Walt at Random

We’re back to b&w and the hour-long B-movie “programmers.” Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, to be sure.

The Lawless Frontier, 1934, b&w. Robert N. Bradbury (dir. & story), John Wayne, Sheila Terry, Jack Rockwell, George “Gabby” Hayes, Yakima Canutt, Earl Dwire. 0:59 [0:49]

The sleeve makes more of this plot than I think it deserves—but maybe that’s the missing ten minutes (out of an original 59 minutes!). What I got from the plot was horse riding, more horse riding, an occasional shot being fired, an idiot sheriff, even more horse riding, Gabby Hayes apparently can’t be killed with a knive in his back and bullet upside the head, more horse riding, really? a sheriff stupid enough to think that cuffing the outside of huge cowboy boots to a bed is somehow going to keep an outlaw trapped?, even more horse riding, and of course the woman in the cast winds up married to John Wayne, who’s the new and less stupid sheriff.

Even Yakima Canutt’s stunt riding’s not that great. Mostly for John Wayne completists. Charitably, $0.50.

Rim of the Canyon, 1949, b&w. John English (dir.), Gene Autry, Champion, Nan Leslie, Thurston Hall, Clem Bevans, Walter Sande, Alan Hale Jr. 1:10

This is more like it—even if there isn’t much real gunslinging (a fair amount of shooting, basically none of it precision or stunting). It’s a real movie with an actual plot, and long enough that it could be considered a feature rather than a programmer. Gene Autry—and this one’s late enough that it’s “A Gene Autry Production”—may not be the #1 singing cowboy and wonder-horse, but he’s a strong #2. And, of course, the character he almost always plays is named Gene Autry of the Flying A Ranch and his horse Champion.

The plot (yes, there is a plot): three prisoners have escaped, notably including one who staged a holdup netting $30,000 in silver (a lot of money at the time) and was caught and put away by Autrey’s father, the sheriff at the time. The escapee wants revenge, but also wants his $30,000, and the other two escapees are there to help out. Autrey just wants to win a stagecoach race as part of the town annual festivities (and with winning, a local hot number will go to the dance to follow), but a competitor has removed one wheel’s nut, so he craches; the competitor laughs at his request to take him back into town—and he limps (he twisted his ankle) two miles to a ghost town, formerly owned by the miner whose $30,000 was stolen. There, he meets up with the local teacher (female and a whole lot more interesting than the town floozie) who goes out there every couple of weeks and swears she’s heard the miner speak to her.

Meanwhile, the thugs have lost one horse and decided to steal Champion as a replacement—forcing him into a nasty-looking metal bit that he really, truly does not like.

That’s just the beginning. In the end, all is well (but no phony “and the hero marries the girl” ending), and along the way, it’s a solid picture. As usual, The Hero prefers fistfights to actual gunplay—and it’s Champion who deals the fatal blow to the chief villain. Along the way, we get to see Gene as his dad in a flashback. Only two songs, which is OK. Even though it’s 1:10, I’ll rate it as a B flick—whilch means $1 in this case.

Man from Music Mountain, 1938, b&w. Joe Kane (dir.), Gene Autry, Smiley Burnette, Carol Hughes, Sally Payne, Ivan Miller, Ed Cassidy. 1:00 [sleeve; 0:58 IMDB, 0.53 actual on the disc]

Perhaps a more typical Autry flick, with his cowhands all being singers and his sidekick being Smiley “Froggy” Burnette. Lots of songs, an interesting instrumental number with some surprising instruments, a couple of Burnette-written comedy songs—and enough plot to keep it moving. It’s an odd one, though: it starts with con men buying up an old ghost town and abandoned gold mine and selling lots (and shares) on the basis that the recent opening of Boulder Dam means electricity and water coming soon, and with hydraulic mining they can work the mine. It’s a con—and Autry, on his way back from a cattle run, spots it—but it takes in lots of people, including Froggy.

Where things get strange is that, between Autry’s counter-con (he salts the mine to con the con men into buying back the mining shares) and shootouts…well, he winds up making the con men’s case: The town winds up with electricity and a worthwhile mine. If he’d been in cahoots with the con men, he could scarcely have done a better job (but they probably wouldn’t have wound up arrested for killing one of his hands, a crime he doesn’t seem to take as any big deal). It’s missing five or minutes and possibly some plot development.

Do note that this is the 1938 Gene Autry flick, not the 1943 Roy Rogers flick with the same title prefaced with “The.” The sleeve description of the plot is just plain wrong—and the sleeve has the “The” from the 1943 flick. Anyway, it’s OK but nothing special. I’ll give it $0.75.

Public Cowboy #1, 1937, b&w. Joe Kane (dir.), Gene Autry, Smiley “Froggy” Burnette, Ann Rutherford, William Farnum, Arthur Loft, James C. Morton. 1:01 [0:53]

Another Gene Autry one-hour B-movie songfest with seven minutes missing—but this time, instead of being Gene Autry of the Flying “A” Ranch in some unstated location, he’s Gene Autry, a deputy sheriff in Grand Junction, Wyoming (ol’ Froggy’s the other deputy). And the aging sheriff and deputies have a real problem: a band of rustlers using airplanes and shortwave radio is ruining the local cattlemen. The rustlers have an interesting MO: the plane spots a herd on the move with relatively few cattlemen; they radio the main group telling them where to go; the main group—a truck full of horses, a couple of cars full of bad guys and a couple of big refrigerated trucks—kill off the horsemen, round up the herd into a makeshift corral, slaughter and skin them on the spot and load the carcasses into the trucks—adding the butcher’s signs later on.

There’s not much three guys with horses can do against this big high-tech gang, even if one of the horses is Champion. The townsfolk demand that the sheriff resign (egged on by the new editor of the local paper, that editor being—of course—young and pretty, since this is a singing cowboy movie). They bring in a hotshot detective agency to replace the sheriff and his deputies. There’s some entertainment (I find that I really don’t care for most of Autry’s written-for-the-movies songs, at least at this early stage, and the Burnette number is flat-out racist), and the deputies manage to spring a trap, showing up the modern detectives. It’s all a lot implausible, but not bad as B-movie entertainment. I’ll give it $0.75.

Warning: This is a silly post. If you’re looking for significance, go elsewhere.

We’ve been watching Stargate: Atlantis (on DVD, from DVD Netflix–you know, the one that doesn’t have shows disappearing all the time because movie companies can’t tell it what it can and can’t circulate), roughly one episode a week, since we went through Stargate: SG-1 some time back.

On one episode we saw recently, we ran into a suspension problem: Namely, even given the grotesque level of suspension of disbelief needed to enjoy Atlantis, we found it difficult to believe this episode. (Hey, we enjoy Scorpion: we can suspend disbelief with the best of them.)

Here’s the situation:

The wormhole/scanning/whatever handwave required for Star Trek‘s transporter and, on a much more galactic scale, the Stargate is a classic handwave: you learn to accept it. (Einstein-Rosen? OK.) And one aspect you learn to accept is that it’s purely a transport mechanism: you can’t duplicate objects in the process because Science.

The episode in question involved a wraith Dart, the ships the wraiths use to harvest their victims by transporting them up to the ships and, later, draining the life force from them (because Evil). The Dart had crash landed or something, and the chief scientist could–of course–get it working again. And, under duress, the good guys were going to fly it up to a much bigger wraith ship and plant a bomb on the ship (and get somebody out or something–I’ve forgotten the extra bit).

But then, when you see the Dart, it’s tiny–with basically enough interior space for the pilot. Which raises the question: where do all those harvested folks go? Or, in this case, where will the other folks on this mission go while they’re rocketing off to the big wraith ship?

Turns out they’re stored as patterns in the Dart, until they’re regenerated later. Now, remember, this method is used to provide food for the wraiths (only human essences are nutritious for them).

And, at that point, I said “Bullshit.” Because, if you’re storing patterns, there is no way you can’t recreate multiple copies of those patterns. Which means there’s no way the wraith can’t simply generate as many cloned humans, thus food, as they want.

I know, I know: the whole transporter/stargate/beaming method is ludicrous anyway. But at least–with the possible exception of one or two Star Trek episodes I’ve half-forgotten–at least it’s consistently ludicrous. You can’t use the transporter/stargate to clean up illness or the like, you can’t make copies, it’s always A goes in and is destroyed, while A comes out somewhere else, just exactly the same, immediately. If A can be stored in some little box, well, bullshit.

My wife had exactly the same reaction. Sure, it’s a silly point–“how much nonsense is too much nonsense?”–but there it is.

The Earth Problem

This one applies to both Stargates. It stems from the assumption that every group Our Heroes encounter on every planet is human or closely related to humans and speaks English–because, you know, they all spring from ancient Egyptians who conquered the stars. And, of course, spoke English.

Given that, it strikes me that, whenever Our Heroes come out of a stargate or Chappa’ai and ask the locals what planet they’re on, they’re going to get the same answer: Earth.

Because, realistically, we all live on earth, thus Earth. If you asked true natives in any land area where they were, they would presumably respond with some language’s version of “here” or “where we live” or “Ourland.” And, presumably, on alien planets the planet would be called by that language’s equivalent of “here”–that is, Earth.

Which could get confusing. Fortunately, Our Heroes rarely ask that question, and they refer to planets as a set of coordinates or magic numbers for dialing the Chappa’ai.

I know, I know: it’s TVSciFantasy. Don’t expect much. Certainly don’t expect the fairly rigorous internal consistency of, say, Buffy. It’s just good cheap fun. Which is OK by us. (Yes, someday I’ll rent one disc from season 1 of ST:TOS, on Blu-ray, just to see just how cheesy those sets and SFX actually look in high-def on a big screen. One episode should do the job.)

Really clever folks will have figured out what this post is. I just finished–sort of–the first draft of one major project. I’m not quite ready to start the next essay/project. This is what you call procrastination.

Bail Out (orig. W.B., Blue and the Bean), 1989, color, “video,” Max Kleven (dir. & writer), David Hasselhoff (star and producer), Linda Blair, Tony Brubaker, Thomas Rosales Jr., John Vernon, Gregory Scott Cummins, Wayne Montario. 1:27.

We start with a thoroughly misanthropic bail bondsman, who drives his classic car to his mistress’s (I guess), has a quickie, then drives to work in a serious beater. Shortly we’re introduced to the three guys he relies on—for as little money as possible—to make sure bailed folks show up. One’s David Hasselhoff (W.B., which stands for Whitebread) back story unknown; one’s a former pro football player; one’s Hispanic with no apparent means of support. After seeing how clever they are individually, we see them in action together.

The person in question is a beautiful young heiress arrested because she was driving with her boyfriend in a car with 40 pounds of cocaine in the trunk. She says he was just some guy she met at a bar. She’s also supposedly disinherited. Anyway, the plot starts there, goes through several kidnappings, a number of drug lords, a demand for $5 million, the street price of the seized drugs, to her father (whose companies were pretty clearly being used to transport and store the cocaine), lots of shootings, and…well, it’s silly to try to keep up with the action. Let’s just say they—very definitely “they” (the trio and the young woman) conspire to get a better payday than the bail bondsman had in mind.

As a cable TV movie (my assumption: too cheaply done for a real movie, too much nudity—including the manager of a hot-sheet motel who greets renters in the altogether—for network TV: turns out I was wrong, it was a “direct to VHS” job), it’s—well, it’s Hasselhoff. It’s amusing (if you discount all the shootings, but they all seem to be bad guys, although in this case it’s hard to tell who the good guys would be). It is a long way from classic cinema. Oh, and it includes the assumption by various Hispanics that nobody in LA can understand Spanish. The quartet (the daughter and the three operatives) make an amusing group. What more can I say? Charitably, taking it as a so-bad-it’s-good action comedy, $1.25.

The Night They Took Miss Beautiful, 1977, color, TV movie. Robert Michael Lewis (dir.), Gary Collins, Chuck Connors, Henry Gibson, Victoria Principal, Gregory Sierra, Phil Silvers, Sheree North, Stella Stevens. 1:40 [1:37]

See, this is what happens when you take a three-month break from watching old movies. As I was thinking about doing this writeup, I thought “I could be really silly and suggest that this mediocre TV-movie was in the Mystery Collection, not some collection selling the presence of Name actors.” Ah, but here it is: in the Mystery Collection. (It was pretty clear it was a TV movie before going to IMDB.)

The biggest mystery is why the collection of mostly-TV stars you can see in the summary took part in this exercise in poor low-budget “drama.” I guess money is the answer.

The plot, such as it is. We start in the Miss Beautiful beauty pageant, where emcee Phil Silvers tells bad jokes, introduces the five semifinalists who will be flown via seaplane to the site of the final contest (huh?), and does the worst job of singing a bad beauty pageant closing song I’ve ever endured. Then we get the incredibly old prop-job seaplane, with two “cleaners” being left at the plane by ground personnel who take them at their word that they’ll walk back to the Miami tower. Then the contestants and emcee and a couple of other people—including one pilot who’s “dead-heading it” on a charter flight to pick up his next flight—are in the plane, it takes off, and the cleaners hijack it.

They’re a little but incredibly crazed group who just want $5 million and a ride to Nicaragua, and so far they’ve only killed one copilot. What they get, though, thanks to Feds who take over from the airport’s security, is an attempt to wipe them completely off the face of the earth—contestants and other hostages included—because (ahem) the government was using a cheapo charter flight and one of the contestants to smuggle a cigar case (one cigar tube) full of incredibly deadly virus that would kill all of Florida if it escaped to a “friendly nation” that works on antidotes to such viruses. (OK, that’s a spoiler, but it comes out very early in the movie and you can’t really spoil a flick like this.) Anyway, first attempt to bomb them all to oblivion fails because the radio messages aren’t coming from the hideout (an abandoned base in the Florida Keys, I think) but from a boat…and the job of blasting them so thoroughly that the virus is completely destroyed is done so well that the government folks can and do rescue the hijacker who was in the boat, and who of course tells them where the hostages actually are.

Oh, never mind. We get forced beauty pageantry. We get various stupidity. We finally get a touch of heroism by flying a seaplane straight into the sea. And I say “there’s 97 minutes I’ll never get back.”

Awful awful awful. A waste of good talent. I could commend the scenery, but they managed to shoot it so cheaply that you don’t see much. If only for the talent, I’ll give it $0.50.

Mysteries, 1978, color. Paul de Lussanet (dir.), Rutger Hauer, Sylvia Kristel, David Rappaport, Rita Tushingham, Marina de Graaf. 1:28.

A stranger comes to town…

That’s one of the classic beginnings for any plot, and I’m tempted to summarize this flick with the line above followed by:

…the stranger dies.

That’s a little cryptic, but so is this movie. Technically, it’s not quite the end of the plot, as the little person (“the midget,” David Rappaport) who narrates much of it winds up defacing one of the two (or three) women who (apparently) drove the stranger to his end (somehow). The stranger is an agronomist: that much is clear, and it’s the only clear thing about him.

For what it’s worth, this is an (apparently faithful?) adaptation of a novel by the same name by Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun. So there’s that. It’s filmed entirely on the Isle of Man.

Sorry, but I really can’t summarize this one. Either the print is flawed or the color is deliberately somewhat artistic and sometimes oversaturated. It’s moody, it’s odd, it’s…well, it was good enough to keep me watching through the whole thing, so even though I end up no wiser or more satisfied than when I began, I’ll give it $1.00.

Corrupt (orig. l’assassino dei poliziotti, also Copkiller or Order of Death). 1983 (sleeve says 1977, IMDB says filmed in 1981), color. Roberto Faenza (dir.), Harvey Keitel, John Lydon, Leonard Mann, Nicole Garcia, Sylvia Sidney. Ennio Morricone (composer). 1:57 (1:33).

I see that the last post on a disc’s worth of movies was in June 2014—and here it is January 2015. That’s the power of OA investigation: I’ve only watched four movies in seven months instead of the usual one a week.

Or, actually, make that 3.3 movies—because I was unwilling to waste another hour on this piece of crap after struggling through the first half hour of perhaps the worst Morricone score I can ever image hearing (“highlighted” by an awful repeated “country” song set to a classic Tchaikovsky melody) and a plot that—if I could make sense of it—was just terrible people doing terrible things, partly while wearing badges.

I guess it’s about a series of cop killings in New York, with the cops all on the drug squad (I guess?), with a detective who has two apartments and an apparent second identity (but with no attempt at disguise—the sleeve says he’s leading a double life as a drug dealer, but that doesn’t show up in the first half hour), and with a young lunatic (Lydon of the Sex Pistols, in apparently—and deservedly—his only acting role) with an extreme British accent who claims to be American and says he’s the killer, which he apparently isn’t. Or is. I dunno. Perhaps all is revealed later in the movie. He gets locked up and tortured by this detective (Keitel).

And, well, I just couldn’t. I didn’t give a damn what happened to Keitel. I didn’t give a damn what happened to Lydon. I never wanted to hear that song again or more of Morricone’s “here’s a sting because this bit of film matters!” score. A cheapo Italian flick. No rating.