Walt at Random

You may remember this post, the second half of which discussed the exemplary customer service I received from a Hilton HHonors phone representative. (Maybe I should have noted in that post that I’m not a Very Frequent Stayer–I’m at the base “blue” level, although I’ve had higher level one or two years. So I don’t believe I was getting special treatment.)

Here’s another one–unexpected because, given the circumstances, I really didn’t expect much of a response at all. Maybe my expectations are too low?

I’m watching the movies in the 50 Movie Pack Hollywood Legends, alternating discs with the 50 Movie Western Classics set. On April 28, I finished Disc 9 of the Western set and, on April 29, started up Disc 8 of the Hollywood Legends set. I was really looking forward to this–not for the first movie, but because the second movie is The Man with the Golden Arm, which I’ve never seen and is supposed to be excellent.

Except that, when I started Side A of the disc, the two titles weren’t what I was expecting. Instead of The Town Went Wild and The Man with the Golden Arm, the menu showed Heartbeat and He Found a Star. A little investigation showed that those two movies should be Side A of Disc 11–and, indeed, Side A of Disc 11 also had those two movies. Side B of Disc 8 was fine. Somehow, in the point in disc manufacturing where the two sides of a two-sided DVD are pasted together, the wrong Side A got matched up with the right Side B. (The hub labels were what they should be–but that’s probably a separate step.)

Well, OK. not a huge deal. I don’t have any idea how long ago I purchased the set or who I purchased it from; probably at least a year, and I probably paid no more than $15-$18 for the 50-movie set. I sure didn’t keep a receipt that long. These things happen–particularly when you’re running such a low-cost operation.

But, well, the website for Mill Creek Entertainment has a contact email. So, just for fun–and just to let them know, if it was a widespread problem–I wrote email. Not angry email, mostly amused.. I did mention the reviews I’ve been writing, and said:

Since I have no idea how long ago I purchased the set and I certainly don’t have a receipt, I’m not going to make a federal case out of this (particularly since your prices are excellent and I admire the work you’re doing in putting the public domain to use). Still, I’ll admit that I was really looking forward to The Man with the Golden Arm, one old movie that I do regard as a classic–and have never seen. So if there was an easy and affordable way to send me a replacement copy (that actually has the right movies on the disc, not just on the label), I’d be delighted.

One business day after I sent the mail, I got a response–with an apology and a note that they’d be sending off a replacement DVD and include a bonus DVD set with their compliments. I immediately responded with thanks–and with a list of all the sets I already own (since, given current prices, that’s a fairly long list).

A few days later, the box arrived. It included a replacement disc (and this one has the right movies on each side), a replacement sleeve (they’ve upgraded the sleeve text somewhat)–and, instead of a 50-movie pack, three different and fairly unusual packs, two of which probably sell in stores for $5 or $6, one maybe $12 to $15(?):

• A two-DVD “slapstick festival” with 35 shorts from Charlie Chaplin, the Keystone Cops, Our Gang, Three Stooges, W.C. Fields, Buster Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle, Stan Laurel, and an “all star extravaganza.”
• A two-DVD “Legends Series” collection: “Shirley Temple: Smiles and Curls Collection”–with three movies on one disc and 11 shorts on the other.
• A four-DVD “Legends Series” collection: “Alfred Hitchcock: The Legend Begins”–billed as “20 Movie Classics” (there are a bunch of four-disc 20-movie sets). It includes two episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 18 feature films (including six silents dating back as far as 1926), and a 55-minute set of movie trailers as a bonus.

I would have been more than satisfied just to get the replacement disc, particularly this long after the original purchase. The extras were, well, extra.

I note, as I also noted with the newest of the 50-Movie Packs that I picked up, that Mill Creek has changed its manufacturing for new sets. Instead of two-sided single-layer DVDs with hub labels, they’re now using dual-layer single-sided DVDs with full labels, which are much easier to handle. (At VHS resolution, you can get six+ hours on a dual-layer disc.) These smaller sets don’t use the one-sleeve-per-disc/multiple sleeves in a box packaging of the 50-movie packs (and, I presume, the 100-movie and 250-movie boxes). Instead, they’re in regular DVD two-disc boxes (well, the Hitchcock uses two hubs on each side with discs overlapping one another).

Anyway: Just another good service story. And maybe I’ll get a lot more familiar with Hitchcock’s early work…

In Old Caliente, 1939, b&w. Joseph Kane (dir.), Roy Rogers, Trigger, Lynne Roberts/Mary Hart, Gabby Hayes, Jack La Rue, Katherine DeMille, Frank Puglia. 0:57/0:54.

This time, Roy Rogers is the prime cowboy at a huge Alta California ranchero—and the foreman, Sujarto, is betraying the owner, Don Jose, to a band of outlaws stealing the gold received for shipments of cattle to California miners. Meanwhile, settlers are arriving—this group of wagons with Gabby Hayes in his full Gabbitude. Sujarto tries to blame Roy Rogers for the gringos holding up his people; Roy Rogers track Sujarto to a meet with the rest of the bandits—but Sujarto manages to place the blame on Rogers and Hayes, who are taken off to be hung in the morning.

It all works out—well, not for Don Jose, but for the rest of them. The plot is pretty solid for a one-hour B western, including a remarkably clever way to trap the outlaws. Rogers contributes several songs, some with a group backing, one with Hayes. There’s also a fine dance number at a fandango. The print is in very good shape except for a little dirt near the end; the soundtrack’s so-so. Those flaws reduce this to $1.

Rough Riders Round-Up, 1939, b&w. Joseph Kane (dir.), Lynne Roberts/Mary Hart, Raymond Hatton, Eddie Acuff, William Pawley. 0:58/0:54.

Roy and friends come from Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders to join the border guard, firmly instructed not to cross over into Mexico without permission. Roy and old codger friend wind up on probation because the third rough rider gets shot in a barroom brawl. Add in Arizona Jack and his band of thieves, hiding out in Mexico and raiding across the border—and robberies of an American-owned gold mine in Mexico.

Naturally, a couple of songs, including one under dire circumstances. Nothing terribly wrong here, but nothing terribly right either. Even as short Bs go, this is a little disappointing. Maybe we need Dale Evans. $0.75.

Hell Town, 1937, b&w (originally Born to the West). Charles Barton (dir.), John Wayne, Marsha Hunt, John Mack Brown, John Patterson, Monte Blue, Syd Saylor. 0:59 [0:55].

The first five or ten minutes get off to a truly rotten start. The print’s dark enough that you can’t quite figure out what’s going on, there’s a song that seems out of place—and then there’s some kind of riding gun battle involving a herd of cattle, but it’s hard to tell what’s going on. Enter a young John Wayne and old-coot friend (Syd Saylor)—who seem totally amoral, ready to join whichever side of the battle appears to be winning. Did I mention that the sound’s distorted? At this point, I was about to give up—but didn’t. (IMDB may help on the confusion: Apparently, when the flick was reissued as Hell Town, the production company “added random stock footage of cattle drives, chases and stampedes to bring the running time to over an hour.” Some of it certainly looks random!)

It gets better, sort of. Wayne’s a cowboy on his way to Montana, who has a wholly undeserved belief that he’s the best poker player west of the Mississippi—and is broke as a result. The sidekick tries to sell lightning rods, apparently as a straightforward low-buck con. The battle was apparently an attempt to rustle most of a herd of cattle (from a ranch owned by Wayne’s character’s cousin) on its way to market—and of course one of the higher-ups in the cattle company is involved. Also of course, there’s potential romance. Somehow, Wayne turns semi-heroic (although still a compulsive gambler and really bad at it). All ends well, I guess. Given the confused plot (not helped by four missing minutes), poor print and distorted sound, I’m being generous at $0.75.

The Kansan, 1943, b&w. George Archainbaud (dir.), Richard Dix, Jane Wyatt, Albert Dekker, Eugene Pallette, Victor Jory, Willie Best. 1:19.

John Bonniwell, on his way to Oregon, encounters the James Gang as it’s planning to rob the bank in Broken Lance. He drives them away but gets shot in the process. As he’s recuperating, he finds that he’s been elected marshall—mostly because of the Steve Barat, the banker and town boss, who’s counting on him to keep the town in line as he (Barat) milks it for all its worth. Things don’t work out that way, as Bonniwell proves to be a man of integrity and honor, not just the law. It doesn’t help that the bigshot’s brother Jeff, a gambling man, has a lot more honor than anyone expects. Oh, and the hotel keeper (Jane Wyatt) is involved in all this—starting with Jeff and ending with John.

It’s a strong movie, with a solid plot, some fine acting and some remarkable action scenes. A barroom brawl is about as extensive and wild as I’ve seen, even though I do believe the same chair crashed through the same huge mirror twice during the sequence. There are two negatives, one related to the print and one, I suspect, a sign of the times. The print’s damaged in spots with missing chunks, some dirt and occasional soundtrack problems. And much of the humor in the film has to do with “Bones,” a black valet at the hotel, who’s portrayed stereotypically. Even with those drawbacks, it’s worth $1.25.

Cites & Insights 8:5, May 2008, is now available for downloading.

This 28-page issue (PDF as usual, but each essay is also available in HTML form) includes:

• Bibs & Blather: One Book at a Time - A year’s experience with self-publishing.
• Perspective: Offtopic or Not? Mill Creek & Libraries - Do 50-movie (and 100-movie and 250-movie!) packs make sense for public libraries?
• Making it Work Perspective: Changes in Liblogs: Slouching Toward a Study - How have 227 liblogs changed between 2005/2006 and 2007? Notes toward a possible study of 500+ blogs.
• Net Media Perspective: Citizendium and the Writer’s Voice - Notes on Citizendium and how it’s developing–and why I disagree with one fundamental tenet of both Wikipedia and Citizendium.
• Offtopic Perspective: 50 Movie Hollywood Legends, Part 1 - From the sublime to the ridiculous, from Good News to The Fat Spy, two dozen movies with big-name stars.
• Retrospective: Pointing with Pride, Part 1 - Looking back at “the 1s”–the first, 11th…91st issues of C&I.

A Friday Funny of sorts:

OK, so I get Publishers’ Clearing House email–hey, at one point I actually found PCH to be a reasonable way to buy subscriptions, and this way I’m not spending $0.41 on the miniscule chance of Winning Big Bucks. (Or the 10 minutes it used to take to find the right stickers…)

I haven’t taken them up on any of the offers for online merchandise (sometimes subscriptions, more often not)–but I was impressed by two of the offers in today’s contest email:

• Apocalypse - 20 Movies on 4 DVDs
• Chilling Classics - 20 movies on 6 DVDs

Each of them just $4.99–per installment, with a mere four installments. I’m told this is 20% off PCH’s regular price.

Oh, plus shipping and handling, which looks to be $6.99 per set.

What a deal! They even show the boxes–which look remarkably similar to those put out by Mill Creek Entertainment, since I’m sure that’s what they are. (There’s also a set of 15 John Wayne movies–but those are in a tin box, so how can you make value comparisons?)

Here’s the thing: As noted in a previous post, Amazon now sells Mill Creek’s 50-movie packs for less than $20–sometimes much less than $20. And, of course, if you buy two of them (or one and almost anything else), shipping is free. To the best of my knowledge, nearly all of the movies in 20-packs come from larger packs (checking one of these two, one film out of 20 might not be in 50-packs or 100-packs). For that matter, Amazon itself sells one of these two packs for about $9, as it does some of the other 20-packs.

I’m not a great fan of supersizing meals–but somehow, given that the discs will be exactly the same quality whether in 50-packs or 20-packs, I can’t see paying more to get less (or, if you really just want the 20, paying more than twice as much because it’s warm and cuddly PCH instead of mean ol’ Amazon).

Let’s Live a Little, 1948, b&w. Richard Wallace (dir.), Hedy Lamarr, Robert Cummings, Anna Sten, Robert Shayne. 1:25 [1:24].

Robert (Bob) Cummings plays an overworked ad man (Duke Crawford—what a name!) who’s ex-fiancée is also his client—and wants him back, holding up the contract renewal to get him. Meanwhile, there’s a psychiatrist with a new book entitled Let’s Live a Little and he’s assigned to work on promoting it. He meets the psychiatrist, a beautiful woman, and he’s having a bit of a nervous breakdown. Oh, the psychiatrist shares an office suite with her maybe-boyfriend, a surgeon (doesn’t every shrink work next to a cutter?). Various light romantic-comedy stuff ensues, as does semi-psychiatric stuff—people hearing bells and seeing the wrong people–with what is apparently a happy ending. There’s a wonderful sequence early on—Cummings is on his way to meet the doctor, hasn’t had time to shave, so jumps into one of a fleet of cabs equipped with electric razors: An idea he created. He gets distracted and shaves off half his mustache—thus, not unreasonably, causing the office receptionist and doctor to assume he’s a patient.

Cummings is great at this sort of role. Hedy Lamarr as the psychiatrist is first-rate (isn’t she always?). Anna Sten as the ex-fiancée/cosmetics boss chews the scenery a little, and that’s probably appropriate for her role. It’s a decent little romantic-neurosis comedy. The print’s a little choppy at times, and there’s a significant break in flow that’s either some missing minutes or pretty abrupt editing. One real oddity: In the opening credits, there’s a black shape superimposed on the lower right corner of the screen, pretty obviously added in post-production. Did the original production company bail, leaving this to “United California Productions Inc.,” which as far as I can tell never released another movie? The sound is marred by heavy white noise, unfortunately, the main reason I can’t give this more than $1.00.

Lady of Burlesque, 1943, b&w. William A. Wellman (dir.), Barbara Stanwyck, Michael O’Shea, Iris Adrian, Charles Dingle, J. Edward Bromberg, Frank Conroy, Pinky Lee. 1:31 [1:27].

This is a mystery with comedy and musical numbers, based on The G-string Murders by Gypsy Rose Lee. It’s a charmer, making burlesque (clean burlesque in this case—comedy, music and dancing) neither glamorous nor too seedy (just seedy enough). Along with various personal and professional jealousies that arise (and which dominate the picture), we get the mystery itself—and it’s not as much a murder mystery as it might seem, although there are a couple of murders, both involving G-strings. (There’s also a great song, “Take it off the E string, play it on the G string.”) It’s distinctly a who-dun-it: Who’s trying to shut down the show—or the theatre—and why?

Well written and well acted. I have to downgrade it a little for the print quality: There are gaps at times, which is always disconcerting. Still, it’s an enjoyable, well made picture. $1.25.

Love Affair, 1939, b&w. Leo McCarey (dir.), Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer, Maria Ouspenskaya. 1:27.

A classic—not exactly a romantic comedy, since there’s very little comedy, but a great romantic flick. He (Charles Boyer) is an engaged French playboy. She (Irene Dunne) is an American with a boyfriend. They meet on an ocean liner, share dinner, try to avoid making a scene. There’s a great sequence at his grandmother’s place—and Maria Ouspenskaya is magnificent in the role. At the end of the cruise, in New York, she proposes that, if it makes sense for both of them, they’ll meet in on July 1 at the top of the Empire State Building and take it from there. Complications ensue—fairly serious complications. There’s a happy ending…of sorts. This one’s the original. It was remade twice, once by the same director as An Affair to Remember (and sleepless people can think of at least one more picture inspired by it).

Great stars, great acting, (Dunne and Ouspenskaya were both up for Oscars, as was the picture), well written (another nomination), well made. This version has two flaws (in addition to the usual VHS-quality print): the soundtrack’s a little damaged at points, and there are some fade-to-black breaks that make no sense thematically but might be well timed for advertisements. Even so, I’ll give it $1.75.

Letter of Introduction, 1938, b&w. John M. Stahl (dir.), Adolphe Menjoy, Adrea Leeds, George Murphy, Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy, Mortimer Snerd (in a bit part), Ann Sheridan, Eve Arden. 1:44 [1:29].

An unusual movie in several respects. It’s a drama—but with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, as well as Eve Arden. It’s romantic—but in an odd way. Adolphe Menjou plays an oft-divorced actor who’s been away from the stage for years. Kay (Andrea Leeds) shows up with a letter of introduction—from her mother, letting Menjou know that she’s his daughter. (The sleeve gets it wrong: He didn’t “sever his relationship” with her—he never knew she existed.) As he tries to make things right—but without simply announcing that she’s his daughter—various complications ensue. What more to say?

Well played, but the print’s dirty, there must be some significant gaps and the sound’s not all that good. For this copy, no more than $1.25.

Back in November 2006, I wrote this post–or, rather, I cut it out of an Offtopic Perspective in Cites & Insights and used it as a post, with slight updating.

Since then, I’ve been staying on the treadmill, watching those old movies (and in some cases TV movies), posting each time I get through one disc, and adding a new Offtopic Perspective each time I finish half a box (six DVDs, once in a while seven DVDs). For a while, it seemed as though the company–now named Mill Creek Entertainment–was running on empty, just distributing the 20-odd sets they’d assembled from public domain, TV movies, and other sources where they didn’t need to pay royalties.

A couple of weeks ago, Seth Finkelstein of Infothought sent me an odd email, assuring me it wasn’t spam and he wasn’t getting a commission. He reads C&I sometimes, and knew I watched these old flicks. He saw that BestBuy.com was having a two-day sale (sorry, it’s over): Two of the 50-movie packs for $25. I didn’t really need any more movies–I’m on disc nine of one set and disc seven of another, with two more packs (100 more movies) waiting after that–but, hey, 100 movies for $25 is a pretty good deal. So I checked it out–and found a couple of sets I wasn’t aware of, one of them released last month. I ordered two of them (that’s right, I now have more than 200 movies waiting to be watched–I intend to keep using that treadmill for years to come), and decided it was time to take another look at Mill Creek Entertainment.

Here’s what I found: The company’s active–and they’ve come up with some even bigger packs. As I write this, there appear to be thirty different 50-movie megapacks, up from 21 in late November 2006. 50-packs I don’t remember seeing before include Box Office Gold, Combat Classics, Drive-in Movie Classics, Family Fun, Frontier Justice, and Nightmare Worlds.

There are also eight hundred-movie packs–most of them straight combinations of 50-packs with no duplications (e.g., Action Classics combines the Action and Suspense 50-packs), all of them (I believe) composed of movies that are also in 50-packs. There were already some smaller subsets of 50-packs and that continues–I see 24 20-movie packs and nine 10-movie packs. (I could see some people going for the 20-pack of John Wayne flicks, most of them early and short, and some of the thematic packs are interesting.)

For libraries where the “informal circulating collection” model suggested in the earlier post might make sense, Mill Creek now has something else to offer:

250-Movie Packs.

That’s right. Four packs–Family Collection, Horror Collection, Mystery Collection and (predictably, given the 50-packs) Western Collection. The “foil collectors boxes” still have individual cardboard sleeves for each disc. So you’d have 240 informally-circulatable items, each with four or more old movies, for a total outlay of no more than $400 and probably significantly less.

Make that definitely significantly less, if you can buy from Amazon: I see all four 250-movie packs available for $50 each. That’s a thousand old movies for $200–less than a buck per circulating DVD.

I’m not shilling for Mill Creek. There are a couple of the 50-movie packs I’d be reluctant to buy for myself or a library (a couple recent packs are heavy on R-rated schlock), and lots of these movies are from damaged prints, nearly all VHS-quality or worse. When they say “Carefully digitally remastered,” they mean the movies were converted from analog to digital form: Otherwise, they couldn’t put them on DVDs. It does not mean restored or anything of the sort: Not at these prices!

That said, Mill Creek Entertainment is doing a fine job of using the public domain for all it’s worth, and I think that’s a good thing. Sure, you can download a lot of these movies–but why bother?

I just checked Amazon a little further. They appear to have all thirty 50-movie packs at $13 to $18 each) and all eight–whoops, all nine 100-packs (there’s one that isn’t even on Mill Creek’s site yet, and it won’t actually be out until May 2008)–at $27 to $45 each.

Mill Creek has some other stuff–collections of cartoons (300 in one box), TV boxed sets and TV-movie mixes, even a few indie movies and fitness sets. But mostly, Mill Creek is boxes of public domain movies at fair prices. The prints may be (and usually are) mediocre, and lots of the pictures are B or less–but there are also some classic gems. Within the last two weeks, I’ve watched McClintock! and the original, black-and-white, Irene Dunne/Charles Boyer Love Affair. Good stuff.

Blue Steel, 1934, b&w. Robert N. Bradbury (dir.), John Wayne, Eleanor Hunt, George ‘Gabby’ Hayes, Edward Peil Sr., Yakima Canutt. 0:54.

As one-hour Westerns go, this is better than most. Sure, some elements of the plot are standard. The leader of the bad guys is the most prominent person in town: Check. The cute young woman winds up with the hero—even though, in this case, he really hasn’t talked to her except to rescue her once: Check. Despite the quick draw and sure aim of the hero, most fights are fistfights—and they’re incredibly phony: Check.

On the other hand, the plot makes more sense than most. A beleaguered town, Yucca City, is in trouble because shipments of supplies (and money) keep getting stolen, and the ranchers are about to give up and move out. At one key plot point, the Big Man offers to buy their homesteads for $100 each—and, of course, there’s a sinister reason. Naturally, John Wayne saves the day, with the help of a crusty old—not sidekick this time, but sheriff. Wayne is young, handsome, and quite effective. The long final chase sequence is effectively done; the long, largely silent opening sequence (a hotel in a really noisy rainstorm) is also surprisingly effective. Most of the acting is good. The sleeve description almost gets the plot right, but messes up one point big time: It has Wayne as “Sheriff Jake” hot on the trail of the man who appeared to rob a payroll. Actually, Wayne is the man who appeared to do the robbing (he’s a Marshal). The Sheriff is the crusty old coot (Gabby Hayes), “Old-timer” as Wayne consistently calls him. I’ll give it $1.00.

Santa Fe Trail, 1940, b&w. Michael Curtiz (dir.), Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Raymond Massey, Ronald Reagan, Alan Hale, William Lundigan, Van Heflin. 1:50.

Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, a young (29), devilishly handsome Ronald Reagan. Costars like Van Heflin (in a key role). Historic names including George Custer (Reagan), J.E.B. Stuart (Flynn), John Brown (Massey) and many more. This is a big movie—big stars, big historical names, good production values, a major motion picture.

Ostensibly, it’s about the Santa Fe trail, bloody Kansas and building the railroad through to Santa Fe. Really, it’s about John Brown and the prelude to the Civil War—where West Point graduates who would later fight each other fought together to bring down Brown’s uprising. As a historical film, it’s a mess—pro-Southern/slavery, riddled with wild inaccuracies, etc., etc. You may find it unwatchable for that reason.

It’s dramatic, generally well acted and well filmed, including the long battle sequence near the end at Harper’s Ferry. The print’s OK—but the sound is sometimes distorted, bringing this down to $1.25.

McLintock!, 1963, color. Andrew V. McLaglen (dir.), John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Patrick Wayne, Stefanie Powers, Jack Kruschen, Chill Wills, Yvonne De Carlo, Jerry Van Dyke, Edgar Buchanan, Bruce Cabot, Strother Martin. 2:07.

The older John Wayne at his most entertaining in a big, well-made movie that’s mostly a hoot. If you don’t already know the movie (I didn’t), I’m not sure how to describe it. G.W. McLintock is a cattle baron(and miner) in the Mesa Verde of turn-of-the-century Arizona, a territory hoping to become a state. He owns most of the nearby town (named McLintock), treats his employees fairly, drinks a lot, plays chess and has a good time. He’s friends with the local tribes (despite an old battle wound) and mostly dislikes the territorial government people he considers incompetent—and, to be sure, homesteaders he thinks are being sold a bill of goods, asked to make a living on 160 acres of 6,000-foot-high land not fit for farming.

That’s just the setup. His estranged wife (O’Hara) shows up, asking for a divorce but mostly wanting to take her daughter (Powers)—just coming back from college Back East—away with her. McLintock’s having none of that. Lots of action ensues, including a rodeo, various romances, and much, much more. Big fight scenes, more slapstick than anything else—I don’t believe there’s a single injury or death in the movie. A combination of comedy, light drama and a little romance, the movie has fine performances by Wayne, O’Hara, Powers, Van Dyke (as an up-to-the-minute college boy with a Letter—in Glee Club), and most everyone involved, all of whom seemed to be having a ball.

I can’t figure out how this wound up on a set with mostly public-domain movies, unless the studio figured DVD buyers would want the wide-screen version so they could give the pan-and-scan away. The print’s OK—if there’s damage, it never gets in the way of the movie. The colors are a little faded, but that may be the way it was shot. Great fun, and at the end of more than two hours I wanted more. I’m sure it would be better in widescreen and with richer colors—but even so, I can’t give this one less than $2.25.

Sagebrush Trail, 1933, b&w. Armand Schaefer (dir.), John Wayne, Nancy Shubert, Lane Chandler, Yakima Canutt. 0:54.

The plot’s a little different, although as usual shootings only happen from a distance—up close, it’s all badly-staged fistfights. A young John Wayne is a convicted killer who’s escaped and is on the run (hopping a freight train bound west from Baltimore). He’s innocent, of course. He winds up with a good-sized gang of outlaws, hoping to find the real killer, which he does…but decides the real killer’s not such a bad Joe. Meanwhile, he’s trying to be part of the gang while foiling their big robberies, in one case by pre-robbing the stagecoach. All turns out fairly well in the end.

The print’s not great. The acting’s not great, but no worse than the run of these things. Some excellent stunt work. John Wayne underwater breathing through a reed. What the heck: $1.00

Wayne Bivens-Tatum posted “On verifying the nonexistence of nonabsurd reference objects” today (March 10, 2008, that is) at Academic Librarian. He describes two reference interviews that left him unsatisfied: He couldn’t find an answer to the question, but he also couldn’t be satisfied that no such answer exists.

He says:

I think what we reference librarians need is a reference source that lists all of the questions for which we know there is no answer. Then I could go to this source, look up the obscure German artist, and say, “See, it says here that no biographical information exists on this person, and this is the authoritative reference source on the nonexistence of nonabsurd reference objects. Do you have any other questions?” A source like this would let me rest easier after a fruitless search. It could be, though, that this reference source already exists, and I just can’t find it. If only I could know for sure.

A reference source listing all questions for which we know there is no answer is a tall order, as unanswered questions sometimes get answered. (Do we know with reasonable certainty who the model was for the Mona Lisa? We do now, apparently.)

What’s needed here, I believe, is something different. (Remember, what you’re about to read is coming from one of those nasty aging Luddite anti-L2 people; I even precede the boomers!)

I think there should be an Unanswered Questions Wiki. Librarians with legitimate reference questions they haven’t been able to answer could post them here. If someone else comes up with a resource answering the question, they add the resource. If the original poster, or someone else, agrees that this is a legitimate answer, they change the item’s category from Unanswered to Answered.

You would, of course, need some combination of logon and oversight to avoid the spam problems that seem to plague almost all wide-open wikis these days (and wide-open blogs, and wide-open whatever…)

Yes, there was STUMPERS-L and is now Project Wombat–but wouldn’t this make more sense as a wiki, incorporating the open questions from PW?

As I said in my comment on the original post, this seems like a natural project for RUSA, but it doesn’t need to be that formal. No, I’m not volunteering: I may “run” a MediaWiki wiki but I didn’t set it up and I’m not at liberty to host another one. (Yes, I think MediaWiki is the right software, bless its ugly-syntax heart: It’s used by several widely-used multilibrary wikis already–LISWiki, Library Success, PLN–and, to be sure, the whale of all wikis, Wikipedia.)

Let me say this again: Whoever does this needs to have provisions to minimize spam.

Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman, 1947, b&w. Stuart Heisler (dir.), Susan Hayward, Lee Bowman, Marsha Hunt, Eddie Albert. 1:43 [1:30]

A nightclub singer helps her boyfriend get a job as a radio singer. He succeeds. They marry. He succeeds more. She quits her job—after all, he’s making all the money they need or want. She has a baby. He’s gone a lot of the time. Meanwhile—well, the opening scene shows her downing a double (straight up) in about five seconds before going on, and as time goes on she has lots of doubles, to the point of seeing double, falling down drunk and starting out again the next morning. Also, she smokes and has a bad habit of dropping the lit cigarette when she’s pretty well lit. Eventually, her husband files for divorce and custody, she kidnaps the child…and, well, you can pretty much guess what happens next. After that, according to the sleeve, “with hard work and her husband’s support, she overcomes her addiction.”

Except that, in the version I saw (which appears to be missing a scene or three), the last minute of film has her going from being bandaged in a hospital bed to sitting up and assuring her husband that it’s all going to be OK from now on. No hard work, just instant cure. Never mind that. Susan Hayward is quite effective (good enough for an Oscar nomination), Eddie Albert is excellent as her husband’s songwriting partner and her friend and accompanist (the only constant through the breakup), and it’s well filmed (and a decent print), but certainly not a landmark in cinema, even as a “sudser” and precursor of all those Lifetime TV movies. Supposedly based on the life of Bing Crosby’s wife Dixie Lee. $1.25.

The Big Wheel, 1949, b&w. Edward Ludwig (dir.), Mickey Rooney, Thomas Mitchell, Mary Hatcher, Michael O’Shea, Spring Byington, Hattie McDaniel. 1:32 [1:23].

If you go by the sleeve, this is a similar story to Smash-Up, but with a race car driver as protagonist: He gets drunk, ruins his life (in this case by killing another driver because he doesn’t recognize that alcohol and gasoline don’t mix), and eventually manages to recover. Well, no. Set aside the fact that alcohol and gasoline mix very nicely; that’s not really the plot.

Mickey Rooney stars as a young would-be racecar driver whose father was also a race-car driver, who was killed in a crash at the Indy 500. The start of that last sentence may tell you a lot about how you’ll approach this flick. If you find Rooney immensely irritating as an actor, it helps that he’s playing an arrogant, bullheaded young driver—but makes him less sympathetic than I think he’s supposed to be. Anyway, yes, he crashes into another driver—and yes, he was drunk: But that was the night before, and he was trying to warn the other driver that his wheel was about to fall off. But, of course, since this punk was fond of saying “I’ll drive right over ‘em” with regard to other drivers, people aren’t likely to believe his story. That’s the key plot turn. Naturally, it all sort of works out in the end.

I’m not fond of Rooney and that may color my rating. It’s reasonably well filmed and not badly acted. Lots of car racing scenes. All things considered, it’s another middling $1.25.

Killing Heat (original title Gräset sjunger), 1981, color. Michael Raeburn (dir.), Karen Black, John Thaw, John Kani, John Moulder-Brown. 1:45 [1:30].

Let’s see if I can summarize the plot. A man asks a woman to marry him. She says yes. They wind up in South Africa (the old apartheid South Africa), on his badly-run farm. She’s miserable from the get-go, and doesn’t especially hide it, mostly moping around looking like death warmed over. He gets terribly ill from time to time. She winds up dead—but since the film begins with her dead, we knew that already.

The sleeve says something about her being a successful woman and having a hard time coping with the new country, and being involved with another man. None of that comes through in the picture. What comes through is…well, nothing much, as far as I could tell. Again, it might make more sense with the other 15 minutes. Maybe. Karen Black gives perhaps the most dispirited, dreary, flat performance of her career (or at least of any of her movies I’ve seen). I didn’t care about any of the characters. If I was watching this from start to end, I would have given up a third of the way in: It’s slow, uninteresting, with no particular point that I could find. It’s just blah, and unpleasant blah at that. Maybe I’m missing something, but I think I’m being charitable even to give it $0.25.

The Fat Spy, 1966, color. Joseph Cates (dir.), Phyllis Diller, Jack E. Leonard (in twin roles), Brian Donlevy, Johnny Tillotson, Jayne Mansfield, “the Wild Ones.” 1:20

I’d call this a triumph of programming. On its own, this teen/bikini/singing flick is a poor example of its kind, with third-rate songs (I’m being kind here), a plot that’s thin even by the standards of the genre, and dancers who don’t seem to much like dancing. But as the second disc on this side, it’s badly-needed comic relief with a little life to it, making it watchable nonsense.

It’s nonsense, to be sure, and mediocre nonsense at that. Maybe it’s intended as a spoof on the teen-bikini movies, but those always seemed to be spoofing themselves. Phyllis Diller is, well, Phyllis Diller. Jack E. Leonard is so-so in his twin parts. Jayne Mansfield makes the most of an odd part, but the script gives her nothing to work with. The Wild Ones were a very minor and (on evidence) not very talented band—apparently best known for doing the first, non-hit, version of “Wild Thing.” The print is very good and the sound is fine. Independently, probably $0.75. Through the genius move of pairing it with a depressing, badly-done downer, it shoots up to $1.00.

I wouldn’t have read this Wired article at all, except that Peter Suber quoted a chunk of it…including portions of these two paragraphs.

The most common of the economies built around free is the three-party system. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties. Sound complicated? You’re probably experiencing it right now. It’s the basis of virtually all media. [Emphasis added.]

In the traditional media model, a publisher provides a product free (or nearly free) to consumers, and advertisers pay to ride along. Radio is “free to air,” and so is much of television. Likewise, newspaper and magazine publishers don’t charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They’re not selling papers and magazines to readers, they’re selling readers to advertisers. It’s a three-way market.

Virtually all media. Isn’t that interesting? So, just to make it clear:

• Media: Commercial broadcast TV and radio. Most magazines and newspapers. Portions of the web.
• Not media: Books. Sound recordings. DVDs. Movies in general. Premium cable (HBO, Showtime, etc.) Other portions of the web.

OK, so he said virtually all Hmm. Let’s see what the government figures are for 2002 (they’ve changed since then, to be sure–but not enough to throw the percentages off all that much):

• Broadcast TV and radio, magazines, newspapers: $134 billion.
• Books, motion pictures and sound recordings: $106 billion.

I’m not sure that I can come up with any usage of “virtually all” that would fit $134 out of $240. Maybe my command of the English language is lacking. Or maybe my command of absurd generalizations is insufficient for me ever to get a job with Wired. I can live with that.

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Update: For some reason, I missed the Statistical Abstract when I was at the Census Bureau’s website. StatAbs has more recent figures–for 2005.

• Newspapers, periodicals, broadcasting: $149 billion
• Books, motion pictures, sound recordings: $120 billion

The percentages haven’t changed significantly: just under 45% of “the media” are paid for.

This disc is also available separately as a four-movie one-disc pack. At $4 or less, I’d buy it–for the first movie on each side, primarily for the true classic that takes up most of the B side. The second movie on each side…well, nobody’s forcing you to watch them.

China 9, Liberty 37, 1978, color. Monte Hellman and Tony Brandt (dirs.), Warren Oates, Fabio Testi, Jenny Agutter, Sam Peckinpah. Original title Amore, piombo e furore. 1:38 [1:32].

It’s a Spanish-Italian Western: Good production values, good background music, some odd accents from some of the actors, and in this case at least an unhurried plot marked by two or three big gun battles. The sleeve description almost gets it right. A condemned gunfighter Clayton Drumm (Testi), just about to be hanged in China (a tiny little Western town, 46 miles from Liberty), is reprieved so that he can shoot down Matthew Sebanek (Oates), a rancher, on behalf of the railroad that wants Matthew’s land. Only Clayton doesn’t do it, meets Matthew’s whole clan (three brothers)—and when he leaves, Matthew’s wife Catherine (Agutter) (who knifes Matthew in self-defense and mistakenly thinks she killed him) catches up with him.

This is all pretty slow-moving: lots of talk and essentially no action. Then the sleeve goes awry: “an enraged Matthew joins forces with the equally peeved railroad company to hunt the pair down.” Not exactly. Matthew and brothers try to gun down Clayton (and fail), and Matthew takes back his wife—but later, the railroad stooges are trying to get rid of both Clayton and Matthew, resulting in a 2.5-way gun battle that’s interesting and a little above the usual gunplay. Not to provide spoilers, but Clayton and Matthew (and Matthew’s wife) all wind up alive, with a fair number of other corpses around.

In the middle, there are some nice little side-plots, including Sam Peckinpah as a dime novelist trying to buy Clayton Drumm’s story—or, rather, lies—to sell to the folks back east, and a non-animal circus (acrobats, little people) whose head wants to hire Drumm as a sharpshooter/showman. If you can get past Clayton’s accent (explained by some dialogue about him coming over from Europe as a child) and the rather curious acting of the bride, it’s a decent flick if you like the slow, sometimes languid, actually fairly naturalistic style—which I do. $1.50.

Gone with the West, 1975, color. Bernard Girard (dir.), James Caan, Stefanie Powers, Aldo Ray, Barbara Werle, Robert Walker Jr., Sammy Davis Jr.. 1:32 [1:30].

Great cast. Good filming, decent print, good color, OK sound. Interesting acting. Stefanie Powers as an odd woman of unclear heritage is, well, odd, manic, amusing. Sammie Davis Jr. as Kid Dandy, a fast-draw artist, possibly a Marshal, mostly a pool player, is as subtle and convincing an actor as in Rat Pack outings. Aldo Ray is loud and stupid. James Caan is relatively subdued—but no scenery went unchewed in the making of this flick.

Remarkable last ten minutes or so. Lots of barroom brawls—indeed, a barroom that seems to be nothing but hysterical brawls and breaking furniture, a nonstop riot frequently spilling out to the streets of a really bad town full of really bad people. Repeated over-the-top operatic singing at barroom funerals, or maybe it’s the same footage used several times—there are a lot of deaths in this flick. Long catfight. Long “wrestling” match. Also some of the worst writing and editing I’ve ever seen in a professional production.

For the first three-quarters of the movie, I couldn’t make any sense of the plot at all. I guess it comes down to this: James Caan saw his homestead burned out and wife and children killed by the town bad man (Aldo Ray), who also molested Powers’ (Native American? Come on!) character. He comes back and, with her help (when he’s not kicking her in the backside or otherwise showing unspoken affection) does everyone in, little by little. Since the townspeople are caricatures of the worst of the old west, I guess that’s OK. I’m supposed to get from the very start that this is a spoof, a sendup of westerns. That certainly becomes clear, when James Caan and Powers are walking back into the mountains and Powers—who up to now has spoken mostly some tongue Caan doesn’t know—says in clear English “You killed everybody except the cameraman”—and Caan turns around and shoots the cameraman. It’s just not a coherent spoof. It is, to put it bluntly, a mess. An amusing mess, I guess, but a mess. Balancing the good, the incredibly bad (one insightful reviewer says it was edited by a Mixmaster) and the empty, I’ll give it $0.75, at least when viewed sober.

The Outlaw, 1943, b&w. Howard Hughes (dir.), Jack Buetel, Jane Russell, Thomas Mitchell, Walter Huston. 1:56.

Sometimes, they really are classics! I’d never seen Howard Hughes’ story of Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, Pat Garrett and Rio McDonald before, and I’m glad I finally did. I expected a spectacular, with lots of action—and got a well-played story of four people’s trails and how they cross, mostly a low-key psychological drama.

Fine acting, solid production and direction, fine screenwriting. I can’t imagine why this movie was considered defiant of the Hayes Code, censored, and banned in some countries—unless there’s even more somewhere than the 116 minutes on this DVD. (There may be—IMDB mentions a 20-minute scene between Billy and Rio—but what’s on the disc is the 116-minute version, not the 95-minute cut version.) Walter Huston is particularly fine as Doc Holliday, but Jack Buetel (Billy the Kid) also does a first-rate job, and the other major characters aren’t half bad. The music works, making extensive use of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony (first movement) and “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” although it’s sometimes a bit much.

After writing most of this review, I made the mistake of reading the IMDB reader reviews. I suppose if you’re looking for a shoot-‘em-up or hot sex, this would come off as pretty awful: In fact, the major shooting scenes aren’t won by the fastest draws and, at least in this cut, there’s very little explicit sex. I’ll stick with my original judgment: This is a fine movie, well acted and well filmed. It just isn’t a traditional western. This is definitely one I’ll watch again—atypical as a western but first-rate as a movie. Generally a very good to excellent print as well, although the sound is slightly edgy once in a while. That slight flaw is all that keeps this from getting the highest possible rating. Instead, it gets $2.25.

Arizona Stagecoach, 1942, b&w. S. Roy Luby (dir.), Ray Corrigan, John King, Max Terhune, Elmer, Nell O’Day. 0:58 [0:52].

On one hand, the print’s choppy—you lose lots of syllables and whole words, maybe more than that. On the other, it doesn’t much matter: This one’s so ludicrous that a pristine print wouldn’t help much. Where do we begin? How about with a mock lynching—but it’s a white guy, so it’s OK Turns out it’s just the devil-may-care Range Busters forcing one of their own to make good on a bet—to sing a song while upside down, in this case hanging from a tree. We’ve got three characters, all using their own names—Ray “Crash” Corrigan, John “Dusty” King and Max “Alibi” Terhune—oh, and Elmer, a ventriloquist’s dummy that acts as a lookout while the boys are chatting (!) and is later the only occupant of a house, chatting away as they enter. It’s Another Range Busters movie, one in a series (of 20!)—the opening and closing credits leave no doubt about that—and it’s bizarre.

Some elements are standard: The good guys always wear white (except when they’re pretending to be bad guys). The bad guys always wear black, which makes it easy to spot the apparent good guys that are actually bad guys—naturally with one of the prominent citizens being bad-guy-in-chief. Wells Fargo wagons to and from an Arizona town are consistently getting held up: consistently, much as though the bad guys knew whenever there was going to be a payload on the stage. So, of course, Wells Fargo doesn’t hire security to ride along with the stage, or maybe investigate the local Wells Fargo agent—no, they hire this bunch of clowns to look into it.

We have an “old west” where people are only too happy to string other people up on the spot—but where these three Range Busters (always in spotless dude attire) laugh and joke around as they drink their presumably nonalcoholic drinks in the tamest saloon I’ve ever seen in a western. The chief bad guy, when he’s listening at an open window and realizes the stagecoach driver’s spilling the beans (of course the holdups are inside jobs—that may be a spoiler, but this one’s pretty rotten already), doesn’t shoot the driver through the open window. Nope, he rides off to join the other crooks in a hopeless shootout with the good guys, then manages to ride off on his own after his group is mostly shot down. Just awful, even as they ride off, turn around and say “See you next time.” (Incidentally, the sole IMDB review is nonsense, misstating what little plot there is.) I’m being charitable at $0.50.

“Wait a minute,” I hear nobody saying, “how could you have gone through four movies since you posted 50 Movie Western Classics, Disc 6, less than a week ago?”

Three factors:

1. I only watched three of the four movies on this disc. I just couldn’t bring myself to walk through 95 minutes of Boy in the Plastic Bubble again.
2. There were a couple of days when it was too inclement for my usual lunchtime walk–so I doubled up on exercise time, going through movies at a faster clip.
3. Most important: I’d actually finished Disc 6 of the Western “Classics” pack before Midwinter–I just didn’t get around to posting it.

We now return to our features…

Boy in the Plastic Bubble, 1976, Color, made for TV. Randal Kleiser (dir.), John Travolta, Glynnis O’Connor, Robert Reed, Diana Hyland, Ralph Bellamy, Buzz Aldrin, 1:40 [1:35].

Note: I reviewed this flick back in 2004, as part of the “DoubleDouble Feature Pack.” Technically, that means I should watch it again, as this is likely to be an entirely different print. But I’m not sure I can bring myself to watch John Travolta’s early “acting” again—so I spot-checked it for print quality and timing. Here’s the original review. This is an Aaron Spelling production: A TV movie with a very young John Travolta. I’m not sure where the five minutes went (or if the IMDB info is correct); it seems to be a decent print. I’d have to say Robert Reed, Glynnis O’Connor, Diana Hyland, and Ralph Bellamy all out-act Travolta, who seems unformed as an actor at this point. As TV movies go, it’s mediocre but watchable. $1.00.

Oh, Alfie, 1975, color. Ken Hughes (dir.), Alan Price, Jill Townsend, Paul Copley, Joan Collins, Rula Lenska. Original title Alfie Darling. 1:42 [1:19]

Make a successful picture (Alfie) and what do you get? A sequel of sorts. It’s about a good-looking but vapid truck driver who has his way with several women, married or not, and finds one who doesn’t fall for him immediately. Naturally, he pursues her; naturally, she catches him. After a little nonsense (he gets punched out by one of the cuckolds, his codriver falls in love, gets married and needs advice), all ends well. That’s pretty much all there is to it.

The sleeve description (apart from spelling “truckor” with an “o”) says Alfie “uses his job as a way to commute from tryst to tryst in his travels across the United States,” that the woman in question is “as callous and fond of one-night stands as he is” and that their relationship faces “dangers waiting in the shadows.” Hmm. The movie I saw was set in England and France both in fact and in dialog, I saw no sign that the woman (a magazine editor) was callous or fond of one-night stands, and if there were any dangers they might have been that she’d come to her senses and see what a himbo she was hitching up with. No such luck. Then again, IMDB mentions “female nudity” which certainly isn’t the case—this is probably a TV version with quite a bit lost from the original. Ah well, it’s reasonably well filmed with a good print. For that, I’ll give it $1.00.

Carnival Story, 1954, color. Kurt Neumann (dir.), Anne Baxter, Steve Cochran, Lyle Bettger, George Nader, Jay C. Flippen, Helene Stanley, Ady Berber. 1:35 [1:33].

A carnival isn’t making it in America so they decamp to Germany—where a beautiful woman clumsily pickpockets one of the carnival folk (who appears to have pocketed a portion of the gate). He catches her, she’s down on her luck, he invites her to join the carnival (as a general helper) and, of course, makes his move. He’s abusive, but she takes it (or maybe “and she loves it”—that’s never entirely clear).

Then she meets up with the high-diving artist, who adds her to his act, courts her and marries her. Then the high-diver plunges to his death when a rung of the ladder is loose. Sure, it’s ruled accidental. Sure, nobody even checks the ladder. You can’t possibly imagine that the sleazy ex-boyfriend could have anything to do with it… Later, he shows up again. The husband had willed his entire fortune to her ($5,000, but this was a while back), all in cash, all hidden behind a mirror. The no-good boyfriend who she can’t resist disappears with the five large.

Oh, there’s another man involved: a photographer who’s sympathetic to her plight and, naturally, also falls for her. I’ve probably left out her attempt to spice up the act after her husband’s death by doing a 360 in midair, which causes her land badly and be out of commission for some time. Eventually, it all ends—with a minor character playing a major role. If this all sounds melodramatic, it is. But it’s also well filmed and not badly acted by a good cast, with a pretty good print. $1.50.

Four Deuces, 1976, color. William H. Bushnell (dir.), Jack Palance, Carol Lynley, Warren Berlinger, Adam Roarke. 1:27 [1:24].

The sleeve calls it a “tongue-in-cheek crime melodrama” and it has a fine cast, with Jack Palance, Warren Berlinger and Carol Lynley (among others). It’s done comic-book style, with big color captions popping up on some scene changes. The print’s pretty good, sound is fine, good Roaring 20s music, reasonably well filmed. And maybe that’s enough. It’s a lively story with loads of action, double crossing, explosions, gunsels, maidens in distress…

No heroes, really, but a variety of villains in what’s basically an old-fashioned prohibition-era gang-vs.-gang war, with each gang having a speakeasy as headquarters. Somehow I couldn’t get into it. Sure, you could say it’s all comic-book violence, but it seemed as though the only ways to move the plot forward were machine guns and arson. I don’t know about tongue-in-cheek, but I found it offputting. You might think it’s great good fun; I didn’t, and wind up with (charitably) $1.00.

Cites & Insights 8:2 (February 2008) is now available. The 24-page issue (PDF as always, but all articles are also available as HTML separates) includes:

• Announcing Academic Library Blogs: 231 Examples - The latest from Cites & Insights Books, a $29.50 289-page paperback that complements Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples. Included are brief notes, the list of academic institutions represented, examples of blog coverage for both books, the announcement of $20 PDF downloads for those who just can’t stand print books–and a few notes on the status of Cites & Insights Books.
• Trends & Quick Takes: Trends and Forecasts - Time to look at some pundits’ scorecards and forecasts, along with some of the trends from the LITA Top Tech Trendspotters, with some of my comments interleaved.
• Bibs & Blather: Midwinter Musings - Notes on a much warmer Philadelphia Midwinter, along with a special essay based on an odd but not unique occurrence: “Leadership and Initiative: The Case of the Empty Chairs.”
• Offtopic Perspective: 50 Movie Western Classics, Part 1 - Roy Rogers is riding tonight, as are Tex Ritter, Gene Autry, John Wayne and a slew of others. A bunch of one hour “oaters” and a handful of pretty good pictures.

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When I chatted with a few of you at Midwinter, I may have expressed concern that the February issue might be some combination of late, short and peculiar, since I didn’t think I had any of it written (I forgot about the Offtopic Perspective). Well, one out of three ain’t bad: It’s not late and it’s not short. Enjoy.

Man of the Frontier, 1936, b&w. B. Reeves Eason (dir.), Gene Autry, Smiley Burnette, Frances Grant, Boothe Howard, Jack Kennedy, Champion. Original title Red River Valley (1:00). 0:54 [0:55].

Gene Autry plays Gene Autry—but maybe not as a singing cowboy (although he does sing in the movie). Delivering some cattle for a fee, he finds that the Red River Valley Land & Irrigation Company, trying to build a dam and canal to irrigate the surrounding land, keeps getting locks blown up and losing its “ditch rider,” the guy responsible for keeping stuff in shape. So Autry takes the job. Naturally, there’s a conspiracy afoot. Naturally, one of the most respected men in town is behind it (the banker, I guess, who wants to foreclose on all the land, in cahoots with the office manager of the company—I think). Naturally, Gene in his white hat saves the day—and, since there’s a pretty young woman involved, you can reasonably assume that he winds up either going with or marrying her.

I’ll admit, I think of “the frontier” as something a little more primitive than an area with telephone service working on a dam and irrigation systems (with construction trains running to the dam site), but what do I know? (Now it makes sense: The original title is Red River Valley.) I haven’t seen that many Autry flicks, but he seems a bit less likable here than in some others: Sneering much of the time, with somewhat of a mean streak. Frog, his lovable sidekick, is amusing as always and gets a more interesting musical number. There’s also a fascinating novelty “hillbilly band” playing some interesting instruments. You can guess the key song for Autry, can’t you, given the setting? Oh, and the big crew building the dam all sing multipart harmony in perfect tune, as though they’re part of an oversize barbershop quartet. Interesting. In a charitable mood, I’ll give it $1.00

Riders of the Whistling Pines, 1949, b&w. John English (dir.), Gene Autry, Patricia Barry/White, Jimmy Lloyd, Douglass Dumbrille, Damian O’Flynn, Clayton Moore. 1:10 [1:08]

Gene Autry’s Gene Autry again in this tale of the new post-WWII west—cropdusters, trucks, cars, ecoterrorism, but when trouble’s afoot, everybody leaps on horses. This time, he’s a forest ranger who’s been given a new rifle as he’s leaving to run a lodge. His buddy (there’s no Crusty this time; instead, a regular-guy sidekick with a drinking problem) points to a mountain lion. Gene tries to shoot it, twice—and instead, believes he’s shot somebody completely out of sight on a horse.

But we know the truth: This dastardly lumber company has an exclusive contract to log on Federal land (when they’re allowed to)—and there’s a spreading infestation that could kill off tens of thousands of acres of forest, which would mean they could log all that timber and make a fortune. The guy was off to alert other authorities of the infestation; one of the timber honchos heard Autrey shooting and found it a convenient cover to kill this guy in cold blood. Naturally, Gene admits it; it’s an accident, but he resigns his post and sells the lodge to the couple who’ve been setting it up. (Later, his forestry buddies tell him that they messed up the sight on the gun as a prank: He could not possibly have shot the other guy, as the gun was set to fire into the ground when he aimed normally.)

But wait! The infestation’s discovered anyway—and spraying the whole forest with DDT from the air is the way to stop it. Nobody but Autry can manage the job—building the access roads and airstrip, organizing the crews to do the flying, all within 30 days—so, of course Autry says he’ll do it. Meantime, the evil timber marauders (one of them’s Clayton Moore in a distinctly non-Lone Ranger role) figure the only way to stop him and see that the forest dies off is to convince the ranchers that DDT will kill their animals. But, of course, as we all know, DDT wouldn’t hurt a fly…

So they fly another plane spraying real poison over various farms. That’s just part of a plot-heavy flick with lots of songs—apparently Autry by this time managed to be both a highly successful musician and an itinerant cowboy-of-all-trades just out to earn a living and pick up another girl by the end of the plot. (By this time, he’d done more than sixty flicks, always playing Gene Autry except for the one time he was Tex Autry.) Oh, and now when he’s singing as he’s riding along, invisible instruments and a background chorus show up from time to time.

It’s not bad, certainly not the standard formula, although in this case the bad guy’s such an obvious jerk that you’d think he’d have trouble convincing farmers to riot against the noble Feds just trying to do their job. This is also a movie of its time: Twenty years later, the concept that DDT is entirely benign might not go over quite so well. The print’s mostly OK, but there’s some choppiness, noticeable in a couple of songs. Still, I’ll give it $1.00.

Painted Desert, 1931, b&w. Howard Higgin (dir.), William Boyd, Helen Twelvetrees, William Farnum, J. Farrell MacDonald, Clark Gable. 1:25 [1:15].

I’m not sure which is more bizarre in this full-length Western: The plot or the acting. Two best friends are making their way through the old west, helping each other at every turn. They come upon a broken-down wagon (presumably the result of a raid?) and hear a baby’s cry. There’s an abandoned infant, which they take with them. Then they reach a watering hole. One person says that’s it, he’s found his grubstake (I guess this was during a homesteading period: Go there and you own it), he’s settling down. The other says no, he’s going on to find grazing land—and insists on taking the kid. End of Act 1.

Now the kid’s grown up and back from mining school. The two men are bitter enemies, and the guy with the watering hole—whose only living comes from renting access to the water to cattle ranchers taking cattle to market—forces the other guy to take his cattle the long way around, refusing water. And both of the old friends act as though zombified, for some reason. Oh, and the waterhole owner has a lovely young (that is, young woman) daughter (but no wife). And the son has found tungsten in the hill that’s part of the waterhole property. When the son tries to talk his father into mending fences, the father basically disowns him and throws him out. The son goes in with the other guy, starts the mine (on a loan), almost loses it because of various nefarious deeds…and, well, of course it all works out (albeit with both older men shooting the hero simultaneously, oddly enough).

As it turns out, the real evildoer is some fellow who would do anything to keep people from taking what’s his—and that’s not quite clear, although I guess it’s the daughter. (Apparently that’s Clark Gable. Maybe his first talkie; not his finest hour.) I don’t know. Maybe it’s a style of acting I just don’t recognize. If I hadn’t been treadmilling, I’d have fallen asleep. (Apparently the missing 10 minutes is mostly three big action scenes that were deliberately removed from the flick after its first showing, to be used in other movies—including one of them in Red River Valley.) The dozed-off acting, peculiar (not in a good way) plot and a mediocre print limit this to $0.75.

Gunfight at Red Sands, 1963, color (original title Duello nel Texas). Ricardo Blasco (dir.), Richard Harrison, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Mikaela, Sara Lezana, Daniel Martin. 1:35.

Red certainly seems appropriate as part of this movie’s title, since it’s in an odd sort of sepiacolor that only includes shades of red, browns, wood, and other faded colors—no blues or true greens that I could see. It’s apparently an early “spaghetti Western,” with decent production values but not a whole lot in the way of acting or, well, logic.

Richard Harrison is Gringo—adopted son of a Mexican family working a little gold mine in a just-north-of-the-border town, who returns from four years fighting in the Mexican civil war. As he returns, three bandits kill the father and steal all the gold (most of it supposedly hidden). The rest of the movie deals with that—and with a town whose handsome sheriff and a group of variously mean-spirited sidekicks all hate Mexicans, even though much of the town appears to be Hispanic. (The most interesting villain is a giggling sociopath who is also, of course, a deputy sheriff.)

I guess I shouldn’t expect logic in a flick like this. Seems as though the sheriff or his clearly-murderous sidekicks would have just shot Gringo in the back or in “self defense” fairly early in the plot, but that wouldn’t make for much of a movie or get us to the inevitable (and really ludicrous) showdown. Maybe I should be impressed by Ennio Morricone’s score. I guess it’s OK. Let’s see. Other than the pseudocolor, there’s a short section where there seem to be holes in the print (that is, real holes, not just the holes in the plot). I can’t see giving this more than $0.75.

Close observers (if there are any) may wonder why this isn’t Disc 4 of the Hollywood Legends set. It has to do with the six-disc cumulations I run in Cites & Insights: I don’t want to have two of them in the same month, so when I’m splitting viewing between two sets, I “get ahead” on one of the two. Given the number of short flicks in this set, it was an easy choice.

American Empire, 1942, b&w. William C. McGann (dir.), Richard Dix, Leo Carrillo, Preston Foster, Frances Gifford, Jack La Rue, Guinn Williams, Cliff Edwards. 1:22.

The setup: Just after the Civil War on the Sabine River between Texas and Louisiana, with Dan Taylor and Pax Bryce running a riverboat freight company. The boat gets grounded where Dominique Beauchard is driving a “there for the taking” herd of cattle across the river from Texas to Louisiana, and offer to transport the cattle if he’ll get the boat back afloat. Beauchard stiffs them on the fee—and they take off with a bunch of the cattle, which they sell to buy Texas land, then sell all the “free for the taking” cattle on the land to buy more land, then…

Anyway, the two build an “American empire” of Texas rangeland—but lose lots of cattle to Beauchard’s continuing attitude that any cattle his men can take are his property. They believe they’ve killed Beauchard because he falls off his horse into a river after a shot: Gee, apparently nobody but Dan’l Boone ever thought of hiding underwater breathing through a straw. When thousands of cattle keep disappearing, one increasingly-arrogant partner decides it must be the other cattlemen and says they can no longer drive their herds across his range. That leads to a forced stampede and the death of the partner’s son—which is not the climax of the movie (as one IMDB reviewer claims), although it helps make the rancher more bitter and difficult to deal with. That’s just part of a fairly large and plausible plotline, with Beauchard a continuing and nearly unstoppable villain and one of the two empire-builders as, well, a horse’s ass. There’s an odd mix of tones, as Beauchard (Leo Carrillo, perhaps best known as Pancho on The Cisco Kid) seems as much comic relief as town-destroying villain.

The climax is a remarkable and extended three-way battle after the rancher (his partner’s asked to be bought out) orders up barbed-wire fence, the rest of the cattlemen decide to attack him, as Beauchard’s gang decides to destroy the town…it’s quite something. My biggest problem with this otherwise-interesting flick, other than the curious way Beauchard’s character is played and yet another sheriff too stupid to prevent a jailbreak, is something I’ve never seen in a DVD transfer before: motion ghosts, the kind you’d get on old LCD displays. They’re sometimes pretty bad, with streaks trailing behind the action. That problem (and some sound distortion early on) reduce this to $1.

Billy the Kid Trapped, 1942, b&w, Sam Newfield (dir.), Buster Crabbe, Al St. John, Bud McTaggert, Ann Jeffries, Glenn Strange, Walter McGrail, Ted Adams. 0:59 [0:55].

This one’s a little different. Billy the Kid (Buster Crabbe) is a good guy, with Crusty and another sidekick (the first sidekick’s not named Crusty—actually “Fuzzy Jones”—but he’s yet another crusty ol’ sidekick), but three real outlaws are dressing up as Billy and his cohort and running around robbing and killing. An evil mastermind who runs Mesa City, a hideout for criminals, is behind it all, of course. (Note: I usd actor’s names as credited in the film, not as in IMDB.) Enough missing frames to interfere with continuity keep this from getting more than $0.75.

Vengeance Valley, 1951, color, Richard Thorpe (dir.), Burt Lancaster, Robert Walker, Joanne Dru, Sally Forrest, John Ireland, Hugh O”Brian, Will Wright. 1:23. [1:21]

This is more like it: Full (and very good) color, some serious acting (and serious actors), cowboys who herd cattle (you know, like cows), grand scale and scenery, an interesting and adult plot. The basic plot: An aging and ailing cattle baron has a son who’s pretty much worthless—and a foster son (Lancaster) who tries to keep the bad seed in shape while acting as ranch foreman and being far too loyal for his own good. The rotten kid’s married—but also impregnated a good local woman, for which her rotten brothers blame the innocent foster son. Various treachery ensues, all of it making a lot more sense than many western plots. Good narration and more detail about (and footage of) spring and fall cattle drives than you might expect. Some damage to portions of the print, but it’s still worth $1.50.

The Sundowners, 1950, color. George Templeton (dir.), Robert Preston, Robert Sterling, Chill Wills, Cathy Downs, John Litel, Jack Elam, Don Haggerty, John Barrymore Jr. 1:23

No, not the 1960 Deborah Kerr-Robert Mitchum flick; this one came ten years earlier. Also full color, with significant star power, some well-written dialog and pretty decent acting—Robert Preston makes a great villain. Distinctly filmed on location: It starts with a screen identifying the four Texas ranches used by name and brand!

The plot, as far as I can tell, is that two guys have a cattle ranch but are under siege from their neighbors (who formerly used the land as free grazing country) and keep losing cattle to nightriders. The Wichita Kid (Preston) shows up and, with the help of the younger guy and a ranch hand, starts stealing back cattle—and also shooting people when he feels like it. The “good guy” (Robert Sterling), the older of the two ranch owners, approves of the new thefts but isn’t quite so hot for the casual shootings. There’s a deep dark secret (given away fairly well, but I won’t mention it) that prevents Sterling from gunning down Preston to save his own hide. It all leads up to a three-way gun (and whip!) battle (three groups of people) and an ending of sorts.

I have two problems with the movie, one of them specific to this print. First, there really aren’t any good guys in the flick (although one woman seems honorable enough), but there are lots of movies that set various shades of badness against one another, so that’s OK. Second, it’s a choppy print: While the color and sound are both good, there are enough missing frames and words to interfere with continuity, even though it’s not even a minute short. I’ll give it $1.00.