WWII Watch: Watch on the Rhine (1943)

Watched:  03/12/2023

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Herman Shumlin, Hal Mohr (uncredited)

I had never seen Watch on the Rhine (1943), which is a bit odd.  It stars Bette Davis, who is tops in my book.  But, the real reason is: back in the early 1990's I was a high school drama kid.  In the spring of 1992, I worked tech support and understudy on Watch on the Rhine, which my school took to UIL One-Act Play competition.  We trimmed the show down to a 40 minute version of the 1941 stage play,* which I guess I ran through dozens and dozens of times.

The play was a formative experience  for multiple reasons, not least of which included pondering the content of the play every day for months on end.  But, still, I was sixteen when I read the play and just turned 17 when the experience was over.  So my perspective was widened but life hadn't come at me.  I didn't yet fully grasp the forces at work, what had happened in the decade or more before the war, how WWI led directly to WWII, and that the world is not a simple place and always 100 times more complex than you believe at first blush, ways that inform the movie and play.

Noir Watch: The Killers (1946)

Watched:  03/10/2023

Format:  Amazon Watch Party

Viewing:  Fourth?

Director:  Robert Siodmak

Way back sometime in high school I read the short story The Killers by Hemingway, and like most 17 year olds reading Hemingway, it hit me over the head like a sledgehammer.*  It's a taught bit about the nature of the inevitable - by those who dole it out, those on the receiving end, and those caught up in its wake.  

About twenty years after publication of Hemingway's story, it was adapted into a film starring a fresh-faced actor by the name of Burt Lancaster.  Lancaster hadn't really acted before, but he walked into movies with a natural talent, charisma and muscley torso that kept him working long enough that I knew him as one of the retirement age gangsters in Tough Guys released 4 decades later.   

The movie also introduced Ava Gardner to mass audiences, and broke her as a major star for decades to come.  Bonus: If you need to get an idea of what to put next to "femme fatale" in the dictionary, Gardner's Kitty Collins is a phenomenal example (then put Jane Greer next to her).  

But the movie opens on an empty small-town street with two men in the forms of William Conrad and Charles McGraw entering a cafe and - for the next ten minutes the movie mostly re-creates the scene from the short story, nearly word-for-word, minus some racial slurs and some logistical stuff.  And, if you were a 17-year-old once who read Hemingway, its wild to see Nick Adams as a minor supporting character in a movie.

It's a hell of a scene.  Taught stuff that movies have been trying to recreate now for almost 80 years - almost 100 if you count back to the release of the short story.

The rest of the film has the tough chore of going back and starting at the beginning and working its way back to the opening sequence.  Eventually, it earns the sequence, but the tone never quite matches the first ten minute again.  Using the flashback-via-investigator framing made famous by Citizen Kane (released 5 years earlier) the movie relies on Edmond O'Brien to play an insurance investigator trying to find out why a man set up a woman he met once as his life-insurance beneficiary.  But I'll be dipped if I can say what he's actually investigating and why.  It seems like he answers work-related questions by the film's halfway point.  I don't know if he was looking to deny the payout or recover the money the Swede took.

What the film does do is create a good detective story infused with what would become hallmarks of noir.  Femme fatales.  Flashbacks.  Disposable hoods.  Character actors being characters.  A scramble for money.  Low-level gang bosses with more hair tonic than brains.  And all the secrets to come spilling out in the final reel as no one escapes their fate.  The only thing it's missing is Elisha Cook Jr. 

Anyway, I very much enjoyed a rewatch.  It's a kick of a movie.

*my understanding from social media is that Hemingway is no longer fashionable with the kids because (gestures at everything about Hemingway).  

PodCast 236: "Elvis" (2022) - a rock n' roll episode w/ SimonUK and Ryan

Watched:  03/06/2023

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing: First

Decade:  2020's

Director:  Baz Luhrmann

For more ways to listen

Your two hunks o' burnin' love take on the Luhrmann-ized retelling of the life of The King. We ponder the nature of biopics, fame, Dutch accents, appropriate management fees, pink suits and the power of shaking one's hips. It's another Oscar-contender episode!

SoundCloud 

The Signal Watch PodCast · 236: "Elvis" (2022) - a rock n' roll episode w/ SimonUK and Ryan

YouTube

Music:

That's All Right - Elvis Presley 

Unchained Meldoy - Elvis Presley 

Friday Watch Party: The Killers (1946)

This one is a straight up banger.  The Killers (1946) brought the world Ava Gardner (we're celebrating her centennial) and Burt Lancaster.  It's based loosely on a short story from Ernest Hemingway, directed by Robert Siodmak and is the noiriest noir that ever noired.  

Also features Edmond O'Brien, Albert Dekker, Charles McGraw, William Conrad, Sam Levene, and a dozen other "hey, THAT GUY" type actors.  

I say "this is one of my favorite movies" a lot, but this one IS one of my faves and genuinely solid.

Day:  03/10/2023

Time:  8:30 PM Central, 6:30 PM Pacific

Cost:  $4

CLICK HERE TO EAT THE BIG DINNER

(link live ten minutes before showtime)

Cyd Charisse at 101

Happy late birthday celebration to actor, singer, and - above all - dancer, Cyd Charisse.  Cyd would have been 101 yesterday on March 8th.  She passed in 2008.

If you've only heard of Ginger Rogers as the ideal dance partner, that's a fact.  No shade on Ginger.  But I can only encourage you to look into Cyd's work.  There's no one else like her in movies.  

Charisse was a force of nature as much as Astaire and Kelly, and while she didn't play the lead as often, she was in demand to work alongside them and she carried a few of her own films.  Graced with a physique that allowed her to be athletic, graceful and sexy as hell.  And, man, was she talented.  Thus, she moved seamlessly through dance genres and eras, always a highlight of the film's in which she appeared, even if just for a sequence.

Speaking of - she's the femme fatale in Singin' in the Rain's "Broadway Melody" movie within a movie, one of film's most justifiably memorable sequences.  

From "Broadway Melody":

which pairs well with "The Girl Hunt Ballet" from The Band Wagon with Astaire.

which segues us to "Dancing in the Dark".

Cyd Charisse is not solely responsible for my interest in checking out musicals that predate my birth, but she certainly was a key feature as I looked for her work quite often in my early days of classic film exploration.  

I do recommend her movie Party Girl in which she plays a starring role, but she's also the lead as girl gone bad!

Happy belated b-day, Cyd.  

PodCast 235: "Top Gun: Maverick" (2022) - a high-flying SimonUK and Ryan PodCast

Watched:  02/19/2023

Format:  Amazon?

Viewing: First

Decade:  2020's

Director:  Joseph Kosinski

For more ways to listen

Simon and Ryan feel the need for speed! These two misfits should be thrown out of podcasting, but they're just too damn good. Instead, they're being sent to watch another sequel 30 years in the making. Join us as as we talk this Oscar contender, why it hit, what it does right and how it gets a pass for what it does wrong. And, against all odds, they don't dwell on Connelly for too long.

SoundCloud 

The Signal Watch PodCast · 235: "Top Gun: Maverick" (2022) - a high-flying SimonUK and Ryan PodCast

YouTube

Music:

Main Titles (You've Been Called Back to Top Gun) - Harold Faltermeyer

Top Gun Anthem - Harold Faltermeyer

SimonUK Cinema Series

The Signal Watch PodCast · SimonUK Cinema Series

Watch Party Watch: Strangers on a Train (1951)

this tagline is wildly misleading

Watched:  03/03/2023

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Hitchcock

Well, that was certainly a good way to get to watch a second Ruth Roman movie in a week.  

I'd been mentally abusing the watch party participants recently via my choice of movies, so it seemed like time to watch an actually good movie with the team.  And my memory of Strangers on a Train (1951) was that it was a strong film, but I couldn't remember anything after the initial train sequence but a sense of how utterly @#$%ed the guy was who was not Farley Granger (Robert Walker*).  

Hitch is the most discussed director in Western cinema, and this movie gets no small amount of ink, so I don't feel terribly compelled to weigh in.  But I will say:

1. this movie and Shadow of a Doubt certainly share a lot in common, and I'd want to dig more into that, and how he gets from here to Psycho by 1960
2. The cops are directly responsible for manslaughter as well as considerable chaos and danger to the public through ineptitude in the final scenes
3. Farley Granger's character never really has a compelling reason to not tell the cops what is happening, all things considered
4. Robert Walker is phenomenal
5. No one much mentions the dead ex-wife other than as a plot point.  Granger doesn't head home to the funeral, he doesn't mourn her in any way.  That's maybe the most suspicious bit of all, really.  
6. I appreciate that Ruth Roman's character is given reason to believe Granger but wasn't entirely unsure he didn't kill his wife.  
7. Pat Hitchcock co-stars in the film, and she's actually really good.  If your career is going to be the product of nepotism, might as well shoot for the moon

Anyway, this is what thrillers are for.  If you've never seen it, recommended.

*Walker passed shortly after the making of the film, while working on a new film. His biography on imdb is grimly fascinating

Friday Watch Party: Strangers on a Train

You've all suffered enough.  I mean, the past few weeks of watch parties have been a real gauntlet and test of intestinal fortitude.  And while "strangers on a train" sounds like something incredibly dirty, it's actually the title of a phenomenal movie directed by no one less than Alfred Hitchcock.  This is how we pivot at the Signal Watch.

I haven't seen this flick in decades, but I remember loving it at the time circa 1997.  It's a popular Hitch favorite, so let's get on that train and see who wants to swap murders.

Day:  03/03/2023

Time:  8:30 PM Central/ 6:30 PM Pacific

Cost:  $3-$4

CLICK HERE TO GET ON BOARD

(link live 10 minuts before showtime)

Noir Watch: Hunt the Man Down (1950)

Watched:  03/02/2023

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  George Archainbaud

For good or ill, there's more movie packed into the 70 minutes of Hunt the Man Down (1950) than in your average 3-hour Oscar Bait prestige film.  And, I'll argue, this movie is actually entertaining while carrying a message about how things *should* work that seems wildly progressive and cutting edge against decades of cynicism and trying to feel wise by having the lowest of expectations of humanity.

The set up is less than simple.  A guy tries to stick up a bar at closing, and the dishwasher stops him and saves the day.  The press puts the hero's picture in the paper (against his will), and it turns out he's a guy who was about to be convicted of murder 12 years prior, but he escaped his guard and fled the day before he was sentenced.  The cops pick him up and he's set to be retried using the original testimony of the witnesses.

Hearing the story of what transpired the night in question, the public defender (Gig Young) has to go back and find the original witnesses with the assistance of his father, a former cop who is reluctant to help spring a guy.  

And, hoo boy, has history happened in the past dozen years.  Alcoholism, madness, suspicious coupling, war heroes, puppetry, mysterious deaths and murder.  It's just slapping the noir-centric fates button for the witnesses as Gig Young locates each one and determines how their futures hinged on that night.

But what's remarkable is the unshakeable belief the movie has in every man's right to a day in court with vigorous defense.  Gig Young isn't even sure his guy didn't do it - but he's going to make sure he does the leg work that didn't happen in the years prior.  It's positively wild to see a movie that's not about people with crafty defense lawyers who can bamboozle a juror's box full of rubes and get their guy off and the poor prosecutor who must see justice done.  There's a real everyman quality to both Young and his client (and especially Young's dad) that appeals to what everyone should expect, and a recognition that not everyone who winds up behind bars is actually guilty.  There's a reason we have a system that's supposed to give you a shot.  And even if that system does fail, maybe it's because we bring a lot of baggage in with us as jurors - including the media we watch.

This movie is no 12 Angry Men, but I was shocked how *good* it was for what it was.  It uses every moment to push the story forward, it contains almost a dozen characters and you know who all of them are and how they function despite minimal screentime, and manages to get it's point across while being way less soap boxy than I got in the paragraph above.  But, hey, that post WWII idealism was not the worst thing in the world.

You can expect a certain level of film - this was the B movie to help fill a double-bill.  Not everyone here is star material, but it's not distracting.  And we do get Cleo Moore as a brunette, which is not a complaint.

There are plot holes.  Why would you stay in the same town where you could run into any number of people who could recognize you?  Why - when you were in the paper - wouldn't you sprint out of town? But.

Anyway - worth a watch some time.

If I have a beef - it's that:  despite the title, no man is hunted down.  The defendant is found by accident.  The witnesses just turn up one by one.  Like, I get that maybe it's about not treating defendants as prey, but.  Sometimes it feels like they just slap a name on these movies.

Netflix Watch: We Have a Ghost (2023)

Watched:  03/02/2023

Format:  Netflix

Viewing:  First

Director:  Christopher Landon

Well, I was looking for something else on Netflix and saw the #1 streaming movie was something I'd never heard of but it starred Captain America, Jennifer Coolidge and Jim Hopper.  And I generally liked the premise of people catching evidence of a ghost and what that might actually mean in 2023.

We Have a Ghost (2023) feels, however, like a few movies that were shuffled together from different results from different writers all given the same prompt and characters but no guidance for what genre this movie was, who it was for, and especially no plot outline.  The result is a strange mish-mash of a film that wants to be funny, touching, exciting, a road movie, a haunted house movie, a teen romance, a wacky buddy comedy, a sci-fi flick...  and a touching story about family, father-child relations and probably ten more things.  I thought it was a kid's movie til about halfway through, and then was like... well, no.

That said, it's weirdly watchable.  It may not be great, or even particularly good, mainly because it bounces so fast from idea to idea that nothing ever really sticks - but it does have some crazy talent in the movie and so you get to see how that can prop up a very shaky film.  David Harbour never even really talks, and still gives a genuinely moving performance.  Anthony Mackie reminds you why he gets cast in so much stuff playing a guy hitting middle-age who thinks maybe he finally struck oil, Jennifer Coolidge is Jennifer Coolidge (if she were a TV ghost-psychic).  Tig Notaro plays the scientist - who seems to have a backstory they left on the cutting room floor - who is mixed up in ghost-chasing, the government G-Men and everything else.  

Our lead is young actor Jahi Di'allo Winston who is very good.  But, man, the movie sure takes its time making it clear you should like his character.  

I don't want to dwell on it too much.  It had a lot of issues.  But I also felt like it got weirdly violent for a minute or two, and it didn't really know a movie can say something, not just be a series of events that unspool.  There's no subtext - this movie is all text.  

The most promising bit of the film, and where I thought it was going before it decided it was not that, is immediately after the evidence of the ghost hits the internet.  You get to see humanity - filtered through the modern internet - doesn't know if the ghost is real-real or not, and makes him into something meme-able and for discourse and all the dumb shit we do as people.  But then the film spins off into something about government overreach, lasers, and a tragic back story I don't know anyone was sitting around hoping for based on the premise.  

SPOILER

I also was just like - did Anthony Mackie really get taken out by a very old man with a pan?  Like...  no one saw that and said "this isn't working."  They just let it be a thing that happened in a movie we all watched.