Just a quick editorial note to say that it's a little difficult to keep the blog going right now, just because it's hard to focus on movie reviews when the things I am learning on a daily basis are so staggering. I am flabbergasted to the point where I have trouble concentrating on anything but the current day's revelations. That doesn't mean I won't try to keep writing about movies. I can kind of do them in my sleep by now (and last night I didn't get any sleep!), but if the blogs are late, short, or of poor quality, the above-mentioned news is the reason. It's been truly life-changing. ////
A few nights back, we saw a TV movie called "The House on Greenapple Road"(1970), in which "Detective Dan August" (Christopher George) is searching for the killer of a promiscuous woman (Janet Leigh). Her little daughter (Eve Plumb) comes home from school to find a bloody mess in the kitchen. There's no body, so she's spared that awful sight, and perhaps she's too young to put two and two together because she's not sure what the scene depicts. She runs next door to her neighbor's house (Julie Harris), and by the time the cops get there, Eve is told her Mom is "out of town". She's kind of a red herring character, used, I suppose, just to put a child in the movie, because the nymphomania of the mother and the passivity of the cuckolded, ineffectual father would suggest a childless marriage.
At any rate, after talking with neighbor Julie Harris (such a great actress), Dan August learns that Janet Leigh had quite a few boyfriends; rotating them as one night stands. August and partner Keenan Wynn (gotta love him) then make a tour of all the prototypes: the blonde, beach-stud boy toy (who works in a car wash), the con man yacht clubber, the club owner, and the phony New Age preacher have all slept with the woman, taking advantage of her mania. Really she's empty inside, and just one step from going off the deep end. Her ineffectual hubby, who suffers from "too nice" syndrome, loves her as a co-dependent. Dan August tries to help him: "How can you still feel anything for her when she cheated on you right and left?" But his head's all twisted around because he's the one she chose to marry. So even though he's the only one Not Gettin' Any, he feels the most important in her life because he's the hubby. "She only uses those men; she needs me." And in a way, he's right. He's her only hold, by marriage, on sanity, and against being tagged a prostitute, which several of her boyfriends call her. One even tries to pay her! She goes crazy and has a fit, almost clawing his eyes out: "Don't you EVER hand me money!" In her mind, she just "believes in free love". But call her a hooker and she'll kill you.
But apparently someone has killed her. The problem is that Detective August can't find a body. The yacht club guy is the first suspect, because he's a con man who is also a former drug dealer. Are we seeing a pattern here? Anyone care to raise their hand?
Well, at any rate, yacht club guy's alibi proves legit, so suspicion now focuses on the hubby, who leads the coppers on a high speed chase through Pacific Palisades. A huge twist will be revealed for the reason he has done this.
The plot is linear: A-B-C-D, with no real Colombo-style backtracks. But the acting is "TV Top Notch", you've even got Linda Day as a snippy bimbo, before she married Chris George and became Linda Day-George. He died young, poor guy. He was very handsome with TV series star quality. Even at almost two hours, the movie never drags. The airdate says January 1970, so my family would've still been living in the big white house on Osborne Street. We had a black and white TV then, on which we watched the moon landing 6 months earlier. It was in the living room. I don't remember watching a lot of TV during the two and a half years we lived in that house, except for "Laugh-In". I think I was upstairs with my radio, listening to UCLA basketball games. My major TV bingeing period began again at the Rathburn St. house when we moved there in June 1970. When we lived in Reseda (until January '68) we always watched TV, but we never had a color set until maybe 1976. I think someone gave us a used Sony. It's funny, because my Dad, who worked as a TV executive when he first came to Hollywood, for a long time did not like television. He called it the Idiot Box. But man, did I ever love TV as a kid. However, this movie was too early (1970) for me to have seen it. Also, it must've ran 2:30 for it to be 2 hours without commercials. At any rate, Two Big Thumbs Up. A very good, if standard, murder mystery. The picture is razor sharp. ///
Our previous movie was "The Quiller Memorandum"(1966), in which government agent George Segal is hunting post-war Nazis in West Berlin. They've gone underground and are hard to spot in civilian clothes. Segal has all kinds of code words and phrases he tries out on strangers, but he can't tell who's who, until he meets a pretty schoolteacher (Senta Berger) with whom he takes a different tack. Instead of saying, "Can I try one of your cigarettes? They're a different brand than mine," he strikes up a normal conversation, then edges in a question: "Tell me...I know it may sound strange, but do you know of any people in this town who aren't who they say they are?"
Because it's George Segal, the filmmakers go with his combo of suaveness and light comedy. And, he's just enough of a tough guy here to be believable as a secret agent. He was also a great actor. Max von Sydow plays "October", the head of the secret Nazi group. He has Segal kidnapped and taken to the group's hideout, where he's drugged and interrogated. October wants to know where the Nazi hunters' base is located, so he can destroy it. Alec Guinness is the leader of the Anglo-American agency, playing a cat and mouse game to bring hidden Nazis to justice. They, in turn, use kidnapping as a prime tool, and they possess a high level of organisation and secrecy, and use drugs and hypnosis to scramble your brain.
George Segal takes their punishment, and even manages to escape a couple times. Of course, a romance develops between him and the beautiful Senta Berger. Max von Sydow (before he was typecast as an old man) often portrayed the prototypical evil, Nordic madman.
The end of the movie is ambiguous. We don't know if Senta Berger is a Nazi sympathizer, or if she's on George Segal's side. That was a key theme of the Cold War spy thriller, not knowing whom you can trust.
All in all, it's competent, formulaic stuff done with style. Two Big Thumbs Up with a high recommendation. The picture is very good. ////
And that's all for tonight. I'm working on a million things, my head is spinning and I'm trying hard to stay above water. I send you Tons of Love, as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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