Wise Watch: A Game of Death (1945)

Watched:  01/27/2026

Format:  YouTube

Viewing:  First

Director:  Robert Wise

Technically I should have watched The Body Snatcher (1945) next in my Robert Wise movie marathon, but I just watched that in April, so I'm going to save it for October.  It's a solid horror entry, so let's do that in the spooky season.

So, instead, I found A Game of Death (1945) on YouTube.*

Minimal surprises here, really.  It's an adaptation of the Richard Connell short story The Most Dangerous Game, which might as well be called "the most frequently adapted/ riffed upon/ re-done plot in movies".  

A wartime-era movie, it stars people who were not part of the war effort, and the only familiar face was Audrey Long, who will also be in the movie again in two movies when we hit Born to Kill.  Our lead is John Loder, who, honestly I simply don't recognize, but he's in Now Voyager, so.  

I give Robert Wise and RKO a lot of credit here.  They don't shy away from the implications of the film, or how psychotic everything is, even if they give our villain an out - that he's suffering some sort of mental instability since he got crosswise with a Cape Buffalo that bonked him on the head.**

But the vibe of the movie is dark from the start as we watch a ship get tricked into wrecking itself, and swiftly realize it was intentional, everyone else is dead, and what our hero has walked into.  And what plans our villain (Edgar Barrier) has for the stranded woman once he offs her brother.  

The two servants are appropriately creepy, Gene Roth playing the cruel German henchman and Hollywood utility player Noble Johnson.  

The hunt sequence makes excellent use of someone's jungle sets, and Wise puts the camera behind the hunted in some visually striking sequences.  

All in all, the movie is fine.  It feels smarter than you'd expect here and there - allowing our hero to never be an idiot or be more than a step behind the audience and what it knows, and maybe a few steps ahead.  

The one thing I'd say that could have been hilarious would have been if when the villain gives our hero a knife before sending him into the jungle, if dude would have stabbed the baddie right there and proclaimed himself the winner.   I honestly don't know why he didn't.  

*I now have a policy of "it's fine" if I watch a movie on YouTube that has been uploaded by someone unofficial.  Look, the studios are refusing to make a lot of movies available via legitimate means, which means they've abandoned both the movies and the audience for those movies.  If they want money, they need to stop letting accountants drive decisions regarding access.  They can put the movie on YouTube as easily as MovieFiend668 or whatever

**I just recently watched a YouTube on how dangerous Cape Buffalo are - and they're responsible for an absurd number of human deaths each year.

Noir Watch: Shield for Murder (1954)

Watched:  01/26/2026

Format:  TCM Noir Alley

Viewing:  First

Directors:  Edmond O'Brien and Howard W. Koch

This movie has some really interesting stuff, and maybe exploits some of the actual issues cops deal with for entertainment and shock value.  It's not the best movie - it drags in some places and feels like it's stretching to reach feature length once you kind of see where all of this is going.  But thematically, it's right there in the mix with the darker noir films.

Police detective Barney Nolan (Edmond O'Brien) kills a man in an alley and takes a stack of money off of him - $25,000 (roughly $300K in 2025 dollars).  He tells his pal and fellow cop Mark (John Agar - the ex Mr. Shirley Temple) that he was trying to bring in the bookmaker, but things got messy and shots were fired.

Soon after, Barney is picking up his young girlfriend, Patty (Marla English) and showing her a model home he says he'll buy.  Meanwhile, he hides the money beneath the house.

A pair of Private Eyes, thugs from the gangster who the money belonged to, start snooping around.  And a witness comes forward who saw everything, and Barney can't have that.

The movie has a scene with a platinum blonde Carolyn Jones as a bar fly.  

The basic gist of the film is a character study of a cop who has always been a good guy, but he's worn down by everything he's seen, and the knowledge he'll never get ahead while the crooks run around with $25,000.  How far will he go for his slice of the pie?  And how crazy will it make him?

As Eddie Muller hinted at during the intro, it just doesn't seem like Edmond O'Brien is anyone's favorite - and I'm probably in agreement.  He's not a bad actor, he's just not a favorite, but he's in enough noir films, he starred in two of three I watched this weekend.  Clearly this movie meant a lot to him, and he directs himself just fine here.  But never has it been more clear that a star was twice the age of the woman he's paired with and with so little chemistry.  It's just hard to buy.

There are some dynamite sequences, like a brutal sequence where we realize how far gone O'Brien is when he's cornered by the detectives in an Italian restaurant.  And a shoot-out at an indoor pool.

Anyhoo, I've seen that poster above for years and never came across the movie itself, so it's a delight to finally watch the thing.  

Texas Noir Watch: The Houston Story (1956)

Watched:  01/25/2026

Format:  YouTube

Viewing:  First

Director: William Castle

The funny thing about The Houston Story (1956) is that there's probably a good idea for a movie in here, somewhere between a less dumb and horny Landman and less intense There Will Be Blood, but the script is so phoned in, it's both a mess and a little too pat.  But it does make Della Street (aka: Barbara Hale) seem like a bombshell, so it has that going for it.

It took me a minute to realize this is the kind of movie where our lead is a true noir protagonist - he's not on the side of the angels, he's a guy who's seen an angle and he's pursuing it to the top.  I read Lee J. Cobb was originally slated to play the role, and I can see that completely.  Instead we get Gene Barry - who is good! - but who didn't give "morally ambiguous POV character" in the first ten minutes of the movie.

Essentially, Barry plays an oil-field worker.  He gets the attention of the Houston mob by identifying a corpse found beneath the "docks of Houston" as a woman he know in Oklahoma.  However - that isn't who it is.  Barry happens to know that the woman he's named is actually living in Houston under the name Zoe Crane and mixed up with a second-banana mobster.  

Totter Noir Watch: Man In The Dark (1953)

Watched:  01/24/2026

Format:  YouTube

Viewing:  First

Director:  Lew Landers

I always like a movie that's entire premise is based on 1950's-era psychological science.  

Edmond O'Brien plays a former gangster who has been pinched.  Facing a minimum 10 year stretch, he agrees to a bit of Clockwork Orange scientification.  A doctor is going to perform surgery on his brain to remove his criminal element or some such.

On the other side of the surgery, he can't remember who he was or what he used to do, and is no longer a shady crook, I guess.  From a detective for an insurance company, we learn O'Brien boosted $130K prior to his incarceration, but nobody knows where it is, and now that includes O'Brien himself.*   O'Brien coming along fine when his old gang kidnaps him/ liberates him.  

For reasons that amount to "we're real dumb", the old gang thinks for way too long that O'Brien is faking his amnesia.  They trot out his girlfriend, Audrey Totter, to convince him to play ball.  Eventually, she realizes he doesn't remember she was his girlfriend - and, if I may, that would seem like a welcome surprise.

Anyway, Totter never really liked O'Brien before - or at least knew she was disposable to him.  But she likes this new version.  

But as the crooks (led by Ted de Corsia) start to press, O'Brien has a dream with clues!  Memory clues!  And they find a slip of paper with a number that must mean something.  

Anyway - it means going to the Oceanpark Pier pier you see in one in every 20 film noir movies, and having a face-off.  

Highlights of the movie include:  

• it has a dream sequence that isn't a patch on Spellbound, but is still entertaining
• plenty of Laffing Sal
• Audrey Totter in smashing dresses
• an extended "getaway" flashback sequence with no story impact that I am pretty sure is on the roofs of the backlot at the studio
• the only fistfight I've ever seen on a roller-coaster track while it's operational.  Some real stunt work here.

I wouldn't say the movie is great or essential, but Totter feels weirdly too good for this movie, putting depth into her character that I'm not sure the movie earns. So if you're looking to catch another solid role for her, here you go.

If the movie seems a bit odd, visually, it is a 2D presentation of a 3D movie.  So that might explain the long escape sequence and a few other scenes.  I am very curious how the roller coaster sequences would have looked.  Pretty good, I expect.

There is a curious "will he go back to his wily, crooked ways" tension to the movie, but it's really just about survival.  Why O'Brien doesn't just go to the cops, I do not know.  It does mean he punches a dude off the hill of a rollercoaster track, so...  it's not like this is entirely a "on the side of the angels" ending.

*I would think handing over the money would have been key to the court agreeing to let O'Brien be a scientific subject, but the ethics of experimenting on prisoners is at best a gray area in this movie

I think I did a phenomenal job not making any jokes about Totter in 3D.  Please clap.

Hallmark Watch: Frozen In Love (2018)

Watched:  01/21/2026

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First

Director:  Scott Smith

Here in real life, we're prepping for a winter storm coming this weekend, and I knew I was planning to finish watching Mademoiselle Fifi in the evening, so we threw on this RomCom from Hallmark, Frozen In Love (2018).  

The film is not a Christmas movie, but the stuff Hallmark programs, post-holidays, to fill the winter months.  Yes, there is snow and ice and ice hockey in this movie.  No, I don't know anything about hockey.

Wise Watch: Mademoiselle Fifi (1944)

Watched: 01/21/2026

Format:  YouTube

Viewing:  First

Director:  Robert Wise

Our viewing of movies by Robert Wise continues with Mademoiselle Fifi, a 1944 movie, made during the darker days of World War II, using the Franco-Prussian War as a wispy-thin analog for the German occupation of France and a clear show of support for the French Resistance.  

This is Wise's first solo directorial effort, but you'd never know.  The movie seems assured of the handling of actors as it does of camera management and tone.  

The movie is intended as an odd propaganda - yes, stateside it would be seen as pro-French Resistance, but also would have informed Americans of what it means to be occupied, and how those under the bootheel may react in ways noble, practical and cowardly.  And, that some may not see much different day-to-day, or take advantage of cozying up to the occupiers.  I cannot assume this would have been very comfortable for movie go-ers who may have wanted to have less nuanced takes on the occupation.

Noir Thriller Watch: Diabolique (1955)

Watched:  01/19/2026

Format:  Noir Alley on TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Henri-Georges Clouzot

Diabolique (1955) hangs heavy over so much of cinema that, like many other films I've both finally watched - or still haven't seen (hello, Bicycle Thieves) - the very weight of it made it seem like homework instead of watching something for the sake of watching a movie.  

It also makes these movies difficult to write about.  I don't guess I'm ever breaking new ground, but when it comes to something with the gravity of this film, what's the point of writing about it, really?

But even I thought it was ridiculous I'd never seen Diabolique.  Spousal murder movies are part-and-parcel for noir, from probably before Double Indemnity.    

Anyway - TCM's Noir Alley programmed the movie, and what better way to frame the movie than with Eddie Muller's brand of bar room rather than classroom?  

The film is both familiar - it's been ripped off endlessly in the ensuing 71 years - and yet it remains unique and surprising in other ways.  A post-WWII France, still sorting itself,makes for an interesting locale.  The economic situation is still rough, and the occupation has left its shadow and scars.  It's also made in France and therefore the Hayes Code isn't so much a factor.  But I'd really point to the characters and performances.  Grade A stuff riding a Grade A script..

At a boys' boarding school - the principal is carrying on with a teacher with the full knowledge of his wife, a timid woman with a heart condition.  However, the principal abuses the teacher, and somehow - the wife and the mistress have fallen into a conspiratorial friendship.  Even as we meet them, they're planning how to kill the principal and make it look like an accident.

Vera Clouzot - wife of the writer/ director - plays the wife of the principal.  She is, frankly, stunning in a complex, conflicted role, asked to play so many things, and she pulls it all off brilliantly.  It's simply one of those roles that will never play as outdated and because of the legacy of the film, will keep Clouzot in the public mind despite having only three film roles to her resume (she passed 5 years later).

I don't know what to say - yeah, the movie met expectations.  Windy, twisty, unrelentingly tense...  and, of course, with an ending good enough that they ask the audience not to share the end with anyone right there at the film's conclusion - something I'm respecting here in 2026, and so I'm not discussing the film too much more.  

Anyway - that one is now checked off. 

Clouseau Watch: The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)

Watched:  01/19/2026

Format:  BluRay Disc

Viewing:  First

Director:  Blake Edwards

We've been having a hard time synching up of late, so Simon returned to Signal Watch HQ at 9:15 AM with this movie in hand.  

I am happy to say, I very much enjoyed The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), another installment in the Inspector Clouseau series of films starring Peter Sellers and directed by Blake Edwards.  

Taking off from the last film, it runs with the Herbert Lom character, former Chief Inspector Dreyfus, escaping an insane asylum and threatening the world unless they hand over or kill Inspector Clouseau.  In a way, this is the plot of Man of Steel, by the way.  

Recurring jokes recur - like Clouseau in terrible disguises, Kato attacking Clouseau...  but much like a Looney Tunes episode, it's all very welcome.  And the vibe is somewhere between Looney Tunes, Bond and prior Pink Panther films.  

Omar Sharif makes a bonus appearance, we see a *very* early Deep Roy appearance, and Lesley-Anne Down makes a convincing argument for herself.

All in all, recommended.  The jokes hold up, and even scenes that could be read as homophobic kind of aren't.  

Anyway, I'll keep it short because I hate explaining jokes, and the whole movie is a joke machine.  

JLC Regret Watch: Virus (1999)

Watched:  01/16/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director  John Bruno

A while back, I read that Signal Watch fave Jamie Lee Curtis has at least one movie she made which she'll publicly drag.  Which made me curious.  And that movie was Virus (1999), a sci-fi schlock-fest. 

Having just sat through the hour and forty minutes of Virus, I am in agreement with JLC.  This movie is very, very not good.  

It's an alien-invasion film (on a boat!) where it feels like the movie is just abusing your willing suspension of disbelief while delivering scenes and sequences from other movies you've seen before and is daring you to keep watching.

Our plot:  a wave of candy-colored cosmic energy passes through the Mir Space Station, which, in turn, shoots a beam of candy-colored energy into a Russian science vessel.  The beam blasts energy around the ship while the captain is alarmed it's accessing the mainframe (boy we were worried about mainframes still in 1999) and we cut to a standard, post-Abyss rag-tag working crew of a tug boat in a hurricane.

Noir Watch: Decoy (1946)

Watched:  01/15/2026

Format:  DVD

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jack Bernhard

What an odd film.

Devoid of narrative economy, the movie starts with a guy staggering his way to the highway, and then hitches a ride from the countryside to San Francisco.  He then takes the lift up to someone's apartment, and shoots them.  It's a dame!  

A cop - an instantly recognizable Sheldon Leonard - who played Nick the bartender in It's a Wonderful Life, here playing a cop named Joe Portugal* - shows up too late.  And the woman shot tells her tale.  But only after she gets to hold the unopened MacGuffin box.

The woman is our femme fatale, Margot, played by Jean Gillie in her penultimate performance before succumbing to pneumonia in 1949 in her early 30's.   Margot's been working a grift on a mobster who knocked over an armored truck, but for his trouble is on death row - and no one knows where the money is.  She's cheating on him with another gangster, Jim, with whom she concocts a plan to get the dough.  

They'll let the guy get executed by cyanide gas, but then steal the body and revive him with Methylene Blue,** a very real medication that can, in real life, combat cyanide, but, alas, in real life, does not restore life function to a corpse.  But in this movie, it sure does.

To do this, Margot seduces the doctor who does the autopsies on executed crooks.  I guess she's really good at *something*, because in a short time she convinces the doctor (Herbert Rudley) to join in on the operation.  If they can get that money, then she'll be happy!, she says.

Anyway, things take... a while... to get to the point.     

The one thing this movie has... well, it also has a knock-out nurse (Marjorie Woodworth) working for the doctor who seems like she's in a completely parallel story that isn't being filmed... So the OTHER thing this movie has is British-born lead actress Jean Gillie, who is really pretty terrific, gorgeous, and as solid a femme fatale as you're likely to find.  The character as written is why this movie exists - not that all the characters aren't a *little* bit bonkers, but Margot is a stunning psycho, using her charms to manipulate three men at a time, sometimes two in the same room.   

The weirdest thing is that the movie is called "Decoy", and at the beginning of the movie they start at the end, seeing Margot shot, the doctor clearly dying and you see an unopened money box.  And , because the movie is called "Decoy", one might spend 80+ minutes sitting there going "well, clearly that money box is a decoy".  

Like, I have zero idea why this starts at the end and tells itself in flashback.  It does nothing to help the story as we can see what will become of everyone before the story starts.  And it's not a good enough movie to make you say "gee, what was that?  Maybe there's twists and turns!"  It just plods toward that ending we saw at the beginning.

Anyway, it's certainly not awful, and from a "this is bonkers" perspective - bringing people back from the dead, Margot's scheming, etc.. - it's interesting.  But the pacing can feel deadly in the first thirty minutes or so, and it telegraphs the ending in the title.  So.

*truly, it can be said he is Portugal, The Man 

**Methylene Blue is the name of my new shoegaze band

Wise Watch: The Curse of the Cat People (1944)

Watched:  01/14/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Gunther von Fritsch / Robert Wise

We're continuing on with movies directed by Robert Wise - our gameplan for 2026.   

In his first outing directing, Wise did some pick-ups for The Magnificent Ambersons while Orson Welles was out of the country.  For his second directorial effort, Wise was *again* tapped in after the first director wasn't around.  Gunther von Fritsch was let go from The Curse of the Cat People (1944) for going over time and over budget at the notoriously tight-fisted RKO.  

I don't know what work belongs to Wise and which to von Fritsch here, so we'll just talk in generalities.

Re: the actual movie - as Jamie said after the movie wrapped "that was a wholly unnecessary sequel", which is absolutely true.  I'd argue The Leopard Man is more of a spiritual sequel to Cat People than this movie - but it *does* feature our heroes from the first movie, and Irena (Simone Simon) in ghostly form.

Noir Crime Watch: Dillinger (1945)

Watched:  01/08/2025

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  First

Director:  Max Nosseck

A biopic of famed gangster John Dillinger, Dillinger (1945) is really a crime drama that feels pulled from a "true crime" pulp magazine - the sort where facts will not stand in the way of a good story.  I can't tell you what's real here or not as I know two things about Dillinger - that he once broke out of jail with a fake gun, and something I can not print in a family publication like the Signal Watch.*

Anyway, this is the movie that broke Lawrence Tierney, for good or ill.  And he's solid in the movie - maybe singularly good here playing a (checks notes) absolute cold-blooded monster.  I won't get too much into Tierney as a person, but apparently he was a real asshole - like in a way you or I can't comprehend putting up with.  

Catch-Up Watch: One Battle After Another (2025)

Watched:  01/05/2026

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  First

Director:  Paul Thomas Anderson

Well, better late than never.  This was one I absolutely wanted to see in the theater, but didn't due to circumstances.

Let's not bury the lede:  I dug the hell out of this movie.  

I suspect One Battle After Another (2025) will do well through awards season - everyone in the movie is great, it's beautifully shot, the audio and score are A-level (I hadn't heard a Jonny Greenwood score in a minute).  It's on an evergreen topic in modern drag.  That said, I haven't read any reviews and I don't know what people *think* about the movie as of yet, just seen it get many stars from folks' letterboxd accounts.  

I kept thinking about how movies are made - what choices were made.  How someone else would have turned this into something preachy, or treacly, or something that was just a standard actioner.  There's a handful of directors who maybe could have done this, but PTA walks a tightrope here, and so many others would have tilted too far one way or the other.

Chabert Watch: Lost in Paradise (2026)

Watched: 01/04/2026

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First

Director:  Dustin Rikert

Job: head of a premier fashion design studio

Location of story:  Fiji

new skill:  jungle and beach survival

Man:  Ian Harding

Job of Man: Chef!

Goes to/ Returns to: Goes to Fiji

Event:  Plane crash

Food:  fish

Again, I'd love to know what stats the Hallmark Channel has about viewership when they have Lacey Chabert in a movie.  Because someone ran the numbers and was able to show that sending a Hallmark crew and stars to Fiji was going to be profitable.

It's not the first time Chabert has wrangled a destination movie.  I've seen her in movies filmed in Malta, Ireland (once as Ireland, once doubling as Scotland), vague Europe, South Africa, Italy and I think Greece.  And for the US, I know she went to Hawaii for a movie.  I feel like she's been in Manhattan at some point.

Somehow Fiji feels particularly nuts, but off to Fiji this movie went.  

Not for my Demographic Watch: 13 Going on 30 (2004)

Watched:  01/02/2025

Format:  Disney+

Viewing:  First

Director:  Gary Winick

So, yeah, this movie was never aimed at me.  I'm fine with that.  It wasn't aimed at me in 2004 when I was 29, and in 2026, it's even less for me.  

It's also not very good.  And not good in ways that I don't really understand.  YMMV with Jennifer Garner as a lead, but mostly the movie is a mess while also managing to feel... boring.  

It's another in a long line of movies about someone who is young getting to be an adult - like Big, Vice-Versa or...  Shazam, I guess.  Oddly, Jenna (as a teen played by Christa B. Allen and by Garner as a 13-year-old) really wants to be... thirty?  

I'll buy the magic as the conceit, sure!  I've bought Duck Planet refugees and Ewoks.   

Mystery Watch: Wake Up Dead Man - a Knives Out Mystery (2025)

Watched:  01/01/2026

Format:  Netflix

Viewing:  First

Director:  Rian Johnson

Look, I am in the bag a bit for these movies at this point.  I am not averse to a good murder mystery, and I like a quirky detective.  And since jump, I've been onboard with Daniel Craig's Benoit Blanc.  

I had planned to go see this upon its theatrical release, but a confluence of events prevented this.  For good or ill, it's a Netflix movie, and after two weeks or so, they shuttled the movie over to the streamer and we finally had time to watch it.  

Honestly, I hadn't heard much about this one, and Howard gave it his usual 2.5 stars, which told me nothing, Howard.  Nothing!  And I would be more charitable than Howard, but I am also always kinder or meaner than Howard, who shoots straight down the middle most days.

In general, Wake Up Dead Man fit the bill just fine for a movie for a New Years Day.  A solid cast, an engaging mystery I was never going to solve on my own, and Kerry Washington (we will always grant extra points for Kerry Washington).  

Crampton Watch: Sacrifice (2020)

Watched:  12/29/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Andy Collier / Tor Mian

There's some interesting stuff in Sacrifice (2020), but it never shakes the feeling it's maybe too-familiar- maybe especially in the wake of Ari Aster's Hereditary and Midsommar, and probably several other scary films where there's a cult involved.  

The film is about a younger couple who come to remote Norway to sell a house the guy, Isaac (Ludovic Hughes), inherited from a father he doesn't remember.  His mother, an American, told him his father found a new family and she returned to America.  His wife, Emma (Sophie Stevens) is very pregnant - and the sale of the house is intended to create a nest-egg for raising that baby.

However, the locals start off rude, until they learn who Isaac's father is, they then welcome him like a brother.  And a local constable (Barbara Crampton trying on a Norwegian accent) comes by to ask questions - telling Isaac his father was murdered in the house.  

This is a movie wherein the dude starts deciding he's down with whatever the people in the culty, remote town are offering up, and the wife is clearly trying to clear out.  

Chabert Watch: Sherman's Way (2008)

Watched:  12/28/2025

Format:  Disc

Viewing:  First

Director:  Craig M. Saavedra

This is my final Chabert film of ChabertQuest 2025.  Please clap.  

Well, first, this movie has a surprising lack of Chabert in it whatsoever.  She's in the opening scenes as our lead's girlfriend who predictably dumps him, which is the catalyst for the rest of the film.  I think she's gone 10 minutes in.

So, that's that.

Hallmark Holiday Watch: The Christmas Baby (2025)

Watched:  12/22/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First

Director:  Eva Tavares

This movie was very offbeat for Hallmark, but a welcome change of pace.  

I tuned in because I saw a few Ali Liebert movies a while back and thought she was better than the average bear.  She's been wearing multiple hats the past few years, though, directing two or so movies per year while appearing in other movies and producing some - so less acting, more behind the lens stuff.  So kudos to Ms. Liebert.  I can barely chew bubblegum and walk at the same time.

Liebert co-stars in The Christmas Baby (2025) with Katherine Barrell, who some may know from Wynona Earp.  The pair play a married couple in Albany, New York, going about their childfree existence when someone leaves a baby in a stroller at Liebert's mail store while she's in the back.

This isn't a Hallmark romcom, it's a dramedy, leaning towards drama.  Unlike 99% of Hallmark's Christmas output, there's a lot of tears and a lot of very real feelings and issues.  It feels more like a TV movie from days of yore than a feel-good bit of Christmas marshmallow you may associate with Hallmark of the past decade.  

The movie provides plenty of questions to answer.  Who is the mother?  What does it mean to suddenly have parenthood thrust on you and what feelings would you have if that wasn't the plan?  What if you and your wife are suddenly not on the same page?  And why aren't you?  And if you commit to this kid, what's to say someone won't just take them away?

Chabert Watch: Home Front (2002) (aka: The Scoundrel's Wife)

Watched:  12/22/2025

Format:  Disc

Viewing:  First

Director:  Glen Pitre

There's a lot going on in Home Front (aka: The Scoundrel's Wife - 2002).  Some might argue too much.  

A period piece taking place mostly during World War II, it's about a woman and her family living on Louisiana's Gulf Coast, who are pariahs already when the war breaks out.  It seems some years before the woman (Tatum O'Neal) and her husband may have gotten up to misdeeds that will be shared later.

It's a bit of a frustrating movie because it's a look at some real life things - that German U-Boats were off the US coast causing havoc, there was concern about internal collaborators, etc....  And some of this forgotten history is illuminated brilliantly, really, as O'Neal's family is awakened by a fire's glow off in the distance, out over the water as a U-Boat hits a shipping vessel.  

Meanwhile, life in the small fishing village carries on for O'Neal and her teenage son, Blue, and her daughter, Florida (Chabert), just aging into adulthood.  A doctor moves in nextdoor, but he has what seems to be a German accent (Julian Sands).  Meanwhile, the town Priest (Tim Curry) wrestles with alcohol.