Jewel Robbery Directed by William Dieterle Written by Erwin Gelsey and Bertram Bloch from a story by Ladislas Fodor 1932/US Warner Bros. IMDb page
Repeat viewing/Forbidden Hollywood Vol. 4
Robber: Come with me. I’ll drop you somewhere in the suburbs, untouched.
Baroness Teri von Horhenfels: Untouched? In the suburbs? Oh, no! No, that doesn’t intrigue me at all!
I rewatched this delightful farce without realizing I had already reviewed it here. If possible, I enjoyed it even more the second time. Powell’s pairing with Francis is second only to his screen “marriage” to Myrna Loy. Kay is the more sly of the two. Highly recommended.
Heroes for Sale Directed by William A. Wellman Written by Robert Lord and William Miznar 1933/US First National Pictures (Warner Bros.) IMDb page
Repeat Viewing/Forbidden Hollywood Collection Vol. 3
Thomas ‘Tom’ Holmes: You used to hate the capitalists.
Max Brinker: Naturally. That was before I had money.
William Wellman delivers the epic story of an idealistic “Forgotten Man” in only 70 minutes.
If Tom Holmes (Richard Barthelmess) didn’t have bad luck, he would have no luck at all. His story begins in the trenches of WWI, where he is assigned with several other men to capture a German officer. This is basically a suicide mission but Tom does manage to get his man. Unfortunately, he is badly wounded and his cowardly comrade got the credit and the medals. Tom is taken prisoner by the Germans, who prescribe morphine to ease his agonizing pain. By the time he returns to the US, he is addicted.
His supply gradually dries up and he is tempted to embezzle from the bank he works for to satisfy his habit. He is too honorable for this and tries to get what he needs from a doctor who refuses and then calls the bank on him. So Thomas is fired and sent to the State Narcotic Farm for a couple of years.
When he is released from the Farm in the early 1920s, Tom has beaten his habit and heads out to look for work and a place to stay. He gets a job in a commercial laundry and a room in the boarding house of Mary Dennis (Aline McMahon). Mary has an instant crush on Tom but after she introduces him to Ruth Loring (Loretta Young) it is love at first sight. They marry and have a child.
Time continues to march on. A card carrying Communist has been hanging around spouting all the usual propaganda. This guy has invented a combination washing machine -mangle (!) that will save much manual labor. Tom agrees to raise the capital needed to patent the invention only on the condition that the machine will allow workers more leisure time and not result in the loss of jobs. The laundry owner is agreeable. But when the owner commits suicide, the new owners throw the agreement in the trash. The inventor has no problem with this and works with them to install more machines in other cities. Many workers lose their jobs and blame Tom for this. I’m going to stop here.
I had seen this before and liked it even more this time. Wellman and the screenwriters kept the story moving through decades of turmoil with masterful economy. The hero is seen as both an Everyman and as a fully realized individual. The crowd scenes, in particular, are powerful. Recommended but be warned it is an unsentimental misery sandwich.
Walk Cheerfully Directed by Yasujiro Ozu Written by Tadao Ikeda and Hiroshi Shimizu 1930/Japan Shochiku Kinema (Kamata) IMDb link
Repeat viewing/Criterion Channel
Yasue Sugimoto: You don’t even love yourself. How could you ever love someone else?
Even in this early silent picture, you can glimpse some of the genius that was Yasujiro Ozu.
Ken(ji)-the-Knife is the leader of a gang of pickpockets. He doesn’t give his moll the attention she thinks he deserves. One day, Kenji glimpses the dainty feet of Chieko peeking out from under her kimono. He thinks she must be wealthy but really she has arrived in her boss’s car to pick-up jewelry he ordered. The boss seeks to use the jewelry to win Chieko’s favors but she is not that kind of girl so she quits.
At any rate, Kenji begins courting Chieko. When she learns he is a criminal, she tells him she doesn’t want to see him again until he has changed his evil ways and obtained legitimate employment. This isn’t as easy as one might expect.
The plot is less interesting than the glimpse into 1930 Japanese urban life. The gang members are all very Westernized but in an oddly comic way. They do kind of a little dance, instead of bowing, when they greet each other. The walls of the gang headquarters are filled with Western boxing posters and English lyrics from popular songs as well as a poster from “Our Modern Maidens”. The office where the heroine works has a movie poster of Joan Crawford in “Our Dancing Daughters”. Only the heroine and her family wear kimonos.
This is an early silent film by one of my very favorite directors, Yasujiro Ozu. The subject matter is highly uncharacteristic of him. You can see early evidence of the development of his stylistic flair. At the same time, it is full of the gentle comedy and humanity I love so much. It was in my Top Ten Favorites for its year and I think I liked it even better the second time.
Danger Lights Directed by George B. Seitz Written by James Ashmore Creelman 1930/US RKO Radio Pictures IMDb page
First viewing/YouTube
Dan Thorn: Come on, get the lead outta your feet!… This ain’t no smoking room. This is a railroad!
I came to see the great Louis Walheim. Others may come for the steam engine action.
Dan Thorn is the boss of a railroad yard. He is tough as nails with a face only a mother could love and a heart of the purest gold. He spots hobo Larry Doyle (Robert Armstrong) who has been illegally riding the rails. When he learns that Larry was previously a railroad engineer, he gives him a break and a job.
Dan has taken care of young Mary Ryan (Jean Arthur) and her crippled father for years. Dan and Jean are engaged to be married. What will happen when Larry comes into the picture?
I love Louis Walheim and this is one of the last films in his short career. He’s great in it. The story is kind of predictable but all the footage of steam engines in action is fascinating. Highly recommended to railroad enthusiasts and Louis Walheim completists and not a bad popcorn watch.
The Omen Directed by Richard Donner Written by David Seltzer 1976/US IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental
One of 1000 great horror films on They Shoot Zombies, Don’t They?
Robert Thorn: If there were anything wrong, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?
Kathy Thorn: Wrong? What could be wrong with our child, Robert? We’re beautiful people, aren’t we?
I’m not a big fan of possessed children movies. This one is solid and watchable with a horrific climax.
The movie starts at 6 a.m. on the sixth day of the sixth month. Robert Thorn is the American Ambassador in Rome. His wife Kathy (Lee Remick) gives birth to a much-wanted stillborn baby boy. A priest at the hospital offers the baby of a mother who has died in childbirth on the same day at the hospital. Robert agrees but keeps the switch a secret from Kathy. Robert is appointed as the American Ambassador to the Court of Saint James shortly thereafter.
When the child Damien reaches about five years, weird things start happening. His nanny commits suicide and is replaced by sinister new nurse Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw) who brings with her a satanic Rottweiler as a “pet” for the boy. When his parents try to take him to church, he throws a fit. The animals at the zoo freak out in his presence,
I’m going to omit a lot of details now. At any rate, several people warn Robert that Damien is the Anti-Christ (or at the very least a menace that must be eliminated). Much horrific bloodshed follows. With Leo McKern as an expert.
I have to give this props for not being near as gross as The Exorcist. I had avoided it on original release for fear it would be. This kept my interest throughout and the third act was suitably territying. I am sure there are many people who liked it better than I did.
Jerry Goldsmith won the Oscar for Best Original Score. The film was also nominated for Best Original Song (“Ave Santini”).
Family Plot Directed by Alfred Hitchcock Written by Ernest Lehman 1976/US IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental
Fran: You better give me a quick synopsis. I’m confused.
Arthur Adamson: Simple. A cab driver is shacked up with a sex-starved medium named Blanche Tyler. Don’t ask me why, but apparently they’re on the trail of some spook named Eddie Shoebridge.
Alfred Hitchcock certainly did not go out with a bang with this screwball thriller.
The story takes place in some unnamed location in contemporary California. Â Fake psychic Blanche Tyler (Barbara Harris) lures in marks to exploit with the assistance of her taxi driver con-man boyfriend George Lumley (Bruce Dern), who does the research to add authenticity to the project. Â Blanche has landed a big fish in the form of aged millionaire Julia Rainbird (Catherine Nesbitt). Â Julia has long felt guilty for forcing her sister to give up her illegitimate son for adoption. Â She wants to locate the son and make him her heir. Â For this she will give Blanche $10,000.
George traces the heir to the Shoebridge family. Â It seems that the adoptive parents and the heir, Edward Shoebridge (William De Vane) were killed in a fire. Â But something about the gravestone seems suspicious to George and he investigates further.
Spoilers
Concurrently the heir has assumed the name Arthur Adamson and is working as a jeweler. He and his girlfriend Fran (Karen Black) have a sideline as serial kidnappers who demand valuable diamonds as ransom.
When George tracks Arthur down he and Blanche are in terrible danger.
Alfred Hitchcock once said of this movie: It’s “a melodrama treated with a bit of levity and sophistication. I want the feeling of the famous director Ernst Lubitsch making a mystery thriller.” Â The problem is that Hitchcock definitely did not have the Lubitsch touch and particularly not this late in his career. Â Most of the humor consists of sex jokes that I didn’t find all that funny. There is one death by rigged auto scene but nothing raising to the level of a Hitchcockian set piece. Â As for suspense, I also found the movie lacking. Â It’s watchable enough but I don’t know that anyone would recognize it as Hitchcock without knowing it’s lineage.
The Tenant (Le locataire) Directed by Roman Polanski Written by Gerard Brach and Roman Polanski from a novel by Roland Topor 1976/France/USA IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime (free to Members)
One of 1000 Great Horror Films on They Shoot Zombies Don’t They
Trelkovsky: Simone Choule does not disappoint!
The third of Polanski’s truly creepy psychological horror film involving paranoia in big city apartments does not disappoint.
Trelkovsky (Polanski) is a mild-mannered clerk. He is looking for an apartment in Paris where they are scarce. He finally finds one in a run-down building with a shared toilet. He does not receive a warm welcome from the concierge (Shelly Winters) or the landlord Mr. Zy (Melvyn Douglas). Two rules are emphasized: any noise after 10 p.m. and women guests are both banned. The previous tenant, Simone Choule, jumped from the apartment’s window onto a glass skylight below and is currently in the hospital in critical condition. Many of her possessions remain in the apartment.
Trelkovsky visits Simone in the hospital. There he meets her friend Stella (Isabelle Adjani). Simone eventually awakes, lets out an unearthly scream, and dies. Trelkovsky invites Stella out for a drink and then to a Bruce Lee movie. Stella makes advances but Trelkovsky is more preoccupied with the events of the day.
Slowly and steadily, the people he meets treat him as if he were Simone. He is served her breakfast and only her brand of cigarettes is available to him. Concurrently, he begins to get in trouble with the landlord and other tenants. He makes the mistake of bringing some uncouth work colleagues over for a housewarming and things get completely out of hand. He is chastised for this and later is chastised for noise made while his apartment was being burglarized. Various neighbors try to get his support for getting other tenants evicted. He refuses. He can see the building’s toilet across the way and it seems to be continuously occupied by people who stand motionless for hours.
As his mental health deteriorates, something compels Trelkovsky to dress up as Simone. He goes deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. Finally, he is hallucinating non-stop. I will stop here. With Jo Van Fleet as a nosy neighbor and Kedrova as a persecuted one.
Love Douglas’s bat wing coat!
This was the last in Polaski’s informal horror trilogy which begins with Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). It is not quite as good as the first two films but holds its own against them. This is one of those films where the viewer is left to decide whether the hero is actually morphing into his doppleganger (here one of a different sex) or is simply going insane. Either way, the movie is filled with forboding and the last act is absolutely terrifying. The striking cinematography was done by Bergman regular Sven Nyqvist.
The Front Directed by Martin Ritt Written by Walter Bernstein 1976/US IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime (free for members)
Howard Prince: What are you blacklisted for?
Alfred Miller: I’m a communist sympathizer.
Howard Prince: Well, you always were.
Alfred Miller: Well, it’s not so popular anymore.
This is an OK movie which was written, directed , and performed by artists targeted by the Hollywood blacklist.
Howard Prince (Woody Allen) is a uneducated nebbish who works as a cashier in a restaurant and is a small-time bookmaker. He is always in bad financial straits and unable to cover bets he loses. His brother is his main source of funds but is fed up with him. So Howard jumps at the chance when his childhood friend Alfred Miller (Michael Murphy), a genius TV scriptwriter who has been blacklisted, approaches him about serving as a front so he can continue to work. He will pay Howard 10% of his fees.
“Howard” is a huge success and attracts the affections of editor Florence Barrett who admires his “work”. They become an item. Howard offers to front for other writers and increases his commission. He begins living the high life. In the meantime, the star of the TV show he writes for, Hecky Brown (Zero Mostel), falls to the blacklist. Florence is incensed and quits her job to write an expose of blacklisting in the industry. Howard befriends Henky who now has to work for peanuts in the Catskills to earn income.
Howard is placed in an awkward position when he is asked to do last-minute rewrites on some of his scripts. Things get even more awkward when the HUAC comes after him and asks him to name names.
Woody Allen shows himself to be a competent dramatic actor in this and the script is good if not a bit simplistic. If you are interested in the period, it is worth watching.
Director Martin Ritt, writer Walter Bernsten, and actors Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi, Lloyd Gough, and Joshua Shelley were all victims of the Blacklist. This was Mostel’s last feature film.
The Front was nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar.
Hollywood on Trial
Directed by David Halpern
Written by Arnie Reisman
1976/US IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime (free to members)
I fought fire with oil. — Dalton Trumbo
I learned many new things from this excellent documentary about the Hollywood blacklist and the fates of the Hollywood Ten.
The film, narrated by John Huston, starts with the inception of the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee on subversives in Hollywood and their influence on films. It begins with testimony by several industry celebrities alleging that members of the American Communist Party were inserting propaganda in films. I had not known that the hearings were, in part, a reaction of the studios to major strikes in the 1930s, in particular by the Screen Writers Guild.
The Hollywood Ten
The film goes on to cover the fates of the “Hollywood Ten” who defied the Committee by refusing to answer questions about their Party membership or political beliefs on First Amendment grounds. Most of these were screenwriters. The ten were jailed for Contempt of Congress. Many never worked in Hollywood again.
There are also extensive contemporary interviews with members of the Ten. The film also discusses The Front (1976) in which Woody Allen plays the titular “front” who puts his name on a screenplay written by a blacklisted writer. I will be watching that movie today.
28 Oct 1947, Washington, DC, USA — Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the “Hollywood Ten” targeted by the Un-American Activities Committee, leaves the witness stand shouting “This is the beginning of Amercan concentration camps.” Trumbo went on to win Oscars for his work on “Roman Holiday” and “The Brave One” under assumed names while blacklisted.
This is a very well-made documentary. I recommend it to anyone interested in this shameful period in American history.
The “sleeper” film Rocky made its debut. It was filmed in twenty-eight days with a budget of about $1 million, and ultimately grossed well over $100 million. Sylvester Stallone supposedly wrote the script for the sports comeback film over a three-day period. He became the third person in Oscar history to be nominated in a single year as both an actor and as a screenwriter. The other two were Charles Chaplin for The Great Dictator (1940), and Orson Welles for Citizen Kane (1941).
The Steadicam (a stabilizing device for hand-held cameras), developed by Garrett Brown, was used for the first time in director Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory, for which DP Haskell Wexler won the Oscar for Best Cinematography. Marathon Man and Rocky also used the new device.
The first VHS cassettes and players, which cost about $885 each, were released by JVC in October. The system was designed to compete with Sony’s Betamax magnetic tape system, with a longer recording time. By 1987, VHS had acquired about 90-95% of the consumer market. The new technology was considered a threat to the film industry but in subsequent years was re-evaluated as a boon when studios discovered videos to be a major source of income. By 1986, the home video industry’s annual gross rentals exceeded rentals paid for films by theatres.
For his performance in Network, Peter Finch became the first person to win a posthumous Best Actor Oscar. Beatrice Straight won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, the shortest role to win an acting Oscar, for her less than eight minutes of screen time in Network .
Futureworld (1976) featured the first use of 3D CGI in a live-action film – it was a brief view of a computer-generated face and hand.
Sal Mineo was murdered. We also lost Roger Livesy, Lee J. Cobb, Busby Berkeley, Luchino Visconti, Howard Hughes, Carol Reed, Fritz Lang, Alistair Sim, Dalton Trumbo, Edith Evans, Jean Gabin, and Rosalind Russell. Albert Brooks, Amy Irving, Jessica Lange, Brooke Shields, and Deborah Winger made their film debuts.
“Silly Love Songs” by Wings spent 5 weeks atop the Billboard Charts making it the number one pop single of the year. Humbolt’s Gift by Saul Bellow won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. A Chorus Line by Michael Bennett etal won for Drama. Time Magazine’s Man of the Year was Jimmy Carter.
The United States celebrated 200 years of independence. Jimmy Carter was elected President. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple. The Viking 1 successfully landed on Mars. The first recognized outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease killed 29 at the American Legion convention in Philadelphia.
After the death of former leader Mao Zedong in September, Hua Guofeng was announced as the new leader of China. One of Hua Guonfeng’s first tasks was ordering the arrest of the so-called Gang of Four which consisted of party officials accused of treasonous actions. Their arrest and Hua Guofeng’s leadership lead to the end of the Cultural Revolution.
Palestinian extremists hijacked an Air France plane in Greece with 246 passengers and 12 crew. They take it to Entebbe, Uganda, where Israeli commandos stormed the plane freeing the hostages. The first Concorde flights took off.
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The list of 1976 releases I will select from is here. Suggestions or warnings will be appreciated!
I’ve been a classic movie fan for many years. My original mission was to see as many movies as I could get my hands on for every year from 1929 to 1970. I have completed that mission.
I then carried on with my chronological journey and and stopped midway through 1978. You can find my reviews of 1934-1978 films and “Top 10” lists for the 1929-1936 and 1944-77 films I saw here. For the past several months I have circled back to view the pre-Code films that were never reviewed here.
I’m a retired Foreign Service Officer living in Indio, California. When I’m not watching movies, I’m probably traveling, watching birds, knitting, or reading.
Photographs and videos found in this blog, unless indicated, are not owned by me and are here only for the purpose of education and discussion. Media found here are not intended for any commercial purpose. Copyright infringement is not intended.
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