Tonight it was me and Joe over at Joe's watching his new 50 inch Samsung. It's really nice. Nice sharp clean picture. Now what to watch? I picked our first feature Rio Bravo from a pile of dvd's Joe had sitting on a table. He wanted to watch them again soon. Glad to help out. RB is a 1959 Howard Hawks movie starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickenson, and Walter Brennan. The plot is pretty much your standard western type. Some good guys are fighting some bad guys. There's usually a bad rancher or rich guy who runs things, or wants to run things. It's John Russell in this movie, and he's got 30 goons working for him. John Wayne, Dean Martin and Walter Brennan live in a little town. They're the good guys and there's only three of them. John's the sheriff and Walter is the old grumpy deputy named Stumpy. He's old and crusty and he has a bad leg. Dean was the deputy but he got all fucked up over a woman and drank himself into the gutter. When we first meet him he's trying to cage a drink in one of the town's saloons. Claude Atkins, John Russell's brother, is a mean cus who tosses a dollar into the spittoon. It starts a fight and Claude kills a guy for touching his arm. He's a real dick. John tosses him into jail to wait for the Federal Marshall to come pick him up. Six days to wait with the evil brother breathing down his neck. It starts with bad guys loitering in the street, then one of them bushwacks Ward Bond while he's walking down the street. He was a pal of John Wayne's who told the locals they should help the Sheriff. The situation helps bring Dean out of his drunken state and he cleans up real good. I have always been a Dean Martin fan and he was the real reason I wanted to watch the movie. I am sure I had seen it back in the days I used to live in Winnipeg, pre-1978, but I am sure it would have been on tv and all cut up. It's a longish movie, 141 minutes, and most of them are pretty entertaining. There's a bit of a romance between John and Angie Dickenson. Ricky Nelson and Dean sing some cowboy songs. There's some good fights and even some explosions. I'm going to have to pick up a copy for myself someday. I'd watch that gain.
I'm pretty sure I hadn't seen Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 The Lady Vanishes. I might have seen it years ago but it was pretty new to me. A young woman is travelling through Europe and gets stuck overnight in a small town in the Swiss Alps. I love that hotel. She befriends an older lady who is heading back to England. Micheal Redgraves is a young man who is collecting folk music for a book he's writing. There is some comedy at the start of the film. Lots of silly stuff in the hotel where the stuck travellers are holed up for the night. The train is to be freed from the avalanche in the morning. Two English guys are travelling to England and they are worried they won't get back for some important cricket matches. Our heroine is knocked on the head by a falling planter. She keeps passing out. She gets on the train with the others and her and the older lady find themselves in a compartment with some pretty odd characters. She slips into unconsciousness. When she wakes up the older lady is gone and no one believes she was there in the first place. Michael Regrave to the rescue. They gather facts and unravel the reason for the disappearance of Mrs. Floy, the older lady. There's a pretty good fight in the baggage car and a shoot out with some soldiers. It was a pretty good movie and one I would add to my collection. I am betting it will turn up on TCM some time in the future.
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