Rudolfo Acosta in "The Tijuana Story", and "Roses are Red" starring Don Castle and Joe Sawyer (Happy New Year!)

Last night's movie was "The Tijuana Story", a you-are-there crime drama, complete with Jackwebbian narration, in which a brave newspaperman goes up against a local TJ mobster to expose drug trafficking and corruption in the border city. The narrator informs us that Tijuana means "Aunt Jane", and we're off to the races. Rudolfo Acosta of "High Chaparral" fame plays "Manuel Acosta Mesa", an incendiary columnist who writes accusatory screeds against "Peron Diaz" (Paul Newlan), the silent partner/owner of a nightclub nominally run by ex-jazz pianist "Eddie March" (Robert McQueeny). Eddie is only fronting for Diaz, who operates behind the scenes, and he doesn't like it in TJ. He's an American who's only there because his piano career went nowhere. But now his wife is pregnant, and he needs the money. He also can't quit on Diaz without risking his life. The club is a money laundering cover for Diaz's narcotics business; young American kids drive down there on weekends to buy marijuana and goofballs.

The ante is upped when Diaz has his men beat up one of Acosta Mesa's news colleagues. The guy dies, and now Acosta Mesa (pronounced like Costa Mesa, California) is no longer content with just accusing Diaz and The Syndicate, he's out to put them in prison. But the Syndicate extends way beyond Diaz and his nightclub. It has ties in the Mexican government and threads it's way up into Los Angeles (pron. Lowss Ang-less). Marijuana joints, known as "sticks", are a prime source of income for The Syndicate, and they don't appreciate Acosta Mesa's crusade. 

Then a young American boy (James Darren) drives down to TJ for a lark. He meets and falls in love with Acosta Mesa's assistant, a pretty, young good girl he meets on the street. But Darren gets hoodwinked in a bar by a savvy older prostitute. Soon, he's mixed up in buying and smoking pot, and the next we see him, he's running into the ocean to get away from the Mexican police. He drowns after hitting his head on the rocks.

After that, Acosta Mesa runs a column calling Diaz a "vulture". Eddie Marsh finally decides he's had enough also, after Diaz bribes a prison guard to let a hitman out of the slammer for 24 hours, to do away with Acosta Mesa once and for all. Eddie didn't know what he was in for when he signed on to be Diaz's nightclub boss, and now he's caught in the middle of a Mexican drug war and murdalization. He tries to go to the cops, to inform on Diaz, but Diaz has eyes and ears on every street corner. Acosta Mesa is set up to be assassinated, and I can't tell you what happens, but his son Robert Blake (doing a perfect Spanish accent) is in line to succeed him at the newspaper, regardless.

This is one ruthless crime story, similar in theme to "Traffic" and shot on location in Tijuana. On a side note, actor Robert McQueeny later became a Catholic priest and led the Padre Pio Foundation. Padre Pio was a miracle worker and healer who was canonized by the church in 2002. Read up on him, he's pretty far out. Two Huge Thumbs Up for "The Tijuana Story". The picture is widescreen and razor sharp.  ////

The previous night, our pal Don Castle was back in a dual role in "Roses are Red", a Noir featuring crooked cops, crooked lawyers, and crooked mobsters. There aren't many people in this flick who aren't crooks, and only DA "Robert Thorne" (Castle) can name 'em all without a scorecard. The movie opens with the murder of a woman found dead in her apartment. Police lieutenant "Rocky Wall" (Joe Sawyer) investigates, then goes straight to wheelchair-bound Mafia boss "Jim Locke" (Edward Keane), in whose pocket he resides, to report on a surprising discovery: a photograph was found in the dead woman's purse, of DA Thorne himself! Locke wants to know: "What's a dead floozy doing attached to our straight-laced DA?" "I have no idea," Lt. Wall replies, "but it's good blackmail bait. We can use it."

As a well-connected cop, Lieutenant Wall knows there's a convict named "Don Carney" (also Castle), who's just about up for parole. He looks exactly like DA Thorne, and because Wall and boss Locke are now in a position to blackmail the DA, Wall approaches Carney in prison.

Meanwhile, early on, one of Locke's henchmen (Douglas Fowley) is upset. He feels he's been hung out to dry for a murder rap and is threatening to talk to DA Thorne. Locke has him rubbed out (a rare early exit for Fowley), and the low-level hoodlum who does the killing is then also abandoned by Locke and sent to prison. Lieutenant Wall tells Don Carney that Locke wants to use him as a double for Thorne, so they can get the loser henchman out of the slammer and prevent him from talking. The plot gets very convoluted here, and it takes a while to sort things out, but once they kidnap the DA, and replace him with Carney the convict, the situation starts to become clear. Only their girlfriends can tell Thorne and Carney apart, and after Thorne is kidnapped by Locke's henchmen, the two lookalikes are confined together, with Carney the ex-con studying Thorne the captive DA, memorizing his history and mannerisms to impersonate him. 

Jeff Chandler (Pete Best) appears midway through, to stage a car accident in which Thorne is badly injured. But then he recovers in the hospital, and recruits a team of investigators, one of whom is a young James Arness, who - at 6'9" - is taller than Chandler! Man, did you know Arness was 6'9"? I didn't. Anyhow, he is one gigantic son-of-a-bee. He out-bigs Chandler (which isn't easy to do), and intimidates him into surrendering. Then, Thorne puts his plan into action, which is to make the mobsters and crooked cop Wall think he's convict Carney, still doing his impersonation. The impersonation plot is super convoluted, but it resolves during the last twenty minutes of the film. This is the best part, when everything comes together and only the girlfriends know who is whom. You might remember Joe Sawyer as the overbearing Army Sergeant in the "Private Doubleday" films we saw and enjoyed last Spring. We observed at the time that Sawyer was a talented comedian and that he was a core member of the Pasadena Playhouse. He shows his versatility here, as a sociopathic detective who thinks nothing about shooting a DA in the back. Two Big Thumbs Up for "Roses are Red", the picture is very good.  ////

Since this is the last blog of 2022, we need to do a year-end review. 60 minute Westerns were without doubt the biggest thing that happened. We discovered Tim McCoy, Tom Tyler, Johnny Mack Brown, and Buster Crabbe, to name a few of our new favorite cowboy stars. Charles King is definitely our Actor of the Year (and probably of all-time). Can you believe we saw 387 movies this year? Yep, I just looked at my list and counted 'em. Some days we watched more than one. We saw some cool franchises, like The Five Little Peppers (who we loved), and The East Side Kids (ditto) and Nancy Drew and Boston Blackie (double ditto). Man, this is the most movies we've ever seen in one year. I'll look over my list again for the next blog and we'll mention some more and do a Top Ten. 

And that's all I know for now. My blogging music tonight is "Beck, Bogert & Apache Live", my late night is various Handel choral music. I'm excited about 2023 and I hope you are too. Happy New Year!

I send you Tons of Love, as always.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)

Tom Tully, John Gavin and Sylvia Sidney in "Behind the High Wall", and "Tough to Handle" starring Frankie Darro (plus Clapton was God)

Last night's movie was "Behind the High Wall"(1956), a prison-break drama starring Tom Tully as a morally compromised warden. He doesn't start out that way. In fact, as the movie opens, he's closer to being the Saintly Warden of prison film prototype, arguing before a state board for better treatment of his convicts. His reasoning is sound: that better treatment not only leads to less recidivism but saves the state money in the bargain. The board disagrees, and Tully, weary of fighting losing battles, is ready to resign from his job. He goes home that afternoon to commiserate with his wheelchair-bound wife (Sylvia Sydney), and as they're having lunch, he gets a call that there's trouble at the prison. He leaves immediately and when he gets there, a massive brawl is taking place in the mess hall. But it's all a distraction for what's really afoot; a plot by four lifers to kidnap Warden Tully and use him as a hostage for their breakout.

With the warden in a prearranged getaway car, the convicts then change vehicles at an auto shop off the highway. The switch is preplanned also, with a mechanic from the shop doing the driving in a company truck. As the hours pass, the owner of the garage calls the cops to alert them to his missing vehicle and driver, and the state police put out an all points bulletin. A motorcycle officer sees the truck pass, he gives chase, and the convicts shoot him dead. But as this happens, their driver - the auto shop mechanic (John Gavin, later the US Ambassador to Mexico) - loses control of the truck and it rolls down a hillside, killing three of the four escaped convicts and ejecting the warden and the fourth con, in addition to himself. Gavin is knocked unconcho. The warden is groggy but alive. He sees the fourth convict trying to run away up a mountainside and shoots him. The guy falls, and as he tumbles, the suitcase he was carrying opens and a boatload of cash falls out.

In his dazed state, the warden makes a decision that will alter his life. Because all the escaped convicts are now dead, and the only other survivor of the crash - the mechanic/getaway driver - is knocked out, Warden Tully decides to gather up the cash and bury it, with the idea of returning later to take it home. When he and the Gavin are rescued, Gavin ends up on trial as the driver of the getaway truck. Warden Tully is called as a witness, but provides no help, pro or con. "I don't remember much of anything due to the accident" he tells the court. Gavin has no evidence to prove he was forced into helping the convicts, and because the motorcycle cop was killed in the act of the getaway, he goes down for the death penalty as the only surviving member of the escape crew.

Gavin will soon be sitting in the gas chamber. The only man who can prove his innocence, if he is innocent, is Warden Tully, who is now compromised because of his misguided decision to hide and steal the stolen cash the prisoners escaped with. Tully explains to his wife that its a no-brainer to take the money. "It's untraceable; we need it cause I'm losing my job, and from now on I won't have to work in the prison system anymore, with all those short-sighted board members always threatening my job." His wife, paraplegic from an auto accident, begs him to turn the money in. "It's wrong to keep it. And what will happen to me if you're caught and sent to prison?"

As to the social aspects of the script, this is an Abner Biberman film, so you've gotta have moral dilemmas, it was in his contract. If a script has anything to do with unions or prisoners, Biberman's your director. He was very good, though (a good actor too), and here he has the warden so tangled up in burying and recovering the stolen money that his wife is completely traumatised, because Tully is willing to let John Gavin die in the gas chamber even though he knows Gavin's innocent. Trying to prove Gavin's innocence is his girlfriend Betty Lynn, the daughter of the auto shop owner, who gives her five thousand dollars to hire a high-powered appeal lawyer. They need new evidence to get Gavin a new trial, and in their search, they'll discover Warden Tully's secret. I wasn't happy with the ending, but the movie still gets Two Huge Thumbs Up. In addition to the stolen money theme, there's a major subplot involving another lifer who makes a separate escape. With nothing to lose, he wants the money, too, and that's all I can tell you. It's 85 minutes long but very involving and the picture is widescreen and razor sharp.  //// 

Now then: do you remember Frankie Darro? We saw him in "Irish Luck", sometime last Summer, right around the time we were discovering The East Side Kids. We said Darro reminded us of Leo Gorcey (or maybe it was the reverse). Both are feisty and short in stature. Darro worked a lot with Mantan Moreland, and I think we mentioned they were the first interracial "buddy team". The previous night, Frankie was back, in "Tough to Handle"(1937) as "Mike Sanford", a sidewalk newsboy whose grandfather buys a winning lottery ticket worth sixteen thousand clamatos. The problem is that it may not be legitimate. In the newspaper, a woman is listed as being the winner, with the same ticket number as Mike's grandpa.

Mike decides to investigate, with the help of one of his customers, a reporter named "Joe MacIntyre" (Kane Richmond). We in the audience know that Mike's suspicions are correct, because we've already seen nightclub owner "Tony Franco" (Harry Worth) talking to his henchmen about his counterfeit lottery ticket scam. Franco has a printing press replicating tickets. The upside is that 99.9999% of lotto tickets never win, so they generally have no crossovers with the real tickets and make a buck off each one. In the big city, it's a million dollar racket. But this time, Grandpa Radford's ticket happens to line up with an actual winner. Franco panics, because he stands to get caught; Grandpa bought the ticket from one of his hoodlums. So, he tells the hood to get the ticket back. "But no rough stuff. Just trick him into handing it over." They try this, but Grandpa won't give the ticket up. "Its my only proof that I won the lottery". The hoods end up killing him, exactly what Franco didn't want. Grandpa's death looks like a heart attack, but the cops suspect foul play. Mike tells them about his lotto ticket, and the resulting confusion about the winner.

Mike's reporter friend Joe MacIntyre asks around at Franco's nightclub about ticket sales, but no one will talk. For his part, Mike can't believe Joe would even suspect Tony Franco. "Why? He's a real nice man, Joe. He even gave my sister Gloria a job as his singer." Tony always treats Mike and Gloria like family, with the utmost courtesy, so Mike can't believe Franco would ever have anything to do with crime, let alone murder. But Joe MacIntyre is a hard-boiled reporter. He knows people have false fronts, especially guys like Tony Franco.

The story is padded with nightclub singing scenes, and because we know from the start that Franco is behind the fake lotto scheme, there's no mystery involved. The twist is that there's a Mr. Big above Franco, someone who is running the scheme statewide. We only see this man in shadow. He advises Tony to pay off the occasional winners. "You should've given the old man his 16,000 bucks. We don't need the scrutiny, and it's a small price of doing business when compared to the million dollars a year we're making." In addition to the mysterious Mr. Big, there's another curious character, a drunk who is always at the nightclub. He wears a suit and pays for his drinks, so we know he isn't a bum, but who is he? Joe MacIntyre finds out, when Franco puts his henchmen on Joe's tail. Is the drunk an undercover agent? It appears so.

Take out the musical padding and the needless, wide shot punchouts, and you'd have an excellent, Frankie Darro-driven crime movie. It runs 58 minutes, should've been 52 or 53, but it's good enough to still warrant Two Big Thumbs Up. You just have to like Frankie's cartwheeling energy, with his long, backcombed hair always falling in his face. We'll go on a Darro binge sooner or later. The picture is razor sharp.  ///// 

And that's all I've got for tonight. My blogging music is Cream's "Wheels of Fire". I've been on a major Cream binge, and I don't think it can be overstated how incredible they were. Notwithstanding later virtuosos like Chris Squire and Geddy Lee (whose styles were different anyway), it's gotta be said that Jack Bruce was the greatest bassist ever. While I loved Cream's hit singles as a kid, I'm just now listening to Bruce's playing in depth for the first time, and there's just no one in his league from that era (except Paul McCartney, whose style was also different), and so many players from the 70s onward emulated him. Bruce is off the charts, especially on live recordings, ditto Ginger Baker, but the guy whose playing really needs to be re-examined in depth is Eric Clapton, who has kind of been given a back seat as a Guitar God after all these years, when he probably should be driving the car. Over the past ten days or so, I've been listening to all the Cream albums repeatedly (and the live 1968 Farewell Concert), and EC just lets loose. He goes off on some blistering jams, and again, as I noted in another blog, nobody was playing like that in 1967. Well, Jimi was, but Jimi was a different kind of player, and it must be also noted that, as incredible as Jimi was, and a great songwriter in many styles and a great singer, he was more prone to experimentation with his guitar playing and thus could be sloppy live, when he got too far out on a limb. Also. though he had excellent sidemen in Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, Clapton had Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. I'm not knocking my Uncle Jimi by any stretch. There was no Other, at the time, for experimentation, innovation, and taking the guitar to the next level. But for sheer lead playing, and the monster tone to end all monster tones, Clapton in Cream was the man. Keep in mind that I'm specifying "when he was in Cream." I don't think he ever approached that level again, although he was great playing a mellower kind of music in Blind Faith and somewhat scorching with Derek and the Dominoes. But with Cream? Fuggeddabboudditt. Clapton was God, as was claimed. Then came Sir Richard of Blackmore in 1972, four years after EC, to take lead guitar playing into the stratosphere with his solo on "Highway Star". Following the Man in Black was young Edward Van Halen six years later, who took things to mind-boggling heights. He came along "ten years after" Clapton (see what I did there?), and EC was his hero, so that brings us full circle. But yeah, go on a Cream binge and see.

My late night music is Bach, various cantatas and chorales. I need a new book to read. I hope you're enjoying the last few days of 2022, and I send you Tons of Love as always.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)         

Lew Ayers, Laraine Day and Basil Rathbone in "Fingers at the Window", and "A Christmas Memory" starring Geraldine Page, written by Truman Capote

Last night's thriller operates on the concept "bigger is better": why have one axe murderer on the loose when you can have six? The more the merrier, right? That's what's happening in Chicago, in "Fingers at the Windum"(1942), oops I mean "Window." There's a rash of axe murders, and murderers, and it's gotten so bad that no one will go outside. Businesses are closing up, including theaters. "Oliver Duffy" (Lew Ayers), a stage actor, finds himself out of work and, as he heads home, still dressed in top hat and tails, he sees a young woman walking alone and notices that she's being followed. As Oliver is acutely aware of the axe murder spree, he can't in good conscience let her proceed by herself, so he approaches to accompany her home, and at first she thinks he's a pick-up artist. Romantic repartee ensues for the next five minutes as they walk together, and during this time, in an intercut scene, we see a psychotic man being examined by a psychiatrist at a police station. The cops think surely they've caught their axe murderer, but the shrink assures them there's more than one man.

Next, a shadowy figure enters the apartment of another schizophrenic. He gaslights the schizo, telling him "you know what I need you to do." He's programming the poor man to kill a woman with an axe. It appears he's the mastermind behind the axe killings, but who is he?

Back with Oliver Duffy and "Edwina Brown" (Laraine Day), they are now at her apartment. He concocts a ruse to stay the night on her fire escape, because he fears for her safety. It turns out he was right, because that night a psycho climbs through her window with an axe. Edwina and Oliver catch the guy, pin him down and call the cops, but the detectives on the case don't believe in psychological explanations or "mastermind" theories. They just think that, for some inexplicable reason, the city has succumbed to an epidemic of axe murders. 

But now, it's gotten so bad that the newspaper has put out a 25,000 dollar reward for the capture of the man, or men, who are committing the murders. Oliver and Edwina could sure use the money. They think the police are out to lunch on their "one man" theory and decide to solve the case themselves. Oliver, being a talented actor, decides to pose as a schizophrenic so he can gain access to a mental hospital, where he encounters a stern doctor played by Basil Rathbone. 

The plot was extremely layered, maybe a tad too much, and Lew Ayers' portrayal of Oliver was what I will call fancy, even precious in places. Ayers had a distinct and slightly eccentric acting style that included some cute or affected mannerisms. He was very good , don't get me wrong, especially in the Dr. Kildare series where he was paired with Laraine Day as his nurse, so they were a team before this film. He was excellent in the sci-fi classic "Donovan's Brain" in which he starred alongside Nancy Davis. Here, he's playing a theater actor, so I guess some of his mannerisms can be forgiven. With a less talky script, it might've been less obvious. Still, even with the over-drawn-out plot, when Rathbone appears, all is right with the movie, and even from the beginning it has a unique calling card. Two Big Thumbs Up for "Fingers at the Window". The picture is dvd quality.  ////

The previous night, we had one last Christmas film, actually a TV movie, entitled "A Christmas Memory"(1966). Written and narrated by Truman Capote, it's his own memory of a Christmas season during the Depression in Alabama, when he was seven years old and living with an eccentric female relative. She doesn't have a name in the movie, he just calls her his "friend". Geraldine Page plays her as an elderly but childlike free spirit. She has two older cousins who own the house she and "Buddy" (Capote, played by Donnie Melvin) live in, relegated to a back room. The cousins, responsible and churchgoing, tolerate but look down on the pair, who haven't any money save for the pittance they win by entering contests; any contest they can find, like naming a new coffee for a national brand. They hope that one will net them fifty thousand bucks. Mostly, though, they win nickle-and-dime contests like puzzlers and box top mail-ins. They've done well enough this Fall, in what must be the early 1930s, to have saved up 13 dollars, enough to buy the ingredients for the fruitcakes they bake and mail out every Christmas. The real Capote explains in voiceover that the fruitcake recipients are mostly strangers. His "friend"  isn't social, she's never been but five miles from their house, and she likes people she barely knows, such as the postman, or a married couple from California who once drove through town and later sent them a postcard. These are the kind of people she makes the Christmas fruitcakes for, and of course First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt gets one every year. This year, Friend and Buddy are going to bake thirty fruitcakes, their new record.

Friend is proud as they enter the small grocery store in town. She reads off her list of cake ingredients to buy, then she and Buddy take the goods home on their improvised sleigh, a baby buggy with a baggage compartment. Their terrier Queenie tags along. They are three of a kind, and when they are done baking the fruitcakes after a full day's work, Friend decides they should celebrate by drinking small glasses of the whiskey they bought on their way home from "Mr. Ha-Ha" (Josip Elic), an American Indian bootlegger. The whiskey was for the fruitcakes, but there's a little bit left, so Friend pours even amounts for herself, for seven year old Buddy, and for Queenie the dog, mixing Queenie's whisky with some coffee. All three get to feeling pleasant, dancing around their tiny kitchen. Then the older cousins come home and scold Friend for giving a alcohol to a child.

But no harm has been done. Friend and Buddy and Queenie are life mates, a team; they listen to the lecture and shrug it off because they've got more important things to do. The next day, they need a Christmas tree, so they go out to the woods and find a perfect one, twice as tall as Buddy, so he won't be able to steal the silver star off the top. Buddy clearly adores his Friend, who it is also clear could never live on her own without the support of her cousins. Friend is an adult child, but she has wisdom (and responsibility, and dedication) far beyond what they offer. She's the kind of person who is a life-shaper for a child of artistic bent, which is why Truman Capote wrote his Christmas Memory about her. If you saw "The Fabelmans", and saw how the eccentric Uncle Boris influenced young Steven Spielberg, it's the same thing here. Friend is actually very industrious when she's doing what she's good at, things like baking cakes, decorating Christmas trees, or making homemade kites for presents. Buddy worships her, and the kites have symbolic significance.

In real life, Capote was sent off to military school, taken away from his Friend who was really his soulmate. He only lived to be 60, and was very eccentric himself but became the toast of New York and a friend of Jackie Kennedy. I've never read "In Cold Blood", but he is said to be a brilliant writer, and this is a beautiful Christmas story, without the cynicism one might expect given Capote's later reputation, and devoid of religious and sexual politics. It's Capote at his most earnest. That's the reason it has an 8.9 on IMDB, a rare score indeed. It gets our highest rating of Two Gigantic Thumbs Up. If there was ever a great actress, it's Geraldine Page. Next Christmas, make sure to watch this classic.  ////

That's all I've got for this evening. My blogging music is "Fresh Cream" and my late night is "Mass in B Minor" by Bach (again). I hope you are easing into the post-Christmas week and looking forward to the New Year. I send you Tons of Love, as always.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)         

Jeanne Crain and Jean Peters in "Take Care of My Little Girl", and "The Great Rupert" starring Jimmy Durante and Terry Moore

Last night, we saw Jeanne Crain in "Take Care of My Little Girl"(1951), a look at the dark side of college sorority life. Crain is "Liz Erickson", who is off to Midwestern University with her heart set on joining the prestigious Tri-U sorority. Her Mom was a member, which gives her a leg up on acceptance as a Legacy Pledge. Before she leaves, Mom extols the lifelong benefits of being a Tri-U alum. Liz arrives and meets the sisters and the house mother, Mrs. Howell, who was her Mom's best friend in Tri-U (we've seen a lot of Mr. and Mrs. Howell recently). Right away, Liz - a nice girl - can see that the sorority president "Dallas" (Jean Peters) is pretentious and dictatorial. After the first few days, she knows she'll be accepted, not only as a Legacy Pledge but because she fits in; she's beautiful and outgoing.

The difference between Liz and Dallas is that Liz isn't a phony. Dallas and her lieutenant "Marge Colby" (Betty Lynn) decide in private which pledges "deserve" to be Tri-U members, and which don't, and their choices don't include girls who can't afford fancy clothes, or who come from the wrong towns. You get the idea: their sorority is based on status. Oh yes, they do charity work, we've seen a lot of that in our recent movies, but they do it because it's good to be seen doing it. Liz, a sincere girl, takes all of this in. Her roommate "Adelaide" (MItzi Gaynor), a tennis protege from Arizona, opts out of Tri-U early on. She's from the country - a ranch girl - and even though she'd be accepted based on her looks and charm, it's all too fake for her. She just wants to study and play tennis.

Liz meets a student counselor named "Joe Blake" (Dale Robt-sn for Carp-teria). Joe offers advice on her selection of a major. Liz chooses languages. They hit it off, and go out for lunch. Joe is older, 28, his education deferred by six years of military service. He thinks sororities and fraternities are silly, not because of the brotherhood/sisterhood experience, but because of the juvenile games that are played for acceptance. Nowdays it's called hazing. This will get serious later on. There is never any question that Liz will be accepted. Other sororities are courting her, too, she's a prize catch. But she sees how some of the other girls are treated, the ones less beautiful or not from well-known families. One girl, "Ruth" (Lenka Peterson) stands out in this way and gets talked about behind her back. She's so nice and tries so hard to be liked, but she's a mousy girl who wears old baggy dresses. Dallas and Marge (the Tri-U president and vice president) have a system of blackballing a pledge anonymously, and they do this to Ruth, who wants more than anything to be accepted.

Meanwhile, Liz is wooed by "Chad Carnes" (Jeffery Hunter), a BMOC fraternity boy who takes her attention away from Joe Blake for a while. Chad is the male equivalent of the Tri-U girls, a guy from the "right" family, who got into Northwestern on connections, but who in reality can't make the grade. He's a F student and wants Liz (who has an A in French) to help him cheat on the final exam. She agrees to do it and then feels guilty. All of this is turning her off to sorority life.

Then comes Hell Week, in which the pledges are demeaned and made to do exhausting, ridiculous tasks. Dallas and Marge single Ruth out for particularly rough treatment with the idea that she'll wash out, which will save them the trouble of rejecting her. But she's so determined to become a Tri-U member that she stays awake for three days running to complete her Hell Week assignment. I can't tell you any more than that, but it's the climax of the movie. The question is how Liz will react to all of this, especially after seeing what happens to Ruth. Jean Peters is very good as the arrogant sorority leader Dallas. In real life, she was the girlfriend of Howard Hughes, and in a coincidence, we have in our next movie Terry Moore, who was secretly married to him for the last years of his life. Our favorite Movie Dad - John Litel - has a small role as Liz's father. But the best supporting role goes to Betty Lynn as Marge, the sorority vice-president who is caught in between Dallas and the blackballing of "unapproved" girls, and her guilt feelings for doing so. It's Jeanne Crain's movie, she's in every scene, and besides being an outstanding beauty, she was also a very good actress in movies like "A Letter to Three Wives" and "Pinky". She also stars in one of our perennial favorites, "State Fair". Two Huge Thumbs Up for "Take Care of My Little Girl", which was once again found on a Christmas Movie list, though it has just the briefest holiday scene. The picture is in color (a tad muted) and is very good.  //// 

The previous night, we watched "The Great Rupert"(1950), about a squirrel who doles out manna from heaven. Wait a sec; make that money instead of manna. As the movie opens, Rupert is living with his trainer and sidekick "Joe Mahoney" (Jimmy Conlin), a vaudeville performer who is too broke to pay his rent. Joe has to leave his little apartment, so he sets Rupert free in a park. But Rupert runs right back to their former abode to live rent-free in the attic. Meanwhile, Joe runs into his old pal "Louie Amendola" (Jimmy Durante) on the street. Louie and his family, also vaudevillians known as the Triple Pyramid, are looking for a place to live. Joe suggests his former building, but warns Louie that the landlord, "Mr. Dingle" (Frank Orth) is a tightwad who demands his money up front and grants no favors. Mr. Dingle has a son named "Pete" (Tom Drake) who's a composer. He has an artistic spirit and is more forgiving, especially when he meets Louie's young daughter "Rosalinda" (Terry Moore), who plays the harp. Pete talks his Dad into letting the Amendolas live there, in the basement apartment, even though they don't have the rent money. Louie promises him they'll pay it by the end of the week.

Mr. Dingle reads Pete the riot act about giving out free rent, but soon forgets the transgression when he receives a letter from his bank, telling him a gold investment is set to pay off, to the tune of 1500 bucks a week. He forgets all about the Amendolas' rent, and every week when he receives his gold dividend check, he cashes it at the bank and stuffs the bills through a hole in the wall at home because he's a "money under the mattress" kind of guy. He doesn't trust banks or institutions. Well, right about this time, Christmas is coming up. The Amendolas have no money for Rosalinda's shoes, let alone presents. Mrs. Amendola (Queenie Smith) starts praying for money, with the words "Rosalinda needs shoes". Suddenly, hundred dollar bills begin floating from the ceiling! Where are they coming from? Why, from heaven of course. Momma's prayer has been answered. Only we the audience know that Rupert, the little squirrel who made his home in the Dingles' attic, is pushing the money out of a hole in the ceiling to get at his winter store of walnuts.

Momma tells Louie about the money from heaven; not knowing about Rupert, she has no other explanation. "I prayed and the money came down!" Louie is thrilled. He pays three moths rent in advance, now all is good with Mr. Dingle. Meanwhile, Rosalinda and Pete are falling in love. He composes a suite for the two of them, but then Rosalinda meets an agent who wants to use her looks to advance her career, and a romantic subplot ensues, based on the theme of artistic integrity versus advantageous opportunism. It appears to Pete that Rosalina has chosen the latter, as she runs off with the fast-talking agent. Pete has no use for the status of showbiz, he's all about his music. If it makes money, fine, if it doesn't, he'll keep composing regardless. However, he does have one chance to invest in an oil scheme, if he can come up with two thousand dollars. Who else to ask but Mr. Amendola, whose wife seems to have a barrel of money all of a sudden. Every time she prays for money for "Rosalina's shoes", sitting in her rocking chair on Thursdays at 3 o clock, Rupert pushes 1500 bucks out of the hole in the roof. All of a sudden the Amendolas are rich, and the Dingles are getting poor, though Mr. Dingle doesn't know it yet because he hasn't seen how Rupert has redistributed his wealth. Then one day Dingle learns that his gold mine will be paying no more dividends. That's when he decides to remove his stash of cash from the wall, and finds that it's all gone. 

"The Great Rupert" is once again ostensibly a Christmas movie; in truth there is only a single scene near the holiday where a brass band plays carols on the street. There is a lament about not being able to afford presents, but that's it. Still, it has that "greed" message, Mr. Scrooge. But the best parts are when Rupert dishes out the dough. These scenes are staged by George Pal (who produced), and he was of course the special effects wizard behind the use of models and stop-motion. It's a hoot to watch Rupert throw hundred dollar bills out the hole in the roof while looking for his walnuts. Jimmy Durante sings and plays a couple songs on piano, and we very much like Terry Moore, who is a sweetheart as Rosalinda. Tom Drake, who plays Pete Dingle, was Judy Garland's boyfriend in the Christmas Classic "Meet Me in St. Louis". Two Huge Thumbs Up for "The Great Rupert". The picture is very good. That will be all for our Christmas movies this year. We tried, with varying success, to find ones we'd never seen. Mostly we got films with minimal holiday themes, but the good part was that they were all excellent (except "Magic Christmas Tree"), and many of them scored Two Huge Thumbs Up. I'm sorry we didn't have a Dickens mini-series this year, it kind of slipped my attention, but we'll make up for it next Christmas, and we'll double up on our holiday movies.  ////

And that's all I know. I hope you had a Merry Christmas today. On my two walks this evening, I was amazed to see all five visible planets. I saw Mercury for the first time ever, at 5:30 when the sky darkened. I was blown off the map by seeing it, as Mercury doesn't appear often, and when it does, it's only up for a little while. I saw a tip on an astronomy website last night, saying that Christmas night would be a chance to observe it (near Venus, the brightest planet in the sky), and so I made a point to look for it. I saw Mercury and Venus on my early walk, then on my 10 pm walk (just now), I saw Venus again, Mars (straight overhead), and Jupiter and Saturn in the southeast. To have it happen on Christmas night made it especially amazing. I also have a bonus movie, "The Fabelmans," which I saw this afternoon in Encino. I'm not gonna review it, because you're gonna want to see it for yourself, but I will say it's an eye-opener. As you probably know, it's the life story of Steven Spielberg, who we've tried to de-mythologize here at the blog (all of that business about him "walking on to the lot at Universal" was a made-up PR story). The movie gives you what I assume is the real deal of how he became a filmmaker, and his family life, and it's a revelation and shocking in places. The ending is classic Hollywood, featuring an appearance by someone entirely unexpected. It's a long movie, two and a half hours, but I thought it was one of Spielberg's best.

My blogging music tonight is various Christmas music on KUSC, my late night is the "Christmas Oratorio". Merry Christmas once again, and let's look forward to a Happy New Year and all good things in 2023. I send you Tons of Love, as always.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)

Gloria Jean and Frances Rafferty in "An Old-Fashioned Girl", and "Louisa" starring Ronald Reagan and Spring Byington

Last night's movie was "An Old-Fashioned Girl"(1949), adapted from a book by Louisa May Alcott. The story is along the same lines as "Little Women". Gloria Jean plays "Polly Milton", a small town girl about to leave for the big city to start her own life. The year is 1870 and this is unheard of. Young women are expected to stay close to home and get married, but as Polly explains to her parents, times are changing. "I want to paint, to study the arts, and I want to earn my own money by giving vocal lessons." Polly is an accomplished coloratura soprano singer who admires the songs of Stephen Foster (the melody of "Beautiful Dreamer" is heard throughout the movie). Her mother can tolerate Polly's artistic ambitions, but not her desire to work. Women didn't do such things in 1870.

But indeed, times were changing, and Louisa May Alcott wrote abut such women in those times. She was a liberated woman and a member of the cultured Alcott family of Concord, Massachusetts, who were immortalized in the legendary Concord sonata of Charles Ives. 1870 seems so long ago, and yet, my great grandmother was 11 years old in that year. She could've been in this movie, and there is a photo from about 1925, showing her as a very modern 65 year old woman with a haircut and dress sense that would not look out of place today, almost 100 years later. So, as we see, people have been "modern" for a long time. But the modern era really started after the Civil War, and in 1870, women wanted their emancipation, too. We see them wanting to express themselves artistically. When Polly comes to stay in the city, near her friends The Shaws, she impacts their lives and the lives of everyone around them, because she is "good at everything she does". Women had never had the chance to show what they could do, (although there had been exceptions throughout history; women have always had a hand in running the world).

Polly's natural aptitude and confidence shake up the Shaw family, most notably "Frances Shaw" (the stunning Frances Rafferty), a girl so beautiful that she downplays it by putting on an air of superiority. This turns off her young suitors. They're more impressed by Polly, who is pretty as well (though not like Rafferty), but it comes through in her confident nature. She isn't afraid to be herself.

She goes to live at a boarding house similar to The Three Arts Club (where my Mom first lived on her own), where she's among peers. One lengthy scene shows a young virtuoso violinist named Saundra Berkova playing the Mendelssohn concerto. It's a brilliant performance, accentuated by close up shots of her fingers flying over the fingerboard. In an earlier time, it was thought that only men could be virtuosos. Then, when women like Fanny Mendelssohn disproved that notion, it was said they couldn't (or shouldn't) write music. Fanny's brother Felix took credit for writing many of her piano works with the thought that it was the only way for her to get them published. However, at the boarding house, the young female artists are training to compete on an even playing field with men. Polly is booked solid with her vocal lessons, and takes up other causes in her spare time, trying to interest the Shaws in charity work, which they "agree" to participate in because it looks good on their resume. Really they are more interested in maintaining tradition, and Irene Ryan, as the matriarch of the Shaw family, is a riot. As a mother of the arrogant Frances, she's a nervous wreck - always about to get the vapors over one issue or another. She so wants Frances to get married, but despite her outstanding beauty, Frances scares away the men. Polly gets her to see her inner beauty, and to realise that her snobbishness is a defense against being herself. This helps Frances become more down to earth. A young entrepreneur named "Mr. Sydney" (John Hubbard) takes a liking to the "new, improved" Frances. Sydney is ahead of his time, designing ironclad ships and fifteen story buildings. Mr. Shaw calls him a dreamer, and doesn't want him wooing Frances, but within ten years we'd have the ships, the buildings, the telephone, and within 20 years we'd have electric lights.

Have you ever stopped to consider that less than 150 years ago, there were no electric lights? They didn't come into common use until just 70 years before I was born, which is almost the length of my lifetime.

So the world became modernized very recently, and very quickly, and women were right there at the forefront. Polly is ahead of her time in daring to assert herself, yet she goes about it in a natural way, non-confrontationally. She simply declares what she plans to do and then does it. But there's still the age-old tradition of children and family. Will she make room in her busy, independent life for marriage? That's the central question of the movie, which I thought was excellent on all counts. I found it on a Youtube list of Christmas movies, and there is a brief Christmas theme toward the end. Let's give "An Old-Fashioned Girl" Two Huge Thumbs Up and a very high recommendation. It's long, 82 minutes, but it never drags, and the picture is razor sharp.  ////

The previous night, we had Ronald Reagan and Spring Byington in "Louisa,"(1950), a crazy comedy about a grandmother who finds true love. Ronnie plays "Hal Norton", an architect who's just been promoted to vice-president of his firm. Byington is his mother "Louisa", who lives with him and his family. To celebrate his promotion, Hal has brought home presents for everyone in the family, but when he hands them out, everyone seems morose. What should be a happy occasion is turning out to be a downer. When Hal asks what's wrong, his wife says "it's your mother". In short, Louisa is a demanding housemate who derides everyone, saving special ire for the parenting efforts of Hal's wife (Ruth Hussey), who has had it up to here. She pleads with Hal to talk to his mother. He does, and suggests that she get out more. "Find a hobby, Ma. Something to get you out of the house." His pep talk makes Louisa feel guilty. She apologises to Mrs. Norton, then promptly joins a Women's Club. On her way there one day, she happens to bump into a man on the street. He's "Mr. Hammond" (Edmund Gwenn), the Norton's grocer. Mr. Hammond is about Louisa's age (65, when 65 year-olds looked 80). He has an English background and is a man of refined taste. He and Louisa have things in common: both are widowed, both are lonely. They hit it off and start seeing each other, with Louisa skipping her Women's Club meetings to meet Mr. Hammond at the park. This isn't what Hal had in mind when he asked him Mom to find a hobby.

Soon, Mr. Hammond asks Louisa to marry him. Hal and his family are taken aback. Why are the old people getting romantic? Why don't they just act their age? A family friend suggests loneliness as the cause. This much is true, but the old folks come alive in love, and soon are making the younger Nortons look like squares. Hal's 17 year old daughter "Cathy" (Piper Laurie) is particularly offended and responds by acting prudish. Louisa tells her to stop being so old-fashioned. Cathy has a boyfriend, "Jimmy" (Scotty Beckett), who's an intellectual snob. He approves of Louisa's engagement, which irritates Hal. "How dare this kid stick his nose in the family business!"

The issue at hand is, do "old people" have "the right" to fall in love? How about those who've been widowed? It freaks families out, because the elderly are not supposed to have such feelings. And again, in this movie, elderly is 65 years old, which was indeed considered old age in 1950. But what happens is that, at Hal's architectural firm, there is a big project coming due that involves the completion of a design for a housing development. Hal's boss "Mr. Burnside" (Charles Coburn) says it must be completed over the weekend. Hal suggests working Saturday and Sunday at his house, and invites Burnside over for dinner, where he meets - and is charmed by - Louisa. Now he wants her, too. Mr. Hammond is also at the dinner, and a rivalry begins. Burnside is rich; Hammond owns one lowly grocery store. Burnside figures he can win Louisa by sheer status. He shows her a grand old time, driving her fast in his car like a teenager. The older folks are acting like they are back in high school, and that's the message we are all learning as we age, that we are indeed the same people we always were.There is no such thing as the aging of the spirit; only the body gets older. So, all of a sudden, the young people are the ones with the hang-ups, they are the conventional fuddy-duddies. Now Louisa has two boyfriends, and they're fighting it out over her. Mr. Burnside even hires a private detective to find out about Mr. Hammond's Liverpool background. It comes back that he's a bigamist!

And from there, the plot twists and turns into a screwball comedy. President Reagan is a great comedian, and after everything America has been through since he was in office, ya gotta love him. The world was a better place in his time. You've gotta love Charles Coburn, too. He's 74 in the movie but has the roguish swagger of his college self. He and Byington go on a whirlwind dating binge and the family is about to lose their marbles. Besides Jimmy, the intellectual high school punk, only the Norton's youngest kid and the family dog think the relationship is cool. They're watching the whole thing like it's a popcorn flick. Two Huge Thumbs Up, then, for "Louisa", an energetic and very funny movie with a legitimate romantic message and realistic sentiment. There's no such thing as "old people", just people in older bodies. We are learning that ourselves, and Neil Peart had an interesting observation that a person finds their "perfect age" (the one they are most comfortable living in), and that is their spiritual age all their adult life. Ronald Reagan is a riot in this movie, having conniption fits trying to keep his family from freaking out about his Mom, while also trying to keep the two older gents from fighting over her. Ronnie is only 39 here, he's very good! The picture is once again razor sharp, and despite their different themes and period settings, the two pictures in tonight's blog would make a great double feature. But if not, make sure you watch 'em one at a time.  ////

That's all I know for tonight. My blogging music is "Fresh Cream" by Cream and "Warzawa" by Porcupine Tree, and my late night is Bach's "Mass in B Minor" by the Netherlands Bach Society. Because I won't be writing again until Christmas night, I'll take the opportunity now to wish you a very Merry Christmas. I hope you have a wonderful Christmas Eve tomorrow night, and I send you Tons of Love as always.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):) 

Loretta Young and Joseph Cotten in "Half Angel", and "I Was a Shoplifter" starring Scott Brady, Mona Freeman and Andrea King (plus Cream's Farewell Concert)

Last night, we had a rom/com entitled "Half Angel"(1951), starring Loretta Young as "Nora Gilpin", a nurse who disrupts the life of a famous attorney (Joseph Cotten). Nora enjoys her nursing career but she's running on autopilot. On her breaks, she talks about men (what else?) with her fellow Florence Nightingale "Nurse Kay" (Irene Ryan, aka Granny). But they're too dedicated to nursing to do anything but dream of marriage. Then Nora sees a newspaper article about a lawyer named "John Raymond Jr." (Cotten), who is about to argue a case before the Supreme Court. The next thing you know, we're taken to his house late at night, and without any warning or exposition to let us know what's going on, a fantasy develops.

We see Raymond arrive home. His walkway is dark and he trips over a lawnmower, cutting up his leg. As he curses his bad luck, suddenly on his porch appears Nora Gilpin, not in her nurse's whites but in a trademark Loretta Young gown, beckoning him come hither. But he can't get up because he's hurt his knee, so she goes to him, reverting to her nursing instinct. Nora bandages his knee, and to thank her, he takes her inside and offers her a drink. This is very much a "suspend disbelief" opening, because you are given no explanation as to what is going on. Why is Nora at Raymond's house? How did she get there, or know where he lives? It's the middle of the night. Why is he accepting her presence without question? Well, it is a romantic comedy, so you just go with it. But this was one of the more belief-stretching openings we've seen. However, there is a reason.

Nora leaves that night, and Raymond is intrigued, so he seeks and finds her at her hospital the next day. He wants to know more about her and have a second "date". But now, in the light of day she is offended and taken aback. She pushes him away, swearing she doesn't know him, has never even met him. What's going on? During that attempted meeting at the hospital, her fiance shows up and a punchout ensues. Security guards cart Raymond away, and he can't figure out the deal. What's up with this chick?

Then she shows up at his house again, this time calling him pet names like "Frog," telling him she wants to "kiss his warts away". He remembers that nickname, and now he remembers where he knows Nora from. She was his teenage sweetheart! (yeah, but how could he forget her in the first place? Answer that, Mr. Screenwriter.) They were boyfriend and girlfriend twenty years ago in high school. But then why didn't Nora remember him at the hospital? Something strange is going on. 

About two thirds of the way through, we finally find out what's going on - in court - when she tries to get a restraining order against him. We learn Nora's a sleepwalker. Aha, now things make sense. Every time we've seen her at Raymond's house in the middle of the night, she's been sleepwalking. There's an extended rollercoaster sequence at an amusement park that sweetly symbolizes their relationship, but Nora's fiance keeps getting in the way. After Raymond destroys her in court (remember, he's a Supreme Court attorney) he decides he wants to marry her. But which Nora is he proposing to? The one who loves him in her sleepwalking state, or the daytime nurse who claims she doesn't know him?

We're huge Loretta Young fans here at the blog. My Mom was a fan also and used to mention Loretta. We like her because she's got such a unique screen presence: beautiful, yet wholesome; theatrical and willowy, yet down to Earth; a romantic leading lady who is capable of hamming it up. She's also an excellent actress and comedienne, and she's so great in this movie. She pretty much carries every scene. Cotten is her perfect foil, and Mr. Howell is good as his sidekick attorney, who's always in need of a martini. What a cast! Loretta, Joseph Cotten, Jim Backus, Irene Ryan, Cecil Kellaway as her Dad, who at wit's end finally resorts to rigging her bedroom with trip wires and overhanging pails of water, to foil any future sleepwalks. But then, how does she keep ending up at John Raymond's house, even as the daytime Nora professes to "hate him"?

Two Huge Thumbs Up for "Half Angel". It wasn't a Christmas movie (we looked but couldn't find any unseen ones), but it had the romantic vibe of a light, seasonal comedy. We love Loretta Young, she's our kind of gal. Color by Deluxe, nine years before my Dad worked there, fifty years before I did. The picture is very good.  //// 

The previous night we found a crime drama called "I Was a Shoplifter"(1950). It begins scenically in Orbach's on Wilshire Boulevard during the height of style in the department store era. Store detectives are following "Faye Burton" (Mona Freeman), a young kleptomaniac from a wealthy family. Faye is detained as she leaves the store, and is scared to death that her bigwig father will find out she's been shoplifting again. "Detective Jeff Andrews" (Scott Brady), who is heading up the task force for the Sheriff's Department, agrees to let her off with a warning if she'll sign a confession admitting guilt in the store crime. She does so, and now Orbach's has a record on file if she ever steals from them again.

Faye goes back to her job at the public library, and all is well until a woman comes in and brings a book to the counter entitled "The History of Kleptomania". It's an intimidation tactic. The woman is "Ina Perdue" (Andrea King), a horrible person who insinuates that she knows all about Faye's history, telling her "you'd better come see me tonight if you know what's good for you. I have a copy of your confession to the department store. I can release it to the newspapers, or to your father. How do you suppose he'd like it made public?" Ina Perdue owns a nightclub, out of which she runs one of the nation's largest shoplifting and merchandise fencing rings, made up of troubled young women like Faye, kleptos with no control over their compulsions to steal. Ina and her squad find out about these kleptomaniacs from  a leak in the Sheriff's Dept, then they blackmail and threaten them into joining the ring. Faye is trapped in this way, and Detective Andrews and the task force decide to use her as bait to catch whoever is fencing the merchandise, and to nail the mole in the Sheriff's Dept.

It's good stuff in an investigative way, but I must say (and I rarely do this) that I didn't care for the performance of Andrea King as Ina Perdue. Maybe she was too effective, I dunno, but she came across as so callous it was a turn off. Also, she has a way of saying her lines without moving a single facial muscle, and after a while it grates on you. I absolutely couldn't stand her character. The movie is also very, very talky and could be cut down from 73 minutes to 65 or even 60. There is a lot of good location footage, however, inside Orbach's, and on a car chase down the highway to San Diego, then the actual Mexican border and into Tijuana. The main problems are the Ina Perdue character; I mean, c'mon, make an expression when you talk, some kind of expression, any kind, just a little twitch, even. I've never seen anyone who could act a part without making even the slightest facial expression. It drove me nuts. So there's that, and the fact that the movie has people yakking and yakking and yakking, and punchouts that are so over-the-top brutal that somebody would've died. I'm getting a little tired of movie punchouts, to be honest. They're to be expected in 60 Minute Westerns, so I can tolerate them there, but I don't like watching men hit each other with that horrible smacking sound the dubbing department uses to simulate punches to the face. In real life, even one such punch could kill a man, but in these crime movies, the hitting goes on and on for close to two minutes, and I think that directors used it as a device to fill time.

"I Was a Shoplifter" could've done better with a real script that delved into  the psychology of kleptomania, or the power structure and dynamics of the merchandise-fencing gang. But the writer didn't dive that deep. I think it was a "directors movie", because you can see how the stops are pulled out and it elevates itself technically during the lengthy car chase down to Mexico. But good Great Lordy Moses Killed the Skunk and Jumping Jiminy Christmas, stop all the dialogue and the brutal punchouts! This could've been an excellent movie. We're still gonna give it Two Bigs, because Scott Brady was good in these kinds of roles, as a good guy or bad guy, and I'm sure Andrea King was a good actress too. Her bio says she played on Broadway. But man, did her portrayal of Ina Perdue irritate me. Watch it anyway, the picture is razor sharp like off a Blu-ray.  //// 

And that's all I know for tonight. My blogging music is Cream's Farewell Concert from 1968, part of which I also watched on Youtube yesterday. I'm on a bit of a Cream kick because of "Strange Brew" (mentioned in the Disneyland blog). Have you ever watched the Farewell Concert? Talk about Holy Jumping Jiminy. I've never seen a band play like that, not even Rush. I mean, as trios go, Rush was as great as they come, but they were a precision band, not jammers (though they could jam in a song like "Working Man"). But watching Cream, every song turns into a jam, but they aren't loosey-goosey jams. It's like three guys playing solos all simultaneously, and all of it fits the song. Their instrumental abilities were just off the charts, and what makes it even more astounding was that it was 1968, when most of the instrumental rock playing hadn't evolved that far. Go watch the Farewell Concert to see what I mean, it's just insane. My late night music is still "Lohengrin" by Wagner. This has been a year of Wagner immersion for me. I hope you are enjoying the holiday week. We're still gonna look for some more Christmas movies.

I send you Tons of Love, as always.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)

Disneyland Report (plus one movie, "Born to Speed" starring Johnny Sands, Don Castle and Vivian Austin)

Here's my Disneyland Report from yesterday (Sunday, December 18th): I left a few minutes before 9am. Had an earworm of "Strange Brew" by Cream that ended up lasting me the whole day. Probably because I watched a live video of that song from The Beat Club the night before. I know everyone loves Jimi and I do too, but people sometimes forget that Clapton was the original big-time lead guitarist. He brought guitar tone and soloing into the modern era before anybody, and you can hear it (and watch it) in his playing with Cream. 

Anyhow, it was a straight shot down the I5 to Anaheim. From the 118 onramp in Porter Ranch to the Disneyland offramp took 50 minutes. Last time, I think it took 75 minutes and I said that wasn't bad, but this time the freeway was empty. Also, the morning could not have been more gorgeous, a clear blue sky and about 60 degrees. It would later warm up to about 70. That was a blessing because we've been having sketchy weather all week, grey overcast and wind. But it was picture perfect and I was ready for an early start. Anyone who knows me knows that I am an all-day Disneylander. I get there early and stay till closing time, which last night was Midnight. Actually, they let you stay and shop for an hour after closing, so you don't have to leave exactly at the stroke of 12.

I was parked by 10am. When you leave the gigantic Mickey and Friends parking lot, you go through a security check, just like at a rock concert. I called my sister, who was driving her own car. She was already parked, too, so we met by the front entrance. The trams are back, so you don't have to walk 3/4 of a mile from the parking lot to the entrance anymore, although to be honest, I preferred it. Anyway, we met at the entrance, and were in the park by 10:45 (yes, it can take a long time to get from the lot, through security and into the park. It took us 45 minutes).

The very first thing we did was go straight to Star Wars Land. We wanted to see how long the wait was for the new "Rise of the Resistance" ride, which has generated a lot of hullabaloo since it opened 18 months ago. The "standby" sign said 65 minutes. We figured it wasn't gonna get much shorter than that, so we waited, and it actually went faster. Our wait was about 45 minutes. There's a lot to look at while you're waiting in line, it's like Indiana Jones, you go down through cave-like tunnels, past a lot of exposed wiring and rusty Millennium Falcon gear. I'm not familiar with Star Wars mythology, but those soldiers in the scary white body armor are everywhere, and somebody (some leader) is jabbering away at you over hidden speakers, telling you that you're being detained for daring to side with the Resistance. I don't wanna tell you too much, because you're gonna wanna ride it yourself and you don't want spoilers. What I will say is that, as far as scale is concerned, it's pretty impressive. There are some massive set-ups and special effects, so in that sense it's like a live-action movie. The storytelling is constant throughout, even the on-site Disney cast members who usher the ride are "in character"; they badger you like you're a prisoner. 

The ride moves similar to Indiana Jones, with your car making a lot of sudden motions, twists and turns, suddenly riding backward, constant motion. I did feel it was overhyped just a tad, and I don't wanna go into specifics but I felt the story wasn't played out as much as I expected. Because I'd heard the ride was 18 minutes long (and it is, if you count all the interaction with cast members and holograms), I was expecting more of a battle to take place. The title is Star Wars, after all, and I felt the actual War was too brief. So I gave it an A for scale and special effects, and just for the overall design, but a B minus for execution. Don't get me wrong, overall it's awesome, and maybe I need to learn more of the mythology (and I definitely need to ride it again), but I got so into the storytelling, role-playing part of it, that when the War started I thought it  ended too fast. All in all, a minor complaint. By the way, Disney has done away with the free Fastpass option that allowed you quicker access to rides with long lines, and they've replaced it with an app called Disney Genie +. I've never loaded an app of any kind; I've got a flip-phone and am a caveman, tech-wise. But the main problem with Genie + is that it costs 25 bucks, to add to your already expensive ticket. More on the wait times later. 

Okay, so that was Star Wars, and when you go to Disneyland, just go there first like we did. 45 minutes is not a bad wait time at all for that ride (when it opened, folks were waiting two hours). But ya gotta ride it, so go there first, early in the morning.

After Star Wars, we went straight to Fantasyland. But oh yeah, I didn't tell you about the Christmas decorations. Man, they are everywhere! From the red and green ribbons, the holly and pine needles pinned to every lamp post and windowsill on Main Street, to  the wreaths above the windows, to the giant Christmas Tree in Town Square, Tis the look of the Season! It's so beautiful, and wait til you see it at night. Wait until you see Sleeping Beauty's Castle, all trimmed in shades of blue and silver and decked with snow. Oh man! As mentioned, I hadn't been to Disneyland at Christmas since 1970, but now I wanna go every year. But yeah, so the whole place just looks amazing. We went to Fantasyland, probably my favorite section of the park, and went on Pinocchio's Journey, then Mr. Toad, then Alice in Wonderland. It was now about 1:30. There was a Christmas Parade coming up, right past the Fantasyland walkway, so we grabbed some available bench space and waited for it. Man, it was pure magic. I remarked to Vickie that Disney seems to have backtracked on some of the "wokeness" it was embracing when it reopened after the pandemic. Not once was the word "holidays" substituted for "Christmas". All through the parade, from the songs to the imagery, it was "Christmas, Christmas, Christmas" everywhere you looked, complete with Santa Claus bringing up the tail end on a giant float. We both observed that Disney has the market cornered on the Princess Look. It doesn't matter your ethnicity, you've gotta have that Disney Look - the sparkling eyes and smile - and it has to look genuine. All the girls look like Rose Parade queens (or Disney Princesses), and all the guys look like Peter Pan. Wow.

When the parade was over, Vickie remained seated to eat her lunch while I went on the Storybook Land Canal Boats, one of my favorite rides. Do you love the Canal Boats? It was Walt Disney's favorite, too.

After that, we headed back to New Orleans Square for two of the biggies, Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion, which is still decorated for The Nightmare Before Christmas. I thought that ended after Halloween, but we were in luck. "Awesome" doesn't ever cover it. And we love seeing Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow on "Pirates". Right next door to The Haunted Mansion is Splash Mountain, another one of my very favorite rides, because I love the story of B'rer Rabbit, and also "The Song of the South". I won't get into a big discussion, but I think that movie is beautiful, the opposite of what it's been portrayed as in recent years. I don't mind The Princess and the Frog taking over, but I wish they'd given her a ride of her own, instead of changing Splash Mountain. In short, we made it before the deadline. The ride is scheduled to close on January 29th, to be changed into The Princess and the Frog, so we got to see B'rer Rabbit and friends one more time, and sing along to "Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah".

By now it was getting to 5 o'clock, just starting to get dark. I mentioned lines and wait times. The past two times we went, in July and October of last year, the waits were, on average, pretty short. Most rides took about fifteen minutes in line, some were a half-hour, and some you just walked right in. On those two trips, our average wait was twenty minutes. This time, it was closer to half and hour, maybe because the park was at capacity and it was the week before Christmas. When it got dark, Vickie wanted to walk back and see the lights on Main Street, so we did, after checking out the menu at the Blue Bayou restaurant that overlooks "Pirates". We keep saying we're gonna eat there one day. We found out it ain't cheap, dinner is 90 bucks plus extras, so you'd end up paying probably 130-150 with drinks and tip. But it would still be worth it as a one-time thing, just for the experience.

Back on Main Street, we pin-shopped. We've both been collecting Disney pins since about 2000 or so. I've got a full lanyard of Mickey pins. Now I've gotta start a new one. This time I opted for a pin of Mr. Toad driving his red motorcar. Vickie couldn't decide so we ended up looking in several different shops, and we checked out the jewelry and clothing stores also. We stopped to watch a brass band playing Christmas carols. By now, the Town Square Christmas Tree was all lit up. We moseyed over to Adventureland to check on Indiana Jones, but the standby sign said 50 minutes. It was now 6:15. Vickie decided she was ready to head home (she doesn't stay as late as I do). I walked her back to the entrance gate. Then I was by myself with almost six hours left to go (good grief, Ad.) I brought two energy bars with me, so I ate my second one and was ready to turn it up to high gear. I'm a fast walker, and it was time to pound some more rides. At 6:30, I was in line for Space Mountain. I should've done Tomorrowland at the end of the evening because the next two hours were my longest waits of the day. Space Mountain took a full hour, then Autopia took another 40 minutes. I love Autopia because you get to drive to the far reaches of the park, way back into the corner where you can actually see outside the fence, to a Chick Fil-A way down the street. Uncle Walt would disapprove cause you aren't supposed to break the spell, but Autopia is fun for that reason, among others (and no, I don't bump cars anymore, haha.)

After Autopia, I went straight to the Submarines. Voila, the line was nonexistent. I walked straight in. I hadn't been on the subs since about 2005. Man, it was one of the best rides of the day. Because you are actually in a submarine, and you are actually submerged. Everything you see is underwater, it's a long ride and there's a ton of stuff going on, undersea storms, coral reefs, giant clams. Nemo and his pals. Don't miss the subs next time you go, you probably haven't been on 'em in a while, either. Things were picking up now. The time was about 8:45. I wanted to take the Monorail since we hardly ever do. You get to see "behind-the-scenes" stuff and it takes you past all the hotels. I had a Monorail car all to myself, which was awesome. Of course, you go outside the park and you can see Downtown Anaheim. Man, is it ever developed nowdays. All that Disney money has made it very ritzy. The whole Monorail loop is about 2 1/2 miles. After it stops at the Disneyland Hotel, it takes you back to Tomorrowland. From there, I saw the train at the Tomorrowland station, so I got on, rode it through the Primeval Forest and got off at Main Street. Now it was twenty past nine. I had just enough time to walk back up to It's A Small World and watch the nightly fireworks show from there.

Man, it was so awesome, set to Christmas themed music, with the facade of Small World used for a colorful projection backdrop. I mean, Disney gives you so much. People talk about the price - and it is expensive, granted - but all day long, everywhere you look, there is something special to see. And then the fireworks, every night at 9:30, every time you go. When that show ended, it was 9:50. I still had more than two hours to go. What to do, but pound more rides? I needed to head back to Fantasyland to do Snow White and Peter Pan, the two Vickie and I missed earlier. Snow White had a glitch and was temporarily shut down. In addition to the longer wait times, ride glitches were another minor problem throughout the day. We waited and waited for the King Arthur Carousel earlier, only to be told it wasn't working. I got out of the line for Snow White and went to Peter Pan. That's always a long wait (a half hour this time) but well worth it. "Are you ready, everybody? Here we go!" Man, it's so awesome. Then, I walked right in to Mr. Toad. You can never ride it just once, and you've gotta scream when you're about to get run over by the train.

By now, Snow White was running again, so I rode it (man, it was awesome!), and now I had done every ride in Fantasyland. I still had a little more than an hour, and - for my grand finale - I wanted to see if I could double up on three of my favorite rides. First, I went back to The Haunted Mansion. The wait was about twenty minutes, but I made it. It's kind of fun riding by yourself, once you get used to it, and I've done Disneyland at night by myself three times now. There was a half-hour left. I had to do Splash Mountain one more time! This was the last chance I'd ever have to ride it. Was there a line? No! I walked right in, and even had my own log to ride in. I got to see all the critters and sing all the songs, and make a face for the camera flash just before the 70-foot drop and getting soaked. Long live Splash Mountain, one of the greatest rides in the history of Disneyland!

Because there was no line for Splash Mountain, it was "only" 11:45. Could I do it? Could I still get on to Pirates? I walked double time over there. There was no one in line. I walked straight onto the ride and had a boat all to myself. It was so awesome, to ride Pirates at closing time, all by myself, that I'm (almost) all out of words. When I got off the ride, it was 12:05 am. The white uniformed employees were sweeping the park up, taking out trash bags and closing up gates to rides. The last couple thousand people in the park were all walking toward Main Street, which as noted stays open a full hour after closing. I've stayed til 1am before, but this time I already had my Mr. Toad pin, and had no more shopping to do. I took my time going down Main Street though. Who ever really wants to leave Disneyland? Not me. And, it's traditional in my last several trips there to end the day by going into the Main Street Cinema to watch a Mickey Mouse cartoon or two. Or three. He's the guy who started the whole thing, and Mickey and the Disney company will be one hundred years old next year. Can you imagine what a party that's gonna be? I sat in the Cinema and watched Mickey cartoons for ten minutes, just to give my feet a rest. Then, at 12:20am, I headed for the gate, after 13 and a half hours at Disneyland. All told, I went on 19 rides (four of them twice), including the new Star Wars. People spend hundreds of dollars nowdays for a rock concert or a football game, both of which last a few hours. For the same price, or even less, you can spend a whole day at Disneyland.

Why in the world would you not do it? The answer is: you would, because you love it as much as I do.

The tram took me back to the parking lot. I was on the freeway by 12:35, and it was a straight shot home. "Strange Brew" was still playing in my head. I was so geared up from my day at the park that I didn't get to sleep until 4:30. And that, in full, is my Disneyland Report. Thanks for reading. Next time, maybe I'll see ya down there.  ///// 

We also have a movie, watched Saturday night, called "Born to Speed"(1947), in which young "Johnny Randall" (Johnny Sands), son of a champion race driver, wants to follow in his father's footsteps. The only problem is that his Dad was killed in a race. Johnny's Mom (Geraldine Wall) doesn't want him to take up the sport. She even shows him a 16mm film  of Dad's accident to dissuade him, but none of it is a deters Johnny. He gets a job at a mechanic's garage run by "Breezy Bradley" (Frank Orth). Breezy was Johnny's Dad's best friend. He builds and repairs midget race cars. No sooner does Johnny walk in the door of his shop than he hits it off with Breezy's beautiful secretary and niece "Toni" (Vivian Austin, who was Miss Hollywood). Breezy may run the shop, but Toni runs Breezy, telling him what to do and how to do it. "Women!" he says. But Toni loves him. She's just a brassy broad, and now she is falling in love with Johnny, much to the chagrin of "Mike Conroy" (Don Castle), her erstwhile boyfriend and the current midget champion. Mike and Johnny have a colossal punchout over Toni, which Johnny loses. Breezy then suggests he race with a mask over his face to cover his two black eyes.

Johnny beats Mike in their next race and becomes known as The Masked Racer. Now Breezy thinks Johnny can make a name for himself with that gimmick, and he takes Johnny (as The Masked Racer) all over the midget circuit in California, places like Bakersfield, Salinas, Saugus, etc., and The Masked Racer beats all comers. Now he's set to race in the championship in Los Angeles (pronounced lowss ANG-less).  His mom steps in and asks him to stop before he gets hurt. Toni agrees. She wants to marry Johnny and actually proposes to him (shes a go-getter), but only on the condition that he quit racing. Johnny's got his heart set on the championship, because he and Breezy have resurrected the car that his Dad drove, rebuilding it from the chassis up. Breezy swears it'll beat the car of Duke Hudkins, the national midget champ. Johnny doesn't wanna quit, and the women realise they can't talk him out of it. He's got one last race to prove himself, which he needs to do in honor of his late father, but will old Number 70 (his Dad's car) hold out for the grueling race? The movie is thin on story, but has Gable-lookalike Don Castle, always a good performer, and the stunning Vivian Austin, who captures the screen and your attention as Toni. Good casting, good stock footage of midget racing, which has gotta be the most dangerous form of auto racing, with guys riding right up your tail, skidding around on a dirt track. The moral of the story is " a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, at least until he gets it out of his system." Johnny's been doing it for his Dad all along, but can he stop racing, even (or especially) if he wins the championship? Will he do it for Toni and Mom? Stay tuned for the nail-biting finish. "Born to Speed" doesn't have much plot, but the action makes up for it. Two Big Thumbs Up, therefore. It's recommended and the picture is very good.  ////

That's all for tonight. Our next blog will once again have two movies and we'll try to find some more Christmas flicks. My blogging music tonight is Bach played by Kempff, and my late night is "Lohengrin" by Wagner. I hope your week is off to a good start, and I send you Tons of Love as always.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)   

Joseph Schildkraut, Una Munson, and Billie Burke in "The Cheaters", and "Magic Christmas Tree" (Oy!)

Two more unseen Christmas films, starting with last night's "The Cheaters"(1945), a delightful screwball comedy starring the great Joseph Schildkraut ("The Shop Around the Corner") as a washed-up actor (we've been having a lot of those lately), who becomes a "charity case" for a wealthy family who are feeling the need to be generous at Christmastime. As the movie opens, "Mr. James Pigeon" (Eugene Pallette), the head of a New York business firm, is told by the company's lawyer that he's bankrupt. It's Christmas season and he begs the lawyer to hold off the creditors until the New Year. "My wife's out shopping for presents. I can't have her hearing this news." Just when things are looking their bleakest, his brother-in-law "Willie" (Raymond Walburn), who lives with the Pigeons and who James thinks is a freeloader, arrives at the office with a telegram from the estate of a rich, recently deceased uncle, who's left five million dollars to a niece neither of the men has ever heard of, a Miss Watson. However, if she can't be located, the telegram states that the fortune will go to the Pigeons.

"It's a miracle!" says James. "All our problems are solved. I've never heard of any relative named Watson. She probably doesn't exist. That means the money is ours and the company will remain solvent. We're rich again, Willie!"

Mr. Pigeon goes home to celebrate, and finds his wife planning to take in a homeless stranger during Christmas week. It's the "thing to do" among the upper class, and she doesn't wanna be outshone. In the paper, she reads of a once-famous actor, "lamed" by an auto accident, who is rumored to be living in flophouses or on the street. She has Willie track him down. He will be her charity case for Christmas. When he shows up, with a pronounced limp, he turns out to be a boozer with a penchant for "very tall drinks" that look like protein shakes but are high in alcohol content. The Pigeons are priming him for "Charity Week" when the news comes in that a detective agency is trying to locate the elusive Miss Watson, the heir to the dead uncle's fortune.

Mr. Pigeon panics, because he was counting on that money. Now all his plans are ruined. But then he gets an idea. "Let's find her first, before those detectives get hold of her. If we keep her with us, we can prevent her from hearing the news". It's a hide-her-in-plain-sight strategy. Their butler locates her and calls her before she finds out the news about her inheritance. The family tells her they want to sponsor her, as a long lost relative, to add to their Christmas charity dinner. She's broke and could use the free meal. They figure that by keeping her in-house, they'll be able to keep her from hearing about the five million bucks, and if she doesn't claim it, they will. She has no idea she's in line to collect, and is just glad to hang out with some rich folks for Christmas (who are near-broke themselves), and in the middle - knowing all the secrets - is the actor "Mr. M" (Schildkraut), the original charity case for the family. He watches as they deceive the good natured "Miss Watson" (Ona Munson), who has a way with people. She transforms the teenaged family brat (Ann Gillis) into a sentimental Christmas traditionalist. Then, in the last ten minutes of the movie, when it looks like the Pigeons are gonna get away with cheating Miss Watson out of her five million bucks, Mr. M speaks up, to recite the story of Dicken's Mr Scrooge, and how he was visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve, and how the ghost of Marley wore chains for eternity for his greed. "Mrs. Pigeon" (Billie Burke aka "Glenda the Good Witch") is overcome with guilt feelings. Is her charity all for show? With Mr. Pigeon, there's no question of his duplicity, but even he breaks out in a cold sweat as Mr. M continues to speak. 

There are numerous other things going on, including a subplot between the two rival Pigeon sisters. Ten minutes could be cut to elevate the tension, but it's so charming you can forgive the lack of direction in those places. The movie runs 84 minutes (long by our standards), but it comes together with Joseph Schildkraut's masterful Dickens speech. He isn't well-known now, but he won an Academy Award for his performance in "The Diary of Anne Frank", and was in many other well-known films and TV shows, including three episodes of "The Twilight Zone". Two Big Thumbs Up for "The Cheaters" and a high recommendation. Give it a shot if you've never seen it. The picture is very good.  ////

Now then, you can't win 'em all. We've been having some mixed results in our search for unseen Christmas movies, but never in my worst nightmares did I think we'd find anything as bad as "Magic Christmas Tree"(1964). The budget's so low that they couldn't afford a "The" in the title, which should've been a warning sign, I suppose. But, I mean, what do you do when you find a movie so inept it make's Ed Wood's flicks look like "Citizen Kane"? At least Wood was a "professional" filmmaker (or was he?); with this movie, there's no data available as to it's release. Was it in theaters? If so, they probably went out of business after running this gem. Was it on TV? Maybe regionally, on a Tuesday night at 3 am in Keokuk, Iowa. But I doubt that, too. It does have a professional-looking credit sequence at the end, so someone paid for it, but where the heck did it play? The pundits on IMDB suggest it was relegated to minor PBS stations and the church circuits. I literally can't imagine it playing anywhere except in the director's living room on a stand-up silver screen or against a wall, but anyhow, it has a small cult following, which is how it came to my attention.

It's Halloween, and in that regard, this movie has "The Nightmare Before Christmas" beat by 29 years, as far as blending holidays. Three schoolboys are trading sandwiches at lunch time (with the most exaggerated "gee whiz" voices in motion picture history), They talk about what they're gonna do that night. "Ya wanna go trick-or-treating?" asks one. Bratty "Mark" (Chris Kroesen) has a better idea. "Let's go to the witch's house on my block. I double dare ya." The other boys agree, but when they get there, they see the witch out front and chicken out. This leaves only Mark, who suggested the stunt, to venture forth by himself. It's still daylight, and up close, he can see that the so-called "witch" (Valerie Hobbs) is just a creaky old lady, wrapped in a shawl with a cane. But she has a witchy voice, and a black cat named Lucifer who is stuck in a tree. She asks Mark to climb up there and rescue Lucifer. He's scared out of his wits but agrees, on the provision she'll let him go home afterward. But he falls out of the tree, and now the last of the budget is spent on a roll or two of color film. Methinks we're about to have a Dream Sequence, brought on by Mark's fall.

He's been given a special ring as a reward by the witch, for his bravery in rescuing Lucifer. The ring contains a seed, and she's given him instructions on how to plant it, with a Thanksgiving wishbone underneath, so that a Magic Christmas Tree will grow that will grant him three wishes. Mark goes home and does this, and from there - if you thought the movie had any promise - it turns to complete and utter s-t. Magic Christmas Tree (no "The") sprouts instantly, and it talks. It talks, and it's fruity and snarky. Mark's Mom, Dad and sister are out Christmas shopping, and the next day Dad tries to mow the lawn (in a sequence that re-defines "interminable"). The best thing about The Lawnmower Scene is Ichabod, the family turtle, who is shown in close up eating clover. Finally, the Tree gets Mark alone and grants him three wishes.

His first wish leads, briefly, to the best part of the movie, some location footage in the neighborhood of La Verne (near Covina) circa 1964. For some reason, this outdoor trek turns into a pie fight between some nurses on the street and a fire engine chase with Mark turning day into night, because that was his first wish, to have power over everything in the Universe. His second wish is to have Santa Claus all to himself on Christmas Eve, which the snarky tree grants, but because Santa is trapped in Mark's living room, the kids of the world get no presents. Mark then finds himself lost in the rocky wilderness of the Angeles National Forest, with only his bb gun to protect him. But it's worthless in the presence of a morally questionable giant who traps Mark because he was greedy. Mark has one more wish, which he uses to set Santa Claus free. He's seen the error of his ways, and he doesn't wanna be trapped for eternity with the creepy giant, so he apologizes for being greedy. The Grumpy Tree, which could've been voiced by Charles Nelson Reilly, lets Santa go. He delivers his presents to the children of the world, and Mark wakes up in the witch's yard, once more in black and white. The whole shebang was a dream.

I'm telling ya, you ain't seen nuthin'. Remember "Laserblast"? You thought that was bad? You got nuthin'! I defy you to watch this movie, and if you do, and honestly sit through it, I'll give you Two Gigantic Thumbs Up. I'm not gonna give the movie any thumbs one way or the other. It is what it is, and it's up to you to watch it. That is all. ////

Tomorrow I am going to Disneyland, and I'm very excited because it'll be my first time there at Christmas since 1970 (52 years!). Hopefully, we'll get to go on the Star Wars ride this time, but even if not, it'll be the usual blast, and extra wonderful to see the park all decked out for the Holidays. I'll have a full report in the next blog, plus one movie. Enjoy the rest of your weekend and stay well. My blogging music was Scriabin by Sofronitsky. No late night cause I'm getting up early. I send you Tons of Love, as always.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)  

Monty Woolley, Ida Lupino and Cornel Wilde in "Life Begins at Eight Thirty", and "Molly and Me" starring Gracie Fields, Roddy McDowall and Monty Woolley

This time around we have a Monty Woolley double bill. He's always good at Christmastime (see "The Man Who Came to Dinner" and "Since You Went Away"), and in "Life Begins at Eight Thirty"(1942) he's "Madden Thomas", a washed-up actor reduced to playing Santa Claus in a New York City department store. He can't even keep that job because he shows up drunk and curses out the patrons, telling them "I hate you all!" Everything's gonna be okay, though, because it's Christmas Eve and he has his adult daughter "Kathy" (Ida Lupino) waiting for him back at their cramped apartment. She takes care of Maddie, as she calls him, even though she's crippled herself with a mangled foot. She's never married because Maddie is an alcoholic who needs looking after. It would've been nice if he'd kept his Santa job, as they could've used the 40 bucks a week, but Kathy is ever forgiving. Her mother died in childbirth and Maddie is all she's got.

One day after Christmas, she meets "Robert Carter" (Cornel Wilde) a handsome tenant of their building. Carter is a piano composer who's up and coming in radio. He takes a liking to Kathy and starts encouraging her to live her own life. "Otherwise, you'll be a spinster one day, and you'll regret it." The trouble is, she sees herself as indispensable to her Dad, and not attractive anyway because of her infirmity. She's really quite pretty, but she doesn't think so. Carter keeps trying though. He even gets Maddie a small part in one of the radio plays he's composing for. Maddie promises Kathy he'll stop drinking during the production. "I'm on lemonade from now on," he swears, but it doesn't last. As a former Broadway star, he feels the radio show is inane, and beneath him, and he goes out of his way to get himself fired. Then he comes home and gets hammered, and Kathy takes care of him, and everything is comfortable again, i.e. co-dependent.

Soon after that, Robert Carter shows up and tells Kathy a secret he's learned: "You aren't crippled from birth." He's tracked down her pediatrician, who told him the truth, that her foot is mangled because Dad fell down drunk while carrying her in his arms. The doc made up the "genetic" crippled-from-birth story to spare Kathy from hating her Dad all her life, holding him responsible for her condition. Carter wants to take her away from Dad and marry her. But she knows it will kill Maddie if she does so.

Then good fortune strikes. An old producer friend of Maddie's calls up. "Hello, old friend. I've heard you're on the wagon" (not true). "Yes, I'm a lemonade man now." The producer offers him the starring role in his new production of King Lear, the role Maddie was known for before his downfall. He wants to accept, but can he do it? He hasn't been on a stage in 8 years! He thinks he can pull off a comeback, and this time, he swears off the booze and means it. Kathy thinks its all gonna work out, so she agrees to marry Robert Carter in secret, and break the news to Dad after King Lear becomes a success. Carter is pushing hard for the marriage. Kathy secretly fears, however, what will happen to Maddie when he hears the news. No matter how well his play does, he might start drinking again. He's relied on Kathy for so long, he won't be able to live without her. The nuance of the Maddie/Kathy relationship makes it ring true. You're actually rooting against Robert Carter, because even though he does love Kathy, he comes across as self-serving. But, there is another relationship at play that introduces itself late in the movie. The great Sara Allgood plays Carter's aunt, who (in a screenwriter's coincidence) has known and secretly been in love with Maddie all her adult life. She's in late middle age, and it's not reciprocal. Maddie doesn't like her, but she's loaded and offers her total devotion and security for him if he'll marry her. Meanwhile, you're still rooting for Kathy to stick with Maddie, because as father/daughter they have the only true love relationship in the movie. Robert Carter just pushes Kathy into thinking she's in love with him. But, because the script must follow the responsible path of "pushing the co-dependents apart and out into the world", Maddie must ultimately give up his hold on his daughter. The problem is, this isn't real life. In real life, the budding spinster daughter would stay with her Dad 99% of the time, because she loves taking care of him. Or, something would be worked out (a compromise) whereby she and the suitor get married but Dad moves in and plays the lovable rascal. In any case, all three lead actors are fantastic and the movie is tremendous, even with a Hollywoodized ending. Therefore, we give it Two Huge Thumbs Up. The picture is razor sharp.  ////

Now then: have you ever heard of an actress named Gracie Fields? I had not, but she was famous enough in her native England to be known as "Our Gracie", and according to IMDB, she was the highest paid movie star in the world in 1937. She was also a CBE (Commander of the British Empire), making her Dame Gracie Fields. You can see the reason for all these things in "Molly and Me"(1945), in which she plays "Molly Barry", an out-of-work actress who - needing money - takes a job as housekeeper to a wealthy recluse (Monty Wolley).  

As the movie opens, she's running a boarding house for fellow actors, all of whom she's worked with. But she's broke and needs to eat. Having no real job experience, she decides to "act" her way through an interview for an advertised housekeeping position. After meeting with "Peabody" (Reginald Gardiner), the employer's butler, it turns out he's an actor, too and has seen her troupe in the theater, so her housekeeper act is both unnecessary and superfluous. Being a comrade in arms, Peabody helps her get the job, and the next thing you know, she's whipped the household staff into shape, and is starting to win over the stuffy "Mr. Graham" (Wooley). He has a stepson he's estranged from (Roddy McDowall), whose mother (Graham's wife), died when he was very small. Word around the household is that Mr. Graham resents the kid because he reminds him of his loss; his wife's death. Molly, being big-hearted, tries to reconcile Graham with the boy, but Graham is too busy trying to resurrect his once-promising political career. He wants a place in the House of Commons, and the way to get it is to invite the influential "Sir Arthur Burroughs" (Lewis L. Russell) to dinner. His wife is Mrs. Howell (huge lol!), who also happens to know Molly from her theater days.

Well, the regular kitchen staff gets fired by Mr. Graham just before this dinner. He orders Molly to find him new kitchen help, and she tries, but no agency can pull together a staff on such short notice. So, she calls the house and tells all of her acting tenants to get over there, pronto. They're gonna play the parts of chefs, servers, chambermaids, etc, though they have zero experience. What ensues is classic British farce of the highest order, headed up by Monty Wooley on the receiving end, and Roddy McDowall in the middle. Then, in the middle of the dinner, Graham's "dead" wife shows up - alive! She's not deceased after all, and definitely not the saintly woman portrayed to young Roddy. In fact she's a total shrew who attempts to blackmail Mr. Graham over his claim that she died. He told that to Roddy when he was a small boy, because it was better than telling him "your mom's a tramp who abandoned you". But now she's back and wants money to keep her mouth shut, so Molly and her acting troupe decide to work her over. Mrs. Howell pitches in and pretends to shoot her. "Oh my! I've never murdered anyone before!" The final objective is to reconcile Mr. Graham and his son. In the end, he so loves having the acting troupe as his household staff that he decides to keep them on, because they liven things up. Gracie Fields is a one-woman show. It's easy to see why she was England's most beloved actress and she has a beautiful singing voice as well. Read the comments on Youtube (below the movie post) and you'll see how much she was revered. Two Huge Thumbs Up again. This level of farce is rare, and comes from the theater training of all the main actors. It's a gem of gems, and Monty Wooley is his usual debonair, irascible stuffed-shirt self. The picture is very good.  ////

So there you have it. There's only a hint of a Christmas theme in one of the two movies, but they both have a holiday feel-good charm. We'll keep looking for ones we haven't seen. My blogging music tonight is Wilhelm Kempff playing Bach. Late night is "Parsifal" by Wagner. Wouldn't ya know it? That respiratory illness I thought I'd gotten rid of made an attempted comeback today. I had a sinus condition all day long that absolutely wouldn't quit. Spent most of the day lying down, but feeling better now. No walk tonight, though.

I hope you are feeling well, avoiding all these awful germs, and enjoying your week. I send you Tons of Love, as always.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)

Sterling Hayden and Peter Sellers in "Carol for Another Christmas" (adapted from Dickens by Rod Serling), and "I'm a Stranger" starring James Hayter and Greta Gynt

We said we were gonna look for unseen Christmas movies, and we found one: "Carol for Another Christmas"(1964), a TV movie presented on behalf of the United Nations by ABC, and adapted from Dickens by none other than the great Rod Serling. I hope Uncle Rod won't mind me saying this, but when I said we were looking for Christmas movies, this wasn't exactly what we had in mind. It's tremendous, but his retelling of A Christmas Carol, set against the backdrop of Cold War and potential nuclear devastation, is so unrelentingly bleak that it's like Rod wanted to get the audience in a hammerlock until they agreed to see sense. Macho Sterling Hayden (from "Dr. Strangelove") plays "Daniel Grudge", a right-wing ex-WW officer who's done well in the private sector, post war. On Christmas Eve, his bleeding heart liberal nephew "Fred" (Ben Gazzara) come to visit him. Fred is a college professor with a hundred do-gooder causes. Grudge doesn't want to hear another pitch from him for charity; he preempts Fred by going on a tirade against the futility of helping the poor, or - worse - trying to create a refugee-friendly, melting pot society.

Fred tries to get his points across but realizes its no use. As Grudge tells him, "you can't change me and I can't change you". So he wishes Grudge a Merry Christmas and bids him good night. Then Grudge, like Scrooge, is visited by three ghosts during the night. The first, Steve Lawrence, is the Ghost of Christmas Past. He represents every soldier who's ever died in war. He gives Grudge a heavy twenty minute spiel about the costs of "having the fastest bombers on Earth". Then he takes him on a tour of Hiroshima, where they visit children in a radiation burn ward. Next up is is Pat Hingle, as the gluttonous Ghost of Christmas Present. He feasts while half the world starves, and berates Grudge for his cheapness. Hingle paints such a stark picture during his presentation of world poverty that you'd think the human race is irredeemable. 

Finally, there's Ribbert Schaugh (pre-heavy alcohol use but working up to it). He's the Ghost of Christmas Fyoochum, and he shows Mr. Grudge what the world will be like after the nuclear holocaust. All that's left is a combination of MAGA types and The Walking Dead. They have a leader, a cowboy Trump type who calls himself The Imperial Me (Peter Sellers). He eggs his followers on, to distrust all outsiders, of which there are few because the world's been blown to smithereens. "But we must still eliminate them", he exhorts, "because they threaten The Imperial Me!"

Man, Rod. Talk about laying it on thick! Rod Serling was a great moralizer, and to his credit he uses the didactic format to great effect here by allowing the adversary to have his say in a reasonable manner. He doesn't present Mr. Grudge as crazy, or even necessarily wrong on all counts, but even when Grudge makes a salient point, his overall arguments are shot down in total by the ultimate result of nuclear confrontation. What does it matter if his philosophy is partially legitimate if the world is going to destroy itself? The final result is that the Earth is inherited, not by the meek but by the insane and illiterate, led by The Imperial Me, who represents the arrogance of ignorance. This kind of writing worked best on Twiight Zone, where any manner of context, from UFOs to telepathic children, to towns where time stopped, could be used to dissect moral platitudes. But here, on Christmas Eve, Rod's got you at two minutes to midnight on the nuclear clock while reading you the riot act from the Book of Revelation. Pestilence and famine would be a relief from what he's predicting. It's still a genius script, and you can't argue with most of it (but in my more conservative older age, I can argue for a strong, defensive military). And, Rod was a paratrooper in WW2, so it's not like his worldview wasn't born of experience. He was the one and only Rod Serling, case closed. But for our purposes, the whole point is that we were looking for Christmas movies, and this movie sucks the wind right out of Santa Claus's sails.

It's a great movie for the Cold War era, but it's so in-your-face depressing that it isn't very Christmassy. It's not Christmassy at all, in fact. It's a warning movie, that the world could end at any minute, and even if it doesn't, life sucks because the whole world is in pain and starving. Rod must've been pretty pissed off when he wrote it. Two Big Thumbs Up, but not recommended for the holiday season. The picture is very good.  ////

The previous night we found a fun one entitled "I'm a Stranger"(1952), a Veddy Brrrittish mystery in which a man abroad travels to London from Calcutta to claim his inheritance. When we first see "George Westcott" (Patric Doonan), he is talking to his late Uncle's lawyer about the dispensation of the will, which has inconveniently gone missing. The lawyer assures George this will not be a problem, to his great relief. He just wants to collect his money and return to India, where he was born and raised. He's a white Englishman, but he's never been to England in his life and the sheer size of London terrifies him.

We leave the two men talking and cut to the street, somewhere in the city, where "Horatio Flowerdew" (James Hayter) is about to get into his work truck to begin his shift as a window washer, when who  should he run into, parked behind him with a car that won't start, but Greta Gynt, playing herself as a movie star. Horatio observes her automotive predicament and recognizes her. "Why, you're Greta Gynt! I'm a big fan of yours, so's me wife." And so are we! (Remember that Greta Gynt binge we went on last year?) She's in a hurry to get to a rehearsal for her next picture, so he offers to drive her in his window-washer lorry, and she accepts. On their way, however, they hear some noise in the back of the truck. Horatio pulls over to investigate and there's a stowaway on board, a young woman who's been shot!

Holy moly. Gynt and Horatio start to take her to hospital (it's just plain "hospital" in England, no "the") but she begs off. "Just take me to my doctor". "Oh, I know him," says Horatio. He drives over to the doctor's office, which is also his residence. They knock and a tight-lipped older woman answers. She hustles the girl inside as if she knows her, then slams the door on Gynt and Horatio. Not knowing what else to do, they go straight to the police station. Horatio belongs to an amateur detective club (like Book of the Month), and he's got several theories, none of which the head detective is interested in. He thinks Horatio and Greta are a pair of nitwits, possibly having a laugh at his expense. But because he can't take a chance (they might be legit), he drives them back to the doctor's home/office, and an investigation begins that takes up the remainder of the 56 minute movie. It's exceedingly clever, staged like a play, with many kinds of British officiousness and opprobrium on display: smarminess, working-class smarts and charm. There's unique touches, like having Greta Gynt play herself, and the English heir from India who's never been to England in his life. I wonder if there are Americans like that, say a white kid born in China whose folks are from Kansas. Maybe he's 21 but has never set foot on American soil. That would be really weird! 

The plot plays out with great intricacy. It's all about the possibility that the will has been stolen, or rewritten, and the girl who got shot was trying to steal it. A gun was found on the premises. The heir admits it's his. He tells the detectives he shot the girl because he thought she was an intruder. "As I say, I'm not used to London. There's 8 million people here." And there's a twist toward the end that you'll never see coming. Two Big Thumbs Up for "I'm a Stranger". We love our British crime flicks, especially with a dose of the eccentric humor the Brits are known for. This one is very highly recommended and the picture is razor sharp.  ////

That's all for this evening. My blogging music tonight is "Johnny the Fox" by Thin Lizzy, and "Another Fine Tune" by Gilgamesh, tremendous albums both. My late night is "Parsifal" by Wagner, conducted by von Karajan. R.I.P. to the great Angelo Badalamenti, whose work on the Twin Peaks theme could be said to have Wagnerian influence. I was fortunate to see him perform some of his music, accompanied by David Lynch, at a screening of "Inland Empire" at The Armand Hammer Theater in Westwood in 2007. David was choked up during his daily weather report yesterday, and today he gave a two word tribute to his friend and colleague, saying simply "Angelo Badalamenti" in the spot where he usually mentions a song. Truly one of the iconic modern composers, you can't imagine Twin Peaks with out his soundtrack.

I hope your week is going well, and I send you Tons of Love as always.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)