Reviews

This ten cent production just ran on TCM. It's one of the worst movies they've ever shown... but like everything they program, it's worth at least a sidelong look. That doesn't mean sitting through it -- it's a *very* long 75 minutes. In fact, I can't imagine how anybody made it through this bomb in a theater or drive-in.

Essentially what happens is this: A teakettle with an antenna lands in the desert. Our star, a portly man with his belt riding high, and his family of wooden wife and daughter, are menaced by their farm animals. This consists of closeups of cows mooing or dogs barking, with reaction shots of the actors screaming and running away. The best special effect comes when the chickens turn on their masters, which involves somebody off-camera throwing chickens at one of the actors. There's also a mute weird guy, for some (no) reason. And most surprising, there's Chester Conklin, who started his career playing opposite Charlie Chaplin in his early silents, continuing through Modern Times in the 30s. He's the finest screen presence here, which is faint praise indeed.

The soundtrack is classical music needle drops that have nothing to do with what's happening on screen (the climax to a symphony while somebody walks through the desert), plus ultra-cheapo sound effects.

On second thought, it's a masterpiece... of what Frank Zappa called "Cheepnis." (http://www.cupandblade.com/ cheepnis/cheepnis.mp3)

This hilarious homemade short is a key moment in British comedy.

Two years before "A Hard Day's Night," Richard Lester (then a TV director) made this movie, starring Goons Peter Sellers & Spike Milligan with the wonderful Leo McKern (who would later play the zany cult leader in "Help").

Here, in 1962, you can see the seeds of the revolutionary style Lester applied to the Beatles, and that was hugely influential in the look of 60s films and media. It's clearly an ancestor of Monty Python, for one.

The movie features an oddball group of deadpans who look like they could come from a Beckett play. For no reason, they're outside in a landscape somewhere, where, for no reason, they play a series of silent-movie gags on each other.

Improvised and loose, it's a record of a bunch of guys (who happen to be comedy geniuses) fooling around with a camera, just like the video posters of today. Only much, much funnier.

Richard Lester is credited as co-director (with Sellers), co-writer, cinematographer, editor, and composer. It's the earliest piece of his work we're likely to see. (Try to catch his other early ones... "It's Trad, Dad," a feature that's half early 60s pop music and half crazy gags, is in rotation on TCM and is wonderful... "Mouse On The Moon," the one just before "A Hard Day's Night," is also enjoyable, but not so much in Lester's typical style.)

When "A Hard Day's Night" was released on DVD a few years ago, the advance information and even the packaging said that the disk would include "The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film." In sad fact it didn't. So for now, it's unavailable commercially. (Though as we know, in the cyber universe, everything is SOMEWHERE.)

and one of the funniest movies I've ever seen.

Not intentionally, though.

It's an operetta set at a camp for English prisoners being held by the Germans somewhere in the African jungle. There are dozens of native extras, all of them black actors, whose main function in the story is to prostrate themselves toward whichever white lead happens to be singing in the vicinity.

And yes, all of the lead actors are white, a little awkward since many of them are playing natives of the same tribe as the actually black extras. Their skin tones range from burnt cork (Noah Beery) to snow white (the golden Dawn herself). The plot revolves around whether the obviously white Dawn is really black. I can't tell you how it comes out -- that would be a spoiler.

Dawn's mother, a slightly darker shade of makeup, wears earrings and pearls and sort of resembles Margaret Dumont.

Speaking of whom, the male lead is played by Walter Woolf, who, as Walter Woolf King, plays the villain tenor Rodolfo Lassparri in "A Night At The Opera." When this, uh, dawned on me, I actually shouted out, just like Groucho as Otis B. Driftwood, "Lassparri?!?!?!"

This is racism too ridiculous to be objectionable. Instead, like the (intentional) loony racial stereotypes in "Blazing Saddles," it's hysterical.

Noah Beery (brother of Wallace, father of Jr.) plays Shep Keyes, who speaks and sings in an exaggerated stereotypical southern black dialect, full of "gwines" and so on. Is he supposed to be American? African? No idea. Then there's the native second female lead character, apparently (made up to be) African, but doing the same shufflin' accent as Beery. Is it just me, or does she bear a startling resemblance to Andrea Martin?

There are so many little delights, other absurd characters and "comic" subplots, moments to cherish. The Whip song! My Bwana! A Tigah! The final, shocking, revelations! Why are you reading this? Go forth, do whatever it takes to find a copy of this movie, and watch it!

As you might have read here, this movie bridges silents and sound, having been shot without sound, and reshot when sound arrived -- and it appears that little of the silent material was used. There are silent-style titles between scenes, but basically we're watching an early sound film.

Sadly, like many early sound films, it's bogged down by the clumsy technology. The camera is static and actionless... in a Harold Lloyd movie! Harold has few action scenes, or even moments, for most of the film. Meanwhile, his character, speaking for the first time, turns out to be a smart-aleck, not at all like his sympathetic silent persona. Add to that the many moments when he bops somebody on the head or kicks them in the pants, which in sound comes off as painful more than comic. And the fact that he keeps casually destroying other people's property with no motivation makes him come off as, well, kind of a jerk.

Sound quality is not bad for the primitive era, but many scenes are obviously redubbed. And the dialogue! It's inane, which is bad enough. But worse, it's painfully slow, mostly overpronounced in projected, stage-actory voices. As a result, the film drags on at an adagio pace for just short of two hours. Way too long for any comedy.

And to read, again here, that it was previewed at THREE HOURS, tells me that this must have been one of the classic ill-fated Hollywood productions.

And yet... There are some real treats here. Edgar Kennedy is great as the irascible desk sergeant. He's on screen for a long time, but unbilled. Meanwhile, prominent billing goes to Charles Middleton as the weaselly John Thorne. This pleased me because four years later, Middleton and Kennedy both appeared (not together) in one of the one or two greatest comedies ever made, Duck Soup.

In Duck Soup, Kennedy has a series of great scenes -- as the lemonade salesman with Harpo, followed by Harpo, Chico, and the hat-and-leg-swapping routine. And when Freedonia goes to war, he gets to sit on Harpo in the bath.

Meanwhile, Charles Middleton, third-billed here, has merely a bit in Duck Soup, as the prosecutor at Chicolini's trial, playing straight man to Chico and Groucho. Short, but like every moment of Duck Soup, sublime.

Out of respect to the greatness of Harold Lloyd, I can't give this less than a five. But no more, either. It's for diehards & completists only. I'm one myself, but this is a long, hard slog.

This is a real stinker. And I say that as a fan of the Ritz Brothers.

It's the third filmed version of a play that must have already been stale back in the twenties. (The first is a silent, of interest only to the Charles Gillingwater fan club. The second is a very early talkie starring the vaudeville comic Joe Frisco. I haven't seen either of them, but they're in the IMDb.)

Before you descend to the low level of this disaster, I'd recommend "The Three Musketeers" or "Straight, Place and Show," which is in the rotation at TCM (in fact I'm watching it right now, having just suffered through "The Gorilla"), and which features a wonderful acting and singing performance from Ethel Merman.

Meanwhile, spare yourself this turkey, unless you enjoy wooden acting, incoherent narrative, and unfunny jokes, or you just LOOOOOOOVE the Ritz Brothers.

It barely earns a "2" from me, and only because of the fact that any movie with a guy in a gorilla suit gets extra points.

Stagy, tedious, wooden, boring, endless. And yet...

Here's a cast of wonderful MGM actors in their prime. Joan Crawford is not that far removed from the musicals of her youth. Her beauty hasn't hardened into the horrible Kabuki mask of later years. She's one of the worst things about this movie. She's utterly unfunny and totally charmless. She sinks every scene to the bottom of the sea, and thence downward to the center of the earth. Still, it's always interesting to watch her, to notice the lighting and other tricks that give her the star treatment in every shot.

The male leads are the incomparable William Powell (one year after "My Man Godfrey"), and Robert Montgomery (one year before "Night Must Fall").

The rest of the cast is filled out with wonderful character actors including Frank Morgan, Nigel Bruce, and Melville Cooper. Not to mention Jessie Ralph, a cinema immortal for her role as Mrs. Hermosillo Brunch in "The Bank Dick."

In 1937 American actors were severely afflicted with the phony English accent syndrome ("cahnt" for "can't"). Here, the cast is supposed to be mostly English, with only Crawford and Powell as visiting Americans. But Crawford and Powell both speak in that mid-Atlantic half- English accent. Meanwhile, half the "English" characters are played by Americans who barely attempt to sound English (Robert Montgomery, Frank Morgan, Jessie Ralph). In these bewildering accents, much dialog is babbled, little of it worth hearing.

But under the wreckage you can discern the movie somebody was hoping to make: something like the infinitely better "Trouble In Paradise," Ernst Lubitsch's masterpiece about two jewel thieves, their victim, and the resulting love triangle. Samson Raphaelson, the brilliant writer of "Trouble In Paradise," is one of the many listed writers on this movie. There are a few flashes of brilliant dialog here that sound like him. Meanwhile, Frank Morgan (later the Wizard of Oz) plays a character that's a prototype for Mr. Matuschek in the wonderful Lubitsch/Raphaelson "Shop Around The Corner."

But in this movie, 90% of the dialog is heavy as lead. There are many frenzied comings and goings, none of them funny. In no way is this movie a comedy -- if by comedy we mean what makes you laugh. Number of (intentional) laughs detected in this film: 0. Unintentional laughs: few. This isn't even one of those so bad it's good movies. It's just a stinker.

And yet... all those actors near the tops of their careers... a first-class MGM production from the golden age... and Mrs. Hermosillo Brunch! My advice: Tivo it and watch it at triple speed if you like, but do take a gander.

You know the moment in "The Producers" when the Broadway theatre audience sits stupefied by the unbelievable awfulness of what they're seeing? I watched most of "The Girl Hunters" with a similar slack-jawed, eye-popping expression.

The ultimate vanity project, in which Mickey Spillane stars as his own ultra-macho detective, Mike Hammer. And, he's miscast! He can't act, can barely deliver his own awful dialogue, and is laughably terrible throughout the movie.

Even better, Mickey cast his also-can't-act pals in supporting roles. The tabloid columnist Hy Gardner never met a line of dialogue he couldn't butcher. Lloyd Nolan phones it in, looking like he's ready for the laxative commercials he would soon be doing. And then there are the assorted slabs of beef who pound Hammer and get pounded by him, in the trademark sadomasochistic Spillane style.

Of course he gets the girl (Shirley Eaton!!!). In fact, the most unwatchable shot in the whole movie is the slow track to a closeup of their mouths as they make out for the first time. I dare you not to blink.

And then there's the music! Laid on with a trowel, it's the same over-orchestrated catchy trumpet blues riff repeated a hundred times, usually crescendoing over a meaningless shot of Hammer walking down a hall, or driving up a road, punctuating exactly the wrong moments in a film that's just chock full of 'em.

Only 103 minutes, but I would have guessed two hours. Grill a steak, pour a scotch, fire up a cancer stick, and don't miss it!!

Wonderful comedy, tops my list of movies that deserve to be better known. Funny from start to finish, well written, well directed, very well cast, with veteran character actors like Marjorie Main and Porter Hall nailing all the laughs and then some, plus Peter Whitney as the identical twins Mert & Bert (which one has the crick in his back? I forget) and excellent performances from the cast in general.

Fred MacMurray is at the top of his game (only a year after Double Indemnity), and the pacing is exhilarating, lots of great gags and surreal comedy, and a nutty, over-the-top ending that pays off the whole thing.

I always come away from this movie feeling happy. Only not often enough -- since it's rarely on TV, not on DVD, and in and out of availability on VHS.

This movie deserves much better. It should have a first-class DVD release, and be in the rotation at TCM. Please!

And then there's the music, which mysteriously is note for note the theme to "All Things Considered" on NPR, only 30 years earlier.... "On horse flies is, in comb bees is..."

Early-50s, apparently VERY low budget film that's too much of a (very bad) soap opera. Ludicrous plot, miscast actors. Richard Conte, though a "lead" is barely seen for most of the film. Nat Cole apparently had about an hour or two to spare -- he's shot from one, static angle, in a single take. But the Nelson Riddle arrangement is choice. Almost everything else in this awful film is an embarrassment. "M" it's not.