I've always had a liking for big, soft-spoken man-mountain Clint Walker - in part, because he reminds me quite a bit of my own father, another gentle giant. Walker's voice might be deeper, and his chest even broader, but both men are old-school guys that embody a certain kind of quiet dignity and honorable conduct that is appealing and, sadly, increasingly rare these days. Known especially for his truly impressive physique (six-foot six and boasting a 48-inch chest) and calm, measured basso profondo voice, Walker rose to fame as the star of the early adult ("non-kiddie") western, Cheyenne, in the late 50s / early 60s, and parlayed that success into a modest big-screen career, mostly in westerns and family films. Night of the Grizzly straddles these two genres and isn't Walker's best, yet is a pleasant enough way to while away a few hours. Walker plays Jim Cole, an ex-lawman who inherits some land and a run-down old ranch in California from a deceased relative and brings his wife, Angela (Martha Hyer), two kids, teenage niece and former deputy Sam Potts (Don Haggerty) with him to start a new, more peaceful life. But things aren't going to be easy for the Cole family. Not only does the ranch need a lot of work, but cagey local powerbroker Jed Curry (Keenan Wynn) has been after that particular parcel of land for a good long time and still has plans to get it, one way or another. As if that wasn't enough, Jim has to contend with Old Satan - a massive killer grizzly bear that stalks the area every summer, and has set his sights on the Cole's herd. Night of the Grizzly is pretty episodic, wavering in tone between genial Disney-style family romp and brutal grizzly attack-filled thriller. Despite this unevenness of tone, there's still plenty to enjoy here, including Walker's dependable, charismatic presence, a rather sweet depiction of a stable marriage, enlivened by good chemistry between Walker and wholesome, pretty Martha Hyer, and some good, roughhouse action sequences. Visitors to this humble blog may have noted a dearth of content of late. The fact of the matter is, things have been pretty crazy here around the Stalking Moon premises. Not only has the day job been at its busiest peak, we've also been dealing with the nervous tension and stress created by our 8-month-old son going through heart surgery, leaving me with very little enthusiasm or energy to write. Now that our boy is through the worst of it and is recovering nicely (thank God), I've regained some of my usual vim and vigor, and realized that I couldn't let the end of May pass without saying a few words about those three icons of horror cinema, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price. Even those who don't much care for the horror genre will likely recognize the above three names. But what many might not be aware of is that all three men were not only great friends in real life, but also were born within the same two days of each other (in fact, Cushing and Lee were both born on the same day). Being as 2013 marks Peter Cushing's 100th birthday, I thought I'd celebrate this momentous occasion by spending a little time talking about some of these three fellows' most memorable performances, both the ones everyone remembers them for, as well as a few gems perhaps less well-known than they deserve to be. "You can't hypnotize me...I'm British!" Aside from Tarzan, the fantasy/adventure classics of Edgar Rice Burroughs have not fared so well on film. Since so much of Burroughs' work dates from 75 to 100 years ago, and so many filmmakers, from George Lucas to James Cameron, have been inspired by (some may say begged, borrowed or just plain stole from) him over the years, that when someone tries to do a more-or-less faithful rendition of one of his works, like last year's mega-budget misfire John Carter, the results can come off as stale and overly familiar. Back in the 1970s, though, the time seemed ripe for Burroughs' patented style of pacy pulp adventure storytelling. The nostalgia boom was still going strong, with various publishing houses releasing massive paperback runs of nearly all of Burroughs books, not to mention stories by Robert E. Howard (featuring Conan, Solomon Kane and other series characters), E.E. Doc Smith's Lensmen novels, reprints of Doc Savage and The Shadow pulps, etc. In Britain, the independent production company Amicus (most noted for their horror anthologies like From Beyond the Grave, Asylum, Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, et al) took a chance and brought three of Burroughs' more memorable novels to the big screen. Amicus, founded by Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg, enjoyed a certain level of success and made some fine genre films. To say their efforts in bringing Burroughs' larger-than-life, elaborate lost worlds to film were not entirely successful would be an understatement. However, the three films in question - The Land that Time Forgot (1975) and its sequel, The People That Time Forgot (1977) (based off the Caspak trilogy) and At the Earth's Core (1976) (the first book in the Pellucidar series) - all have their hearts in the right place and bring plenty of old-fashioned fun to the table. For those of us who saw these movies as youngsters when they first came out, they still hold a certain nostalgic appeal that (just barely) transcends their clumsy monster effects and general silliness, and most of their (many) faults can be blamed on the production teams' trying to do far too much with way too limited means. The final collaboration between director John Ford and John Wayne, Donovan's Reef doesn't show any of its participants at the top of their game, but there's always been something about the film's easygoing, loose tropical island vibe that I find eternally charming. I've probably seen the movie at least a dozen times over the years, and it never fails to please in its own shaggy dog way, despite its undeniable faults. It's a film that is content to just amble along, with only the barest wisp of a plot, recycling some of Ford's common preoccupations: knockabout, brawling "Oirish" humor, the poetry found in shared, communal ritual and ceremony, the battle for dominance in male/female relations, an affectionate ribbing - yet absolute acceptance - of the Catholic faith, and pride in brave service during WWII. How much you enjoy it will depend on how much you like the people involved. It's reminiscent of (if nowhere near as good as) Howard Hawks' Hatari, another film which creates a world out of an exotic setting and a group of characters that are just plain good company to spend time with. The film takes place on the South Seas island of Haleakaloha (presumably somewhere in French Polynesia, but actually filmed in Hawaii), the kind of island paradise that only truly exists in Hollywood fable. The story follows the antics of three former American navy men, Mike "Guns" Donovan (Wayne), Thomas "Boats" Gilhooly (Lee Marvin) and Dr. William Dedham (Jack Warden), who back in the war were the only survivors of a torpedoed destroyer, who landed on the island and fought a vigorous cat-and-mouse game against the occupying Japanese forces there. After the war, both Donovan and Dedham decided to stay on, the doctor starting up a much-needed hospital (and marrying the beautiful island princess who aided them in the war) and Donovan a bar and shipping line. Donovan and Gilhooly share a birthday (on December 7th, no less) and every year Gilhooly visits the island for an annual birthday brawl with his old sailor pal. Back in the 1930s and 40s, it wasn't uncommon for popular radio dramas to make the leap to the big screen. Crime and adventure serials were a natural fit for the sort of breezy programmers that filled out the bottom bills at theaters, such as Boston Blackie, Dick Tracy, etc. This was the heyday of the B movie mystery and detective series, many of which became very popular and ran for a long time and many films, such as Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto, The Saint and The Falcon, to name just a few. Others fizzled out after only a few films. The I Love A Mystery series is a prime example of the latter. Based off one of the most famous and popular radio shows of its day, I Love a Mystery came to the screen in a trio of little-seen and rarely talked about films that aren’t easy to find, but are nonetheless well worth seeking out. I Love a Mystery (the radio show, known in OTR circles as ILAM) was the brainchild of Carlton E. Morse, who penned most of the adventures and was also responsible for the long-running radio soap, One Man's Family. ILAM stood out from the pack of adventure and detective shows in its frequent emphasis on the macabre and the supernatural (usually proved by the end of each serial to be mere window dressing in an elaborate crime plot, but not always). The program featured the incredibly atmospheric adventures of Jack Packard (no-nonsense leader of the group), Doc Long (a laid-back Texan who loved pretty girls and a good fight) and Reggie York (stalwart, stiff-upper lip Brit), friends during WWI who after the war ended formed the A-1 Detective Agency, mainly as a means to keep getting into trouble. The series originally was broadcast from Hollywood in various forms from 1939-1944, and was later re-cast and re-done, using Morse's original scripts, in a later New York run from 1949-1952. For most of both series, the show ran in a 15-minute serial format, nearly every chapter ending on a hair-raising cliffhanger. Stories featured such evocative titles as "Bury your Dead, Arizona," "Temple of Vampires," "The Fear That Creeps Like a Cat," "The Thing That Cries in the Night," "Pirate Loot of the Island of Skulls," and "I Am the Destroyer of Women," etc. Sadly, very few stories exist in complete form today, and those that do are from the second run of the show. What does survive is wonderful stuff, full of action, humor and bloodcurdling, creepy goings-on. (Interesting trivia alert: a young Tony Randall voiced Reggie in the N.Y. run of the show, with Mercedes McCambridge voicing most of the female characters). "Listen...for a man, or a mole, or a bird - every day is life and death." 1952 was a good year for Stewart Granger. Riding high at the peak of his career, the British star made four films that year: the early heist film The Light Touch, with Pier Angeli and George Sanders; the wonderful swashbuckler Scaramouche (with its deservedly-famous, 7-minute long climactic fencing duel); the color remake of The Prisoner of Zenda (against baddie James Mason) and, last but certainly not least, the rugged outdoor adventure pic, The Wild North. The Wild North is essentially a western (technically, a northwestern), its action taking place in the remote regions of Canada (never stated, but likely somewhere in the Yukon). Granger stars as Jules Vincent, a French-Canadian trapper with a lust for life and devil-may-care philosophy. Vincent arrives in a tiny settlement with furs to sell and the intention of engaging in some drunken carousing. Instead he ends up adopting a couple of strays - a kitten with more backbone than size, and a beautiful Indian woman (played by stunning dancer Cyd Charisse), who's eking out an existence singing and being pawed at by drunken frontiersmen in a saloon. Jules brings the cat into the bar with him, and soon is chatting up the sad-eyed crooner. "Does it have a name?" she asks about the kitten. "Does it have to? Do you?" Jules replies. "Do I have to?" she answers back. "No." Before he knows it, Jules finds himself making a promise to bring the woman back to her people (she's part Chippewa), on the way up to his winter cabin in the north, but not before cheerfully trouncing an inebriated bear of a man named Brody (Howard Petrie) who presumes to lay hands on her. Sure enough, the next morning, the Indian maiden (who never does get named in the film) is waiting for Jules at his canoe. He doesn't remember his drunken promise, but he agrees to take her with him anyway (he's not stupid). A contrite Brody wants to accompany them and vows to be a useful hand with a paddle. Jules reluctantly takes him up on his offer. But it seems Brody has revenge on his mind when he forcibly steers their canoe into deadly rapids. When Brody refuses to turn the canoe towards the shore and safety, Jules is forced to kill him. He leaves the girl with her tribe, with a promise from the chief (John War Eagle) to take her under his protection. He then heads north, wanting to put some distance between himself and the police, who he doesn't trust to take him at his word about the killing being justified. “The remake of a classic may be worth everybody's while. The sequels rarely are. I never had any sense of embarrassment over the first Dracula nor The Face of Fu Manchu...alas, in the follow-ups to both there was much to make me look shifty and suck my paws. Knowing this, I nevertheless repeated each character many times over. I did so because they were my livelihood." (1) ~ Christopher Lee Christopher Lee, no matter his roles in prestige productions like The Three Musketeers, The Man with the Golden Gun or, more recently, in the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars franchises, will forever be associated with his most famous role - Count Dracula. But in the 1960s, Lee was also busy playing another famous villain – Sax Rohmer's evil Chinese mastermind, Dr. Fu Manchu. It was a part Lee played in 5 films, and similarly to the Dracula series, but in a much more pronounced fashion, the early films started strong but each sequel brought an incremental drop in quality. Generally speaking, the Hammer Dracula films all have something good going for them and are beloved by horror fans to this day. This can't really be said for most of the Fu Manchu films (the abysmal last two of which were directed by infamous Eurocult figure Jess Franco), although Lee himself was happy with the first film, The Face of Fu Manchu, a well-produced, lively action thriller with plenty of period flavor and a good cast. The most well-known of all “Yellow Peril” novels, the Rohmer Fu Manchu series ran to 13 titles published between 1912-1959. The books are speedy, very readable pulp thrillers but are definitely products of their time. The Face of Fu Manchu takes some of the best elements of the books and puts them up on screen. The film opens in China with master criminal Fu Manchu (Lee) being marched out to his execution under the watchful eyes of his arch-nemesis, Sir Nayland Smith of Scotland Yard (Nigel Green). A few months later, once Smith has returned to London, he begins to sense Fu Manchu's hand in a series of strange deaths and abductions centered around the River Thames. It seems Fu Manchu is very much alive and, together with his sadistic daughter, Lin Tang (Tsai Chin), and assorted henchmen, is once more up to no good. In the 1960s, elements of decay and division in society, especially U.S. society, were becoming more obvious, and 1960s sci-fi reflected this. (1) The 1960s were a fertile ground for many movie genres. The decade saw a number of fine traditional westerns, as well as the advent of the iconoclastic, bombastic spaghetti western, sweeping epics (like Lawrence of Arabia, El Cid), the final heyday of the big-budget musical (West Side Story, The Sound of Music), the James Bond spy craze, etc. The Hammer Studios' horror boom was in full swing, the WWII spectaculars went from strength (The Great Escape) to strength (The Dirty Dozen), Disney still was cranking out some classics (like 101 Dalmations) and Gidget and the Beach Party movies catered to the younger crowd. One genre that didn't exactly flourish, though, was the science fiction film. Much like the decade itself, the 1960s were a transitional period for the science fiction film. The decade started out pretty much as a continuation of the 1950s, with most Hollywood sci-fi reduced to fun but generally cheap and cheesy kiddie or teenage monster fare, like The Leech Woman, The Angry Red Planet, The Manster and The Brain that Wouldn't Die. By the end of the 60s, though, the social upheaval, chaos and malaise of the post-JFK assassination, counter culture, Vietnam War-era world were beginning to seep in, eventually leading to the slew of serious minded, downbeat sci-fi films in the early to mid 1970s, such as The Andromeda Strain, Colossus: The Forbin Project, Soylent Green, A Boy and His Dog, and Silent Running, to name just a few. In between were a handful of Hall-of-Fame sci-fi films, which clearly show this gradual transformation from more juvenile fare into darker territory. Below is my list, in chronological order, of what I consider to be the 10 best films of this type to come out of that decade, along with a few worthy runners-up. While films like The Birds and Night of the Living Dead could be legitimately classified as science fiction, albeit in a fringe sense, to me they fall more clearly in the horror genre and so I chose not to include them here, as good as they undoubtedly are. This post is my contribution to the John Garfield 100th Birthday Blogathon, hosted by Patti at They Don't Make 'em Like They Used To. Please go here for a list of other contributors. "Tell the crew they can sleep in the next world." A confession...When I first started contemplating what film I should cover for the blogathon, I quickly came to a startling realization: despite his iconic status, I didn't really know much about John Garfield or his films, and in fact, only possessed one paltry title in my DVD collection, Air Force, and that was due more to my being a Howard Hawks fan than anything else. Of course, as a classic movie buff, I'm well aware of Garfield's stature and importance as a leading man, and have caught a number of his more famous films over the years. Yet for some reason, I haven't really given him the sort of thought or attention that I have to his contemporaries, like Bogart, Gable, Grant or Cagney. It's high time to remedy that oversight. For an all-too-brief 13 years and 31 films, John Garfield brought his own distinctive kind of earthy, brooding intensity and volatile charisma to the screen. His star on the ascendancy in the early 1940s, he took an ensemble role in Howard Hawks' Air Force, partly because he had always wanted to work with Hawks since seeing Scarface many years before, and mainly because he wanted to do his part for the war effort. Unable to enlist due to a weak heart, Garfield was a tireless supporter of the troops, and, along with Bette Davis, was one of the co-founders of the Hollywood Canteen. Air Force was the first of a handful of patriotic war films Garfield made (followed by Destination Tokyo and Pride of the Marines), and it's a skilled example of its kind. This post is my contribution to the "Fabulous Films of the 1940s Blogathon," sponsored by the Classic Movie Blog Association. For a full list of excellent entries from the other blog participants, please click here. "The grand age of the adventure epic gave to the American people, as to people all over the world, an image of grandeur and glitter and flair which our own eccentrically stable country could barely approach. Most importantly, it gave a sense of grace. Grace - the ability to make the difficult look easy and the simple look profound - was the stylistic hallmark of the swashbuckler and the gentleman adventurer." (1) I love a good swashbuckler. The swashbuckler is a particular subgenre of the period adventure film, or costume epic. It's a particularly fun little corner of the movie universe, where good always triumphs over evil; disagreements are settled with swordplay and, if at all possible, accompanied by a witty verbal riposte; where heroes are dashing and villains hissable; and where historical accuracy adds plenty of background color but never gets in the way of a ripping good yarn. Though swashbucklers have always been made by the major studios, the genre enjoyed three distinct heydays: the 1920s, when Douglas Fairbanks Sr. came bounding onto the scene; the mid-to-late 1930s, when Errol Flynn and his cheeky grin ruled the box office; and a late blossoming in the 1950s, when studios used the color and pageantry of the form to liven up their new widescreen processes and lure audiences back from the upstart medium of television. |
Videophilia!
Opinionated ramblings about new and old movies (mostly old, as that's the way I like 'em!) Blogs of Note
Stuart Galbraith IV's World Cinema Paradise
Movie Morlocks (TCM's Classic Movie Blog) 50 Westerns from the 50s Riding the High Country Sweet Freedom Tipping My Fedora Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Silver Screenings Laura's Miscellaneous Musings Classic TV and Film Cafe Just a Cineast She Blogged By Night Chess, Comics, Crosswords, Books, Music, Cinema Out of the Past - A Classic Film Blog Pretty Sinister Books They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To In So Many Words... Greenbriar Picture Shows Flix Chatter My Love of Old Hollywood Tales of the Easily Distracted Another Old Movie Blog Lasso the Movies Kevin's Movie Corner Films From Beyond the Time Barrier Carole & Co. Rupert Pupkin Speaks Caftan Woman Vienna's Classic Hollywood The Lady Eve's Reel Life ClassicBecky's Brain Food Hey!
Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed below, to be informed of new postings! Categories
All
Archives
September 2015
|