no one with the knowledge in Garner's head would have been allowed to leave Britain and risk capture. It's a colossal mistake that just wouldn't have happened. Also Eva Marie Saint's character is somewhat problematic. She plays a concentration camp survivor compelled to help Taylor under threat of being returned to Auschwitz. It makes no sense that they would pull someone from a death camp and put them to work in an experimental interrogation program. The story is that she's so desperate not to go back, that she'll do anything they want. Which is no explanation at all. There must have been plenty of Germans who would have been eager to help gain such vital information. Why the need to use a prisoner from a reviled group? Also, major anachronism, during the movie Saint shows Garner the tattoo on her arm to explain her past. But in 1944 an American would have had no idea what that meant.

These are quibbles, and I did very much enjoy the movie. The cat-and-mouse between Taylor and Garner is well worth watching.

A marriage equality opponent tells the truth for once.

One of the arguments that the anti-gay-marriage side has increasingly turned to outside the courtroom is that allowing same-sex marriage would hurt heterosexual marriage. At the pretrial hearing, Judge Walker kept asking Charles Cooper, the lawyer defending Proposition 8, how exactly it did so. "I'm asking you to tell me," he said at last, "how it would harm opposite-sex marriages."
"All right," Cooper said.
"All right," Walker said. "Let's play on the same playing field for once."
There was a pause--it seemed like a long one to people in the courtroom, though it was probably only a few seconds. And Cooper said, "Your Honor, my answer is: I don't know. I don't know."

I've never understood this argument that gay marriage threatens straight marriage -- beyond disagreement, I can't understand what it means -- and I'm kind of amazed to see a lawyer defending marriage inequality admit that he doesn't either.

January 10 movie: The Stranger. Post-war thriller starring Orson Welles as a Nazi mastermind posing as an American college professor, Edward G. Robinson as a detective tracking him, and Loretta Young as the woman who unwittingly marries him.

I saw this years ago, and I have to admit I enjoyed it more the first time. I think the first time I didn't see the very beginning, so I missed a major structural flaw: the movie begins when Robinson arrives in the small town where Welles is living. Which means that Welles is acting all creepy and skulky from the first moment we meet him. The movie doesn't spend any time making his cover story convincing. So I spent the movie wondering how on earth Loretta Young could be stupid enough to marry that guy. Look at him, he's obviously an evil lunatic of some kind!

On the bright side, the suspense is handled very well. I remembered basically what was going to happen, and I still found myself on the edge of my seat. And it has a hamtastic climactic scene. Scenery chewing like only Orson Welles could do.

January 5 movie: Life Begins. Melodrama about pregnant women in a "waiting ward." Which is where they used to put the women who were about to deliver, especially the ones who were expected to have a difficult time of it. Loretta Young stars as a woman convicted of murder who's been let out prison to deliver her baby. She was in her prime and she's just riveting. Incredible presence on camera. And there's a nice ensemble surrounding her. All cliches: the kindly, naive older woman; the sassy unmarried flapper who doesn't want to be burdened with children; the wise, devout Italian who barely speaks English; the wisecracking nurse with a heart of gold; etc.

It's not subtle drama for the ages, but still worth watching just because it was so rare to see pregnancy depicted in a movie back then. It was pre-code and I'm guessing that's why it could be made at all. Even so, none of the women look at all pregnant. It's kind of hilarious: rows of them lying in their hospital beds, supposedly all ready to pop at any moment, and nary a bump to be seen.

January 5 movie: Independent Lens: Billy Strayhorn. Wonderful PBS documentary about Billy Strayhorn. I did a show about him in November, and to prepare for the show I read 2 books about him and listened to hours upon hours of his music. And still I learned a lot from this documentary. Watch it if you get the chance! And then tell me how you saw it -- we missed the first few minutes and I really want to see it again so I can catch the whole thing.