PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Dr Renault's Secret 1942

 

I noticed this 1942 SF horror movie on Netflix a while back, put it in my queue, and it finally arrived in the mail today. Dr Renault's Secret was written by William Bruckner and Robert F Metzler and directed by Harry Lachman. It was the last feature film for William, he would go on to direct a lot of TV, including episodes of The Lone Ranger, The Loretta Young Show, Maverick, Surfside 6 and Bonanza. Robert didn't write much else and I haven't seen any of it. It was the last feature from Harry, he'd direct a short in 1953 and pass away in 1975. Before Dr Renault's Secret Harry directed a few of the Charlie Chan pictures but nothing else I recognize as having seen, except possibly one of the George White's Scandals.

The story is set in France. Dr Larry Forbes, played by Shepperd Strudwick, visits the home of his fiancée Madelon, played by Lynne Roberts, and her father Dr  Renault, played by George Zucco. They have a servant named Noel, played by J Carrol Naish, who lives in the house, and a gardener called Rogell, played by Mike Mazurki, who lives in a shed. Dr Renault is a bit secret of his work. Noel is a bit jealous of Forbes taking Madelon away from the house. Rogell is up to something on top of that. A giant stay Great Dane mauls Noel's hands and winds up hung in the night. There's a couple of murders and some creepy folk running about. Noel's big secret comes out and more sad shit happens. There's a stack of corpses when it finishes up, a lot of strangling going on.

It's a good solid piece of entertainment. It looks pretty good for fairly low budget 58 minute B-picture, it was part of a double bill with The Undying Monster. Some say Fox was trying to cash in on the money that Universal, and some of the other studios, were making from horror pictures. Good for them for taking advantage of public whim, it certainly can change at a moments notice. I'm certainly pleased to see good films being made in a genre I like. Dr Renault's Secret might not be more than a B-movie but it delivers a good story and I was glad to have taken a look.

The Titfield Thunderbolt 1953

I quit watching Westerns to check out The Titfield Thunderbolt last evening. It's a 1953 Ealing Studio production. It's their first comedy filmed in Technicolor and one of the first in the country. It was written by T E B Clarke who had read of volunteers restoring the first heritage railway, the Talyllyn Railway in Wales. Clarke wrote other films for Ealing but I haven't seen most of them. I have seen The Lavender Hill Mob, Passport To Pimlico, and Who Done It? The movie was directed by Charles Crichton, who had previously directed The Lavender Hill Mob and would later direct A Fish Called Wanda. He would also direct episodes of Danger Man, Man In A Suitcase, The Avengers, Space: 1999 and Dick Turpin as well as other popular British TV programs.

The Titfield Thunderbolt is about problems that arise when the government decides to close the line and the locals volunteer to keep it going themselves. shares the type of plot that Westerns use a lot, baddies trying to sabotage the local attempt to save the railroad so that they can profit from their bus service. Stanley Holloway, George Relph, John Gregson, Sidney James, Hugh Griffith, Edie Martin, Jack MacGowran are among the cast.

The baddies enlist the local steam roller driver, played by one of my favorite character actors, the legendary Sid James. He attacks the train with his steam roller.

Sid loses. Later he helps the baddies pull the train out of the station and down a sabotaged side line. After that train has been wrecked, the local train buffs borrow the original Thunderbolt from the museum and use it to run the inspection test. They win the right to run a rail line.

That's the Liverpool and Manchester Railway locomotive LMR 57 Lion playing the Thunderbolt. It was built in 1838, 9 years after Stevenson's Rocket, and it ran well enough in 1953 to do all it's own scenes. It was slightly damaged during one scene in the film. If you go to the Museum of Liverpool you can see the damage to this day.

I found it a fun movie and one worth adding to my collection. There's a recently restored version on Blu-ray that might be worth getting. Unfortunately, it;s only available in the UK and you need an all region Blu-ray to watch here in the US. As you might imagine, getting one is on my list of things to do, I already have a Blu-Ray from the UK I can't play yet. It comes with a DVD so I'm atleast covered until an all region Blu-ray player comes here. It then opens the doors to even more films. Just what I need more stuff to watch..

Western Wednesday 36

I thought I'd watch as many of my massive stock of Western DVDs as I could today. First up She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, a 1949 Western directed by John Ford and the screenplay is by Frank Nugent and Laurence Stallings. Ford is well know for his Westerns, they stand out among the rest. Frank wrote several films for Ford and John Wayne, Fort Apache, 3 Godfathers, The Quiet Man, Donovan's Reef and The Searchers. He also wrote the screenplay to Mister Roberts. I always liked that movie, I read the book before I saw the movie. Laurence's output isn't something I'm familiar with, I see he wrote this and 3 Godfathers with Frank but nothing else.

It's 1876 and it's a short time after the battle of Little Big Horn. The battle and the death of Custer have emboldened the young men of the local Apache, Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. They are off the reservation and attacking white men. John Wayne plays Captain Brittles, who's got a week to go before he retires. He gets an order to take a troop out and deliver the wife and daughter of his commander to the stagecoach line. They have Indian trouble along the way and find the station attacked and the stage burned. Brittles devises a plan to stop the braves from fighting and it works. He retires and rides off into the sunset.

Don't worry the Army isn't done with Captain Brittles. John was 41 at the time the movie was made and he plays a man in his 60s. He does a great job and it's one of the many movies that really show how good an actor he can be. It's one of John's favorite roles. There's a good cast; Joanne Dru, John Agar, Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr, Victor McLaglen and Mildred Natwick were the ones I knew. There's plenty of gorgeous scenery in Monument Valley. It's a good entertaining story that's worth seeing.

Cast A Long Shadow is a 1959 Western with Audie Murphy as a man who inherits a big ranch when the man who might be his father died. It's directed by Thomas Carr and written by Martin Goldsmith and John McGreevey. Walter Mirisch is the producer for a company he owned with Audie Murphy.

John Denher is the foreman of the ranch and he'd been on Audie's trail for 5 weeks when he finds him gambling in a cantina. He brings Audie back to the big ranch so the men that worked there can buy him out and he can go on drinking. Audie meets up with his old girlfriend, played by Terry Moore, and he changes his mind about selling the ranch. Trouble is, they need to get 3000 head of cattle to Santa Fe in a week to make enough money to keep the bank from foreclosing. There's a lot of tension and hard feelings as Audie acts the big cold hearted boss on the trail. It all works itself out in the end, though the third act is like a summary of what happened, Audie regains his humanity in a stampede, literally and figuratively. It was still an OK movie but you sure wasn't as good as the first movie I watched today.

The Alamo is John Wayne's movie, he directed and starred in this 1960 historical Western. I say historical, only in that it's based on something that happened in the past. I read on the Wikipedia that some say there's really nothing much that really happened depicted in the movie but I kind of expect that from a Hollywood historical drama. It was the first movie he directed, The Green Berets was the second, though he has some uncredited directing on three other movies. James Edward Grant wrote the script. It's a long film that used to be longer. The DVD I have is 162 minutes and the original release was 202 minutes, much of that longer time was musical overture, intermission and end music. I don't feel I'm missing anything by not seeing the longer version, even John Wayne said it was too long. It's a movie that only ends badly for everyone at the place. It's not going to be one of my favorites, that's for sure, but it's OK. I'll keep the DVD but I doubt I'll get around to watching it again.

The Proud Ones is a 1956 Robert Ryan Western. He's a sheriff in a small town and he's dating the lovely Virginia Mayo. It's nice to see him as a good guy. Jeffrey Hunter is the son of a man Robert killed in another town. Jeff's dad was a skunk gunfighter working for Robert Middleton, a gambler that run a dirty saloon. Ryan moved away and some time later Middleton has moved to the same town. Ryan's got problems, a scared deputy who quits and dizzy spells that blur his vision. Things get tense but Jeff sides with Ryan and takes a job in the sheriff's office. It's a good story, with a good shoot out in a barn at the end. The script was by Edmund H North and Joseph Petracca. They adapted the novel by Verne Athanas. Robert D Webb is the director. 

Francis Goes To The Races

When looking at what next to watch and decided to watch another of the Francis movies. I was mildly surprised to find that it was another movie about horse racing. Francis Goes To The Races is the second in the Francis The Talking Mule series. Like the first it was directed by Arthur Lubin, working from a script by Oscar Brodney.

Donald has lost his job when his boss discovers Francis talks. He stumbles into a job at a race track because he can get inside info from Francis. Piper Laurie is the daughter of Cecil Kellaway, the owner of the stable. Cecil owes money to a sharpie played by Hayden Rorke. Hayden takes all of Cecil's horses but Piper asks Donald to buy one back. He buys a different horse and the police, Jessie White in a rumpled suit, comes calling at Cecil's request. Donald, acting on a tip from Francis, bets the races and wins enough money to make Jessie notice. He tries to buy the horse back from Cecil but he doesn't want to sell. Then a gangster kidnaps Donald to find out how he won the 7 races. It gets hairy for Donald as things don't go so well and the gangster is out 200Gs. Lucky for Donald the gangster doesn't kill him. Donald and Francis team up with Cecil and Piper to turn the horse into a winner. It's about as entertaining as the first. Good for a laugh, always a good thing.

Sorrowful Jones 1949

Sorrowful Jones is a 1949 Bob Hope movie that's an adaptation of the Damon Runyon story Little Miss Marker. The story was adapted for a 1934 movie with Shirley Temple. Sorrowful Jones had a big gang of writers to beat the story into a screenplay but only one director, Sidney Lanfield. Sidney directed quite a few movies over his career, the 1939 The Hound Of The Baskervilles, the 1951 Bob Hope movie The Lemon Drop Kid, and near the end of his career he directed 48 episodes of The Addam's Family.

Bob plays Sorrowful Jones, a horse racing bookie who has a shop hidden behind a barbershop. William Demarest is Sorrowful's partner in the bookie shop. Mary Jane Saunders is the little girl, Martha Jane Smith, who gets left behind at the shop while her gambling addicted father goes off to borrow 20 bucks to bet on the sure thing. The trouble is Mr Smith went to borrow 20 bucks from crooked nightclub owner Big Steve. Mr Smith overhears of a big fix and winds up in the river with three slugs in his torso. Now Sorrowful is stuck with Martha Jane but he gets a hand from his ex-gal Lucille Ball. Big Steve has dirty plans to make some money fixing races by doping his own horse with a speedball and of course Sorrowful is drawn right into the middle of it. It gets a bit more complicated until the pretty much happy ending. It's good hearted and lightweight fun. The movie shares a disc with The Paleface but I watched that recently so I don't need to watch it right now.

Science Fiction Sunday 469

I had picked up the Aliens Vs Humans three pack of Full Moon movies for 3 bucks. Each movie has it's own disc. I had already watched Seed People a couple of months ago, I had seen a copy on YouTube, and didn't really need it, but now I have it. It's not a good movie, barely average. I was really more interested in the copies of Oblivion and Oblivion 2: Backlash. I was sure I had seen Oblivion but Watched Movie List says no. Well, I might have seen it and forgot, or not seen it, and the memory is going. No matter, they both are on the list now.

Oblivion came out in 1994 and it's based on an original story by Charles Band. Three other guys wrote the story again and Peter David wrote the screenplay. Yes, the same Peter David who would go onto write a couple of episodes of Babylon 5 and an episode of Crusade. Most of his other work seems to be tied into Marvel TV programs which I haven't watched. Sam Irwin is the director. I haven't seen much of his work, besides the two Oblivion movies, but I did see Elvira's Haunted Hills. Oblivion 2: Backlash had the same people work on that film, the movies were shot back to back in Romania, and it came out in 1996. It explains how the town looked exactly the same in the sequel.

The story is set in a Western style town on a distant planet. It's like some crazy aliens copied the wild west but didn't quite get it right. Humans and aliens populate the place. In typical Western fashion, a baddie comes to town and tries to take it over. The sheriff is killed and his coward son comes back to town with a philosophical Indian in tow. Andrew Divoff plays Red Eye, the eye patched alien on the poster. He killed the Sheriff and it's only fair that monster scorpions eat him as punishment.

That's them ripping his torso in two before they stuff the bloody bits into their giant maws. I did like the giant scorpions stop motion animated by David Allen Productions' Joel Fletcher. The movie needed more giant monsters. Luckily there's another in the sequel.

Since it follows the Western kind of plot, the baddies will get what's coming too them, except for the lady on the left. That's Lash, she features in the sequel.

The jokes are kind of weak but so is the script. The location and sets are fairly descent, you can get a lot for your US dollar in Romania. The actors are mostly OK but I suspect they aren't given much rehearsal time or second takes. George Takei plays the drunken town doctor, Julie Newmar plays Miss Kitty, the saloon owner, Carel Struycken plays the undertaker, Meg Foster plays the cyborg deputy - called Stell Barr, Musetta Vander plays Lash, and Isaac Hayes plays the bartender. Some of them could have used more direction, or something, I'm not sure what. It's pretty much the same for the sequel.

I got a few laughs and in general was happy to have the movies. I doubt I'll get around to them again too soon but at less than a buck each, who cares.

Travel Man 48 Hours In... Series 6

You can see the four episodes of Series 6 of Travel Man 48 Hours In... with Richard Ayoade on YouTube. Richard is joined in a different city each episode for a 48 hour mini-vacation.

Matt Lucas in Rome. The guys at gladiator school. They got certificates.

Sara Pascoe in Valencia.

Joe Lycett in Amsterdam.

Sally Phillips in Stockholm.They are in a bar that is made of ice. You're only allowed to stay for a while, then you have to leave.

There will be a Christmas Special sometime in December and John Hamm will travel to Hong Kong with Richard. There's interesting scenery, cityscapes and gags. I've enjoyed the series as it's been coming out.

Friday Night Movies 660

OSS 117 Se Dechaine is a 1963 French-Italian spy film that goes under the name OSS 117 Is Unleashed here in the USA. I hadn't ever heard of the series, that I remember, but I don't follow the spy genre as a rule. I liked the James Bond films when I first saw them in the 60s. I went on to read the novels back in the 70s. I re-read a few about 10 years ago and found they were still entertaining. I more prone to liking the James Bond style of spy film. I even went and bought the Blu-set of the Bond films. When it comes to more serious spy films I find I can take or leave them. I often I find the John LeCarre type story a bit of a bore. OSS 117 Se Dechaine leans toward the James Bond type of story but it's not quite as accomplished. I think that might be why hardly anyone I know here seems to have heard of them. Still, hard to keep up with all of film.

Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath is the secret agent in the OSS 117 series of 88 books by Jean Bruce. He started writing them in 1949, 4 years before Bond, and after dying in a car crash in 1963, Bruce's wife wrote 143 more novels over the next 22 years. Bruce's daughter and her hubby wrote 23 more novels from 1987 to 1992. There was a 1956 film adaptation but that isn't included in the 5 film set I picked up. I had seen the 2006 and 2009 French parodies of the series, and I enjoyed those, but I knew that the older films are serious. After seeing some clips on YouTube I decided to take a chance on the set. Sometimes you just get a gut feeling that you need to see something. Nothing rational about it.

OSS 117 Se Dechaine was based on two novels by Jean Bruce. That isn't one of them to the left, it was the most Fu Manchu like cover of the bunch on Amazon. So I harvested it for here. The movie has a screenplay by Raymond Borel, Pierre Foucard and director Andre Hunebelle. Andre would direct the next 3 sequels in the OSS 117 series. One of the two comments on the film's IMDb page says that he'd read the books and the film stays somewhat true to the story and characters. Nice to know, even if I bought a copy of an OSS 117 book, I wouldn't be able to read it, all the ones listed on Amazon are in French. They got plenty of different books, some at high prices, some for $4-6 each.

Kerwin Matthew's plays Hubert in the 1963 film, and the first sequel. Hubert is one for the ladies, he's always on the make. Hubert's boss at the OSS cock blocks Hubert, who was seducing the Boss's assistant, and sends him to investigate the death of an American agent. The agent had been scuba diving and didn't come back. The man with the boat lies and tries to cover up the death of the agent. There's a fair bit of diving in the movie, set against the backdrop of the interesting looking cliffs of Corsica.The scenery of Corsica is pretty too.

That's the agent in the middle and baddies on either side of him. The guy on the left is the boat owner, he's a hired hand who's  more stupid than evil, greed drives him. The blonde is in it up to her eyeballs but she's a bit of a cliche, the good person in a bad spot. She's tied up with one group, the American's are involved, the French, and maybe others. It's still not an overly complicated story, the baddies are up to something in a secret cave, Hubert and his allies put a stop to that. Back to the seducing.

I enjoyed the movie. While it might not have the polish of a James Bond film, it does OK. The only complaint I had was the fights. They need some better fights. Maybe we'll see an improvement in the next films.

The Vampire's Ghost is a 1945 Republic film that's based on John William Polidori's story The Vampyre. Leigh Brackett wrote the screenplay with John K Butler, the director was Lesley Selander. Lesley directed a lot of Westerns, with a lot of the popular Cowboy stars of the 30s and 40s. I've seen a few of them. TVG is really short and until recently the only way to buy the movie was from the bootleggers. Sadly Olive films have packaged it at a high price that might mean many won't bother. You can see a copy posted on Daily Motion in the link in the title above. 

That's John Abbott, Charles Gordon and Peggy Stewart on the lobby card. John plays the owner of a bar in a tiny African port town. He's secretly a 400 year old vampire who is getting tired of the life, or lack of it. He's always having to move, once the locals start to notice the blood drained bodies piling up. Charles is the captain of a ship and Peggy dances in the bar. She's quite the beauty.

There have been a trio of death's before the movie starts and the locals are pounding the drums non-stop. How annoying that would be, yet another reason to stay out of the jungle. John tries to keep from being discovered but eventually it all comes out.

It's not a bad film. Though the sets are the fakey jungle of the low budget studio, there's a good bit of story here to keep you from spending too much time on the flaws. The actors are all pretty good, one of advantages to the studio system, people get plenty of chance to learn their craft by working.

John Abbott is an interesting choice for the vampire but he does well. John was born in London in 1905 and before he was in the movies he was a well known Shakespearean actor in the UK. You might have seen John is any of the 2-300 movies and TV episodes he'd been in over his 48 year film career. He started making films in 1936 and he retired when he was about 80. He died 10 years later, in 1995.

Woman In The Dunes

I noticed that there's a fairly good looking copy of Woman In The Dunes on YouTube. If you haven't see it, it's worth a look. Woman In The Dunes is directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara and it came out in 1964. There was a 1962 novel by Kōbō Abe that was adapted by the screenwriters Eiji Okada and Kyōko Kishida. Below Woman In The Dunes are a list of other Japanese films, some of them are worth a look: Onibaba, The Pornographers, Sansho the Bailiff, and others I haven't seen.

Francis 1950

I got the complete Francis The Talking Mule series from the library. There are 7 movies in the series, the first is Francis. It's based on the 1946 novel by David Stern, who also wrote the 1950 screenplay. It's directed by Arthur Lubin who would go on to direct the next 5 Francis movies. He's directed plenty of movies, including a few for Abbott and Costello. I watched his film The Incredible Mr Limpet recently. He would direct 131 episodes of Mr Ed.

Donald O'Connor, Patricia Medina, Zasu Pitts, Ray Collins, John McIntyre, Frank Faylen, Tony Curtis, Chill Wills as the voice of Francis and Molly plays Francis. Donald seems to be channeling Jerry Lewis in the early scenes of the movie but he settles down after a bit. If you don't pay attention you'll miss Frank and Tony but Ray and Zasu have nice size parts.

The movie starts with Donald working at a bank and people wondering about him. His boss wonders what's going on and Donald tells him about meeting Francis during the war. Donald was a second Lieutenant in the Army and serving in Burma. Francis helps Donald with some intelligence and Donald gets sent  over to G2. Francis wants to keep his talking secret but it gets out. It ends with Donald introducing Francis to his boss, who passes it out. It's no laugh riot but it's still enjoyable. I'll be getting to the rest as soon as I can.