Walt at Random

Four of these are Studio One episodes from the heyday of live b&w TV drama—thus, they’re kinescopes (filmed from the TV), and presented including Westinghouse’s ads. The live format and limited resources of the time can result in somewhat claustrophobic dramas, but it’s at least interesting historically. In a way, viewing these with contemporary equipment is unfair. They were made to be viewed on screens probably no larger than 15″ diagonal (thus 9″ by 12″); viewing them on the 4×3 portion of a 54″ screen—which is to say an area 27″ by 36″, or nine times the area—warps the original staging expectations.

There Was a Crooked Man, 1950, b&w (TV). Paul Nickell (dir.), Robert Sterling, Charles Korvin, Virginia Gilmore, Richard Purdy, Robert Emhardt. 0:56.

A small boarding house with eclectic—even strange—tenants: One young man who avoids everybody, an eccentric professor supposedly writing a 12-volume history of education, a young woman waiting for her husband to return, another young woman in similar situation (both of them, apparently, working in the rare book room of a library), the woman whose house it is who’s expecting her husband to return after six years away, and an upstairs boarder who’s room-bound thanks to an accident but called on by all sorts of people.

And who winds up dead. Suspicion falls on the professor, but there are reasons to believe it must be somebody impersonating him: His beard and hair were bushier when he was encountered just after the crime, and he was wearing high-heeled shoes, which he doesn’t normally do. Lots more plot, including the arrival of one woman’s husband, the truly eccentric husband of the owner (who was actually a few blocks away and claims to have long-term amnesia), and a conclusion that leaves a whole bunch of question unanswered. Some scenery-chewing, too much plot for the time, but not bad as a mini-mystery. Note that the running time includes two lengthy Westinghouse commercials (one for a big screen TV—well, big for the time, I guess); it’s probably around 52 minutes of actual program. $0.75.

Two Sharp Knives, 1949, b&w (TV). Franklin J. Schaffner (dir.), Stanley Ridges, Wynne Gibson, Theodore Newton, Abe Vigoda. 0:59.

A surprisingly ambitious live drama, with scenes set in a (patently phony) train, police station, railroad station and cheap hotel—and an intriguing script by Dashiell Hammett. A father and his daughter are on their way to a small town to meet the mother, who the daughter really doesn’t know at all—and, when they arrive, the father’s detained because the police just received a “Wanted for Murder” message with his photo on it. The father’s never heard of the supposed victim and has no idea what’s going on… The police chief’s daughter (who’s engaged to a police detective) takes the little girl home with her, while the police chief, detective and suspect go to the hotel where he expected to meet his wife—who isn’t there and nobody’s heard of.

Next thing we know, the father’s apparently hung himself in his cell—and the police have discovered that the wanted message was a forgery and the supposed victim doesn’t exist. Although the coroner tells reporters that it was a suicide (in part because a conniving DA is gunning for the police chief), he tells the police chief that it was clearly murder (oh, there’s politics at play too). The plot continues from there, and it’s a tight plot for the 50-52 minutes of actual program. (Ads this time are for the Westinghouse Laundromat and Dryer, with the pitch that your Westinghouse dealer will be happy to wash and dry a load of your clothes to show how great they are—and a prominent “damp” setting on the dryer, for all those clothes needing ironing.) Note: I mention Abe Vigoda because he became so well known; as with all but three actors, his only credit was a voice-over at the end of the episode. He was 28 at the time; this was one of his first two roles.)

Well done, well-acted; since it’s also well under an hour, I’ll give it $1.00.

The Inner Circle, 1946, b&w. Philip Ford (dir.), Adele Mara, Warren Douglas, William Frawley, Ricardo Cortez, Virginia Christine, Ken Niles, WIl Wright. 0:57.

This one’s not a Studio One kinescope—it’s a B film, humorous, fast-moving, complicated and thoroughly enjoyable. A private detective, Johnny Strange, Action, Inc., starts to call in an ad for a private secretary (young, blonde, good-looking, etc.), when the phone’s removed by…well, a young woman (Adele Mara, a stunner) who more than meets his criteria and says she’s there for the job. Before you know it, she’s calling to get his office cleaned—and on his other line there’s a call, which she answers (the first call’s busy), by a new client who informs the secretary that Johnny is to meet her in front of a jeweler’s at 7:30 that night.

This leads to a dead body, Strange being knocked over the head, the gun placed in his hand and the police showing up—and the secretary giving a thoroughly false story to clear him. He wants to know what’s actually going on, and this takes us through a bunch of characters, the secretary’s socialite sister (who she thinks might be the real murderer)…and eventually a re-creation of portions of the murder scene during a radio broadcast (the victim had a gossip radio show, with a side of blackmail). All fast, with snappy dialogue, the natural love interest between the private dick and the beautiful secretary. William Frawley—yes, that William Frawley (later of I Love Lucy, The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, and My Three Sons) does a fine job as the police detective lieutenant pursuing the case. Great stuff—light-hearted and well-done. It’s only 57 minutes (actually just over 56), so I can’t give it more than $1.25.

Things Happen At Night, 1947, b&w. Francis Searle (dir.), Gordon Harker, Alfred Drayton, Robertson Hare, Gwynneth Vaughan. 1:19 [0:56]

The biggest mystery here is why this odd little farce is in the Mystery Collection rather than being filler in a comedy megapack. The plot, such as it is, involves a poltergeist who’s possessing the daughter in a too-big house and causing all sorts of mischief. An insurance investigator (Gordon Harker) arrives to evaluate a claim for a hole in a rug (caused by a burning cinder in a room where the fireplace wasn’t used and had a grille that wouldn’t have allowed the cinder to escape in any case) and, somehow, becomes an overnight guest, formal dress and all. A “scientist” also arrives to photograph the poltergeist (?).

Mostly the plot is an excuse for cheap special effects and lots of Gordon Harker’s odd expressions, and whether you’ll enjoy it depends on whether you think Harker is side-splitting. Since I don’t, I mostly found this to be a wasted hour. (Harker was much better in The Farmer’s Wife both because it was one of Alfred Hitchcock’s rare comedies and because there was a script, something that’s lacking here.) Maybe the missing 23 minutes would make this better, but the flick seemed overlong as it is. Add to the missing script sometimes-sketchy video quality (bleached at times) and some odd filming, and I’m being extremely generous to give this $0.75.

Flowers from a Stranger, 1949, b&w (TV). Paul Nickell (dir.), John Conte, Felicia Montealegre, Yul Brynner, Robert Duke, Lois Nettleton. 0:59.

The beautiful young wife of a psychiatrist has trouble sleeping, mostly because she keeps thinking about a tune that she can’t quite place—and that may be evil. As a typical young professional couple, they of course have a housekeeper/maid, and she’s having friends to dinner—an odd number, and suggests her husband invite someone. He thinks of an older colleague, a famous psychiatrist who survived the concentration camps and has one bad hand for it. The psychiatrist, Yul Brynner with white hair (29 years old at the time, but a credible elderly psychiatrist), is free.

In short order, we get several dozen white carnations sent to the wife by an anonymous sender—and she hates white carnations. When the older doctor arrives he is, of course, wearing…a white carnation. He’s charmed by her; she believes he’s evil…and he refers to her by a name her husband didn’t know, her stage name when she was giving piano concerts in Europe as a child. Next scene: A violent inmate escapes and, next thing you know, she’s being subdued by the housekeeper. The wife concludes that the inmate was brought there by the old doctor to kill her and that the old doctor pushed her mother off a train platform…and goes in to New York to get evidence of a sort (the old doctor was briefly married to the wife’s mother, and he decamped to the U.S. a few days before the death).

A word about lengths for these Studio One kinescopes: Yes, they were longer than today’s ad-saturated hour shows, but not that much longer. I fast-forwarded through ads on this one, and it seems to come to about 50 minutes including titles—thus, five to seven minutes longer than today’s adfests. There were only three ads, but they were long ads.

We get a climax in which the young woman, apparently frail and easily breakable, suddenly turns into a victim-turned-pursuer, breaking down the older psychiatrist. I found this scene so wholly unbelievable that it compromises what’s otherwise a minor psychodrama. For some reason, I was more aware on this little drama that doctors are portrayed as all being smoking fiends: It was a different time! Overall, I’m being generous with $0.75.

Plan For Escape, 1952, b&w (TV). Paul Nickell (dir.), Peggy Ann Garner, Frank Overton, Jean Carson. 0:59.

Another Studio One presentation, this time with Betty Furness doing the ads (one of them for a Westinghouse sunlamp so you can get your tan in winter, back when tanning was supposed to be as healthy as smoking). The plot: A very young (21 years old) trophy wife of a gangster hates being a bird in a gilded cage, wants out…and sees her chance when her husband’s gunned down. But her minder (who’s in cahoots with the gangster who shot her husband) is on her trail, since she could rat on the killer. She winds up in a tiny town on the rail line, befriended by a handsome young mail clerk who’s deeply philosophical. Her problem with him: He’s not Somebody, being more interested in living a good life than in being a big financial success.

Lots of talk, then more plot leading to a shootout of sorts. Will the girl-woman ever grow up? Perhaps… This one’s fairly well done, but I still can’t give it more than $0.75.

Shaker Run, 1986, color. Bruce Morrison (dir.), Cliff Robertson, Leif Garrett, Lisa Harrow, Shane Briant, Peter Rowell, Peter Hayden. 1:31 [1:29]

A research scientist whose project has accidentally developed a lethal bioweapon (it suppresses the immune system) finds that it’s about to be turned over to the military—so to save mankind from that awful fate, she and her lover (also on the project) decide to steal the stuff and deliver it to…the CIA? Really? So that sterling institution can see to it that an antidote is developed. Oh, and the evil country whose military she’s trying to avoid: New Zealand.

Yep. That’s what we have: the New Zealand military vs. the CIA—except that it’s mostly stunt car driving with Cliff Robertson as a former race car driver turned stunt-car driver, who takes on the delivery job without knowing what he’s transporting (but he’s bad broke and she’s offering $3,000). Garrett plays Robertson’s mechanic (and son of the crew chief Robertson’s character accidentally killed at Daytona). The military presence includes a sinister head and an associate who’s pure assassin. All filmed on location and with decent production values, on roads covering a good portion of New Zealand’s South Island—lots of scenery. Lots of shooting, explosions, cars going over cliffs, and mostly lots of stunt car driving. The print’s pretty decent for VHS quality, and the movie moves right along. Even if…the CIA? Really? (When Robertson, as an American stunt driver, hears what she’s doing, he comments “Lady, you are really naïve.” Ya’ think?) I have no idea how MCE could get rights to a 1986 color movie cheap enough to include in a megapack, but there you go. All in all, a minor effort worth $1.25.

Against All Hope, 1982, color. Edward T. McDougal (dir.), Michael Madsen, Maureen McCarthy, Cecil Moe. 1:29.

Awful, awful, awful: A badly-done film that’s nothing more than a 90-minute sermon for one narrow brand of Christianity as being the five-second cure (and the only cure) for whatever ails you.

It’s all about a falling-down drunk and how he got that way, told in flashbacks as he’s sitting in a 4a.m. chat with a minister he’d never met, trying to decide whether to kill himself. It’s a mildly sad story, but mostly boils down to a man with no apparent self-esteem who lives for his drinks and has somehow stayed married. When he decides he’s in trouble, we get a display of how every other helping profession is worthless: A doctor blows cigarette smoke in his face while telling him there are no medical problems, a neurologist dismisses his issues, a psychiatrist wants to know whether he hates his mother or his father and then refers him to a minister from the Church of Good Times (or something like that), whose only advice is that the couple should come to Wednesday Night Bingo or Friday Night Dances at the church—and, of course, not one of these people asks anything about him being a drunk. No AA suggestions or anything that might actually help.

Add in a barroom scene in which everybody in the bar gathers around him to force him to take a drink after he’s been on the wagon for a couple of months, a diner with a remarkably vicious waitress and even nastier other customer and the fact that not one character in the whole film, including the long-suffering wife and the protagonist, seems to be more than a convenient cliché. And even after the lead is miraculously saved (after a 30-second prayer, he walks out of the minister’s house, says everything suddenly looks beautiful, and of course everything goes great after that), he’s upset because his wife (who’s always been religious, even taught Sunday School for 11 years, but doesn’t much cotton to his particular fundamentalist group) “still isn’t a Christian yet.”

The lead character’s name—Cecil Moe–is also the name of the cowriter and executive producer (who also plays a different role, the minister who saves Moe). It’s really bad propaganda, of a sort that strikes me as wholly useless—I mean, would anyone outside the “you’re all doomed, but if you just Say the Magic Phrase, you’re instantly saved” camp be convinced by anything here? Madsen’s first movie; based on his stellar performance, it’s a miracle he was ever in a second one—but this one must have been seen by, what, 50 people including the cast? (If you read the IMDB reviews, note that the only semi-favorable ones are from those who think the “Christian” message overrides everything else.) I’d give it a flat $0, but as an example of really bad moviemaking that’s also remarkably awful propaganda it’s a weak $0.25.

Kangaroo, 1952, color. Lewis Milestone (dir.), Maureen O’Hara, Peter Lawford, Finlay Currie, Richard Boone, Chips Rafferty. 1:24.

An old guy, Michael McGuire, shows up at a cheap sailor’s rest (six cents a night for bedding and a bunk) drunk and with booze to share—and, as he’s singing and then becoming maudlin, Richard Connor (a young Peter Lawford—29 at the time) asks about it and finds that he’s mourning the long-lost son that he put in an orphanage as a child, from whence the son fled. Connor then leaves the sailor’s rest, tries to rob a gambler, John W. Gamble (Richard Boone), winds up robbing the proprietor of the gambling establishment with Gamble (a robbery during which Gamble shoots the proprietor)…and that’s just the start. (Interesting gambling hall: Most of the action’s betting on whether a person tossing two coins in the air will have two heads or two tails land, with one of each being a non-result.)

The primary plot: McGuire’s got a 10,000-square-mile cattle station in South Australia; the two, after taking him back to his ship (dead drunk), connive to go to the station…with the hope that they can convince him that Connor’s his long-lost son. Turns out he also has a beautiful daughter (Maureen O’Hara), and they’re just trying to hang on given a three-year drought that’s nearly wiped out the nearby town and threatens to wipe out their herds.

Most of the movie’s a combination of Australian scenery, driving cattle, aboriginal rites and a little action here and there. The ending’s not terribly important (indeed, other than a break in the drought, the ending’s not even very clear). It’s fair to say that the long con doesn’t work, partly because Lawford’s conscience gets the better of him.

Fine cast, generally well played, maybe a little heavy on the Australian exotica (supposedly the first Hollywood flick and first Technicolor movie shot entirely in Australia). While the print’s not terrible, it’s not as good as you might want for a movie this heavy on scenery. All in all, though, it’s entertaining enough. If the print was better, this might get more, but I’ll give it $1.25.

A Hazard of Hearts, 1987, color (made for TV). John Hough (dir.), Diana Rigg, Edward Fox, Helena Bonham Carter, Fiona Fullerton, Christopher Plummer, Steward Granger, Neil Dickson, Anna Massey, Marcus Gilbert. 1:30.

Romance-novel fans may recognize that as a Barbara Cartland title, and snobs may say “Oh, please, it’s a cheap romance novel.” Maybe, but it’s well-done and a distinct pleasure, some highly implausible plot issues be damned.

The basic plot: A British nobleman (Christopher Plummer) is an inveterate gambler and loses not only his entire fortune but his estate and his daughter’s promised hand in marriage (which brings with it an £80,000 inheritance) to a villainous lord who his daughter detests. Another lord takes on the villain, winning back the estate and daughter…while the nobleman shoots himself. Then, the other lord (an oddly distant sort, but handsome) discovers the youth of the daughter (Helena Bonham Carter, 21 at the time) and decides he can’t possibly wed one so young—and decides to sell the estate and send her to live with his mother at his estate. His mother, played by Diana Rigg, is a proper scoundrel—another inveterate gambler who runs her own gambling operation and also a smuggling franchise, and who regard the girl as an annoyance to be dealt with.

That’s just the start of a hearty plot involving hidden doors, staircases and even apparently-dead fathers, subterfuge, betrayal, and eventually both a pistol duel and a swordfight. Virtue triumphs—how could it not? And, frankly, it all works—because the actors are first-rate. Also, this is an unusually good print for a Mill Creek movie, nearly VHS quality: It was a pleasure to watch on the big screen. Yes, the plot’s silly, but the staging and acting are both fine. I’ll give it $1.75.

The Great Flamarian, 1945, b&w. Anthony Mann (dir.), Erich von Stroheim, Mary Beth Hughes, Dan Duryea, Steve Barclay. 1:18.

We begin in a theater in Mexico City (1936), where an odd act with a guy swirling a cloth is ending and one with a clown is beginning. Suddenly, shots ring out… The woman in a husband-and-wife team is dead, the husband’s the obvious suspect, but we’ve seen somebody climbing up into the rafters and hiding. We soon find that the woman was strangled, not shot—but the husband’s still the obvious suspect because, you know, he’s the husband. It doesn’t help that the wife apparently had eyes (and whatever) for others within the troupe.

As the police leave and the clown closes down the theater, we hear a thump, as the guy in the rafters falls to the stage, almost but not quite dead—he was the recipient of the shots. He tells the clown that he’ll be dead by the time the police arrive and tells his tale: The rest of the movie, told as flashback. The guy (von Stroheim) is The Great Flamarian, a remarkable trick-shot artist with a little act built on him catching his (stage) wife with her (stage) lover. The woman (Mary Beth Hughes) is a gold-digger out for herself. Her husband at the time (and lover in the act), Dan Duryea, is increasingly a drunk but knows she was a petty crook until they got married.

We have a tale of conniving, an innocent man who lives only for his work, and the results you’d expect—death and betrayal. It’s quite a story, and although it’s short of greatness, it’s good noir, well-acted and done well enough to get $1.75.

Parole, Inc., 1948, b&w. Alfred Zeider (dir.), Michael O’Shea, Turban Bey, Evelyn Ankers, Virginia Lee, Charles Bradstreet, Lyle Talbot. 1:11.

Based on the opening title, this is propaganda for tough parole laws and boards, with the implication that parole boards are commonly releasing dangerous criminals. The actual film is sort of a potboiler, with a federal agent going undercover to prove that one state’s parole board is being bribed to let people out. Good cast, but to me, the whole thing felt a little forced—and, frankly, I don’t believe a real undercover agent in this situation would tell the three men setting him up for the sting what his cover name was going to be, since he’d have no way of being sure one of them wasn’t corrupted and it’s information they don’t need.

Good cast, mixed acting. Overall, OK, but it didn’t quite ring true for me. And, of course, there’s no real mystery, since the movie’s all flashbacks while the injured agent’s dictating his report from a hospital bed—where if things had really gone bad, he wouldn’t be dictating any report $1.00.

Baby Face Morgan, 1942, b&w. Arthur Dreifuss (dir.), Richard Cromwell, Mary Carlisle, Robert Armstrong, Chick Chandler, Warren Hymer. 1:03 [0:59]

We open with telegrams being delivered to cheap grifters in four different areas—and, separately, a cute scene with a soda jerk/waiter and his somewhat more worldly cousin and the cousin’s girlfriend (a remarkably vapid girl who’s never heard from again). Then the plots converge: The telegrams are bringing the grifters back to re-form the mob that had once ruled Central City with a protection racket, back before their boss, Big Mike Morgan, was killed. One smart guy’s decided to rebuild the racket, using Big Mike’s son as a front (without his knowledge). First, though, he wants to check out the son—who turns out to be the soda jerk who, thanks to an overheard and wildly misinterpreted phone conversation (his boss’s initials are DA, he dropped off some pineapples—which the mobsters assumed to be grenades—at the sheriff’s office, and he picked up bill payments from some customers), is assumed to be a hardass criminal and immediately nicknamed Baby Face Morgan (he does indeed have a baby face), although he doesn’t know that.

That’s the start of what could be film noir but is, in fact, a nicely done little comedy—as the son & cousin, set up as heads of the shell Acme Protection Agency, get bored doing nothing (they have no idea what’s actually going on) and start selling insurance to local business owners, beginning with one cute young woman (a trucking company owner) who’s resisting the racketeers. The racketeers blow up one of her trucks; the Acme Protection Agency immediately writes a check to cover it—that check, unknown to them, being funded by the protection money—and we’re off. Rabbits play a role as well. The close is a little improbable, but it’s an interesting blend of noir and comedy. Despite its short length, I’ll give it $1.25.

The Woman Condemned, 1934, b&w. Dorothy Davenport (dir.—credited as “Mrs. Wallace Reid” in the film itself), Claudia Dell, Lola Lane, Richard Hemingway, Jason Robards (Sr.), Paul Ellis, Douglas Congrove, Mischa Auer. 1:06 [1:01]

I’m not sure what to make of this one—part noir mystery, part romantic comedy, part farce (I guess), and for most of its length, a short movie that seems very slow, as though it was written as a 15-minute sketch and expanded to a one-hour movie.

The plot involves a woman singer who takes a “vacation,” tells her boss & would-be fiancée that she doesn’t know when she’ll be back, and tells her maid to tell everyone she doesn’t know where she is. There’s a phone conversation with a mysterious and evil-looking man who points out that, while something is expensive, she wants to be free to live her life—and he doesn’t take checks. (A contract murder?) There’s a female detective from out of town, hired by the boss to find out what’s going on—a detective with a truly lousy skill at being unnoticed. And there’s a wisenheimer reporter (or something) who hangs around night court and, thanks to an even more wisenheimer judge, winds up married to this detective he’s never met before. Oh, and identical twins are crucial to the plot.

That’s just the start of a complex plot; there is an actual murder, which if this is intended as a comedy makes it a bit less amusing. Everything gets resolved, more or less, in a final eight minutes that almost makes up for the lethargic pace of the rest of the movie. All in all, though, it felt underdone and confused. Charitably, $0.75.

Here Comes Trouble, 1948, b&w. Fred Guiol (dir.), William Tracy, Joe Sawyer, Emory Parnell, Betty Compson, Joan Woodbury, Beverly Lloyd. 0:55 [0:50]

“Filmed in Cinecolor”—but this print’s in black and white, unfortunately. It’s pretty good slapstick in the service of a reasonable plot. We have a crusading newspaper publisher/editor whose police reporters keep getting beaten up and quitting and whose daughter’s in love with a returning serviceman who was a copyboy at the paper. The father isn’t wild about the copyboy marrying his daughter…and figures that promoting him to police reporter might kill two birds with one stone.

That’s the setup. Add a service buddy of the son who’s just joined the police force (and in his case “police farce” might be better), the fact that the criminal mastermind is also the comptroller of the newspaper, a burlesque queen…and you have a very good, almost 20-minute climactic sequence. Color would have been better, and this is a short one, so I’ll say $1.00.

Hollywood and Vine, 1945, b&w. Alexis Thurn-Taxis (dir.), James Ellison, Wanda McKay, June Clyde, Ralph Morgan, Franklin Pangborn, Leon Belasco, Emmett Lynn. 0:58.

A romantic comedy, emphasis on the comedy, with a surround story that makes no sense. It’s told in flashbacks from the office of a tycoon, and is supposed to be the story of how he got started—but there’s not a thing in the picture that suggests the guy (who started as proprietor of Pop’s Burgers) would go anywhere.

The flashback, though, is charming, and that’s 95% of the picture. It’s the old Hollywood story but with several cute twists and relies heavily on a remarkable stunt dog. Cute and well played, albeit short and with an outer plot that doesn’t lead anywhere. All things considered, including its length, I’ll give it $1.00.

Lost Honeymoon, 1947, b&w. Leigh Jason (dir.), Franchot Tone, Ann Richards, Tom Conway, Frances Rafferty, Clarence Kolb. 1:11 [1:09]

Somewhere between a B programmer and a feature, this one’s interesting—part romantic comedy, part identity confusion, with just a little slapstick thrown in. The gist: A young woman returns to the British boarding house she’d formerly stayed in, knowing that a friend of hers died, leaving two very young (twin) children, who the landlady’s taking care of. The woman also knows the friend was a GI bride in WWII—and apparently the husband’s disappeared to America, with known city but not address. She decides to assume the dead mother’s identity (modifying her passport) and take the children to America to confront the husband.

That’s the setup. Now there’s the apparent husband—a young architect, engaged to the somewhat-shrewish social-climbing boss’s daughter. He’s astonished when he gets a cable from the Red Cross informing him that his wife and children are on their way, because he’s not aware that he had a wife and children. But he did have a six-week amnesia episode during the war, a period of which he remembers nothing, so maybe…

Everything follows from that, and it’s actually pretty well done. The ending’s silly, and maybe it had to be. Not great, not bad. Some missing frames and a problematic picture at first, so I won’t give it more than $1.25.

The Animal Kingdom, 1932, b&w. Edward H. Griffith (dir.), Ann Harding, Leslie Howard, Myrna Loy, William Gargan, Ilka Chase. 1:25.

I guess this is a comedy of manners, and that’s the only basis on which I can call it a comedy at all. The primary character is a small-press publisher, a terrible disappointment to his wealthy father who wants him to be a Proper Person. The publisher’s about to marry a socialite who his father much admires—after having spent a couple of years with an artistic woman who left (but is now returning).

I’m not sure what to say about the rest of the plot, such as it is. I found it dreary, and in fact found the movie tiresome. Myrna Loy as the socialite with a heart of dollar signs certainly makes the most of backless gowns, but I didn’t find any of the acting worth more than a yawn. I’m being very generous in giving this one $1.00.

Behave Yourself, 1951, b&w. George Beck (dir.), Farley Granger, Shelley Winters, William Demarest, Francis L. Sullivan, Margalo Gillmore, Lon Chaney Jr., Hans Conried, Elisha Cook Jr., Glenn Anders, Allen Jenkins, Sheldon Leonard, Marvin Kaplan. 1:21.

Reviewed previously: The plot: A CPA (Granger), somewhat browbeaten by his mother-in-law, realizes almost too late that it’s his 2^nd Anniversary. He goes to a store to buy his wife (a svelte and wonderfully funny Shelley Winters) a nightgown. Meanwhile, a dog (trained to go to a certain spot) has come into town as part of some odd scheme—and, somehow, breaks free and starts following the CPA, in the process demolishing enough of the store so that the CPA flees. And, when the dog keeps following him, pretends that the dog is his present for his wife.

Then an ad shows up about the lost dog, with precise physical description. The CPA wants to do the right thing…and that’s just the beginning of a wonderfully funny, fast-moving blend of caper and farce, with lots of mistaken identities, bad guys getting shot (sometimes with the CPA’s business card in hand), mother-in-law stuff, counterfeit money (that wasn’t supposed to be counterfeit), overeager cops…and one charming dog. It’s a 50′s movie: The married couple have twin beds. But never mind…

The cast is remarkable—William Demarest as a cop, Lon Chaney, Hans Conried, Elisha Cook Jr., Glenn Anders, Sheldon Leonard and Marvin Kaplan as gangsters and other criminals, Margalo Gillmore as the mother-in-law. They all do good jobs (Farley Granger, the CPA, is probably my least favorite character of the lot—he’s OK, but so many others are better). Good print, good sound. Thoroughly enjoyable. $2.00.

The order of movies on the disc is not the same as the order on the sleeve. My comments appear in the actual order on the disc.

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

Previously reviewed (May 2008). Back then, the sleeve called it “a tongue-in-cheek crime melodrama”; while that’s no longer true on the sleeve, the movie’s clearly intended that way. Here’s what I said in 2008; I didn’t watch it a second time:

…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.

…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.

The Limping Man, 1953, b&w. Cy Endfield and Charles De la Tour (dir.), Lloyd Bridges, Moira Lister, Alan Wheatley, Leslie Philips, Helene Cordet. 1:16.

The movie begins on an airplane with Lloyd Bridges returning to his seat, asking the person next to him what happened to the magazine he was reading, being told that the person behind him borrowed it, and then settling in for the remaining hour of a flight to London.

Once he gets off in London, things get strange: A person right behind him in line is shot by a sniper; the police ask questions; he can’t reach the woman who was supposed to meet him…and we spiral into an odd and complex mystery involving illicit goods, two musical numbers, a dead man who may not be, mixed motives and an ending that…

Well, I guess the scriptwriters had trouble with the ending. I won’t give away what they finally did, but fans of Bob Newhart or certain movies set in and above Kansas might guess. Let’s say it’s a real comedown from the rest of the film that cheapens the whole business. (The feature review at IMDB calls it a “moronic ending,” and I think that’s about right. That, plus a damaged print, reduces an otherwise serviceable (if perhaps overly complex) semi-noir mystery to $1.00.

Trapped, 1949, b&w. Richard Fleischer (dir.), Lloyd Bridges, Barbara Payton, John Hoyt, James Todd. 1:18.

Lloyd Bridges once more—this time as a forger who’s in prison when his masterpiece $20s start showing up again. With staged escapes, lots of ambiguity and a fair amount of double-crossing, it’s a nice little adventure/mystery. (This time, Hoyt’s a hero—a government agent—and Bridges a villain.)

The major drawback I saw was the opening six minutes and closing two minutes, essentially an advertorial for the Treasury Department. It’s all very stirring and even informative, but once you get to the plot it’s clear that no Treasury person will ever be less than wholly moral and clean, and I think that weakens the movie somewhat. Even so, it’s a well-done film with great atmosphere, good writing and some nice little twists, easily worth $1.50.

The Pay Off, 1930, b&w. Lowell Sherman (dir.), Lowell Sherman, Marian Nixon, Hugh Trevor, William Janney. 1:05 [1:10]

Here’s an odd one that, despite its 1:10 length, feels more like a vignette than a movie. We open on a city park around midnight, with two cops walking the beat and a young couple asleep on a park bench. One cop wakes the couple, who start discussing their plans to marry the next day on the $230 the young man’s saved from his job as an assistant to an apartment super. A bad guy overhears the $230, robs them, and sets the plot in motion—because the young man’s been to one particular apartment where some folks play high-stakes poker. As things progress, the couple tries to hold up the folks in the apartment and recognize that one of them is the robber, but they only want their $230 back. Naturally, the bad guys turn the tables on the good guys, but…

Well, the robber’s a young punk who is part of a gang run by another guest (Lowell Sherman, director and lead), a mastermind who specifically tries to avoid gunplay and is quite suave. The mastermind views the young couple as an opportunity, takes them back to his apartment, treats them well…and, eventually, the young punk manages to involve them in a jewel theft where the punk shoots the jeweler. Later, the mastermind shoots the punk in self-defense—but his former girlfriend (or moll), now attached to the punk, decides that he’s Guilty and should be Shot. This leads us to the gang’s meeting room inside the nightclub that the mastermind set up…and, as he’s trying to make his case, the cops arrive (with everybody but the young couple fleeing the scene).

And yet, this doesn’t feel like much. It all comes down to a DA claiming he can fry the young man because he was, somehow, involved in the jewel theft/murder as an accessory and whether the mastermind will ‘fess up, condemning himself to save them. Can there be any question? All very heartwarming, all very improbable. All in all, I can’t give this more than $1.00.

Let’s see. All color. Some dates in the 1970s and 1980s, although some also earlier. Mostly 84-94 minutes. Big stars in almost every movie. Thirteen discs to hold 50 movies, because there aren’t six short subjects. This can only mean…TV Movies, at least most of them, or at least movies with no significant commercial presence in the U.S.

I reviewed another set of mostly TV movies in “50 Movie All-Stars Collection,” and a generally good set it was, starting with the first-rate duo Divorce Hers and Divorce His. This set doesn’t get off to quite such an auspicious start, but we shall see. Why am I interleaving a third megapack, along with “Comedy Kings” and the everlasting Mystery Collection? For the worst of all possible reasons: Sometimes I just want to watch a color old movie, and there are precious few of those in the other collections.

Guns of the Revolution (aka Rain for a Dusty Summer), 1971, b&w. Arthur Lubin (dir.), Ernest Borgnine, Humberto Almazán, Sancho Gracia, Aldo Sambrell. 1:32.

I’m not sure what to say about this one, with Ernest Borgnine as the general in charge of getting rid of all the priests in 1917-era Mexico—and one would-be priest, very much a jokester, who winds up defying the general and revealing the lasting Catholicism of the people. Supposedly based on a true story, this movie seems unclear as to its purpose and mood, although it’s most assuredly pro-Catholic. Borgnine is, well, peculiar in the role of the dictatorial general insistent on freeing the people from the tyranny of religion. The rest of the cast is adequate, but I found the writing flat and the direction scattered. The picture’s fine. This is supposedly a theatrical release, but has all the depth and attitude of a TV movie. I come up with $1.25.

High Risk, 1981, color. Stewart Raffill (dir.), James Brolin, Anthony Quinn, Lindsay Wagner, James Coburn, Arnest Borgnine, Bruce Davison, Cleavon Little, Chuck Vennera. 1:34 [1:32]

A better title might be Four Idiot Gringo Thieves. I guess it’s a caper movie of sorts, one in which we’re apparently supposed to identify with four young men who decide to rip off a drug warlord in South America for a million or so. Hey: Four guys, most of whom have never handled a weapon, armed with various overpowered stuff from a friendly neighborhood armaments-out-of-a-truck dealer (Ernest Borgnine), flying on a chartered drug plane, parachuting in to open a safe (for which the leader thinks they have the combination) in a heavily-guarded estate, expecting to just go in, do it, and leave…oh, and they’ll do it during siesta, because everybody will be asleep.

What could go wrong?

Great cast, with James Coburn as the drug lord with $5 million (and a lot of drugs) in his safe, Anthony Quinn as the head of a scraggly bunch of former revolutionaries who are now just bandits, James Brolin as the head of the idiot gang who sold his house and belongings to pay for the weapons and arrangements, Lindsay Wagner as—it’s hard to say …and more.

Plausibility: Zero. Likability of the gang members: For me, not a lot more than zero. This was mostly people who felt justified in ripping off somebody else because, I dunno, they’re underemployed, at war with a high-living suave drug lord and a bunch of aging revolutionaries. Decently filmed, good print, but…well, I just didn’t see it. Apparently, this was also a real feature, not a TV movie, released in nine countries with as many titles. IMDB calls it a comedy as well as an action film; I really don’t get that. Charitably, $1.00.

The Cop in Blue Jeans (orig. Squadra antiscippo), 1976, color. Bruno Corbucci (dir.), Tomas Milian, Jack Palance, Maria Rosaria Omaggio, Guido Mannari. 1:35 [1:32]

There’s this Italian cop (or “special agent”) who dresses like a bum and rides a scooter that can keep up with any car and can be driven up several flights of stairs without difficulty. He’s out to reduce the plague of purse-snatching and other crime—by going after the fences, which he does in an odd way. (And if you believe that, of a full busload of Japanese tourists, 100% of them would spend two minutes taking pictures of someone mooning them from across the street, with nobody paying attention to the guys putting all of their luggage in a van and driving away…well, then you can believe everything else in this movie.)

Add to that a misstep by the king of the snatchers, the Baron, whose own scooter team manages to snatch a briefcase from an American coming out of a hotel—a briefcase holding $5 million in thousand dollar bills. Without giving away the plot climax, I’ll mention the bizarro ending—in which the cop shows just what a good guy he is by, well, snatching somebody’s briefcase while riding a scooter—while violating airport security in a fairly outrageous manner. Incidentally, the IMDB plot summary is as wrong as the sleeve summary.

It’s all high-action nonsense, really badly dubbed (except for Jack Palance, the American) and with dialogue I’m pretty certain doesn’t match the original—and badly out of focus to boot. Palance is there for maybe 15 minutes and pretty clearly in it for the bucks. I’m being very charitable to give this Eurocrap $0.75.

Act of Love, 1980, color. Jud Taylor (dir.), Ron Howard, Robert Foxworth, Mickey Rourke, David Spielberg, Mary Kay Place. 1:44 [1:28]

Fratricide, euthanasia and Ron Howard (acting, not directing), with Robert Foxworth as a wealthy lawyer. How can you beat that? Well, a clear picture that wasn’t red-shifted through much of it (Howard and others aren’t so much rednecks, country accents aside, as red-faced) would help. This one is a TV movie.

The setup: Howard is the younger brother who loves his older (married) brother (Rourke), and both live with their mother—after their father died the previous winter. One day, Howard goes off to work while the older brother takes a brand-new motorcycle and starts driving it around the farm like a madman…including the uncleared five acres the two sons were planning to start clearing. Motorcycle. Uncleared acreage. Accident.

When the older brother realizes he’s probably going to paralyzed from the neck down, he asks his younger brother to swear to kill him. Which Howard does—by shooting him in the head with a half-loaded buckshot cartridge in a sawed-off shotgun. The rest of the movie is about the trial. I won’t give away the ending.

Great cast, reasonably well acted. The poor quality of the print—soft and reddish—hurts quite a bit. I wind up with $1.00.

Cause for Alarm!, 1951, b&w. Tay Garnett (dir.), Loretta Young, Barry Sullivan, Bruce Cowling, Irving Bacon. 1:15.

Part near-real-time mystery, part melodrama, and more effective than I’d expect. Woman’s husband has some unstated but wholly debilitating heart disease—but he’s convinced that she and their doctor (who she was acquainted with before marriage) are trying to kill him. He sets up a frame (e.g., spilling most of his heart medicine so he can claim overdose), then writes a letter detailing it all to the DA… which she mails (not knowing it’s the DA, and of course she’s innocent). Then, increasingly crazed, he decides to shoot her—but has a fatal heart attack in the process.

Most of the movie has to do with whether or not she can retrieve the letter, since she’s convinced that (although innocent) she’ll fry if it gets to the DA. I won’t mention the ending. There’s a fair amount of tension, and the lovely Loretta Young is quite effective and Barry Sullivan is convincingly nuts—and Irving Bacon may be the world’s greatest whining postman. Not a great movie, but not bad at all. $1.25.

Woman on the Run, 1950, b&w. Norman Foster (dir.), Ann Sheridan, Dennis O’Keefe, Robert Keith, Ross Elliott. 1:17.

This one’s noir, San Francisco…and surprisingly effective. A man’s out walking the dog at night on one of SF’s many stair/street combinations; he sees a car above him pull to the side, hears a shot, sees a body come out of a door, hears another shot…and finds that somebody’s shooting at him. Cops arrive, identify the victim as a witness for a forthcoming trial of a mobster, spot two bullet holes indicating that the shooter must have aimed at the witness’s shadow, note that he saw the shooter directly under a street lamp.

Meanwhile, as they’re dealing with something else (and getting his semi-estranged wife from their nearby apartment), he decides he doesn’t want to get involved and disappears. That sets things in motion. The wife wants to find the husband—more so when she discovers that he really does still love her and has a heart condition requiring prescription medicine. The cops want to find both of them, since the husband’s the only real witness against the shooter. And a reporter teams up with the wife to get a big story…or is he a reporter?

Very well done, with excellent dialogue, a fair amount of tension and good use of SF atmospherics. Sheridan (the wife) and O’Keefe (the “reporter”) are both effective, as are most secondary players. Not quite a classic, but pretty close: I’ll give it $1.75.

A Life at Stake, 1954, b&w. Paul Guilfoyle (dir.), Angela Lansbury, Keith Andes, Douglass Dumbrille, Claudia Barrett. 1:18 [1:14]

A guy’s a little down on his luck: He was a successful house designer/builder, but his partner gambled away the firm’s funds—including $35,000 of life savings that friends invested in the company. So the guy keeps a framed $1,000 bill as an odd pledge to make things right. He’s visited by a lawyer who represents a couple interested in backing him in restarting the firm, to the tune of $500,000.

He meets with the wife, a young and hot Angela Lansbury (29 at the time), who explains the deal: She sold real estate for several years before getting married, so she’ll handle the real estate side while he handles the building side—and her husband will bankroll the whole thing. She also gives him every reason to believe that she’s a fringe benefit.

One little problem: The husband quite reasonably insists on key-man insurance for the builder, to the tune of $250,000 (which he talks down to $175,000)…and the builder’s become a little suspicious of motives. He also meets the wife’s younger sister, a 21-year-old charmer who makes her older sister seem like a conniving bitch.

Things progress from there. Are the couple trying to kill him to collect the insurance money—or is he paranoid? When he finds out that the family’s money is mostly from a life insurance policy on the woman’s first husband…well, that doesn’t help. I won’t give away the ending.

Nicely plotted and really quite well done and well acted. Good print, and I don’t sense much missing. $1.50.

Hell’s House, 1932, b&w, Howard Higgin (dir.), Bette Davis, Pat O’Brien, Junior Durkin. 1:12.

Previously viewed, in 50 Movie Hollywood Legends. What I said then:

Rural kid sees his mother get run over by a car (driver gets out, looks at victim, drives away; kid makes no move to remember license plate or, apparently, call authorities). Next scene: Kid shows up at urban home of aunt & uncle, who have a boarder who acts like a hotshot—and the uncle’s out of work. Next scene: Kid asks hotshot if he knows of a job; hotshot, who’s actually a bootlegger, hires kid to take phone calls but never say who he works for or where he lives. Next scene—this movie moves fast—cops show up, kid won’t talk, kid gets sent to reformatory for three years.

Then there’s a bunch of reformatory stuff, with a side plot of newspaper reporter trying to blow the lid off the terrible conditions there but not getting cooperation. Kid’s best buddy, another kid with a heart condition, tries to smuggle letter out for kid, gets caught, won’t snitch, goes to solitary, where the ticker goes worse. Kid knows this, busts out (in the outgoing garbage), pleads with hotshot to help. Despite hotshot’s not actually knowing anybody, he manages to get in to see the reporter, kid tells story—and, as the cops arrive, the bootlegger finally develops a heart and signs a confession. After which, of course, the reformatory gets cleaned up (the kid doesn’t go back). Oh, his friend dies.

Pat O’Brien’s the hotshot. Bette Davis is his girlfriend, who suspects he’s mostly a blowhard.

All a little too formulaic—and maybe it doesn’t matter in this case. While the print’s so-so visually, the soundtrack is so scratchy that I almost gave up on it several times. I can’t imagine most sane people would ever listen all the way through. Given that, it can’t earn more than $0.50.

Hay Foot, 1942, b&w. Fred Guiol (dir.), William Tracy, Joe Sawyer, James Gleason, Noah Beery Jr., Elyse Knox. 0:48 [0:46]

This wartime B feature is a charmer—fast moving, funny and with a nice balance of logic and slapstick. Sgt. Doubleday (a very young Tracy), a young soldier who made Sergeant on the basis of his book learning (and apparent eidetic memory—for text, that is) is Colonel Barkley’s assistant, disliked by the blowhard marksmen (Sawyer and Beery) who don’t care much for that book stuff. Thanks to some plausible accidents, Barkley (Gleason) gets the idea that Doubleday, who’s gunshy, is an even better sharpshooter—while Doubleday’s enchanted by Barkley’s beautiful daughter. (This turns out to be the second in a series of six Hal Roach Studios short comedies starring Sgt. Doubleday.)

Lots of laughs as the two blowhards get themselves in trouble as they’re trying to bring down Doubleday. The print’s tonal range is excellent. The performances are all appropriate; Gleason is particularly good as the slightly pompous Colonel. There’s one big problem: Just enough print damage (in the form of missing frames) to make some of the dialogue hard to follow. Even with that defect and its short length, this one is an easy $1.00

Her Favorite Patient (orig. Bedside Manner), 1945, b&w. Andrew L. Stone (dir.), John Carroll, Ruth Hussey, Charles Ruggles, Ann Rutherford. 1:19

We start out with a beautiful young woman stopping to pick up a sailor who’s on his way to Chicago for 30-day leave…and then another sailor down the road and another. She needs to stop off at the little town she grew up in to say “Hi” to her uncle, one of the two doctors in town—but the town’s grown a lot and her uncle’s hoping she’ll stay—she’s also an MD—instead of taking on a research position in Chicago.

Before that happens, actually, she mistakes a test pilot for an old friend, much to his date’s dismay; this confusion plays out again over a couple of days. What follows is a series of happenstances and subterfuges with the overall effect of keeping her around…and I realized partway in that this is really an early romantic comedy with wartime overtones.

Quite good, all in all, with Charles Ruggles fine as a slightly bemused and very busy doctor and John Carroll (the pilot) and Ruth Hussey (the woman doctor) both good, as is a solid supporting cast. One review calls this “frothy” and I think that’s both right and a compliment. I would note that the IMDB listing shows this film as 1:12, presumably based on data contributed by someone who viewed a truncated release. In fact, as the original Variety review makes clear, the movie originated at the 1:19 of this print. Not great, but fun, a good print, and worth $1.50.

Affairs of Cappy Ricks, 1937, b&w. Ralph Staub (dir.), Walter Brennan, Mary Brian, Lyle Talbot, Frank Shields, Frank Melton, Georgia Cane, Phyllis Barry, William B. Davidson. 1:01 [0:56]

Here’s another short B movie with one great virtue for a comedy: it’s funny. Walter Brennan—playing a crusty 60-year-old although he was only 43 at the time—is head of a San Francisco shipbuilding company who’s been out of the country for a year or more. During that time, things have gone to hell in a handbasket in his home and his family—with his nemesis, head of an automation company, ready to take control of his company and become father-in-law to one of his daughters, while the other gets divorced.

To try to set things straight, he gets his kids and the soon-to-be exhusband, plus his former general manager and ex-fiancée of the daughter and bossy mother of the soon-to-be-ex (who’s taken over the household and bought enough of the company’s stock to assure a merger with the automation company) out on his yacht for a weekend sail…which turns into an 8-week adventure down to the Marquesas (incorrectly labeled “uninhabited,” but some of them are). At that point, feeling that he’s failed to get people to straighten up, he stages a shipwreck.

That’s just part of the plot, and there’s plenty of plot to keep things moving. This is a fast-paced little film with a fun cast. Lyle Talbot as the ex-fiancée is excellent, as is most of the cast. Apparently five minutes are missing, but I didn’t see any continuity gaps. I found it thoroughly enjoyable, but since it’s under an hour I can’t come up with more than $1.

All Over Town, 1937, b&w. James W. Horne (dir.), Ole Olsen, Chic Johnson, Mary Oward, Harry Stockwell, Franklin Pangborn, James Finlayson. 1:03 [1:01]

Another Olsen & Johnson flick, this time with the two playing Olsen & Johnson, a vaudeville team—one that’s trying to get a musical-seal act going while staying in a cheap vaudeville hotel. They get a tiny check and are overheard in a way that makes them sound like millionaires; this leads to Putting On a Show in a jinxed theater; which leads to problems. Eventually, there’s a murder and, well, lots of frantic farce.

Basically, this is an extended vaudeville act. I find the Olsen & Johnson shtick tiresome after a while, which makes the movie itself a little tiresome. Also, there’s one key scene where there’s enough missing footage to scramble the dialogue. All things considered, I give it $0.75.

Niagara Falls, 1941, b&w. Gordon Douglas (dir.), Marjorie Woodworth, Tom Brown, Zasu Pitts, Slim Summerville, Chester Clute. 0:43.

A shaggy dog story or curiously innocent bedroom farce, depending on how you look at it—the whole told as a flashback by a guy about to jump off Suicide Point at Niagara Falls to a peanut vendor (who apparently sells peanuts for those who get hungry on the way down…)

You see, this guy’d been dating a farmer’s daughter for 20 years and finally struck oil so he could afford to marry her. So they’re on their way to their honeymoon and encounter this apparent couple trying to fix a car alongside the road… Well, things go on from there. Let’s just say the guy’s a born meddler, the couple (who weren’t a couple, but become one) are charming and it’s all fluffy but fun, although with few real laughs. It’s also a long short subject, too short for even a B movie. The best I can do is $0.75.

The Mystery of Mr. Wong, 1939, b&w. William Nigh (dir.), Boris Karloff, Grant Withers, Dorothy Tree, Craig Reynolds, Ivan Lebedeff, Holmes Herbert, Morgan Wallace, Lotus Long, Chester Gan. 1:08 [1:10]

Since I previously discussed the oddity of Boris Karloff playing the highly cultured, highly educated Mr. Wong, I won’t repeat that discussion. He’s first-rate in the role, and the other Chinese-American roles in this picture all seem to use Chinese-American actors.

A collector of Asian art comes into possession of The Eye of the Daughter of the Moon, an enormous sapphire that should be in the Nanking Museum but disappeared during the looting of Nanking. Naturally, the stone carries a curse. The collector, who is tough on his wife (who’s in love with her secretary) and whose first wife was a suicide, throws a party, specifically inviting Mr. Wong, one of the two greatest criminologists on the West Coast. (The other one’s also there. San Francisco was a hotbed of criminologists!)

At the party, the wife begins a parlor game that’s essentially charades but with a different name, with three little playlets. In the second one—a mystery—the husband plays the wife’s lover, surprised and shot by the secretary playing her husband. He’s using blanks, but somehow the husband winds up dead. At this point, I was a little troubled: I was sure I hadn’t seen the movie before, but that scene felt awfully familiar. Turns out that the answer to the charade was a 1931 mystery on Disc 10 of this set, Murder at Midnight, which does indeed use the same device—and this is a much better film.

I won’t attempt to describe the rest of the plot. I found it thoroughly engrossing and well played, from Karloff on down. The print’s generally very good. Even discounting a little for using a Caucasian in the lead role, this gets at least $1.50.

Strange Illusion, 1945, b&w. Edgar G. Ulmer (dir.), Jimmy Lydon, Warren William, Sally Eilers, Regis Toomey, Charles Arnt, George Reed, Jayne Hazard, Mary McLeod. 1:27 [1:25]

We open in a misty space, which is clearly part of a dream/nightmare sequence. The young man who’s caught in the nightmare wakes up, and the movie begins. The nightmare involves his mother, his sister, and a strange shrouded man-shape who claims to be (but clearly is not) his father, and includes a train wreck (his father died in a train accident) at which point the mystery may says “Just what I was waiting for.”

The young man, who is on a fishing trip with his professor friend, goes home because he feels the need to do so—to a clearly-wealthy household, where his young mother is now involved with another man. She’s charmed by the man, as is her daughter (the young man’s sister); he’s decidedly not…and concludes that the nightmare is his dead father’s way of warning him about the strange man. (This is abetted by his receipt of a letter from his father, one of several that the family trust is sending him periodically, telling him it’s his responsibility to watch out for his mother.)

The rest of the film involves a sanitarium, a psychiatrist who’s in cahoots with the new suitor (who is, of course, the man who killed her husband in the “accident”) and lots more. It’s paced pretty well, although the young man seems far too willing to trust in situations he should know could trap him. Things all work out in the end…and we wind up in a dream that’s not a nightmare. Not great, not bad; let’s say $1.25.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, 1946, b&w. Lewis Milestone (dir.), Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, Lizabeth Scott, Kirk Douglas, Judith Anderson. 1:56.

Great cast, interesting plot, first-rate print, and a generally fine picture. The real mystery here: How did this movie fall into the public domain?

In any case, it did, and it’s a winner. The first scene is set in 1928, in Iverstown—a factory town, where the Ivers plant is the mainstay. Down at the railroad tracks, a young boy whistles his way into a boxcar where a young girl is waiting with her cat. She wants to run away with him—but the cops catch the both of them, since she’s the niece of Ms. Ivers. Who is a mean, vindictive, not nice woman who hates cats (among other failings). The mansion also holds, in addition to regular servants, a man who’s tutoring the girl—and his son, about her age, who he thinks should go to Harvard if only he had the money.

Between a storm that puts out the electric lights and other things, the aunt is climbing the stairs to confront the young girl when the cat comes down the stairs and meows—and the aunt starts beating the cat with her cane. In what I’d consider perfectly reasonable reaction to such a horrific act, the girl comes down, grabs the cane, hits the aunt…who rolls to the bottom of the stairs, dead. The girl comes up with an alternative explanation (“there was a big man on the stairs”) and the tutor, who was about to lose his job (the aunt was going to send the niece away to school), goes along with it—as does his son, who saw the whole thing.

Jump forward to 1946, as a guy (Van Heflin) in a car manages to run it into a post as he’s staring back at the new billboard for Iverstown. As it happens, this is the other kid—the one who wanted to help the girl escape, then fled on his own. And, he finds out, the tutor’s son, Walter, is now the niece’s wife and the District Attorney (who’s become an alcoholic) By the way, the niece (Stanwyck) and only heir has made the company ten times as large and basically owns the town.

That’s just for starters. The mood is noir, the plot’s intricate and reasonable, the acting’s first-rate, the climax—well, I guess it’s a reasonable ending. Unusual to see Kirk Douglas (Walter) in such a sad sack role, but he does it well—it was his first movie. I give this one a solid $2.00.

Man Who Cheated Himself, 1950, b&w. Felix E. Feist (dir.), Lee J. Cobb, Jane Wyatt, John Dall, Lisa Howard. 1:21 [1:20]

A rich woman’s divorcing her husband—and he’s purchased a gun and hid it from her, jimmied the lock on the outside entry to his room, then leaves for a trip to Seattle (but, while he’s burned the box the gun and ammo came in, the firing test receipt fell on the floor). She finds the receipt and, eventually, the gun…and makes sure her police-detective lover’s there to see it. Hubby sneaks in the jimmied door, presumably to get the hidden gun and kill her (having established that he’s at the airport as an alibi); she shoots him instead, with the cop watching.

So far, we have something that feels almost like self-defense…but the upstanding lieutenant, who’s also training his younger brother as a homicide detective, doesn’t play it that way: He decides to use the husband’s alibi against him.

Things get odder from there, in this mystery set entirely in San Francisco. Even for 1950, it’s a little hard to believe that traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge would be so light at 11 p.m. that the cop could drive part way across, stop, and toss a gun over the side of the bridge without anyone noticing—and, later, that the husband’s supposed three hours spent at the airport before getting shot would be suspicious because he wasn’t eating or drinking at the one and only dining or drinking place at SFO. Really?

More plausible, in some ways: the mook who saw the cop drop off the body (but doesn’t recognize the cop) described the car as a green coupe, and it’s really blue…and he’s colorblind but doesn’t realize it. Lots of men are colorblind, but very few are blue-green colorblind.

Still: it’s an interesting noir mystery, as the younger brother realizes that his older brother’s apparently guilty of something (just what is never quite clear). Cobb (the older brother), Wyatt (the rich socialite) and Dall (the younger brother) are all very good, as is the younger brother’s new wife (Howard). Unfortunately, the sound’s distorted at times and at least one scene—a conversation between the two brothers that might have been significant—is garbled because of missing footage. On balance, I’ll give it $1.50.

When I had a trivial problem with a Mill Creek Entertainment DVD megapack–in this case, a 60-DVD set of 250 mysteries, where one disc was duplicated–and let them know about it, they not only corrected the problem (for free), they sent me some collections as a form of apology.

One of those collections was a five-DVD set of 20 Spaghetti Westerns, entitled Spaghetti Westerns 20 Movie Pack (the link is to Amazon’s record). I liked the set quite a bit, giving 14 of the 20 movies better-than-mediocre scores, even though it’s really 19 spaghetti westerns and one American film that’s a strong contender for worst movie ever made. The complete set of reviews is in the June 2010 Cites & Insights, or you can just search “Spaghetti” in this blog’s sidebar to pull up the five posts, one for each disc.

In late May 2010, the set was selling for $9.49 at Amazon. I thought it was a heck of a bargain. Now, the set sells for $5.49 at Amazon, which is even more of a bargain.

And I think maybe it’s not the right choice.

Why? Because there’s a newer product that Amazon calls Spaghetti Western Collection (11pc) although Mill Creek calls it Spaghetti Western 44 Movie Collection. It’s essentially a Mill Creek 50-Movie Megapack–but shy one DVD and six movies (all of which would be short ones, to fit 50 movies onto 12 DVDs: some of the 50-Movie Megapacks run to 13 DVDs because there are no short movies suitable for the set). It’s actually longer than some of the 50-movie sets, with 69.5 hours total running time.

OK, so it’s really 43 spaghetti westerns and the gawdawful Apache Blood. Still, that’s another 24 movies beyond the other set, and from reviews I’ve seen, it looks as though there are even more that are widescreen (not anamorphic; you’ll have to use a zoom function). You’re not going to get Clint Eastwood, of course; you are going to get a surprising amount of stuff you may find entertaining for…$12.49.

No, I’m not going to buy it: I think at least 10 of the additional movies are in another freebie I already have, and I’m not that big a fan of spaghetti westerns. But I was pleasantly surprised last time. (You may know I’m not much for violence–and, with one major exception, most of these have what I think of as SpagViolence: like cartoon violence but with live actors. The exception, a brutal massacre of innocents, is–as far as I can tell–truly an exception.)

Warning: There are other DVD sets called “Spaghetti Western Collection” on Amazon, including a notorious Madacy 3-DVD set with all of three movies on it for a higher price; based on one review, that set may be inferior video quality along with costing more than 12x as much per movie. Make sure you’re getting the 11-DVD set. The user reviews are worthless, since Amazon’s algorithms mean that all the reviews show up for any title with “Spaghetti Western Collection” as part of the title, even if they’re for entirely different products.

Am I thinking of getting any more of these megapacks? Well…I have three 50-movie sets in queue (one that I’ve started on) along with the 250-movie mystery set, but I must admit that the Heroes set is almost enticing in its way. (It’s mostly Hercules/Sons of Hercules/etc. movies…)

…as I used to before the company decided that “free” streaming was such a wondrous thing that they should raise the prices for those of us who actually want discs.

In our case, even though we only watch one movie a week, we watch old TV on DVD–typically two series at a time in addition to ones we’ve purchased–so we’re on the three-DVD plan. And since we can tell (and appreciate) the difference, we get Blu-ray when available. As of January, that puts us up to $24/month (oh, sorry, only $23.95).

Which, frankly, given that we usually require about six or seven (at the most) disc swaps per month, seems a bit high.

Why not use streaming?

Because when we’ve tried it on our HDTV, using our AT&T DSL Pro broadband, the quality was awful–perhaps VHS-quality, certainly not up to S-VHS quality, not even in the same ballpark as DVDs. Any comparison with Blu-ray or broadcast HDTV would be ridiculous.

At this point, I’d love to sign up for a disc-only Netflix. Ideally, that should cost $16/month (since streaming-only is $8/month–you can subtract the $0.05 if you prefer), but even $20/month would be OK.

But Netflix doesn’t offer disc-only service. You get streaming “free”–whether you find it usable or not.

Just get faster broadband?

That’s one solution. Only it’s not really. AT&T won’t even sell us their 6Mb DSL: We’re too far from the central office. AT&T U-verse isn’t available yet either–and if it was, it looks as though we’d need to pay something like $90/month for basic cable-equivalent and true high-speed broadband. Right now, we’re paying $30/month (as part of a bundle) for DSL and $15/month for basic basic Comcast. Doubling that so that we can get roughly DVD-quality streaming from Netflix doesn’t seem like a great deal.

Comcast broadband? Also considerably more money to get the speed we’d need, and, well, Comcast.

Just lower your standards?

I think that’s the Preferred Answer: We shouldn’t give a damn about picture quality. We should settle for lqTV: a big screen with a crappy picture.

I’m seeing a lot of people saying The Future of All TV is streaming, even though it’s pretty clear that 20mb cheap broadband isn’t going to be universal or affordable any time soon…which says to me that these people don’t think picture quality is important. Are these the same people who think 64k MP3 is all the music quality you need, and that nobody can really tell the difference between Sennheisers and the earbuds that come with MP3 players? Dunno; I just don’t want them telling me that I have to lower my standards.

Letting Netflix know

Consider this a message to Netflix. We’ve been subscribers for a very long time. We like the way Netflix has operated, and I think we’ve always been low-volume enough to be profitable. We still like the way Netflix operates, and have no real desire to switch to Blockbuster or Redbox or whatever.

I would send email to Netflix, but you can’t really do that any more, except to a report a specific problem. I find that worrisome: It’s always unnerving when an internet-based corporation, or any customer-oriented company, makes it impossible to contact them via email.

I checked the Netflix blog. The post announcing the rate hike had more than 1,200 comments. Of those I looked at, at least one out of four of the literate comments (man, there are a LOT of people who can’t spell, punctuate, or whatever) was from somebody in our situation. I added mine.

We’re not anxious to leave. We’re not threatening to leave, for that matter–at least not yet. But we also aren’t thrilled about paying for something we have no use for. That’s why we dropped our cable to “limited basic”–we didn’t feel like paying $35/month more for 100 (or whatever) channels that we might watch for a total of one or two hours a month.

Colonel Effingham’s Raid, 1946, b&w. Irving Pichel (dir.), Charles Coburn, Joan Bennett, William Eythe, Allyn Joslyn, Elizabeth Patterson. 1:12 [1:10].

The setting is a Georgia town of 30,000 in 1940, where a good-ole-boys group of genially corrupt politicians has run things for generations, thanks to an apathetic population (less than 20% bother to vote). There’s only one party, and the town still smarts because it didn’t get burned down on the way to Atlanta in the Recent Unpleasantness. Into this, a long-time Army Colonel (born in this town) retires and Takes an Interest.

The narrator is this Colonel’s young cousin (who really never knew him), a bright young reporter on one of two daily newspapers who doesn’t feel the need to cause trouble—he goes along without much thought. There’s also the pretty young society editor, daughter of the former editor/owner of the paper (now part of a chain run out of Atlanta).

The basis for the plot: The power group wants to rename the Confederate Square to honor a former mayor, well known for taking the town for as much as he could. The Colonel, who’s wangled a war column, takes umbrage and makes a counter-proposal, to plant a circle of 13 trees to honor…well, you know, this is the unrepentant South. The good ole boys figure to play this to their advantage: They’ll plant the trees, but also build a new courthouse with, of course, the mayor’s brother-in-law getting the contract. The Colonel doesn’t see the need to replace the 150-year-old courthouse, brings in his friend who’s the retired head of the Army Corps of Engineers to offer a second opinion, and things take off from there.

It’s amusing and well played, nothing terribly serious but reasonably good fun. The motivations of the narrator are a little odd: After he sees all of the society editor’s calves and two inches of thigh, he discovers she has legs—and this brings him to join the Georgia National Guard (which then gets called off to WWII) and become an advocate for reform. Truly. There are also a couple of mildly amusing running gags. Sometimes distorted music on the soundtrack, but a very good print with rich tonal range. I’ll give it $1.25.

Country Gentlemen, 1936, b&w. Ralph Staub (dir.), Ole Olsen, Chic Johnson, Joyce Compton, Lila Lee, Pierre Watkin, Donald Kirke. 1:06 [0:56].

How you feel about this one depends mostly on how you like shtick and the duo of Olsen & Johnson (whom I don’t believe I’ve previously encountered). The two play con artists on the lam with a bunch of worthless gold-mine bonds who wind up with an oil-well scheme and…well, it’s mostly an excuse for a remarkable series of lame jokes. Certainly fast moving and lots of punch lines; if the high-pitched laugh of Olsen doesn’t drive you nuts, you might enjoy this. I’m not sure what the missing ten minutes might have added. I give it $0.75.

Freckles Comes Home, 1942, b&w. Jean Yarbrough (dir.), Johnny Downs, Gale Storm, Mantan Moreland, Irving Bacon, Bradley Page. 1:05 [0:59]

A bank robber needs to get out of town, so gets driven out and takes a bus…where he sits next to a college kid going home to his 500-person burg, Fairfield. The bank robber figures this is a great place to hide out. Ah, but the reason the college kid’s come home is largely that his pal has done something incredibly stupid that endangers the family-run hotel he’s temporarily managing.

That’s the setup. The reality? On one hand, there’s the ever-charming Gale Storm. On the other, there’s not really much to redeem this flick. I won’t go through the rest of the plot (such as it is) or the ethnic-humor byplay (featuring Mantan Moreland and Laurence Criner). Let’s just say that, what with sound problems and occasional dropouts, I wasn’t impressed. Would the missing six minutes help? Well, I dropped off during the last quarter for a few minutes—it’s really exciting throughout—and when I rewatched it, it made no difference. At best, and being very generous, $0.75.

Goodbye Love, 1933, b&w. H. Bruce Humberstone (dir.), Charles Ruggles, Verree Teasdale, Sidney Blackmer, Phyllis Barry, Ray Walter, Mayo Methot. 1:07 [1:05]

This one reminds me that comedies, perhaps more than most genres, are very much creatures of their time and setting. I’m not sure whether this is a farce or an odd American version of a bedroom comedy, but it’s all a little strange—and I suspect Charlie Ruggles was the chief draw in 1933, given his eccentric mannerisms and the credits.

The plot has to do with alimony, “alimony jail” (which seems to involve lavish lunches with most of the inmates dressed to the nines, while other inmates scrub floors), assumed identities, stock manipulation, a businessman finally Discovering his secretary and…well, I think there’s more. Portions of the plot seemed mysterious to me, but that may be my fault. Not really knowing what to make of it, I’ll give it $1.00.

Sucker Money, 1933, b&w. Dorothy Davenport & Melville Shyer (dirs.), Mischa Auer, Phyllis Barrington, Earl McCarthy, Mona Lisa. 0:59.

The opening titles call this an exposé of phony psychics—but it’s really a remarkably slow-moving B movie. Newspaper editor sees an interesting help-wanted ad, tells reporter to go undercover on what might be a human interest story. The job turns out to be one of the actors in a swami’s theatricals, as the swami works to con marks out of big money, then move on.

We get danger, hypnotism, lots of nonsense, a swami who’s fond of killing as many associates as possible, and an eventual happy ending. In the process, we also get some absurd acting and one of the most lethargic suspense flicks I’ve ever seen. Very charitably, $0.75.

The Chase, 1946, b&w. Arthur Ripley (dir.), Robert Cummings, Michele Morgan, Steve Cochran, Peter Lorre. 1:26 [1:22]

Down-on-his-luck navy vet, standing outside a café unable to afford a meal, finds a lost wallet at his feet. Has a meal—then, seeing the card for the wallet’s owner, returns it to a posh Miami house where two suspicious servants eventually lead him to the owner. The owner’s a tough guy, a successful criminal, who’s impressed with the vet’s honesty and takes him on as a chauffeur (firing his existing chauffeur). On the first drive, the thug shows off his trick car: He can flip a switch and take over control of the accelerator from the back seat, in this case running it up to 110MPH and seemingly racing to cross the tracks ahead of an oncoming train—before suddenly stopping.

The thug’s wife (I guess successful criminals who dress nicely are mobsters, not thugs) is desperate to leave him, enlists the chauffeur to take her to Havana…and she’s killed there, with the murder pinned on the chauffeur. There’s a complex chase…and we find out that it’s all a hallucination/dream…or at least part of it is. The vet takes a whole bunch of pills and calls his Navy doctor.

There’s more plot after that, and a happy ending of sorts. It’s an interesting piece of noir, with Lorre doing a good job as the thug’s sidekick and Cummings good in a non-comedy role. Unfortunately, the print’s frequently bad enough to be nearly unwatchable in night scenes, the missing four minutes could be significant, the romance makes little sense and the ending’s a little too easy. On balance, I’ll give it $1.25.

Woman in the Shadows (orig. Woman in the Dark), 1934, b&w. Phil Rosen (dir.), Fay Wray, Ralph Bellamy, Melvyn Douglas, Roscoe Ates, Ruth Gillette, Joe King, Granville Bates. 1:09.

As we begin, a man’s getting out of prison—with the warden saying he probably shouldn’t have been there anyway, and he needs to watch his temper. The parolee (Bellamy) gives back the money the prison provides on release—and adds some of his own, for whatever good purposes the warden finds. The man, who hit somebody in a fight and was in prison for three years for manslaughter because the other person died, is going back home to live in his deceased father’s cottage and stay out of trouble.

The story seems mostly to be about attitudes. The sheriff thinks any ex-con is a criminal and to be avoided, with his word meaning nothing. The sheriff and police think that a single woman (Wray) who’s beautiful and tried to make a living as a singer is essentially a prostitute—and her word means nothing. And, of course, a degenerate wealthy young man (Douglas) is the Pride of the Community, and his word is worth everything. A lawyer starts out by pawing his client and booking her into an adjacent room at a motel. Oh, and police are generally both incompetent and fully willing to violate anybody’s rights.

The heart of the story comes in the last seven minutes, which makes for some odd pacing. It ends happily, I guess. Great cast, some good performances, decent print, but I found the whole somewhat unsatisfactory. (By the way, the longest IMDB review is flat-out wrong, with its “shady gangster and on the run moll.”) On balance, $1.25.

The Scar (orig. Hollow Triumph), 1948, b&w. Steve Sekely (dir.), Paul Henreid, Joan Bennett, Eduard Franz, Leslie Brooks. 1:23.

Here’s the setup for this noir mystery: A bright guy named Muller—medical education, all that, but a habitual criminal—gets out of prison, with a job reference and expectation by the warden that he’ll be back. He immediately contacts his crooked colleagues and insists on setting up a casino heist. It doesn’t go quite as planned. Although Muller and one accomplice get away with $200 grand (or something like that), four others are captured and give up his name. The casino owner’s known as someone who never gives up when he’s crossed.

Muller goes to LA and takes the job, such as it is…and, delivering a parcel, is recognized. But he’s recognized as someone else, the psychiatrist Dr. Bartok, and when the person (a dentist in the same building) sees him full-face, he sees the one difference: Bartok, otherwise an exact double, has a large scar on his face. Muller also encounters Bartok’s secretary, who obviously had something going with Bartok.

After Muller encounters a couple of the casino owner’s hoods, he decides to become Bartok. He romances the secretary and gets some of Bartok’s voice records; he also takes a picture of Bartok so he can create his own scar. Except that the photo store screwed up doing the enlargement—flipping the photo.

Ah, but nobody notices—including the secretary, patients, the dentist and Bartok’s girlfriend. (Muller’s killed Bartok to assume his identity, naturally.) And so it goes, right up until the climax, which is a slight twist and has to do with Bartok’s own considerable failings.

An odd story but an interesting one, well played by Henreid as Muller and Bartok and Bennett as the secretary, with a strong supporting cast and excellent, subtle lighting and photography. (For what it’s worth, a 28-year-old Jack Webb is in the movie—for about two minutes in a tiny uncredited part as one of the hoods.) I wouldn’t call it great, but it’s quite good and the print’s consistently very good. Worth $1.50.

I just don’t get it. Which is nothing new.

What don’t I get? The thunder of voices saying not only that they all use Netflix streaming (or Hulu) instead of DVD and Blu-ray, but that everybody should. (Well, some of these voices just mention DVD, either saying that Blu-ray is a fraud or simply ignoring it.)

And, in many cases, asserting that there’s no difference in picture quality between streaming through any ordinary broadband and DVD/Blu-ray.

It’s your choice

So far, it’s your choice. Netflix is certainly encouraging people to go with streaming, especially given the changes in subscription prices. They won’t offer us a “no streaming” option for a slight discount, but they’re now offering a “no DVD” option…and increasing the prices for DVDs, albeit only slightly.

Here’s the thing, though. We didn’t get an HDTV until just three or four months ago–in part because our 12-yr-old Sony XBR had such a superb picture, one we’d paid a lot of money for at the time. But with the cutoff of analog TV (although we could still use cable) and the growing percentage of shows broadcast widescreen, we finally took the plunge.

We took some care to buy a set with a first-rate picture. We picked up a Blu-ray player. After watching one movie in Blu-ray, we switched our Netflix subscription to Blu-ray as a preference, and probably 80% of the movies we get now are in that format. Yes, we can see the difference–although DVD as upconverted by the player is certainly still very enjoyable, Blu-ray is a lot better.

As for TV itself (an antenna isn’t an option here without a humongous rooftop tower), Bones is the extreme example: Comcast gave us a consistently crappy analog image last year–and Bones in HD is magnificent. Just magnificent.

We don’t watch much current TV–it comes out to 7.5 hours a week. Some nights, we either watch a full-length movie or catch up on old series, using Netflix discs for some of those.

Yes, we tried streaming

Our TV has internet widget support (and we added the wifi dongle), including a Netflix widget. I got it working. And we tried it–a couple of little tries, then five minutes of a Lois & Clark episode, since that’s one of the old series we’re watching.

Neither my wife or I could stand it after five minutes: The picture quality was so vastly inferior to the DVD, at sort of a sub-VHS level, which might have been acceptable on a smaller screen but was just unpleasant on the big screen. Netflix surveyed me on the streaming quality. I told them: Unacceptable.

Oh, it’s your broadband…

Maybe. We have the fastest DSL AT&T will currently provide at our address. It typically tests out at 1.5 to 2Mbps download–right now, it’s 1.6 as I run speedtest.

You can’t stream true HD at 1.6Mbps. Hell, you can’t stream DVD quality at 1.6Mbps. (True Blu-ray quality would require a minimum of 30Mbps.)

So should we upgrade our broadband?

Well, Comcast (shudder) will sell us “6Mbps” broadband for $54 a month–$29 more than we’re paying for AT&T DSL. Want 20Mbps? That’s $100/month. Still not enough to stream at Blu-ray quality, but close. 6Mbps? Probably better than we’re getting now, but certainly nowhere close to Blu-ray, probably not even DVD quality.

And, of course, from everything I’ve heard, Comcast isn’t going to let you happily stream at full speed for hours on end: “usage caps” do come into play.

Plus…hmm. $29 more, plus $8 for a streaming-only Netflix subscription. That’s more than we’re paying for Netflix now–and if we drop back to a 2-disc subscription, it’s a lot more than we’re paying now. Since 1.5-2Mbps download speed is just fine for everything else we do, we would wind up paying more money…for still-inferior quality and the loss of Blu-ray and DVD extras.

What a deal.

(No, neither Fios nor I-Universe or whatever AT&T’s fiber-almost-to-the-home is called are options, at least not yet. And the I-Universe prices, after the first six months, aren’t all that attractive either. We have Limited Basic cable, $17/month including all the fees, and it suits us just fine.)

Just don’t tell us our choice is wrong

If you don’t see the difference between streaming and Blu-ray or streaming and HD, that’s your business (and maybe your TV set). If you see the difference but don’t care, that’s also your business: I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong, any more than I ever said people listening to 128K MP3 were wrong.

But when you say there is no difference, or that anybody who wants Blu-ray or HD broadcast quality is either foolish or wrong, then my back goes up. My wife professed not to care about the differences…until she started seeing the higher quality. She was the one who said to stop the Lois & Clark streaming, although I could certainly see that it was crap video quality.

As a sidenote: We don’t own a DVR. I’d love to be able to record shows in HD. What I wouldn’t love: Increasing our total electricity usage by more than 10%, because the DVR is running 24 hours a day and consuming 50 watts all the time (according to the tests done by somebody who refuses to give up the DVR). Sell a DVR designed for those of us who don’t record all that much, that spins down and uses 0.5 watts or so when it’s not needed, and we’d probably buy one. (Yes, adding 36 kWh a month to our usage would be at least a 10% increase.) That’s a different discussion.

It’s over, it’s over, this set is finished. What a relief. I know I didn’t actually start watching it until April, but it seems even longer than that, as some of the 1-hour films in this set felt like they’d taken whole days of my life. With the fervent hope that I never again encounter Tod Slaughter, and could actually do without ever seeing Bela Lugosi again either, here are the last two discs—one of them saving me loads of time because it’s entirely Hitchcock.

Disc 11

It’s Never Too Late (or It’s Never Too Late to Mend), 1937, b&w. David MacDonald (dir.), Tod Slaughter, Jack Livesey, Marjorie Taylor, Ian Colin, Laurence Hanray, D.J. Williams, Roy Russell. 1:10 [1:07].

This film is a horror, all right—another example of Tod “Snidely Whiplash” Slaughter’s astonishing range of acting, from V to Villainous to…V for Villainous. The excuse for this one is that it’s supposedly based on a book that exposed the horrors of 19^th-century British prisons and caused Queen Victoria to clean them up. Maybe, but prison scenes (as brutal as they are, with the “visiting justices” apparently competing to see how vicious they can be towards prisoners) aren’t all of the film.

The plot? A young woman loves a young man who’s having trouble making a farm pay off. The Squire, a typically villain-tending-toward-insanity Slaughter role, wants the young woman for his own. He fails in framing the young man for poaching (which leads to most of the prison scenes, since an innocent friend of the young man “confesses” to prevent the frame), but the young man must go off to Australia to win his fortune, without which the young woman’s father will forbid the union.

The Squire, also the local Justice of the Peace, suborns the postman to assure that no letters between the two ever reach their destination, cultivates the father, and variously twirls his mustache and otherwise sneers. Oh, in the end, he fails, of course…another hallmark of a Slaughter flick. (Another: Despite his continuous sneering, debasement of others, etc., he seems to be viewed favorably by most.)

The only reason I’d give this any rating at all is for Slaughter fans (which apparently include every IMDB reviewer of this piece of…well, never mind.) In that case, I guess it’s no worse than most. As a revelation of bad conditions in prisons, it’s apparently several decades too late and mostly consists of sneering. As a Slaughter film, after which I had to go wash my hands and mind…well, kindly, $0.75.

The Bowery at Midnight, 1942, b&w. Wallace Fox (dir.), Bela Lugosi, John Archer, Wanda McKay, Tom Neal, Vince Barnett, Anna Hope. 1:01.

It’s an hour long. It stars Bela Lugosi in a role with two names. It’s…an incoherent mess, and maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. The only plausible explanation I can see for the way this movie doesn’t work is that it’s a summary version of a really bad serial—but that seems not to be the case. It’s surely a really bad movie. This time Lugosi’s not a mad scientist; he’s a professor of psychology (at a campus that looks like UC Berkeley but is apparently near the Bowery) who, in the evenings, runs a soup kitchen up top and an incredibly evil gang down below—a gang that pointedly leaves one of its members as corpse at each robbery.

Or does it? The has-been doctor who’s a support person (I guess) for this gang (which, at the point of the film, has maybe two members at a time) seems to be doing things with their bodies. Near the end, a bunch of fatalities seem so be taking care of the evil mastermind. I’d say “oh good, zombies,” but the very end has one apparent fatality reunited with his girlfriend.

Awful, awful, awful. Also, portions of the print are so faded as to be nearly unwatchable, and some dialog is missing just enough syllables for unintelligibility—which, fortunately, doesn’t harm this picture all that much. (Reading some of the IMDB raves for this trash…I guess true fans are true fans.) For Bela Lugosi completists, maybe, charitably, $0.50.

Number Seventeen

Previously reviewed (September 2009), $1.75.

The Face at the Window, 1939, b&w. George King (dir.), Tod Slaughter…and what else do you need to know? 1:10 [1:04]

Mercy, I beg of you, mercy: Not another Slaughter melodrama! I tried. Honest, I did. And when the nobleman played by Slaughter attempted to woo the young woman half his age and began laughing His Laugh when informed she was in love with someone else…I snapped. No more, no more: Even 40 minutes more of Tod Slaughtering another role was too much.

The plot, from the sleeve: “The Wolf” is murdering people in Paris with no clues—and is, well, who else? I can predict the rest: The nobleman does his best to ruin the young man, does various evil deeds, and is eventually caught out, with good triumphing. Some of the same cast as The Ticket of Leave Man. Since I gave up part way through, I’ll just say that if I hope never to encounter endure another Slaughter melodrama. $0.

The Shadow of Silk Lennox, 1935, b&w. Ray Kirkwood & Jack Nelson (dir.), Lon Chaney Jr., Dean Benton, Marie Burton, Jack Mulhall, Eddie Gribbon, Theodore Lorch. 1:00.

Another one that involves a “Legend of Horror”—if Lon Chaney, Jr., really deserves that moniker. This one’s a gangster musical mystery of sorts, featuring Chaney as a nightclub owner that everybody assumes, correctly, is a gangster. The sleeve description seems entirely offbase: Everybody knows he’s a gangleader, and he doesn’t actually start killing off associates until one of them doublecrosses him.

The key, such as it is, is that he’s got locals in his pocket, making sure he’s bailed out and intimidating witnesses so nobody faults him (one sequence shows just how easy that is when anybody’s allowed into a lineup). But then the G-men arrive and things go wrong. There’s one plot line that appears to be a red herring and an undercover agent who’s accepted far too readily as being a safecracker who can also escape from jail. And there are musical numbers—quite a few of them for a one-hour flick. Unfortunately, the sound track’s extremely noisy through much of the film (the print’s also damaged at times).

Chaney Jr.’s not that impressive, and neither is the movie. I suppose it’s worth $0.75.

Disc 12

All previously-reviewed Hitchcock films: Champagne, $1.00; Juno and the Paycock, $0.75; The Manxman, $1; Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Chaney Vase, $0.55; Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, $0.