Last night's film was "The Houston Story", an epic crime saga, directed by William Castle, that tells the story of an ambitious oil "roughneck" who develops a plan to siphon the stuff from the wells of neighboring drillers. Gene Barry stars as "Frank Duncan". In the opening scene, he can barely pay his rent. But he's smart, and studies diagrams day and night to learn the layout of the oil fields. He knows from the trade that a well can be drilled into at an angle. This also allows potential crooks to drill sideways and steal from a well adjacent to their property. Duncan has considered every necessity, from paying off foremen to look the other way, to finding independent distributors who will buy the stolen oil with no questions. When his plans are complete, he takes his scheme to a mob-connected nightclub owner, "Gordon Shay" (Paul Richards). Shay introduces him to "Paul Atlas" (Edward Arnold), the number two man to a corrupt oil company owner, "Mr. Constant" (John Zaremba). Duncan offers to give him five million dollars worth of stolen oil, in exchange for a place on the board.
Mr. Constant likes Duncan, who delivers on his promises. But Duncan steps on too many toes. By ingratiating himself with Mr. Constant, he's gone over the heads of Gordon Shay and Paul Atlas, the two guys who got him where he is. Shay in particular isn't happy. He sends his goons to rough Duncan up. But Duncan is one of those guys who always comes out on top. Think Pacino, working his way up the ladder in "Scarface". Duncan intimidates Shay's enforcers, then steals his girl, "Zoe Crane" (Barbara Hale) a singer at Shay's club. He also has a nice gal on the side. "Madge" (Jeanne Cooper) runs the local truck stop cafe. She knows him only as Frank the oil worker, and nothing about his other life as a master criminal. Madge believes Frank when he promises to marry her. Meanwhile, he's out on the town with Zoe Clark. Duncan finally bites off more than he can chew. After cooking up a scheme to expose Gordon Shay to investigators, he plans to get rid of Paul Atlas in the bargain. Then he'll only have Mr. Constant above him. Like Scarface, he gets a little too big for his britches.
The film bogs down at times, in the minutia of oil company dealings. It tries, once again like "Against All Odds", to be all things to all moviegoers, by having Duncan talk drilling technology one minute, then romance his two broads the next. The plot would've been tighter had they focused on the crime. For instance, after hearing about all the know-how that's needed to drill sideways into a competitor's well, we never see the actual theft take place. All Castle shows us is that Duncan now wears a suit. He's got money, which tells us that his plan was a success. But this is essentially a heist movie, and in heist movies, we see the robbers break into the bank. It would have been interesting to watch them steal the oil, but we don't get a single frame. More suspense would have helped the plot, and less "sweeping melodrama". Having said that, the protagonist is an overly ambitious man, so I suppose that his rise and fall took precedence over the crime theme.
It's still a very good film, and at 81 minutes, despite the outsized story, there's basically no fat. As a Hitchcock fan, William Castle was good at keeping things moving. Gene Barry, who you might remember from the late '60s series "The Name of the Game", is great as the would-be oil king Duncan. Barbara Hale is alluring and tough as nails as the passed-around nightclub singer Zoe. Let's give "The Houston Story" Two Big Thumbs Up. As with every Castle flick, the black and white photography is spectacular. The whole shebang is highly recommended and the picture is razor sharp. ////
The previous night we watched an interesting but very low budget espionage film entitled "The Master Plan"(1954), staring Wayne Morris as "Major Thomas Brent", an American officer assigned to a Cold War base in Germany. The base is shared with British counterintelligence, headed up by "Col. Mark Cleaver" (Norman Wooland). Major Brent is there to help stop an information leak emerging from the Colonel's office. There are only a handful of people who could be responsible, but something is happening to Major Brent. He blacks out in the middle of conversations. We see this happen first on his flight to Germany, when he spaces in the middle of a chess game.
Col. Cleaver chalks it up to post traumatic stress. Major Brent suffered a concussion from a mortar attack in the Korean war. And yet, he seems almost zombielike at times, as if he's in some kind of trance. Not good for a man in a high security operation. Col. Cleaver is dismayed that Brent is often out of commission. He takes it out on his secretary (Mary Mackenzie), who he accuses of eavesdropping on Brent's phone calls. He suspects she's manipulating Major Brent in some way. He questions her loyalty due to her friendship with a German woman, "Helen" (Tilda Thamar). But Col. Cleaver dates her himself in his off hours. Could he be the mole, trying to draw attention to others?
That's what I thought, and of course I can't tell you. What you will find out, though, is that Major Brent is the guinea pig in a mind control experiment, like something out of "The Manchurian Candidate". The objective is to make him look like a commie. These programming scenes are the highlight of the movie, which is limited to just a few sets and a static camera. Most of it takes place in the Colonel's office. As noted, the budget must have been minimal, but director Cy Endfield does a good job with what he's got. The mind control aspect makes the average spy plot quite interesting, and for that reason, and the performance of Norman Wooland as the dogged Colonel Cleaver, "The Master Plan" gets Two Big Thumbs Up. The picture is slightly flat, but watchable. ///
Well, that's it for 2021. Can you believe we watched 361 movies this year? My goodness! That's what our discovery of Youtube led to. Before Covid, I swore I'd never watch a movie on a computer. But last year the libraries closed up, and I've never had Netflix or cable. So Youtube was a last option, and it turned out to be a blessing in disguise as far as old films are concerned. We've found dozens and dozens of flicks that will never be on dvd, and we've become b-movie historians and archivists in the process. That's not to say we haven't watched a lot of high-grade stuff, too. And earlier last Spring, we did watch several Major Studio Epics on dvd (and what amounts to The Big Screen nowdays, i.e. a TV set), including "Cleopatra" and "West Side Story" (the original, not the recent crummy remake). We'll do a brief Year in Review in an upcoming blog. In the meantime, I wish you a Happy New Year. 2022 has got to be better than 2021, right? Fingers crossed......
I send you Tons of Love, as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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