Burl reviews GoldenEye! (1995)

 

With a cocktail in one hand and a lady in an evening gown in the other, it’s Burl, here to review a bit of Bondery for you! This was the first of a millennium-ending series with new Bond Pierce Brosnan, whom we know from Dante’s Peak and The World’s End, taking over after Timothy Dalton’s abbreviated but perfectly competent run of two pictures, The Living Daylights and License to Kill! The picture I’m talking about is of course GoldenEye!

The other major newcomer is Judi Dench playing M, who would outlast Brosnan and assume the role until Skyfall! She plays it crabby here, and also is the character used to call out Bond’s superannuated sexism, which was a much remarked-upon aspect of this picture at the time of its original release! (Other characters, including Miss Moneypenny and the main bad guy played by Sean Bean from How to Get Ahead in Advertising, mine this rich vein as well!)

The plot: typical Bondism! The opening involves the double-nought hero infiltrating a Russian weapons facility (ha ha, the fall of the Soviet Union is another update the picture must grapple with) and escaping thanks to a spectacular but frankly impossible stunt! Unfortunately he’s left behind his compadre, Sean Bean’s 006, whom Bond believes to have been killed! But it’s all part of a plot by Bean, in conjunction with a hatchet-faced strongman general played by Gottfried Johns from Fedora and an erotic thigh-killer called Xenia Onatopp (ha ha!) played by Famke Janssen from Taken 2, to take control of a Russian satellite weapon that will shoot electromagnetic rays to wipe out computer systems on Earth! Ha ha, pretty much the usual stuff - I think The Man With the Golden Gun had a similar space weapon in it, for example!

Bond hooks up with a Russian lady played by Izabella Scorupco, and then with Joe Don Baker from Fletch, who’d played a bad guy in The Living Daylights but here is a CIA guy emphatically not named Felix Leiter! There’s a nice tank chase in St. Petersberg and a steam room fight with Onatopp in which Bond burns her bum, and much of the movie seems to be captures and escapes! It all ends in Cuba in and around a big giant radar dish that stands as one of the Bond team’s finest miniature trick effects jobs!

The picture is brisk and fun, the script is occasionally clever (though its understanding of mid-90s geopolitics seems a little shaky), and there are some engaging action sequences! Brosnan acquits himself well and was clearly a solid choice for the role! Unfortunately the picture is burdened with a substandard score and a terrible end-credits song, and the opening credit sequence, also with a mediocre song, is dull and cheeseball! But these are minor afflictions, and the ultimate impression is of a Bond movie solidly somewhere in the upper middle of the pack! I’m beginning to think that Tomorrow Never Dies might have been an improvement on this one, but certainly GoldenEye is still streets ahead of the cornliquors that came later, The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day! Ha ha, pee-yew! I give GoldenEye two Canadian admirals!

Burl reviews North By Northwest! (1959)

 

Hi, I’m Roger Thornhill! Ha ha, no, I’m Burl, but I feel like Roger Thornhill after my recent viewing of North By Northwest! Yes, it’s a comfy old favourite, a highly rewatchable thrill-omedy-omance, and always pretty fun! There’s not much more to it than that, other than some romantic scenes that go on a bit too long for young new viewers of Hitchcock; but by garr it’s a pleasantly airy jaunt! It feels a bit silly to review it, because everyone’s seen it and everyone more or less likes it!

It’s a curious warm-up for Psycho, ha ha! Our main character, played by the one and only Cary Grant, is a happy-go-lucky Madison Avenue man who gets mistaken for a government spy called George Kaplan! Immediately he is wrapped in a web of intrigue: kidnapped and assaulted with a gun and a car and a bourbon by nefarious bad guy James Mason, whom we know from ffolkes and Bigger Than Life; his dapper, Smithers-type minion Martin Landau, an actor we recollect from his appearance in Without Warning; and two sinister, hatched-faced sub-minions! Poor perplexed Thornhill is soon accused of a United Nations murder, and he flees to Chicago on a cross-country train! On board he meets an almost psychotically flirtatious blonde beauty played by Eva Marie Saint from The Curse of King Tut’s Tomb, whose extreme willingness to shelter an accused murderer arouses only mild additional bewilderment in Thornhill!

Leo G. Carroll from Tarantula is meanwhile a government spymaster who knows what’s going on, but is initially pleased to hear that Thornhill is believed to be Kaplan, who is not a real person but a fictional CIA confabulation! Ha ha, I think the movie could have waited on this revelation and presented it as a twist going into the third act, instead of revealing it in the first, but that’s just one Burl’s opinion! Anyway, with crop duster cornfield chases and hotel room duplicities and the finale in that fantastic modern house apparently perched near the top of Mount Rushmore, we barely notice!

Ha ha, there is so much window dressing to love about this movie - the great Saul Bass titles, the fantastic Bernard Herrman score, the clever Ernest Lehman script, and of course Hitch’s confident direction and the suspense scenes he pulls off with typical wizardry - that we don’t quite mind realizing later that it’s pretty much all window dressing! However, aside from the romantic longeurs mentioned earlier, it’s a top-flight Hollywood entertainment, attractive and shiny, gripping and funny; and when it’s over, it’s over - ha ha, until the next time! It’s far from my favourite Hitchcock picture, but it’s like a gooseberry you keep under your armpit: always there for you! I give North By Northwest three complaints of dan-druff!

Burl reviews Silver Streak! (1976)

Choo choo! Hello gumchewers, it’s Burl, here with a mile-long review of a 1970s train picture! I’m not talking about The Cassandra Crossing - ha ha, I have yet to see that one, but one day perhaps I will - nor The Great Train Robbery, nor Murder on the Orient Express! This one does feature murder, and there is also some robbery involved, and the picture in question is of course Silver Streak!

This is the kind of movie they did well in the 70s, and by that I mean movies with some sort of hook to attract the Evel Knevel-and-Superdome-besotted young people of the day! Here we have the train itself, called the Silver Streak though there’s nothing special about its speed or appearance, and the climax in which the engine crashes spectacularly through its Chicago terminus! Leading up to this great moment is a plot I won’t get into, because when bad guy Patrick McGoohan explains his nefarious scheme near the end of the picture, I didn’t understand a word of it! Ha ha!

Our main character is George, a mild-mannered editor of gardening books played by Gene Wilder, who’s taking the train to get some rest and relaxation! He first meets an obnoxious vitamin salesman (or so we think!) played by the excellent Ned Beatty from Rolling Vengeance, and then hooks up with prettylady Jill Clayburgh, known from It’s My Turn and several similar movies, here essaying the role of - well, to be honest, I was never sure exactly what her character was meant to be! Soon George witnesses an apparent murder, then is repeatedly thrown off the train by a pair of goons, Ray Walston from Galaxy of Terror and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Richard Kiel, playing the same spangle-toothed killer giant he does in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker!

Eventually, more than an hour in to the picture, none other than Richard Pryor shows up! Ha ha, we certainly recall him from his adventures in Brewster’s Millions! He gives the proceedings a shot of energy they badly need and, by this point, barely deserve! Don’t get me wrong: the movie is generally entertaining even without Pryor, but Pauline Kael’s observation that Pryor briefly makes the movie into the comedy its makers had hoped it would be is well taken! However a scene in which Pryor tries to help his little white frizzy-haired buddy evade capture by smearing him with shoe polish and teaching him how to “act Black” nearly destroys the whole endeavor: only the movie’s profound, essential, guileless unhipness helps it survive this ill-considered passage! Ha ha!

Of course it’s all a big tribute to Hitch, and especially to North By Northwest; but the Wrong Man scenario is not played up as much as I was expecting it to be, which was something of a relief! The director, Arthur Hiller, who would use the success of this and his subsequent picture, The In-Laws, to launch a brave stab at eco-horror with Nightwing, keeps it all moving with the stolid momentum of a freight train, though if he’d pushed the throttle up to bullet train speeds, who knows what we might have had!

As you can see, the cast is generally great, with a properly cold-eyed performance from McGoohan, whom we recall from Scanners and Escape From Alcatraz! Ha ha, his demise is certainly a tent-capper! Clifton James from Juggernaut shows up, playing an only slightly less cartoony cracker sheriff than the one he essays in Bond pictures like Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun! We also get Stefan Gierasch from Blood Beach, Fred Willard from Moving Violations, and the great Scatman Crothers from The King of Marvin Gardens and The Shining, playing a porter of course! And there is a trio of obnoxious conventioneers played by Canadian acting staples Henry Beckman from The Brood, Steve Weston from Sudden Fury, and Harvey Atkin from Funeral Home! (Obnoxious conventioneers are themselves a convention in movies like this - ha ha, just look at Airport ’75, where the analogous triumvirate is played by Norman Fell, Conrad Janis and Jerry Stiller!)

There are some laffs here and there, for example in George’s repeated cries of “Son of a bitch!” whenever he’s thrown off the train, which is frequently! But there are tone-deaf scenes too, like the aforementioned blackface debacle; and another in which Wilder, in an effort either on his part or on the part of Colin Higgins’ script to make him seem unexpectedly virile and manly and domineering and bristling with alpha confidence, instructs Clayburgh on every pre-coital step as though he’s a director blocking her in a scene! Maybe it was a gay man’s imagining of straight foreplay, or maybe it was meant to show a hint of steel in George’s spine, or maybe Wilder demanded extra toughness in his character, but whatever the case it didn’t work for me!

But the big climax did! Tons of gunfire, helicopters buzzing around, a racing train smashing through the station, ha ha, it’s all pretty good! George personally kills two people dead in the picture, one of them with a harpoon, and this is not behavior we expect from Gene Wilder! So it gets points for that too, ha ha! As middlebrow comedy-suspense-action pictures go, it’s one of them and no mistake! I give Silver Streak two Rembrandt Letters!

Burl reviews The Train! (1964)

Ha ha and rolling stock, it’s Burl, here to review a fantastic movie about a train - and guess what, it’s called The Train! That’s right, it’s the wartime action drama from John Frankenheimer, who also brought us such winners as Prophecy and The Manchurian Candidate! The picture is laid in France as the Liberation approaches, and the Nazis, at the behest of a German colonel called Von Waldheim, played by the terrific performer Paul Scofield, are collecting great artworks from the Paris museums and shipping them to Berlin by puff-puff!

Burt Lancaster, whom we know so well from The Osterman Weekend and Local Hero, plays Labiche, a railway yardmaster who’s also part of the Resistance! When he’s asked to use his rail-based sabotage network to stop the art train, he initially scoffs! Ha ha, he says, a bunch of paintings aren’t worth the lives of several fellows! But others in his group feel more strongly about it, and when they start acting to slow or stop the train, Labiche has no choice but to join in and do his best to foil the Nazis! Quickly he becomes the number-one enemy to the increasingly art-obsessed Von Waldheim!

Ha ha, I became a big fan of this picture the moment I first saw it, which was actually at an art gallery as part of some kind of film series they were doing! The movie clearly respects, even cherishes, the crucial role of art in human society, but as more and more partisans are killed in the effort to save the Picassos, Cézannes, Braques, Renoirs, Mìros etc. etc. from the Nazis, the tough questions are asked: how many lives are a trainload of paintings worth? Ha ha, or, is that even a fair equation?

Of course the picture has a fantastic French cast: Jeanne Moreau is in there as a wan war widow; Suzanne Flon and Albert Rémy both make appearances, and the great Michel Simon plays the dyspeptic Papa Boule! And there are Germans too of course, most notably Wolfgang Preiss, who was always playing German officers in pictures like Von Ryan’s Express (another wartime train picture, ha ha!), and who plays another one here! He does a particularly good job of it, and is a good foil for Scofield, particularly near the end!

But the puff-puff itself might be the real star! Well, ha ha, I’d give it and Lancaster equal billing I suppose, because both turn in the most extraordinarily physical performances! Lancaster is forever sliding down ladders, leaping on and falling off moving trains, rolling down hills and leaping over gullies, often while in real life suffering from a leg injured when he stepped into a gopher hole while golfing on his day off! Meanwhile the train steams grimly ahead, slipping off sabotaged rails or charging ahead like black lighting, a scream of warning issuing from its whistle!

There’s a great train collision that has to be seen to be believed, and this was accomplished not with models or other trickery, but by simply smashing one real train into another, at speed! Ha ha, my hat is tipped to Frankenheimer, his great camera crew, and all the stunt and trick effects folk who worked so hard to make this spectacle! And we should pour one out to all the cameras that obviously got mangled while capturing, in their last moments, these titanic clashes of steam, wood and metal! Ha ha, this is a fine war picture, and I give The Train three and a half one-franc pieces!

Burl reviews Planes, Trains & Automobiles! (1987)

Ha ha and best of Thanksgivings to my Yankee Doodle friends! Yes, here for you is one of the quintessential American Turkey Day movies, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, which has no particular holiday resonance for me, being Canadian as I am, but is a perfectly enjoyable picture simply on its own merits! I like it better than Uncle Buck, anyway, ha ha!

Anyway, a viewer looking for Canadian content need look no further than John Candy, who alone provides a great deal of content, ha ha! This beloved comedy star, admired for his appearances in pictures like Summer Rental and Armed and Dangerous, and of course that other holiday classic The Silent Partner, plays shower curtain ring salesman Del Griffith, who travels around hawking his wares and making friends everywhere he goes! Meanwhile, uptight Chicago ad man Neal Page, in New York for a presentation, wants to get back to Chi-town to be with his picture-perfect family for the holiday! Neal is played by silver-domed Steve Martin, famed for roles in All of Me and ¡Three Amigos!

This picture is the story of their trouble-filled journey from Wichita, where foul weather forces them to land, to Chicago, and of course there are many delightful happenings along the way, and strong performances from both Martin and Candy! Ha ha, in fact, I think this may be Candy’s best work! Alongside the delights there are plenty of patented John Hughes moves, like the ascension of minor inconvenience to high tragedy when the victim is a white upper middle-class fellow; the absolute fealty to bourgeois family ritual; sudden sledgehammer blows of sentiment; and the use of horror movie tropes like musical stings and oblique cinematography to introduce working class characters, who are supposed to be naturally terrifying, I guess, unless they’re founts of wisdom like Carl the janitor in The Breakfast Club! Ha ha!

It’s a two man show for the most part, but Hughes sprinkles in plenty of cameos and familiar character faces! Kevin Bacon, well known for his appearance in Friday the 13th, shows up as a young businessman trying to get the same cab as Neal; Michael McKean from D.A.R.Y.L. turns up near the end as a highway patrolman; Larry Hankin from Escape From Alcatraz is Doobie the cabbie; Richard Herd from Summer Rental and Gary Riley from Summer School are in there too, along with plenty of others! There are even familiar voices, like that of Chino ‘Fats’ Williams, who is an unseen bus driver here, and was one of the old boys in the blues bar in Weird Science!

Anyway, we all know the story and we all know the jokes, and probably most people feel Planes, Trains & Automobiles is as much a comfy blanket to put on in a cold season as it is a movie! Ha ha! But it raises a lot of questions, too - things that are maybe explained by the rumoured four-and-a-half hour original cut, ha ha! I wonder if that wouldn’t have been a bit much? Anyway, I wonder how it works out after the concluding freeze frame on John Candy’s face: did Del stay for Thanksgiving dinner? Did the in-laws all accept him? Where did he go after that? Who paid for the destroyed rental car? Ha ha, I give editor Paul Hirsch a lot of credit for putting it all together and leaving room for all the comedy smash cuts Hughes was so fond of!

Well, it’s a solid little picture, not beloved by me, but I admit it has a comfy feeling to it! I saw it at the theatre, maybe on not exactly a date but one of those little co-ed gang outings that sometimes happened! Ha ha, I saw The Breakfast Club that way, too, which was apt! In any case, it gave me a fondness for both these Hughes works that I might not have otherwise, and so I give Planes, Trains & Automobiles two and a half pillows!

Burl reviews The Lonedale Operator! (1911)

With a silent ha ha, it’s Burl, here to review The Lonedale Operator, one of the hundreds and dozens of short subjects that D. W. Griffith made in the days before his ambition brought him to make Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, and all the rest of the pictures that made his reputation for both good and ill! Ha ha, I think this might be the first silent picture I've reviewed for you since Eternal Love, and I found it on a compilation tape of old silent railroad dramas! There were a couple of Griffiths on that tape, and a less interesting film about rescuing an old grouch from an oncoming train that was produced by Thomas Edison’s company, and a little mini-documentary on the railroad genre as well!

But The Lonedale Operator was well worth a gander! If you’re anything like me, you’re wondering “Ha ha, but what does he operate? A station? A telephone exchange? A train?” It turns out he’s a telegraph operator, but he’s feeling poorly that day and turns over the operation of his post to his lovely daughter! She’s having an affair of the heart with a train engineer, and they share a happy moment before he zooms off in his iron horse!

The next thing you know another train arrives, this one bearing the payroll! But it’s also bearing something else: two rail-riding hobos who climb down from the rods and observe our pretty young operator hauling the heavy cash bag into the station! Ha ha, they seem to say as they rub their hands together with glee! An easy mark! Or so they think!

The young damsel espies these rascals lurking outside her window and almost falls into a faint, but manages to lock the door just in time! As the scoundrels begin bashing their way into the hut, she hurries to send a telegraph of her predicament to the next station down the line - but the operator there is asleep, the dirty dog! The bandits are that much closer to getting in - the door is starting to buckle! Meanwhile the sleepy telegraph man wakes to hear the frantic beeping! He conveys the situation to the young engineer, who jumps into his train and speeds to the rescue!

But alas, he might be too late! The hobos have crashed through two doors now and are in the telegraph office! But wait! What’s that shiny object in her hand? It must be a gun, and the two would-be thieves are kept at bay until the engineer and his fireman burst in! And what was the metallic item in her hand? Not a gun, but a wrench! The two rapscallions offer humble bows before the bravery and bluffing artistry of the heroic young woman! The end!

So it’s got a pretty good plot, but it’s a noteworthy bit of cinema too, being one of the hundreds of one- and two-reelers Griffith made for Biograph, where he was helping to figure out the visual language of narrative cinema, ha ha! He hadn’t fully gamed out reverse shots yet, or eyelines - the bandits outside the window are not at all in line with where the young woman is looking, for example! But on the other hand there are thrilling shots taken from the train’s tender, and a great early example of crosscutting for suspense! It’s a sweet little country thriller, and I give The Lonedale Operator two and a half enormous black bowties!

Burl reviews Spectre! (2015)

Ha ha and haberdashery, it’s Burl here to review the newest Bond picture, Spectre! This one has the same director as Skyfall, and is a direct follow-up to that movie! In fact, it aims to tie together the last bundle of Bond pictures, but isn’t able to do so without adding in a strong measure of goofiness!

Goofiness is certainly something Bond viewers have seen before, but never has it been so unintentional! The picture opens with Bond, still being played by Daniel “The Adventures of Tintin” Craig, on personal assignment in Mexico City! He’s got a fellow with a little ponytail in his crosshairs, and when you see that ponytail it doesn’t matter what Bond’s reasons for killing him are, because the ponytail is reason enough! Ha ha!

After some swooping helicopter excitement and a ho-hum opening credits sequence (I liked the octopus, don’t get me wrong, but the song was a real snoozer, and the rest Binder-lite!), we get several scenes of Bond being yelled at by his boss, M (now embodied by Ralph “The Grand Budapest Hotel” Fiennes). Bond goes rogue in order to follow up clues and effect the last wishes of the previous M, and he finds himself making sweet love to beautiful ladies and on the run from a bulky henchman who recalls not so much Jaws as Tor Johnson! (Ha ha, and the fight Bond has with this manmountain later in the picture, on a curiously deserted train, ends with a gag stolen wholesale from the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou!)

There’s an alpine clinic of course, and a crazy chase where Bond secures himself an airplane seemingly out of nowhere; and another chase in Rome that’s kind of subdued in a way; and a scene where Bond gets bits drilled out of his brain! Ha ha! And the lovely Léa Seydoux, well-known from Midnight in Paris, turns up as Madeline, the doctor-daughter of a previous bad guy!

It all leads, of course, to S.P.E.C.T.R.E., the criminal organization led by, of course, the cat-stroking madman Blofeld, played by Christoph “Inglorious Bastards” Waltz! Bond and Madeline are on their own against him for a while, there in the desert, but eventually the double-naught spy hooks up with Q (Ben Whishaw from Paddington) and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris from Ninja Assassin) and even M, and they form a team meant, I suppose, to recall the gang from the Mission Impossible pictures! Ha ha, teams are so popular now in pictures! Well, I guess it’s a fad!

The movie goes on longer than I thought it would, and it seemed for a while as if they’d accidentally kept making the movie past the end of this one and into the next picture in the series! And there’s a revelation nearer to the end, and this counts probably as a spoiler for those of you concerned about such things, that Bond and Blofeld are virtually step-brothers, and old Blofie has daddy issues; this, we discover, is what originally set him on a criminal path! This is silly and goofy and adds exactly nothing to the story! I guess they feel they have to add some backstory and gravitas, because that’s another current trend in big-budget action, but let me be the one to say it: not necessary!

There’s a hideout and a big explosion, but then another act’s worth of adventure and intrigue after that! Ha ha, this last section is introduced with a panoramic shot showing the River Thames, the Tower Bridge, Big Ben and the London Eye, accompanied by a title at the bottom of the screen explaining that this particular city is called LONDON! Ha ha, thanks – never would have known it otherwise!

But anyway, this is not the best Bond picture going (not with Moonraker still in existence, ha ha!) but it’s not the worst either (see previous parenthetical comment)! It’s got some excitement, some goofiness and some goofy excitement, and plenty of exquisite styling, and so it qualifies as a night out! I’m going to give Spectre two articulated head drills and a big ha ha! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Tombs of the Blind Dead! (1971)

Hola friends, it’s Burl here with a taste of Iberian horror for you! Yes, I’m here to review the very first installment in the four-film Blind Dead series, Tombs of the Blind Dead! I’d never seen any of these pictures and had always been curious about them; now that I have lived to tell the tale, I can pass on my findings to you!

I knew going in that these were essentially zombie pictures, with the twist being that the zombies are blind! Ha ha, they also ride horses, which I think is a pretty marvelous variation on the theme! They seem to have some kind of an agenda over and above that of the usual zombie, but it remains obscure! Finally, like most zombies these fellows enjoy putting a biting on their victims, but ingestion doesn’t seem to be a part of the program! In other words, these guys don’t bite to eat, they bite for the sheer pleasure of biting! Ha ha!

Well I’ll tell you! I watched the full-length Spanish version of the movie, and I can tell you that there’s a good deal of telenovela about it! It starts with two old school chums, Betty and Virginia, reuniting by chance at a fabulous seaside swimming bath in Lisbon! It seems they used to be very very close with one another, but now Virginia has a muttonchop boyfriend named Roger; or at least he appears to be her boyfriend, though there is much talk about them being “just friends!”

Anyway, all of them end up on the world’s slowest-moving train, and Virginia ends up jumping off and walking to an abandoned medieval town with a lot of its real estate occupied by graveyards! Ha ha! Virginia beds down for the night, but bearded, skeletal monk zombies pop up from their tombs, chase poor Virginia around and put a dreadful biting on her!

She herself is briefly zombified, until a conflagration in a mannequin factory that is; and then the rest of the characters, along with a couple of new ones, end up back in the town; zombie monks; bitings and choppings; Betty is chased back to that slowbones little train, and after an eternity of trying to get her onto the darn choo choo, the old beardos climb on too and put pokings and bitings on everyone! Ha ha, and there’s a definite feeling of apocalypto at the end, as so often in European zombie movies!

The soap opera drags it down a bit, but the zombies are great, and actually pretty scary! They ride horses who can only run in slow motion, and that works pretty well too, even if it looks a bit silly when Betty’s riding one, as she briefly does! It gets a bit rapey, unfortunately, so that interrupted my enjoyment! But there was enjoyment, plenty of it, right from the great swimming pool seen at the beginning! I give Tombs of the Blind Dead two and a half flaming backsides!

Burl reviews Twentieth Century! (1934)

By jimbus and by goo, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to look at a classic picture made long ago by one of cinema’s grand innovators, Howard Hawks! I’m tempted to say that Twentieth Century is an atypical Hawks picture, but the man was so incredibly versatile – he took successful stabs at action, screwball comedy, horror/sci-fi, war movies, films noir and westerns, after all – that I’m not so sure there is any such thing as an atypical Hawks picture!

This one is a comedy, though not particularly screwball! It’s a pretty good satire of showbiz personalities, though, and a train picture on top of that! Ha ha, I sure do love a good train picture! It starts with the great and gorgeous Carole Lombard playing Plotka, a would-be actress working on her first Broadway play! The director is the moody and tyrannical Oscar Jaffe, played by le grand jambon John Barrymore; Jaffe is in a Svengaliish frame of mind, and changes Plotka’s name to Lily Garland before first seducing her and then making her a big star!

Ha ha, cut to three years later when Jaffe and Lily are still an item, and have done three hit plays together, but are at each other’s throats! Jaffe is a terrible control freak and manipulator, and poor Lily is tired of it! So off she goes to Hollywood and becomes a big movie star there! We move forward in time again, and now Jaffe’s star has fallen, and he has to escape creditors in Chicago by donning whiskers and talking like Colonel Sanders! Ha ha, it’s great!

The rest of the movie takes place on the titular train, and I do admit that I’d assumed the whole picture took place on the train! So for a while there, through the first half, as much as I was enjoying it all, I was sort of wondering “Ha ha, where’s the train?” But don’t worry, because there’s plenty of train action! It’s packed with characters too, like the nutty evangelist, the goofy acting troupe and so forth! And of course there’s a Bellamy, which is to say a milquetoast pretender to the leading lady’s affections, who doesn’t stand a chance when set against the outrageous antics of the male star! Ha ha, he’s not actually played by Ralph Bellamy here, but close enough!

It’s a funny movie with that rip-roaring Hawksian verve and a hee-larious central performance from Barrymore! And it’s a train movie, like Human Desire, and you know how much I love those! There are some great supporting actors too, like Edgar Kennedy who was in Cosmo Jones, Crime Smasher, George Reed, who was in Strange Illusion, and Charles Lane, who had a long career and was in everything! Ha ha!

It’s a terrific picture, and I recommend you have a look at it when you get a chance! I’m going to give Twentieth Century three and a half iron doors!

Burl reviews Von Ryan's Express! (1965)

Burl reporting for duty! Ha ha, yes, I’m here to review a war movie, though I guess a specification ought to be made before we go any further: it’s more an adventure story with the war – World War II, that is – as a backdrop! That seems to me an important distinction, even if movies purporting to recreate some actual wartime event are usually as full of fake heroics and jumped-up drama as the totally fictional adventure stories!

Well, there’s a taste of reality in Von Ryan’s Express anyway, since the first part of it deals with a POW camp in occupied Italy, and the novel on which the movie’s based was by a guy who actually spent a lot of time in just such a camp! The story begins as Yankee flier Colonel Frank Sinatra is shot down and imprisoned in the camp, which is mostly filled with Tommies who’ve been there for years and are constantly trying to escape! It’s of course their duty to do so, as we know from The Great Escape! But Sinatra is certain that liberation is near, and his determination to play nice with his captors and wait it out earns him the Teutonic prefix Von! Major Trevor Howard spends most of the picture pretty disgusted with Sinatra’s approach!

Well, Sinatra makes his mistakes, of that you can be sure! But there’s a bust out and a fairly quick recapture, and the whole prison camp of men end up in boxcars on a train bound for Germany! That’s a place none of them are in a particular hurry to visit, at least not as prisoners! So they commandeer the thing, and it becomes the express train of the title!

I’m a lover of microgenres as you know, and there are maybe just enough WWII train movies to form one! Of course the other big taco in this category is John Frankenheimer’s The Train, a movie that came out a year before this one and which I unabashedly am wild about! That’s the one where Burt Lancaster plays a Free French partisan whose day job is yardmaster of a Paris railyard! He gets persuaded to stop a Nazi train full of stolen art, and the movie becomes a great action/suspense tale with actual speeding locomotives smashing into one another in titanic crashes of steaming, screeching metal! It’s amazing, and Frankenheimer’s trains have a heavy, monumental tactility the one in Von Ryan’s Express sadly lacks!

But it’s a pretty enjoyable yarn nonetheless! Sinatra is pretty decent, and of course Wolfgang Priess is in there as a Nazi, same as he was in The Train! There are a few lapses in logic here and there (how did they unhook the flaming boxcars and reattach the coach car in such a short time?), but Mark Robson, who started his career making excellent Val Lewton pictures like The 7th Victim and ended it with another train movie, the crazy Avalanche Express, does a pretty decent job with the suspense scenes! I give this movie two and a half formations of completely naked men!

Burl reviews Human Desire! (1954)

Ha ha, hello there! It’s Burl! Have I ever told you how much I appreciate the films of Fritz Lang? Probably! But have I told you how feverishly I enjoy the microgenre of train movies? I don’t think I have! I’ve always admired the great Runaway Train, and when I saw the fantastic John Frankenheimer movie The Train, I knew I had seen something special! Of course I really like train-set murder mysteries like Murder on the Orient Express or The Lady Vanishes, or even comedies like Silver Streak and The Darjeeling Limited, but I particularly like train movies where there’s tons of insider detail on the mechanics of running trains! The Frankenheimer picture is certainly like that!

And so is Human Desire, which you’ll be pleased to hear is a Fritz Lang train movie! In fact it’s a choo-choo noir, which is a great and natural combo, ha ha! It’s based on Émile Zola’s novel La Bête Humaine, but the story was changed around quite a bit! Instead of a psychotic woman-hating killer of ladies, the main character, played here by Glenn Ford, is now a fairly goody two-shoes Korean War veteran train engineer who becomes a typically noir-ish obsessive man-patsy weakling in the blink of an eye, and then towards the end returns to his earlier persona in another blink! Ha ha, they also remove the train crashes and multiple murders at the end, which is too bad! I’ll have to check out the Jean Renoir version to see if they stay truer to the book!

But this movie has plenty of its own virtues! It’s set mostly in and around the train yards of some unidentified small town, and begins with Glenn Ford returning from war and starting back at his old train engineer job! He stays at his old buddy’s house, where the buddy’s beautiful daughter has a crush on him! But meanwhile, Broderick Crawford, the deputy assistant yard master, has been fired from his job and gets his wife Gloria Grahame to meet with a powerful man of her acquaintance in order to get it back!

But Broderick Crawford (whom of course we know from The Vulture) is insanely jealous, and gets it into his head that his wife has had an affair with this rich man, and so, with her unwilling complicity, he pokes the guy with a knife one night on a train! Glenn Ford happens to be on this train too, smoking, and he pretty quickly falls in love with Gloria Grahame! It’s a little unbelievable how quickly it happens actually – blink and you’ll miss it! I must have blinked, in fact! As their love develops, monster-hubby Broderick becomes a meaner and more pitiful drunk, eventually losing his job once again! Glenn, pixilated by love, plots a murder, but it doesn’t quite go as planned! Of course it all ends on the train, but not in the way that I expected!

Well, as far as Fritz Lang goes, this is no M, that’s for sure! It’s not even a Big Heat, which he made a year earlier and which also starred Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame! As I’ve mentioned, the Ford-Grahame romance is kind of unbelievable, and maybe it’s that Ford just wasn’t able to radiate that cowardly pushover desperation vibe that’s so vital to noir men in this situation! You’d think if Fred MacMurray could do it anyone could, but I guess it’s just not that easy! There’s also a little bit of sloppy mise-en-scene here and there in the movie, which is very unlike our Uncle Fritz!

The main problem I think is that Lang just plain didn’t believe in this picture! He didn’t even like the title, for which I don’t blame him one bit – it should have been called That’s Railroading, which is a great line we hear from a minor character early in the film! Also, there was disagreement between Lang and his producer, Jerry Wald, over just what la bête humaine actually was! Lang thought it referred to the beast inside all humans, whereas Wald though it meant women were the human beasts! And so they try to cram the Gloria Grahame character into the typical scheming femme fatale mould when she’s actually not that at all!

No, her character gets a real raw deal in this picture! She tells a few fibs and attempts a little manipulation, but mostly is on the level and is just trying to get by! She gets stymied by nasty men at every turn and I’m sad to report that it doesn’t end very happily for her! I have to say, I don’t think it was very fair! No, not fair at all! But because I love all the train stuff and because there’s plenty of good acting – Broderick maybe overdoes the drunk act a bit, but he and Ford and especially Gloria Grahame are all very solid – I give Human Desire three deadhead trips back home!