Part II, he calls it. Can the sequel be as good as the original?

(You can find Part I, here)

I say yes. Godfather Part II, The Empire Strikes Back, arguably Lethal Weapon II and Die Harder. Hot Shots. Oh, and Return of the Thin Man. From Russia With Love. Plenty of precedents.

When we last met, we had completed American history on film through the Civil War. Now come the growth years, when the US of A, tempered by fire, becomes an ingenious engine of profit, progress, and profligacy. Reconstruction. The so-called robber barons of the Gilded Age (or as Mike Myers said on the SNL skit Coffee Talk “they were neither robbers, nor barons; discuss amongst yourselves”). Lots of immigration from eastern and western Europe, as well as the Far East, which was rather less Far once the steamship appeared than 16th-century European cartographers could have anticipated. Ridiculous technological advances: first the railroad, then the automobile and aeroplane. Not to mention the light bulb, the telephone, sliced bread; the Otis elevator and Bessemer steel; standardization of means and methods, and, most important of all:

The motion picture.

Capturing history, wittingly or otherwise, objectively or subjectively, wisely or foolishly, is nigh upon us. This segment of Franxflix is the moment when the streams cross. History is flattened on the screen, so that the movies began to tell our own story as it was unfolding.

~As always, click on the poster for a link to clips~

The Iron Horse (1924) - set in 1862-1869

directed by John Ford

starring George O’Brien, Madge Bellamy, Cyril Chadwick, George Waggner

First were the Natives, peacefully killing and stealing from each other. Then came the trappers and the mountain men, then the (often dishonest) US government agents, then the cowboys and cattle, and then the first homesteaders and land speculators to show them how it could be done much better.

Then came the locomotives, and the cars they pulled that bore the arrival of dread Civilization.

Every classic western relates the clashes involved in one of these transitions, from The Covered Wagon through Blazing Saddles, and the Locomotive (and her corporate ownership) is often the villain. (The greatest villain of them all is Henry Fonda’s “Frank” in Once Upon a Time in the West, but it’s not quite an American film so not included here).

This movie was John Ford’s first epic Western, and is still one of his best. In this telling of the story of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific racing to complete the transcontinental railway, the film’s crew practically relived the experience, fighting the elements to lay down track while using the actual engines of the original feat. (Well, that’s what the title card says. Historians disagree).

Visually compelling and stunningly accurate, and featuring a cast of hundreds of Sioux, Apache, and Navajo as well as Chinese railworkers, the film is still gripping today and well worth a look-see, to speak in the vernacular of the peasantry.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) - set c. 1880s-1915

directed by John Ford

starring James Stewart, John Wayne, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin, Edmond O’Brien, Andy Devine, Woody Strode, Lee Van Cleef

The perfect companion to The Iron Horse is one of the last films made by John Ford of his lengthy Western career, and fittingly it tells the story of the closing of the Old West.

In the early 20th century, Senator Ranse Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) returns to Shinbone (territory unknown, though there are some allusions to Colorado) to attend the funeral of his friend Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). The rest of the film is told in flashback, in which we see young Stoddard arrive in town with the intention of establishing a law practice. Outlaw Liberty Valance (young Lee Marvin, in perhaps his coldest role) and the cattle barons who employ him do not take kindly to having the law settle in, nor to the idea of statehood that is bubbling up. Stoddard does his best to carry on with his plans, establishes a school for the generally illiterate population and opens his law office.

Eventually the tensions boil over, and Stoddard is faced with the classic Western scenario of meeting Valance for a duel in the dusty street.

Obviously, the title gives away the ending. Or does it?

The Molly Maguires (1970) - set in 1870

directed by Martin Ritt

starring Richard Harris, Sean Connery, Samantha Eggar

You think crossing a prairie in a Conestoga and building a railroad and fighting Apaches was hard? Well…it was, yeah.

Meanwhile, back East…how would you like to mine coal? Think about it: in the winter, when daylight hours were short but the hours were fixed, you could go six days without seeing the sun. The only day you might see it— if the weather in northeastern Pennsylvania cooperated (good luck with that)— was the aptly named Sunday.

The kicker is that you live in housing provided by the company you work for, and have to shop at the store owned by the company you work for— and the combined total of that “complimentary” room and board comes to more than your wages.

Remember the Tennessee Ernie Ford song Sixteen Tons?

Ok, so that song was written about bituminous coal-mining in eastern Kentucky, not anthracite coal-mining in northeastern PA, but you get the picture.

If a miner died on the job— which was a daily possibility— his wife (legendarily) had 48 hours to settle up accounts, be evicted, or substitute one of her sons, who was probably already employed by the company at the age of eight as a breaker boy, in his stead.

Can you imagine?!

That was your life?!

Cradle to grave. Womb to tomb. Sperm to worm. Mostly in the dark, and why? Because working like that meant your descendants might someday know something better, like writing a Substack about films,

~

Back to the film itself: wonderful.

Martin Ritt directs the story of the uneasy relationship between labor and capital that had been simmering for years. On the one hand, these people— in this case, Irish immigrants— are clearly being exploited. On the other hand, without the mines to work in, they would have even less than nothing.

As Harry Truman once said, “can someone please find me an economist with a third hand?”

Outside “agitators” were known to infiltrate the labor force to introduce the idea of unionization; in response the mine owners hired Allan Pinkerton’s detectives to go undercover as counterspies.

And here is that story.

Sean Connery had one more James Bond in his future (Diamonds are Forever, 1971), but this is where he lay the groundwork for non-Bond roles.

He plays here the real-life Black Jack Kehoe, an Irish transplant who has seen this dynamic play out before in the Old Country, with the English as the exploitative owners. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. He is the leader of the Molly Maguires, a revolutionary/terrorist group (depending on your point of view) who regularly sabotage the mine.

His Pinkerton counterpart is the great Richard Harris. He witnesses the injustices, but also recognizes that when the power dynamic shifts, ends begin to justify means is little better than the status quo. His motivations and allegiance remain obscure as the plot unfolds.

This is one of those films that FranxFlix desperately wishes everyone were familiar with, but finds few know of it, which probably means it will sink into the ether of “never existed” when you try to find it on streaming services. Do a boy-o a favor and watch it if you can.

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) - set in 1873-1912

directed by Orson Welles

starring Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, Agnes Moorehead

Orson Welles’ second masterpiece is a beautiful exposition of America’s road to modernity, looking back fondly on the gilded age of innocence, as it were, while tearing off in an automobile.

I recently waxed poetic about this incredible movie here. The story is good, yes, but it’s the way it is told visually and narratively that makes it so compelling.

Meet Me in St Louis (1944) - set in 1903-4

directed by Vincente Minnelli

starring Judy Garland, Mary Astor, Margaret O’Brien, Lucille Bremer, Tom Drake, Leon Ames, Harry Davenport, Marjorie Main, Chill Wills, June Lockhart

As I’ve said before, this is my favorite movie where nothing happens. It is director Vincente Minnelli’s love letter to two things: turn of the century America, bubbling with optimism, and his future wife Judy Garland, bubbling with emerging neuroses.

Every scene bursts with color and comfort. The sets and the costumes are exquisite (as was Minnelli’s wont), the songs are delightful, the cast and characters feel like old friends. More than anything, there is just a charm in the air in every scene.

It is set in St Louis, obviously, taking place across the four seasons leading up to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. (You know, the World’s Fair).

Was life ever this simple? Of course not. But that’s what movies are for.

Ragtime (1981) - set in 1906-1917

directed by Milos Forman

starring James Cagney, Mary Steenburgen, Brad Dourif, Moses Gunn, Elizabeth McGovern, Pat O’Brien, Donald O’Connor, Mandy Patinkin, Howard E Rollins Jr, Debbie Allen, Norman Mailer, Jeff Daniels, Fran Drescher, Frankie Faison, Samuel L Jackson, Bessie Love

Well I can finally give this movie its due. I heard from several readers of my 1981 review that I had given it short shrift. So here you go!

It really is a remarkable panorama, capturing the unnamed era between the Gilded Age and the Jazz Age (the Brits have it easy; Edwardian Era perfectly fits but we’re not going to use it this side of the pond, are we). I usually shy away from the Progressive Era (too political), but I suppose it’s appropriate for this film.

Based on E L Doctorow’s novel, it examines all walks of life and how they intertwined in bustling New York and its suburban environs. Several historical figures wander in and out, but our focus is primarily on one upper-middle-class family who seem to have no surname and their servants. Through their eyes, we encounter the industrialists and upper classes who have the world at their beck and call.

We also follow the story of the aspiring “colored” ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker and his encounters with racism. The studio actually had two different marketing campaigns: one to attract black audiences, and the other to appeal to whites.

I still can’t get past its length, but it is well done and, more importantly for our intentions in this little project, gives great insight into a time in our history when things seemed placid on the surface but had a lot going on below.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (1945) - set in 1912-1918

directed by Elia Kazan

starring Dorothy McGuire, James Dunn, Peggy Ann Garner, Joan Blondell, Lloyd Nolan, Ted Donaldson, James Gleason, Ferike Boros

A coming-of-age film within the coming-of-age of America can only be set in tenements in the nineteen-teens.

This is the story of second- and third-generation immigrants, Irish and Austrian, living in the real melting pot of New York City. The streets are alive with music and noise and smells and vendors and beat cops and gossipy neighbors and kids.

This is the story of Francie (Peggy Ann Garner), the daughter of the aforementioned second generation, and her brother Neeley (Ted Donaldson). She watches her increasingly dour mother Katie (Dorothy McGuire) scrubbing floors all day for low wages to keep the family alive, but Francie’s face lights up whenever her father Johnny (James Dunn) comes home, which he announces by singing all the way down the street before climbing the three flights of stairs to their tiny flat. His dreams of becoming a famous tenor have dwindled to occasional jobs as a singing waiter whose tips he uses to assuage his powerful Irish thirst. As he faces the reality that the promise of the American dream isn’t going to be fulfilled in him, he makes sure to instill in Francie a yearning for something better. (He knows the boy will be just fine. He’s a street-smart toughie but also something of a mama’s boy— just the right combination to get on in life).

Grandma Rommely (Ferike Boros) sums it up best about why she and her husband had chosen to come here, even though they still ended up living in squalor. She didn’t understand it as a younger woman, but now seeing her grandkids on the verge of adulthood she knows that they will fulfill the promise of getting an education and rising to a higher station of life. Those trees that grow in Brooklyn…

The best line is from the Eye-talian barber who says to Francie, “Your father was a good man. You tell your mother that I, his barber, said this.” It is clear that there is nothing so sacramental in the neighborhood as such a benediction from an Italian barber.

WORLD WAR I DOUBLE FEATURE!

Well, World War I was the shit, wasn’t it? I don’t mean as an ironic compliment, I mean literally. As Ma York answers in Sergeant York as to what they are fightin’ for over there in Europe, “I don’t rightly know.” Over a hundred years on, it’s still the smart answer.

But here we are, and there we were, “Over There.” So here’s the wartime double feature:

Sergeant York (1941) - set in 1917-1918

directed by Howard Hawks

starring Gary Cooper, Joan Leslie, Walter Brennan, Ward Bond, George Tobias, Noah Beery Jr, June Lockhart, Dickie Moore

No, despite the promise of the title, this is not a dual biopic about the two Dicks who played Darrin Stevens on Bewitched (though I would certainly watch that). It is, though, in a sense still a dual biopic which would be a template for future Vietnam war movies The Deer Hunter and to a lesser degree Full Metal Jacket, in which we are immersed in the comforts of the hero in his home turf before being yanked off to war and becoming someone else altogether.

In the first half we follow the life of Alvin York (Gary Cooper), a hillbilly who lives in the poor-farming topland of a Tennessee holler, spending his time drinkin’ and huntin’ and whorin’. Then he falls for Grace (Joan Leslie), and starts to hear the voices of his mother (Margaret Wycherly) and his preacher (Walter Brennan, wonderfully playing an inversion of his usual “dagnabbit” old coot; funny thing to hear a hillbilly who sounds like he came from Swampscott Massachusetts), and then in a dramatic turn, the voice of God, in a manner of speaking.

Director Hawks and five screenwriters, including John Huston and Howard Koch, are dogmatic about using Appalachian diction such as “hain’t” and “kilt a bar” (“killed a bear”), and if the actors cain’t quite master an accent, most of them give it an occasional try. Not Walter Brennan though, dagnabbit.

It would be a great movie if it ended there, and it could have; the story arc is complete. But now reformed Alvin York is faced with his greatest moral crisis: the decision to register for the draft against his conscience, and then whether to serve in the War when selected. He is, and he does.

NOW it’s a World War I movie. One of the best. Mud and blood and trenches and meaningless spits of land to capture; barbed wire and grenades and all kinds of whatnot for a war whose purposes no one could actually explain.

Alvin York was a real person who happened to become one of the most decorated soldiers in US military history, despite his initial reluctance to sign up for the draft because of his religious convictions. He (almost single-handedly) led the capture of 132 German soldiers after killing a bunch more. The way the film portrays the event by him using his old fox and turkey-hunting skills makes you damn proud to be ‘Murican.

The screenplay was based on his diaries, and he personally signed off on it under the condition that he would be portrayed by his favorite actor, Gary Cooper.

The Big Parade (1925) - set in 1917-1918

directed by King Vidor

starring John Gilbert, Renée Adorée, Karl Dane

The interesting thing about World War I movies made in the immediate years after the fact is that they all seem to touch on the innocence of youth being inaugurated into the glories of war, with a cynical eyebrow raised toward why are we doing this. By the time WWII comes along, the back half of that sentence gets expunged. I can’t help but wonder how the Civil War would have unfolded if cinema had been a factor.

Unlike Sergeant York, which rushes us past basic training and right into the thick of things, this movie brings us all along the way, and shows the interesting relationship that doughboys had with the local French residents.

You can read more about it here.

The Roaring Twenties (1939) - set in 1918-1933

directed by Raoul Walsh
starring James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Priscilla Lane, Gladys George, Jeffrey Lynn, Frank McHugh

Of the great gangster films of the 30s, this may be slightly weaker from a critical standpoint than some others (The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, Scarface…), but it is the perfect vehicle for our purposes here: Prohibition, the rise of organized crime and the reactionary “G-men, T-men, revenuers too” (to borrow from George Jones’ ode to bootleg whiskey, “White Lightnin’”).

And gosh darn it, it’s so fun to watch. James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart together: any excuse will do.

More to the point for this exercise, it focuses on the plight of men returning from “The Great War” to something of a foreign land. Unable to find honest work, accustomed to handling a gun, all these new laws outlawing basic pleasures of life— what’s a body to do?!

We shall address the term “Forgotten Man” in the next entry, but in one sense these are the guys.

Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) - set in 1933

directed by Mervyn LeRoy

starring Warren William, Guy Kibbee, Joan Blondell, Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers, Ned Sparks, Aline McMahon

Here we are: “Remember My Forgotten Man.”

This may be THE Depression movie. What did people do when they had no job and no money? Go to the movies! Up to six hours for two bits (that’s what we call .25 today), sometimes even in air conditioning.

What did folks want to see? Escapism. Nothing like real life. Westerns, or “ripped from the headlines” gangster films, or musicals, or glamorous people living glamorous lives in shiny deco surroundings— say, that would make for a pretty good movie! Let’s focus on the musical part, with a dash of the others thrown in— and then turn it on its head. How about a seventeen-minute musical number that takes place on a Broadway stage devoted to people trying to escape their lives by watching a show?

Wiseacres and con artists abound on every level, but the deliciousness comes from watching the different social strata interact when things were fluid enough that a showgirl had a reasonable chance of advancing rather quickly if she played her cards right, and a Wall Street man could find his fortunes plummet just as fast.

My Man Godfrey (1936) - set in 1930s

directed by Gregory LaCava

starring William Powell, Carole Lombard, Alice Brady, Eugene Pallette, Gail Patrick, Mischa Auer, Alan Mowbray

…And again with the Forgotten Man. This time he’s an object to be found in a Scavenger Hunt by spoiled socialites in the form of Irene (Carole Lombard) and her sister Cornelia (Gail Patrick). Fortunately for us, the Forgotten Man Irene finds is in the form of William Powell, whom she enlists as the family butler.

And what a punctilious butler he proves to be; why, it’s almost as though he grew up among servants all his life. Whatever can his past be, that found him living on an ash heap under the Williamsburg Bridge?

It turns out that Godfrey has some clever ideas of his own that just happen to dovetail with concepts emerging from the White House around the same time, but with a difference— Godfrey and his peers aren’t looking for a handout; they want work and opportunity within a capitalist framework that works for the people as originally intended.

Powell suppresses his “Thin Man” tendencies to ham things up, playing it straight to give space for Lombard do the comedic work. The effect is wonderful.

Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) - set in 1939

directed by Frank Capra

starring James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Claude Rains, Edward Arnold, Thomas Mitchell, Guy Kibbee, Beulah Bondi

Did you know that somewhere along the way, the US Senate became a corrupt institution in defiance of the Founding Fathers’ intentions. Heaven forfend!

Four score and eighty-three years after the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart), Boy Rangers leader, finds himself the newly appointed US senator of his midwestern state. He gets to serve alongside senior senator Joseph Paine (Claude Rains), his boyhood hero and old friend of his deceased father.

Young Jeff Smith doesn’t realize he is meant to be a stooge and proxy vote for the political machine of the state; who knew such things occurred? In his naiveté and earnestness, he proceeds to advance his own agenda, only to find that the rot goes much deeper and wider than a reasonable person could imagine.

He wins over his world-wise and world-weary assistant Saunders (Jean Arthur) to his causes and attitude, and they double-handedly set out to restore Washington to its founding principles.

It’s a lovely little fable. For the two hours watching it, you think, “Gee, do you think someone could actually…” and then the lights come on and you say, “Naaaah.”

It’s a lovely little fable.

World War II double feature

Meanwhile, across the globe, events are unfolding, as they always seem to do.

Once again, young Americans find themselves at the beck and call of the guy who calls himself their Uncle Sam, and they have no choice but to answer. With the right answer.

One day FranxFlix intends to do a complete “History of World War Two on Film”, but as a placeholder for now let’s focus on two films involving D-Day.

One ends on June 6, 1944. The other begins on the same day. The first is based on a painstaking reconstruction of the actual events featuring dozens of actors in two-minute cameos and is filmed in the conventions of its day buttressed by historical footage. The second is loosely based on a true story and strives for accuracy, using a few box office draws and focusing on “realism”. The truth and legend lie somewhere in between.

The Longest Day (1962) - set on June 6, 1944

directed by Ken Annakin (British and French), Andrew Marton (American), and Bernhard Wicki (German)

starring (deep breath): Arthur Hill, Mel Ferrer, Edmond O’Brien, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, Eddie Albert, John Wayne, Bill Nagy, Rod Steiger, Jeff Hunter, Red Buttons, Sal Mineo, Richard Beymer, Roddy McDowall, George Segal, Robert Wagner, Paul Anka, Fabian, Tommy Sands, Peter Lawford, Richard Todd, Richard Burton, Richard Dawson, Sean Connery Gert Fröbe, Curd Jürgens, Bourvil,Jean-Louis Barrault and many, many more.

The Longest Day? At 178 minutes, more like The Longest Movie, amirite?

Every stud in the Screen Actors Guild floats onscreen for about five minutes and then disappears, until the prop department ran out of helmets somewhere below Fabian and Tommy Sands.

Along with whomever the European casting agents in Britain, France and Germany could equivalently muster.

And yet, it works. It somehow covers the breadth of all the action on D-Day across the various fronts. We see the top brass making and adjusting the plans, officers carrying out the orders and improvising on the fly, and the soldiers doing the dirty work from the Americans, British, French, and German perspectives. Based on Cornelius Ryan’s painstakingly researched book, the film could slide right into a history class and provide a more or less accurate account— star power notwithstanding.

FranxFlix considers this must-see Memorial Day and/or Veterans Day watching.

Saving Private Ryan (1998) - set in 1944

directed by Steven Spielberg

starring Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Matt Damon, Tom Sizemore

Okay, we’ve landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day. Now what? Off to Germany, to find one particularly special soldier.

The War Department has learned that three out of four brothers have been killed in action and the fourth— that would be Private Ryan (Matt Damon)— is missing in action. General George C Marshall himself orders that he be found and returned safely to his mother.

I know we’re always fighting the last war, but it’s been 80 years since the Civil War wiped out entire communities and families; you’d think they’d have learned before now. But it’s a little more complicated: although we’ve always had a standing army, in peacetime it was deliberately skeletal, supplemented in wartime by National Guard units that were, by definition, locally-based. A regiment could therefore contain an awful lot of boys from the same place.

When wars drag on (as they always do), the “57th Virginia Regiment” may eventually be replaced by the drawling Texan, the wiseacre Brooklyn Italian, the intellectual Yalie and all the other war movie stereotypes we are accustomed to.

So yes, even though the story is fictional, it was based on some real families where brothers had enlisted and deployed together and parents of large broods suddenly found themselves almost childless because they were all on the same ship that went down or in the same unit that got slaughtered.

As for the movie: gird your loins for D-Day. It’s a toughie. But after that you get to hang out with enigmatic Tom Hanks and his wisecracking boys as they trudge across France, and to see them all picked off one by one in an imaginative and graphic variety of ways.

Coda: Post-war

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) - set in 1946

directed by William Wyler

starring Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo, Harold Russell

Rounding out Part II is the first look at what life would be like once the war was over; the new normal, as it were, which shall be the subject of Part III.

But for now we have the immediate aftermath: much like in the Roaring Twenties, we have officers and enlisted men coming home to find their roles for the rest of their lives have been turned topsy-turvy. Time has marched on at home and left the proclaimed heroes out of step if not outright left behind. And that’s bad enough for the regular Joe who still has all his limbs.

We follow the story of three servicemen who meet each other on the same transport plane back to the same town. Fredric March is Al Stephenson, an Army infantry sergeant/banker, Dana Andrews is Army Air Force Captain Fred Derry, and Harold Russell is Homer Parrish, a Navy sailor who had lost both his hands when his ship was sunk.

Each has been broken in his own way, though each refuses to acknowledge it: they’ve been through worse fights before and have the scars to prove it, but reintegrating back into society is something else altogether.

Harold Russell was not an actor; he truly was a veteran with no hands (he actually lost them in a stateside training exercise). He proved to be a natural, though, holding his own alongside the A-listers sharing the screen. He won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar as well as an honorary Oscar recognizing him for his “bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans”, the only time an actor won two statuettes for one role. One for each hook.

Thus ends Part II. What do you love? What did I miss? Leave a comment!

Stay tuned for Part III in a few weeks.

250 years of a great experiment: “A Republic, if you can keep it,” according to Ben Franklin (apocryphally).

Ninety years of effective filmmaking, according to Franxflix. How do we overlay the two to come up with a relatively concise telling of the story of the former through the medium of the latter?

This is our mission, which we have chosen to accept.

It is absolutely subjective; no doubt each of your lists would look totally different. And I’m sure much of my own would too if I did it again a few months from now.

First of all, this is obviously a broader mission than our usual one-year-at-a-time analysis, so it has to be broken into pieces. Easily done; make it a trilogy.

Second of all, one must steer clear of bouncing from war to war, where all the obvious action takes place. Let’s not forget the evolving Everydayness and Varieties of Experience, which may be the greatest aspect of this noble experiment over time. But let’s not get too caught up in that either, at the expense of the major events. We’re blindfoldedly steering a ship of fools, shouting contradictory orders somewhere between Scylla and Charybdis, as every narrator is, almost by definition, unreliable.

Third of all, as both the nation as well as the industrial art we call cinema have evolved into more sophisticated and self-aware entities, the focus shifts over time from who (we like to think) we were to who (we like to think) we have become. Earlier films are largely about depiction; later films are more about self-cultural psychoanalysis. Most of these movies ultimately say as much about the era in which they were made as the era they portray—which is half the fun. Accept it and roll with it.

The image Franxflix has in mind is a screening room set up for a cosmic reunion of Founding Fathers, notable figures of American history, and random citizens from every walk of life across three centuries of North America, who have been zapped in for an update on who we are now and how we got here.

This is a vast overview of optimism, self-reliance, inventiveness, stick-to-itiveness, the pioneering spirit, rugged individualism. Westward expansion. The changing role of women in public life. The gradual acceptance of minorities and immigrant cultures into the melting pot. Jazz. Baseball. Rock ‘n’ Roll. The Depression. Industrialization. Postwar affluence and materialism. Flirtations with skepticism, cynicism, fascism, socialism, communism, nihilism, -ism, -ism, -ism.

All we are saying is, give film history a chance.

Got it?

Okay, strap yourself in, pull down your safety bar, let the toothless carny pretend to check it, keep your hands inside the car at all times...

...and aaawaaaaay we go!

~ As always, click on the MOVIE POSTERS for previews~

Let’s start with the films that aren’t there.

There is no good movie about the the failed first attempt at settling Virginia, or the founding of Jamestown¹, the Mayflower crossing, the landing at Plymouth Rock and Plymouth Colony. These are great stories!

¹Terrence Mallick did make a film about Jamestown called A New World, but a) it was made in 2005 and thus excluded from my 20th century list and b) I haven’t seen it.

Perhaps someday FranxFlix will set up a production company to correct this vast oversight.

The Scarlet Letter (1926)

directed by Victor Seastrom

starring Lillian Gish, Lars Hanson, Karl Dane

- set in 1642-1649

Let’s start at the beginning; a very good place to start.

Poor Hester Prynne; she didn’t stand a chance against the rest of her fellow Puritans.

You know the story; you were supposed to read it in freshman English class.

Of the three screen adaptations I’m aware of, this one is the best and most faithful to the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, mostly because of the casting and the rewardingly economical (one is tempted to say, Puritan?) directing.

Lillian Gish is perfect as Hester Prynne; demure but not shy <nudge, nudge, wink wink>.

(So much better than the 1995 casting of…Demi Moore?! I still can’t decide whether to shake my head in disbelief or snort-laugh when I think of it).

Looking beyond the movie itself to what it tells about the historical era, it’s useful to remind ourselves from time to time that our society which is now widely considered as one of the most libertine, lazy and selfishly pampered in the history of the world (which is demonstrably false) began life in a repressed, uptight, humorless colony (which is demonstrably true).

Descendants of Puritans still abide in our world, in places their forebears would likely be aghast to know about. Let’s just say that stripped of modern political shibboleths such as “right and left”, “conservative and liberal”, “fundamentalist and progressive”, many people across the political spectrum would feel right at home in 17th century Salem, where they could sentence their neighbors to spend a day in the stocks for WrongThink, which must have been so much more satisfying in its own way than writing an angry screed on NextDoor.

I Married a Witch (1942)

directed by René Clair

starring Fredric March, Veronica Lake, Cecil Kellaway, Robert Benchley, Susan Hayward

- set in c. 1670 + 1942

Most of the movie is set in 1942, but it opens with witches being burned in Salem— those Puritans strike again!— and the way that 1942 looks back on its/our foundational heritage is quite revealing: think of it as a rest stop on that highway from Puritanism to libertinism that I spoke of above.

And let’s be clear: in this case the Puritans were right. She actually is a witch.

It’s just a fun watch; not the least of which is seeing the reaction of the witch (Veronica Lake) and her father (Cecil Kelloway) awaken after a 300 year slumber to see what has become of the descendants of those Puritans. There should be more movies, short of another Bill & Ted sequel, where people from the past can see what’s become of their heritage.

Last of the Mohicans (1992)

directed by Michael Mann

starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, Jodhi May

- set in 1757

We still call it the French and Indian War, which just proves that the winners write the history. A gripping adventure story in which Native Americans are portrayed in three dimensions, based on the James Fenimore Cooper novel that Roger Ebert called “unreadable”, this is the best film representation of Colonial American life alongside an alien culture, and the much worse French.

I love Daniel Day-Lewis as much as anyone, but this is probably his worst role; clearly Tom Cruise was unavailable so the studio had to settle for the best real actor of the times who was handsome and under thirty. Set that aside, as well as all of the other super-imposed 90s Hollywood contrivances including the soundtrack and self-undermining feminist dogma, and breathe in the concept of proto-freedom in a wilderness shared with The Other, whether you are a true Native or an adopted one.

The real bastards, outside of the French, are the British. In other words, the real enemy are the men who wear pants and wear wigs and march in a straight line to fight and take a break for tea with the so-called enemy.

Where do we go from here?

1776 (1972)

directed by Peter H Hunt

starring William Daniels, Ken Howard, Howard DaSilva, Blythe Danner

- set in 1776

Long before Lin-Manuel Miranda sullied the Founding Fathers with political correctness and bad music, there was 1776, a musical treatment of the Founding Fathers with catchy music, wit, and some naughty asides.

Like Hamilton, the script takes great liberties with historical figures, but it’s all in service to the larger message about how messy the compromise as it leads to a triumphant conclusion with an asterisk of ambiguity.

This is a Franxflix favorite. It drags a bit in the middle, but stick with it. The cast is excellent, led by William Daniels and Howard Da Silva as John Adams and Ben Franklin respectively, with future “White Shadow” Ken Howard as Thomas Jefferson. Much of the dialogue is lifted from actual letters and diaries of the protagonists, so even as it’s denigrating, or at least humbling, the FFs, it’s celebrating them with their own words.

I first saw this as a wee lad in a movie theater in 1976 as well as onstage at least four times (most recently at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC a month ago), and it led me to decades of reading about what heroes these guys truly were. Many of the “clowns” in the movie— James Wilson of Pennsylvania, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, Thomas McKean of Delaware, as well as the “villains”— John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, Charles Rutledge of South Carolina— were in real life truly thoughtful and patriotic men to whom we owe a great debt. If their service to the screenplay served a more memorable role than their service to history books, then thank young screenwriter Peter Stone for taking liberties to liberate them in the cause of liberty.

The Kentuckian (1955)

directed by Burt Lancaster

starring Burt Lancaster, Dianne Foster, Diana Lynn, Walter Matthau, Una Merkel

- set in 1820

Not the best movie on the list (maybe it’s even the worst) but worth a look-see for the depiction of the means and motivation of early settlers moving west. I really wanted to include a movie about Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone but this as good as it gets without sacrificing quality movie-watching. (Believe me, I tried, but the 1950s era movies and tv shows about those guys are wretch-inducing hack-written, poorly filmed, stereotype-ridden dreck that rely on so-called action to carry things forward. You know, like current superhero movies but without the CGI/AI dopamine rush).

It’s an important chapter to be told: (Eli Wakefield) Burt Lancaster talks of how “crowded” the former frontier of Kentucky has become, and why he needs to set out with his son for Texas.

Along the way he meets and brings aboard an indentured servant girl— that still existed?!— and a fetching (natch) school-marm, and runs up against a whip-toting regional bully in the form of Walter Matthau in his film debut.

Don’t worry — optimism and perseverance win the day.

Young Mr Lincoln (1939)

directed by John Ford

starring Henry Fonda, Alice Brady, Marjorie Weaver

- set in 1832-1837

His legacy lives on, but in the 1930s Lincoln was truly revered as the Hercules of the American experiment. In no small part, this was due to Carl Sandburg’s six volume biography released in installments from 1926 to 1939, which focus on the various tragedies and heartbreaks that plagued the man, that somehow made him more resilient and likely to look at the humorous side of situations even as he was prone to great depressions.

There were dozens of movies about various aspects of his life; this is the best.

The actual “moonlight trial” that is depicted occurred twenty years later, in 1858, but it DID happen and propelled young unknown lawyer Abraham Lincoln to national fame and a role in national politics. Henry Fonda, with the brilliant assistance of the 20th Century Fox makeup department, makes for a convincing and compelling young Mr Lincoln.

The Alamo (1960)

directed by John Wayne

starring John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey, Richard Boone, Frankie Avalon

- set in 1836

I know, I know…it’s historically inaccurate, a jingoist vanity piece produced and directed by John Wayne, but, it’s the best movie about the Alamo this side of PeeWee’s Big Adventure. And it’s better than you may have been led to believe.

If you take it at face value, it’s a pretty nifty little Western war movie, telling a piece of American history that should not be forgotten: the end point of all those Kentuckians like Daniel Boone and Davy Crocket and Jim Bowie who had moved west in quest of freedom— and were willing to die for it.

The actual battle was a tactical defeat that led to strategic victory, and became one of the foundational myths of America. Seeing it told through Wayne’s Cold War lens does nothing to diminish that.

Amistad (1997)

directed by Steven Spielberg

starring Djimon Hounsou, Anthony Hopkins, Matthew McConaughey, Morgan Freeman, Nigel Hawthorne, Pete Postlethwait, Anna Paquin

- set in 1839-41

Both Presidents Adams, the only one-termers of the first seven administrations, were considered failures at the time and in history books. They were obnoxious and disliked; that cannot be denied. Second President John retired to his farm in Quincy Massachusetts, but his son 7th President John Quincy Adams took a seat in the House of Representatives and went on to have a remarkable 17-year career there, becoming the strongest anti-slavery voice in Congress. He suffered a massive stroke on the floor of the House in 1848 and uttered his last words there before dying a few days later.

While serving in the House, he reluctantly agreed to argue a case before the Supreme Court about the illegal transportation of slaves across international waters. Spielberg (this was in his historically conscious phase) rather accurately depicts the case. Anthony Hopkins is brilliant as JQA, assisted by the nearly inevitable and always wonderful Morgan Freeman, and young Matthew McConaughey.

What is sneaky and great about this film is that it isn’t directly about American slavery - it’s about the recent universally agreed upon abolition of international slave trade. The domestic implications and tensions are clear.

The Covered Wagon (1923)

directed by James Cruze

starring J Warren Kerrigan, Lois Wilson, Alan Hale, Ernest Torrence, Tully Marshall

- set in 1848

“You have died of dysentery!”

Do you remember that? The early floppy disk game The Oregon Trail?

This is basically the silent movie version of that game. It’s all here: Conestoga wagons, births and deaths, hostile and friendly Indians, chiggers, river fords…well, maybe not the chiggers. But this is perhaps the best way to experience the Oregon trail short of dysentery.

The great thing about the “moving pictures” of this era is that they were image-focused. They really did take authentic conestoga wagons across a prairie and film it, using real Native Americans, real buffalo, and real situations. The plot is secondary, but is quite good. The Indians are not the villains, per se; their point of view is understood by the pioneers who are invading their territory and whose forebears and government agents don’t have the best track record for honesty. Only the legendary mountain man Jim Bridger (portrayed here as an eccentric wily old coot by Tully Marshall) can truly deal with both sides as he is interested in neither land nor treasure.

No, the villain here is Sam Woodhull, played by Alan Hale, one of the best silent>talkie character actors of the time. He would play Little John in Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood, and his son, who would age to look just like him, would be best known as Captain Josiah Quimby, aka The Skipper on Gilligan’s Island.

Jeremiah Johnson (1972)

directed by Sydney Pollack

starring Robert Redford, Will Geer

- set in 1848

It has been said that there are only three types of stories: man against man, man against nature, and man against himself. The “mountain man” was a unique character in American history and folklore who tackled all three. He was willing to live alone in the harshest conditions for months at a time and minimal recompense, at one with the nature he was trying to conquer, while being beset by people he has no interest in. The sad irony about the mountain man is that he blazed the trail for the civilization he yearned to escape.

One could argue that this is a somewhat autobiographical picture for Redford, as it was his first big part (1967’s Barefoot in the Park notwithstanding) without Paul Newman by his side. He portrays a naive wanna-be trapper who is taken under the wing of a crazy old coot of a mountain man, Chris “Bear Claw” Lapp (Will Geer) but has to earn his grizzly claws on his own.

This movie tells that story oh so well.. If you liked The Revenant (and you should): watch this one.

Gone With the Wind (1939)

directed by Victor Fleming

starring Viven Leigh, Clark Gable, Leslie Howard, Olivia deHavilland

- set 1861-1873

It really is still The One, the movie that best captures the prologue, action, and epilogue of how the Civil War changed the landscape, economy, and culture of the United States, especially the South, in five years. The lush green lands of Georgia burn before our eyes, visions of glory turn to nightmares of death and starvation, southern belles are reduced to scrounging any means of survival necessary, men are killed, slaves are freed, carpetbaggers roll in, the KKK is born.

And yes, there’s the love story; the American anti-Romeo and Juliet romance of star-crossed Rhett Butler and Scarlet O’Hara. Cinema would never be the same either.

CIVIL WAR DOUBLE FEATURE!

And yet, Gone With the Wind for all of its breathtaking stereophonic, Metrocolor, 1000s of extras production is still at heart a melodramatic love story with the war as a backdrop.

Nothing makes for good film like a good war movie, and the American Civil War is just about the best place to start. Pop some popcorn and set aside a good chunk of time; I recommend a rainy Saturday afternoon starting about 2:00 ‘cuz these are long.

Gettysburg (1993)

directed by Ronald F Maxwell

starring Jeff Daniels, Martin Sheen, Tom Berenger, Sam Elliott, C Thomas Howell

- set July 1-3, 1863

Critically speaking, this is not a great movie. But it’s a great movie.

Martin Sheen is terrible as Robert E Lee; he is nothing like the man we have from photographs and letters— did he not even watch Ken Burns’ epic PBS Civil War series for a basic take on the man?! Tom Berenger is just as bad as Longstreet, in his Soggy Bottom Boys beard.

And oh that synthesizer soundtrack…

BUT, the battle scenes are all that a Civil War nerd could ask for. The script based on Michael Schaara’s The Killer Angels keeps a balanced, well-paced, easily followed narrative faithful to the real action.

Jeff Daniels gives one of the greatest performances of his career as Joshua Chamberlain, the Maine professor-turned-colonel who single-handedly turned the course of American history.

And even though he’s only in it for about ten minutes, Sam Elliott’s mustache carries the day, which is the job it was assigned to do.

It was supposed to be a TV mini-series, produced by Ted Turner, who was a Civil War aficionado. Ted turned into a theatrical release, which bombed, because it does carry the whiff of “made for tv” that a large screen can’t overcome. I’ve always been ambivalent about Ted Turner (founded CNN, colorized movies), but the man loved movies (founded TCM), and loved history (he has a cameo in the movie).

FranxFlix FunFact: I bought my first large screen TV and Dolby 5.1 sound system when this movie came out on DVD in 1994. I watch it every couple of years on July 2 and still get a thrill when the cannons rumble announcing the beginning of Pickett’s Charge.

Glory (1989)

directed by Edward Zwick

starring Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, Cary Elwes, Morgan Freeman, Andre Braugher

- set in 1863

When I first showed this to my girls as young teens they were horrified: “You’ve ruined Ferris Bueller forever!” Which is to say, Matthew Broderick can play a serious role convincingly. (They’ve since gotten over it).

It is indeed a very good role, in a very good movie, about a very true experience that should swell every American breast: the formation and action of the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Regiment, formed of black volunteers who participated in the doomed assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina.

Broderick plays Col Robert Gould Shaw who trains and leads the men. His story propels the plot, but the real stars are Morgan Freeman, Andre Braugher, and Denzel Washington, three of the best African-American actors at the peak of African-American acting in Hollywood.

The title says it all: it is heart-breaking and inspirational, and is probably the best movie made about the Civil War.

I hope you enjoyed this little survey of the first four-score and twenty years of the US Nation, (plus another 150-ish of Colonial times) as seen through the lens of Hollywood. Stay tuned for Part II: Coming of Age, taking us from Reconstruction through World War II. Should be a good one, right?

Let me know if you think I’ve made any glaring errors/omissions in this list!

Last year at this time, I posted a FranxFlix special edition entitled Long Hot Summers, dealing with movies in which heat drives people crazy.

I thought new readers might like to take a gander as we all await the newest FranxFlix edition, America250 on film, which should be arriving aaany day now….

Enjoy and stay cool. Physically and metaphorically.

Long Hot Summers

“I wish I had a pencil-thin mustache,/the kind that Boston Blackie wore…”

I’m not much of a Parrot Head, but that’s a good Jimmy Buffett lyric. I get where he’s coming from.

I’ve been immersed in films of 1942 for the past few weeks; it slowly dawned on me that this was the pinnacle of the Mustache Era. Flixing back through the files: yes. Circa 1934-1942 was indeed Peak Mustache, and like much else in 1942, this was the apex before a dramatic change across the cultural landscape.

The mustache at that time made an actor appear debonaire and mischievous, with a hint of danger. On the early side (late 1920s into 30s), it also implied that he had money and was vaguely aristocratic: it takes work to keep that pencil-thin well-groomed. You just know whoever was sporting it also had well-manicured nails and a pleasant scent of eau-du-toilette, always appearing as though he had just come from the barber after stopping first at the clothier and florist for a carnation boutonniere before stopping for a buff at the local shoeshine.

But before you make a fag joke, bub, the man in question could kick your ass and straighten his tie and go into dinner while you’re on the pavement holding the back of your hand to your lip with a look of incredulity on your stupid face: that’s the power of the mustache, and don’t you forget it.

He could be en route to closing a big business deal, taking a swell dame for a night on the town, dodging a creditor or two, or appearing in a swanky uptown cabaret for a rhumba or two. Perhaps all of the above.

By the end of the era— the early forties, with the Depression just loosening its grip and and World War II an inevitability, these mustachioed heroes were slowly replaced by clean-shaven rugged types: Bogart, Cagney, Peck, Cooper, Fonda, Stewart… and then Ladd, Brando, Clift, Lancaster. They were guys that were just trying to make ends meet, like you, Average Joe. Life is complicated enough without time for this manscaping nonsense. Some of the new guys were even willing to appear onscreen with a five-to-twenty hour stubble and an undershirt with pit-stains, or even (gasp!) a wife-beater t-shirt.

At it’s peak, the mustache and the men who wore them are worthy of consideration for their valiant contribution to what society could be, given enough time and effort and finely-honed straight blades. Let’s face it: you can’t get that precise with a safety razor which just happened to be appearing on the scene.

Here is my (albeit ad hoc, I haven’t given it too much thought) list of greatest classic Hollywood men of the classic mustachioed era. In no particular order.

Please let me know who I’ve forgotten!

Ronald Colman

Undisputed king of the mustache golden era.

Audiences who saw The Talk of the Town would have been amused by his unkempt Van Dyke-ish beard at the start of the film. The beard is something of a joke in much of the dialogue, until he shaves it all off in an effort to find his true inner self, who just happens to look like, ahhhh, Ronald Colman. Much better.

Melvyn Douglas

Rakish, but not flamboyant. I love that he let it grow old and shaggier with him and kept it almost all the way to the end as he played more serious roles, through Hud (1961) and The Candidate (1972).

Errol Flynn

You need to be able to wink like a rascal and swing on a rope while defeating seven brigands in a sword fight several times on you way to dinner to wear a mustache like that. He could, and he did.

Claude Rains

He played a lot of clean-shaven roles, but when he’s got that mustache he always comes across as someone who is proud to be wearing it, even though he knows he doesn’t really deserve it. He puts it to excellent use, using it as that extra bit of charm his characters usually need to inspire confidence in his intentions.

Clark Gable

He had a few roles without it in his heyday (mostly historical roles, like Mutiny on the Bounty), but I admire his sticking with it as his career waned and then waxed again. His wearing it never made him seem an aristocrat— more of an appealing pretender, winking to the audience that an average joe like he could find a few extra minutes in the morning to look like a million bucks.

By the time of his last great roles in the fifties and early sixties, that mustache had a life of its own: as weather-beaten as the face it sat on.

That mustache has seen shit you couldn’t handle.

Adolphe Menjou

Considering that most of his career was spent playing delightful men of dubious character, his almost-twirl-able fat lip caterpillar suited him perfectly. A carry-over from a bygone era, it’s plumpness and fastidiousness suggests to young women that he was a man of means who is still capable of compensating for other… physical limitations.

Fredric March

He was a great actor no matter what, but he was always a little better when he had that pencil-thin curve on his upper lip. Confident, composed, forward-thinking. And one could argue, given my thesis outlined above, that he recognized the demise of the mustache was at hand…

Basil Rathbone

The funny thing is that he was always clean-shaven for his most famous character, Sherlock Holmes. But when he wasn’t playing Holmes, which usually meant he was playing a villain, his ‘stache announced that he was still the smartest and most dangerous man in the room: don’t try any funny stuff.

William Powell

Even when he wasn’t playing Nick Charles, his upper lip announced that whatever situation he’s facing, he has it well in hand, as well as a martini. Like Gable, his facial hair was perfectly accented by a twinkle in the eye: why so serious? An old acquaintance in TheThin Man says , “Ah, those were the good old days” he replies, “Don’t fool yourself. These are the good old days”. Indeed. Old Bill Powell in the 50s still wore the mustache, but it carried a look of wisdom and weariness.

The Douglas Fairbankses, Sr and Jr

Junior inherited the role of Zorro and the mustache from his father Douglas Fairbanks Sr, each of whom could fly in a window, cut a Z in your ass, grab the girl and be gone before you knew what hit you - other than the memory of a toothy grin with a lipbrow above it.

Which swashbuckler wore it better: Erroll Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks Jr? It remains an open question.

One can never resist the urge to bring up the eternal question that Mel Brooks raised in Blazing Saddles: “How did he do such tremendous stunts…with such little feet?”

Speaking of Mel Brooks, there are the three comedians of the classic mustache era who must be acknowledged: Chaplin, Groucho, and Hardy.

Charlie Chaplin

Hats off to Le Charlôt for turning his liability into a joke: when Hitler rose to power with the same mustache Chaplin had been wearing to comedic effect for nigh on thirty years, he stepped into the limelight and said “I’m your guy!”

And then…. he shaved it off. His legacy rests with the pre-forties Little Tramp, but he went on to make another half-dozen great movies in his clean-shaven image. Ultimately, the mustache was but one tool in his kit, and he discarded it just when it would have become a liability.

Oliver Hardy

The more one considers Oliver Hardy’s mustache, the funnier it becomes. It is so barely there, like a soul patch that has migrated north. It’s far too small to do anything except accentuate how large his face is, in the same way that his too-short tie accentuates his girth. It’s often uneven, as though he were trying for a Chaplin but kept shaving until it’s almost beside the point and just quit out of frustration.

And I think that’s the innate joke that is constantly before us but gets lost in the antics.

Like Chaplin, he could use it to great effect in the way it goes askew with his facial movements.

Groucho Marx

The first time I saw Duck Soup on a big screen (after years of seeing it on a tiny tv), I finally got the gag: Groucho’s mustache was greasepaint! There’s a close-up where his whole face fills the screen, and the entire theater erupted in laughter. Moments like that can’t be replaced by home video.

That fake mustache was so much a part of his public persona that he grew it for real, and for several subsequent films you can see the real mustache under the greasepaint one and the gag is even better.

Slave to a mustache; two bits.

You bet your life he kept it for the rest of his life as he hosted the game show You Bet Your Life in the 50s and did the Carson and Cavett talk show circuit through the 70s. He kept the cigar, too.

So that’s it for the Peak Mustache Years. I’ve limited myself to 1934-1942, but there have been so many other great ones over the decades, including the entire sub-genres of Westerns and the 70s comeback of cheesy macho men.

But let’s cut to the chase: across all genres and eras, there is one mustache king of ‘em all: Sam Elliott.

Dear Friends of Film,

1942 was just one of those years that had so many good films that it requires a robust follow-up post.

Below are the films that I would have gladly paid two bits to see in a stuffy seedy theater that had been converted from vaudeville, with old mohair seats and scuffed wood armrests and peeling plaster cartouches; box of Cracker Jack in hand.

These aren’t the films that make “10 Best” lists, but they are all fun to watch and provide the datum for those others to slightly rise above.

~as always, click on the movie poster for a preview~

Across the Pacific

directed by John Huston

starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Syndney Greenstreet

Across the Pacific is the glass key to 1942.

Made slightly before Casablanca, it reunites Bogart with two Maltese Falcon nemeses from the year before: Sydney Greenstreet as the Heavy (and I do mean heavy), and duplicitous, charming Mary Astor as the Femme.

Directed by John Huston, the plot is openly propagandistic in its message to not trust anyone of Japanese decent, no matter how charmingly Westernized they may appear. Ironically, so many Japanese actors had been shipped off to Roosevelt’s internment camps that the production team had a hard time casting the movie and relied mostly on Chinese-Americans in their stead.

Bogie plays a disgraced court-martialed army officer who can’t even get a Canadian commission. He outwardly declares his intention to offer his munitions expertise to the highest bidder, be it Chinese nationalists or Japan. And so he sets off for the Pacific (but the action never makes it past Panama).

It’s a fine movie, handled skillfully and beautifully shot by Huston & Vincent Sherman who replaced him when the former was called up to the US Army Signal Corps, but there’s one scene that makes it really special.

In an unwitting announcement of the ending of one film era to embark on another, about half hour into the film, Bogie trades in his officer’s uniform for a trench coat and fedora and announces he is now a free agent to whatever army pays him the most: he is interested in no cause but himself.

Sure, he wore trench coats before in other movies as a private dick, but this is “the” Bogie trench coat and fedora of Rick in Casablanca. As an added tickler, his name in this film is Rick too. Interestingly, Mary Astor’s name is Marlow, a homophone of Bogie’s famous noir role as Philip Marlowe in The Maltese Falcon.

It’s farewell to noir Bogart, and hello to Mssr. Rick navigating the unsettled world of wartime loyalty tests, opportunism, and chances at redemption. When he puts on that coat, Humphrey has taken on a new persona, the one that would really make him the legend— the man who sticks his neck out for nobody even when he’s up to his smirk in political intrigue.

I can’t help but think of the scene in For a Few Dollars More when Clint Eastwood’s “Man With No Name” character dons the Mexican poncho that would forever change how we think of him and Westerns in general. Sure, he wore that poncho in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly a year earlier, but in Federico Fellini’s world, time is a loop, so we see him acquire it in the second one. As far as Franxflix is concerned, the same principle applies here: this is the moment when Humphrey Bogart, contract studio player at Warner Bros., becomes Bogie, exalted cinema icon.

Sydney Greenstreet would appear again in “Rick”’s near future, as Signor Ferrari, owner of Rick’s rival bar The Blue Parrot in Casablanca— wearing the same double-breasted white linen suit. No one could wear that double-breasted white linen suit like Syndey Greenstreet. Well-done, Hollywood tailors! Would that current generations had access to the same sartorial skills and the desire to make use of them.

Bambi

Walt Disney Productions

Let us not even touch on what the man Walter Disney would think of the current form of his legacy. I even think he would not have been all-too pleased with what are now called “classic” from the 90s Eisner years. Cryogenic-tube spinning doesn’t even begin to describe it.

This is a hard movie to watch. It hits you right in the id: Bambi’s mother dies, there’s a cute fawn that makes eyes at him but his wing-men are a bunny and a skunk, he’s being chased by horrible monsters called Men with a horrible weapon called Fire, he has an absentee-father called The Prince of The Forest that all of the other herbivores are scared of, and then Bam! puberty hits.

The fact that people took children to see this proves that the past is a foreign country.

I know I saw it in a theater upon one of its re-releases, so it must have been 1975 and I would have been seven or eight. The next year saw the release of The Bad News Bears so yes, even by then the past was a foreign country.

To watch it now (still hard!), is to take your breath away. Colors and sound and painted backgrounds/foregrounds create a technicolor dreamworld.

The lengths to which Walt & Co went to get the animation exactly right is unbelievable. The “cinematography” incorporates the best of recent Orson Welles-like deep focus: animals move like animals and emote like humans, as does fire. All done by hand, one multi-plane set-up at a time, three years in the making.

Yeah, Bambi’s bunny friend Thumper may be a little cutesy annoying to modern eyes, but he’s dolloped into the film in just the right amount to assuage the harshness of the other goings-on. Let’s all admit it: you take a sigh of relief when Thumper appears. Thumper is the anti-JarJar Binks; give him some respect.

By-the-bye, on rewatching this it occurs to me just how much Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer glommed onto Bambi for audiences who would have been familiar with the latter and were then raising young kids.

For Me and My Gal

directed by Busby Berkeley

starring Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, George Murphy, Martha Egerth, Ben Blue

The title credits include “Introducing Gene Kelly”, and what a debut, thanks to his co-star Judy Garland who had discovered him onstage on Broadway in My Pal Joey and brought him to the attention of MGM lion Louis B Mayer. This was the first of three pictures they made together (there were supposed to be four, but Gene broke his ankle during the filming of Easter Parade; Fred Astaire came out of semi-retirement to fill in out of his friend Judy’s precarious mental health at that point to keep her from breaching contract- such was Hollywood).

Kelly brought a new kind of dancing to the screen: more athletic than Astaire, less aggressive than Cagney. A lovable Irish-American cad who might throw hands (but never does, he’ll raise an eyebrow though).

Franxflix loves this movie; always has, always will. Had it on the main 1942 list for the longest time but in good consciousness had to acknowledge it’s not objectively “great”. But it’s oh so good.

For one thing, usually over-the-top musical director Busby Berkeley gives reality a nodding smile and restrains all the musical performances to a legit Vaudeville stage-on-screen— and they’re all charming. (Cut to Louis B Mayer chomping on a cigar in the background with a copy of Berkeley’s contract that he bought out from Warner Bros.)

For another, Gene is a sensation, and I would have loved to have seen him in Pal Joey- he’s perfect for it. (Sinatra got the film role fifteen years later, also good). He has the perfect amount of hubris, charm, hokum and pathos, which plays so well against Garland’s female equivalent of the same.

Speaking of Judy…Judy, Judy, Judy. This was her first truly adult role. She was still involved in on-screen romances with Mickey Rooney as a late-blooming teenager, but this is her first breakout from juvenile to adult female, and she handles it with aplomb.

Throw in George Murphy (future governor of California; you can look it up!) whom MGM played up in the marketing because he was more bankable than Kelly who was just some guy from Pittsburgh that no one had heard of, and always-in-the-background funny guy Ben Blue. Give it a more or less forensically accurate accounting of the last days of vaudeville, some patriotic hoopla about how awful your life will be if you dodge the draft for selfish purposes, and you’ve got a great little movie here.

George Washington Slept Here

directed by William Keighley

starring Jack Benny, Ann Sheridan, Charles Coburn, Joyce Reynolds, Hattie McDaniels, William Tracy, Percy Kilbride

This is a classic “money pit” scenario, like Green Acres, but with the spousal roles reversed.

Bill Fuller (Jack Benny) has no desire to leave the city but his wife Connie (Ann Sheridan) has a penchant for history and dreams of living in a historical house in the country when they are kicked out of their third apartment because of their nasty cur of a yappy dog. She buys a rundown house on the realtor’s suggestion that George Washington slept there; the local historian chuckles and tells her he actually did not— but Benedict Arnold did.

This launches into overdrive what Jack Benny did best: sarcastically complain about everything under the sun, at every living second, knowing that Ann Sheridan is the perfect wife who will withstand the onslaught.

In this case, he is completely justified.

All of the locals they encounter in Bucks County PA (just a short train ride from New York— if you catch the 5:43 AM or the 10:15 PM) are impassively satisfied with their rural life in historic Pennsylvania, near where Washington crossed the Delaware, until legal matters about metes & bounds & easements are at hand. Costs quickly add up in the form of fending off beetles, well-digging and buying gravel and dirt. They have no dirt, no water, yet somehow lots of mud, and an impassive handyman who hands them the bill and instructs them what “has” to happen next.

Then descends the metaphorical plague of locusts in the form of long-lost relatives, including devil-child nephew Rickey (Douglas Croft, who was also in this year’s Kings Row and Pride of the Yankees, and the following year would portray the first onscreen Robin in the popular Batman serial), and Uncle Sidney (Charles Coburn, the great character actor who excelled at playing grand old men who aren’t what they at first seem).

Then come the literal locusts.

You are forgiven for getting tired of Benny’s squawkings for the first 2/3 of the film, but in screwball fashion the last twenty minutes take you for a holy ride of plot resolution that make it all worthwhile.

In a way, this is a proto-inversion of It’s a Wonderful Life. Instead of being saved by the good people with good intentions the hero has known his whole life but wouldn’t dare ask for help, he is saved by the ne’er-do-wells among the locals and locusts who happily take down the town villain just for sport.

As Jack Benny was wont to say on his popular radio show,

“Well.”

The Glass Key

directed by Stuart Heisler

starring Brian Donlevy, Veronica Lake, Alan Ladd, William Bendix, Bonita Granville, Richard Denning, Joseph Calleia

The title is a metaphor, helpfully explained by Ed Beaumont (Alan Ladd): You may think you have the means to access power and happiness, but perhaps the key just look pretty until it’s put to use. Try that key and you may end up getting slugged over and over by William Bendix. Dad loves his work.

Alan Ladd created a new kind of loner/gangster/gun-for-hire who was inscrutably taciturn, always sees a job through; motivation unknown.

This is the second of Ladd's three great noir films (between this year’s This Gun For Hire and 1946’s The Blue Dahlia, both of which also had him paired with Veronica Lake). Ladd and Lake make a great pair: you never know who’s playing whom in any given scenario. And they looked great together: the 4’-11” Lake was about the only actress that the 5’-6” Ladd (5’-9” with the Afro) could believably glower over.

Plotwise: Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy) is a former(-ish) gangster who wants to get into a ‘legal racket’; he chooses politics as being the easiest conversion for a man of his skills. Ed Beaumont (Ladd) is his best friend and trusted assistant whom we would call consigliere if his name weren’t French. There’s a murder that gets pinned on Madvig, and the only one who doesn’t believe it is Beaumont. He becomes an unsanctioned private investigator in search of the truth, crossing paths with Janet Henry (Lake), gangster Nick Varna (Joseph Calleia), and Nick’s dim-witted eager-beaver thug Jeff (William Bendix, in the role he was born to play).

There are twists and turns as we find out who the real perpetrator is. None of the twists is particularly shocking, but it’s those constant little satisfactory “I thought so!”’s along the way that make it fun.

I Married a Witch

directed by René Clair

starring Fredric March, Veronica Lake, Cecil Kellaway, Robert Benchley, Susan Hayward

Here’s that woman again: another Lake Effect snow in the forecast.

We first meet Jennifer and her father as disembodied voices imprisoned in the roots of a tree after being burned at the stake by Puritans for the (legit) crime of witchcraft. 270 years pass before a lightning bolt sets them free in 1942.

Wally Woolley (Fredric March) is a descendant of one of those Puritans, and the two ghosts are eager to revenge torture him for the transgressions of his forebears. And what timing: today is his wedding day, which is on the eve of his predicted landslide victory to be state governor.

They adopt human bodies (hers is of course, Veronica Lake’s, his is that of the great character actor Cecil Kellaway). A bit of witchcraft goes awry, and Jennifer falls in love with Wally. The whole movie takes place over the course of about 36 hours. It’s not the tidiest of plots but who cares. It’s fun, and Lake is a dream.

Jennifer and Wally do get married, as the title gives away, and she promises to be a good wife and only resort to witchcraft when absolutely necessary. Gen X: sound familiar?

My Favorite Blonde

directed by Sidney Lanfield

Bob Hope, Madeiline Carroll, Gale Sondergaard, George Zucco

Poor Bob Hope. To those of us of a certain age, he was an unfunny old guy trotted out on tv to deliver lame one-liners when it was clear he didn’t even know what he was saying. This is a travesty that must be corrected, for in his prime he was one of the funniest men to stroll the earth: there was a reason he hosted the Oscars for 19 years.

To be honest, a lot of his movies have poor material that he does the best with, but this one is a gem, with Bob playing a struggling vaudevillian who finds himself in a Wrong Man situation involving a female British spy and secret war plans held be fifth columnists. He has to travel across the country incognito to deliver some microfilm McGuffin or whatever without losing his penguin, who is the real star of his show.

The rapidity of jokes is so furious that you have to watch it several times to call balls and strikes. With at least five gags per minute, and approximately two out of every five hit— that’s a respectable .400 average in the era when baseball was the king of sports.

Mel Brooks fans will applaud the tenacity of the constant gags, and Woody Allen fans will recognize the template of the cowardly amorous loser who’s never to scared to crack a joke even under the worst of duress— and will notethat he also adapated many of Hope’s mannerisms and timing.

There’s also a cameo by Bob’s golf-and-horsetrack buddy and usual partner-in-comedy, Bing Crosby, who narcs on him to the cops, natch.

My Sister Eileen

directed by Alexander Hall

starring Rosalind Russell, Brian Aherne, Janet Blair, George Tobias, Allyn Joslyn

I had an English professor who once said if he could live his life over, his greatest wish would be to read Romeo and Juliet for the first time with what he knows now. Sort of a chasing the dragon kinda thing that has always stuck with me.

It’s been a great pleasure re-watching favorite movies lately as part of the FranxFlix mission, and especially 1930s-40s screwball comedies. Even if one forgets every little nuance, it’s never exactly the same as the first time, and truth be told there are some clunkers that don’t play as well 30, 40, 50 years on from when you first saw them.

The closest I’ve gotten to pure experience is showing movies to other people (especially my wife, and most especially my daughters, and especially when they were young) and watching their reaction as they watch it.

Last week I caught the dragon.

This movie that I had never seen was on my 1942 throwaway list; it comes up in lore a bit, Roz Russell was nominated for an Oscar, but it mostly doesn’t exist anymore. It never made it to “Officially Released Home Media” before the memory-hole archivists swept through, so I had to do a real search to find a copy of it.

Watching this movie for the first time let me catch that dragon for an hour and a half.

And in the end I found it in the most obvious of places: it is still free on YouTube.

I have a feeling that as soon as I post this, AI-driven bots will swoop down and blot it out. Find it while you can, and please watch it. If you have a legal and practicable means to save it: do so.

[We, the FranxFlix legion, are the equivalent of the 5th century monks storing civilization in anticipation of the hard times to come, when people don’t know what it is they don’t know. Send me a message and I can hook you up.]

About the movie:

Two sisters from Columbus Ohio move to NY to find fame and fortune. The two girls grope (and get groped upon) their way through the madcap world of New York in 1942. They each have different attitudes towards the intentions of the colorful characters who are constantly bounding into their apartment unannounced to add another layer to the increasingly complicated situations, and their teamwork pays off in the end.

Screwball comedy at its absolute best.

The last ten seconds include cameos by fellow Columbia Studios stars Moses Horwitz, Laurence Feinberg and Jerome Horwitz, which provides the cherry on top.

Now, Voyager

directed by Irving Rapper

starring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Gladys Cooper, Bonita Granville

Franxflix tends to eschew melodramas, but this Cinderella story is one of Bette Davis’s finest vehicles, giving her a breadth of characters to play and reconcile.

When we first meet Charlotte Vane (Davis) she is a dowdy, pudgy spinstress with coke-bottle eyeglasses and caterpillar eyebrows, living under the thumb of her wealthy domineering mother.

A fairy godfather, in the form of a benevolent unorthodox psychiatrist played by Claude Rains, gives her the secrets to finding freedom and happiness because psychiatry had all of the answers in 1942.

Behold: she plucks her eyebrows, charges a new wardrobe to her mother’s account, takes an ocean voyage and finds Prince Charming in the form of Jerry Durance (the ever-noble and ever-suffering Paul Henreid) who has troubles of his own. The transformation is magical, but never unbelievable: dowdy Charlotte has always spoken with the fire of her new-found ego Carlotta, and Carlotta maintains the doubts and willies of her inner Charlotte.

It would be disingenuous of me to say the film holds up terribly well, but Davis is magical as she runs the gamut of emotions in her transformation. At some point, you are bound to say “ah, so that’s what the phrase ‘Bette Davis eyes’ means.

Spoiler Bonus: It ends with one of the most endearingly corny lines on film: “Oh Jerry, let’s not wish for the moon…when we have the stars.” I still don’t know what that means.

Pride of the Yankees

directed by Sam Wood

starring Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright, Babe Ruth, Walter Brennan, Dan Duryea

Lou Gehrig was as monumental a hero you could get in the 30s & 40s: baseball’s “Iron Man” who played 2,130 consecutive games for the indomitable Yankees’ “murderer’s row”, until he had to sit down with the disease that would eventually came to be named for him (now unromantically and clinically known as ALS).

Barely a year after his death, Gary Cooper played him in this biopic hagiography. It was a long-standing legend that they filmed right-handed Cooper in a backwards uniform running to third base and then flipped the negative so he would look like the left-handed Gehrig, but the Baseball Hall of Fame has confirmed that the (surprisingly unathletic) Coop learned to hit southpaw for the role. (How’s that for method acting, 10 years before Brando & Dean). Perhaps Cooper plays young Gehrig as a little bit of a clumsy goof, but he was coming off a few years of success working for Frank Capra who encouraged such stuff.

The two highlights are Teresa Wright as his charming wife Elly, and Babe Ruth playing himself— quite well too!— with stalwart actor William Brennan playing a crafty reporter against his usual dim-witted coot-type.

It would be a Franxflix Fib to say this is great cinema, but the vintage game scenes (far too few) are wonderful and it has a heart of sweetness with several great apogees along the way to the final scene, the reproduction of Gehrig’s famous “luckiest man” speech. You know they worked hard to get this right: audiences had all seen the real deal in newsreels a few years before, being acted out by someone almost as well-known.

Do me a Franxflix Favor and watch them side by side.

Ultimately what really makes this film a keeper is the way it captures every-day America (filtered through a sunny Hollywood lens) at the peak of optimism.

Random Harvest

directed by Mervyn LeRoy

starring Ronald Colman, Greer Garson

This movie will break your heart over and over. In keeping with two of the major themes of 1942, it is about war and psychiatry.

Ronald Colman plays a shell-shocked World War I vet with amnesia. He walks out of the asylum he’s been assigned to and falls in love with Greer Garson (the perfect movie wife if there ever was one). They live happily until, well, something happens. Then something else happens, and something else.

On paper it would all seem so unbelievable, but it’s so well done that it works.

Fine performances all around, and the languid pace of the film counter-intuitively keeps it interesting.

Someday when I’m old enough, I’d like to grow a Ronald Colman moustache. Ah crap. That would have been like twenty years ago. Guess I’ll have to settle for a David Letterman beard.

Roxie Hart

directed by William A Wellman

starring Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou, George Montgomery, Lynne Overman, Nigel Bruce, Phil Silvers, William Frawley, Spring Byington

You are correct: the title name does ring a bell. Roxie Hart is the lead character from the 1975 Broadway musical-cum-2002 movie Chicago, but the tale has a much longer lineage. [link to 1927 FFx]

Based on a true story back in the bad old days of 1927, Roxie is accused of shooting her lover behind her husband’s back right in front of his eyes. Unlike the later musical versions which focus on her showbiz aspirations, this one elevates the complicity of the judicial system and the press to keep the story going at the expense of the people involved.

If you’re a fan of the latter musical versions, you will be tickled to see the relative roles of Amos & Billy Flynn. (If you’ve never seen the 2002 movie: shame on you). There is also a key character, a reporter named Homer Howard, who was excised from subsequent versions. Velma Kelly and Mama Morton ain’t in this one. Whatever happened to class?

The other constant through the erstwhile franchise is columnist Mary Sunshine, which is funny from a 21st century perspective because such a formerly ubiquitous press creature no longer exists; her professional descendants now haunt Tik-Tok, X, and BlueSky.

I’ve long espoused that legendary dancing Ginger Rogers is one of the finest actresses and comediennes of her era and therefore of all time, and she had two doozies this year. This film supports the thesis, especially when she breaks into dance as though it’s an afterthought.

It’s weird to see her in a red curly wig, since her naturally red hair always looked so nice in black-and-white. You can tell it’s shocking red, even through the black-and-white medium; the effect was deliberate.

The surprise here is Adolphe Menjou, who usually plays taciturn military officers and public officials, taking his turn as publicity-hound lawyer Billy Flynn. He may not look like Richard Gere, but he is handsome in his own way and plays this role to its fullest.

Oh- and young Phil Silvers does a great turn as young Phil Silvers.

This Gun’s For Hire

directed by Frank Tuttle

starring Robert Preston, Laird Cregar, Veronica Lake, Alan Ladd

Robert Preston gets top billing in the credits, but it’s Ladd and Lake who were the instant sensation in this, their first pairing.

A noir/wartime mashup about secret formulas and double-dealing scientists and fifth-columnists, ruthless hitman Philip Raven (Alan Ladd) is used as a pawn in a greater scheme. He doesn’t take kindly to that and seeks revenge. As far as we can tell, he’s a sociopath who by my count smiles exactly three times in the film. He even appears immune to the charms of Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake) whom he essentially kidnaps to help him.

The culmination of the film is a chase through a gasworks and then a train yard, wonderfully shot with steam and smoke and shadows and echoes among clanking metal machinery.

Franxflix does his best, but is always on the hunt. If I’ve missed one of your favorites, please let me know!

So many movies, so little time…

Leave a comment

May 19, 2026.

Friends of film:

Just as screwball comedies, film noir hit their stride, here comes a World War to disrupt the flow.

Three themes dominate 1942: America goes to war, psychiatry is the miracle cure for everything, and Veronica Lake.

America goes to war: The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor dovetailed nicely (tinfoil-hatters might say TOO nicely) into the films currently in production. It is no secret that the War Department had been speaking with the studio heads about putting as many pro-American messages into films. Hollywood happily complied: most studios were run by first or second-generation European Jewish emigrants, bolstered by a recent wave of German talent— directors, writers, cinematographers, and actors— fleeing Weimar/Nazi Germany. Hollywood writers leaned left-to-pink-to-red; actors tended to be rather liberal and/or pro-American ingenuity/rugged-individual.

Consequently, we are constantly subjected to tangential monologues about what it means to be an American and how we all need to do our part to stay free.

From a high level, I see three general categories:

1) Movies about the war (which American forces had yet to enter). The plots tend to involve saboteurs and fifth columnists living among us. Love your neighbor, but don’t trust him or her. This would include not only Saboteur, but also Across the Pacific and This Gun For Hire. And for gosh sakes, do something patriotic! The Major and the Minor, My Favorite Blonde, Woman of the Year, Yankee Doodle Dandy (mostly set in WWI), and of course the year’s Best Picture, Mrs Miniver all address themes of sacrifice and home-front patriotism.

2) Nostalgic movies, that remind audiences of childhood memories, dying grandmothers, and what it took to build a modern land like no other world had. Interesting that in almost all of these, the Victorian past is simultaneously cherished and disposed with, in an “I come not to bury Caesar, but to praise him” sort of way: Kings Row, The Magnificent Ambersons, Now,Vogager, Pride of the Yankees and Yankee Doodle Dandy all lean hard into nostalgia while trumpeting the progress of recent decades.

3) Movies that all but ignore current events altogether; mostly comedies. And oh, what comedies we have: this is where the ”light touch” of my opening statement comes in. Lubitsch, Sturges, Billy Wilder, Hope & Crosby, Jack Benny are but a few of the masters at work.

Interestingly enough, at least three of these films are fixated on the recently-developed and rather fetishized field psychiatry/psychology (two of them starring Claude Rains as a shrink!) What was in the air to produce such a coincidence? Perhaps it was predictive programming for the war-induced mental trauma to come, with the hope that the recent advances in the now-graduated-from-pseudo to actual science would be at the ready unlike 20 years earlier. I leave it to you, dear reader, to draw your own conclusions.

Which brings us to Veronica Lake. What? You say you’ve never heard of her? For a brief moment, she was the brightest star in the firma-mint. By brief, I mean about 18-36 months, give or take. She was equally a film noir femme fatale, the girl next door, and a favorite pin-up for our boys over there, a one-stop virgin-whore complex for the psychiatrists to rub their hands over gleefully. (I mean that metaphorically; sometimes a gleeful hand rubover is just a gleeful hand rubover). Her primary claim to fame was staked not on her talent (which wasn’t minimal, to be honest; she was quite good in her roles), but on her signature “peek-a-boo” haircut, with one platinum blond tress carelessly hanging down to cover her right eye.

Alas, it turned out she was more Samson than Delilah: after she appeared in a government-sponsered public service video in which she had her hair cut to demonstrate to the women taking over the factory jobs that everyone should do their duty for the war and not grind the gears with their fashion choices, and guess what: her career tanked. Yes, there were other factors, contractual and personal, but in the end those golden tresses proved but a flash in the pan.

But what a flash. As a testament to her temporary greatness, two of the best films of the year that she wasn’t even in make reference to her. (The Major and the Minor and Talk of the Town).

We also have Fred and Ginger going their separate ways (for a few years, anyway), with great benefit to each. We have the third Bob Hope-Bing Crosby pairing, and the first screen appearance of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.

FranxFlix found himself on the horns of a dilemma involving possibly the greatest film of all time, Casablanca. You see, it was voted Best Picture by the academy for 1943, though it was technically released in November 1942 — not in a bid to qualify for the Oscars, but to capitalize on the recent Allied invasion of North Africa. It was overlooked that year, but went on to do boffo box office so the Academy came around to it the following with its deserving honors. FranxFlix has decided to restore it to its rightful temporal place.

There were so many great films this year. I will definitely be posting a “Cutting Room Floor” in the next few weeks.

Enjoy.

FXD

Arlington VA.

~As always, click on the MOVIE POSTER for a preview~

Casablanca

*****

directed by Michael Curtiz

starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, Dooley Wilson, Syndney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt, S Z Sakall

This is the big one. Not just of the year, but perhaps ever. It’s got it all: the setting, the scenario, taut direction, cracking dialogue with chunks of memorable lines, beautiful cinematography, taut direction, and one of the best ensemble casts ever put on screen. FranxFlix was tempted to give it a sixth star but recognizes how that could create problems down the road. FranxFlix sticks his neck out for no one.

From lead actors Humphrey Bogart at his Bogiest and Ingrid Bergman at her ethereal mysterious best, through recognizable supporting actors Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt and down into the real stars of the show, the denizens of Rick’s Cafe American that include Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet, (who are sort of the Laurel and Hardy of Warner Bros noir films), and S Z “Cuddles” Sakall, plus all the others whose actors’ names I don’t know, and don’t need to, because they are eternally those characters: Sasha the bartender, Emil the croupier, the old Austrian couple practicing English en route to America, the pickpocket, and Rick’s girlfriend of last week Yvonne…all of them. And of course, Sam. Dear old Sam: no one can play ‘As Time Goes By’ like Sam.

You see, everybody comes to Rick’s.

We touch upon the great, beautiful mystery of possibly the greatest film of all time: some critics argue that it is director Michael Curtiz’s signature film and therefore supports the “auteur theory” that genius creates greatness, while others argue that it was such a haphazard production of countless anonymous hands that no one can be credited with its genius and therefore is the greatest argument for “collaborative work”.

Perhaps its both, and perhaps it’s neither. Perhaps it’s Schrödinger’s movie: a neither/nor, a both/and, the proof of quantum physics right here before our eyes for eighty-four years.

Who cares: as far as I’m concerned, critical arguments don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Put it before my eyes at any time of day or night, in any stage of life, in any crisis or celebration, and I’m right there back at Rick’s Café Américain, with all the other gamblers, desperadoes, and refugees from all over Europe and life, hoping against hope that the plane will arrive and I will be on it to face other miseries elsewhere.

Holiday Inn

*****

directed by Mark Sandrich

starring Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Marjorie Reynolds, Virginia Dale, Louise Beavers, Walter Abel

Is it just my own sentimental attachment that let’s me think this movie is nearly perfect? ‘Fraid not. It really is close to perfect. Fred and Bing have chemistry, Marjorie Reynolds is scintillating, the songs and the dance numbers are endlessly entertaining - with one infamous exception.*

It’s fun to see Fred play something of a cad, and Bing to play something of a simp (a clever departure from his playing opposite Bob Hope).

The plot is simple: Jim Hardy (Bing Crosby), Ted Hanover (Fred Astaire) and Lila Dixon (Virginia Dale) are a successful singing/dancing act until love gets in the way. Bing— er, “Jim”, retires to a farm to live a lazy life, goes crazy, and decides he can pay the bills to pay for his lounging by holding revues only on the fifteen-ish holidays per calendar year. And so we are treated to an Irving Berlin score of holiday-themed songs that “Jim” writes, starting with his most famous, White Christmas.

One of the many magical moments happens on Independence Day, when Fred’s dancing partner (Marjorie Reynolds) abandons him just before showtime and he replaces her with…firecrackers. Yes. It’s wonderful. [There will be a future FranxFlix about all of Fred Astaire’s inanimate “dancing partners”.]

*The one exception to entertaining songs would be the blackface number set on Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday. I have a very high tolerance for these things (see my essay on the matter in FranxFlix Volume I, issue 8), but this one is rather cringy— all the more so because it’s trying to be magnanimous which makes it just pathetically patronizing. But never mind that, it’s 3% of an otherwise nearly perfect movie, so by my reckoning it still gets a 97. (Spoiler: Bing still gets the girl; it must have been a contractual obligation with him).

Kings Row

****1/2

directed by Sam Wood

starring Robert Cummings, Ronald Reagan, Ann Sheridan, Betty Field, Claude Rains, Charles Coburn, Harry Davenport, Judith Anderson, Maria Ouspenskaya

The sign on the outskirts of town says “Kings Row: A Nice Place to Live”, and indeed, so it appears. Gosh darn it, I’d like to live there. But (thanks to the likes of Rod Serling, Peter Bogdonavich, David Lynch, and John Waters, etc) eighty years on we are well-attuned to what lurks behind nice places to live, don’t we: Not-Nice people!

We are introduced in the first act to children — played by juvenile actors who are quite good— who grow up to be the credited actors listed above. There’s the wealthy side of town, with the house of the “doctor who has no patients” (Claude Rains) and his reclusive wife and their daughter who doesn’t fit in (Betty Fields), the earnest do-gooder who only wishes to please his grandmother (Robert Cummings), and the trust fund baby without a care in the world (Ronald Reagan). Across the Irish tracks lives a tomboy (Ann Sheridan), and then there are the other respectable and ignoble residents.

As they grow up, the onion peels. A curious unraveling occurs as various successes and tragedies reveal that the reliable, respectable town elders who seemed like demi-gods to those in childhood were mortals after all and perhaps something worse; and the slow realization to the protagonists that perhaps their own life choices were built upon misgiven faith. And yet, here we are, and what are we to do, living here in Kings Row?

When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, he was endlessly derided for having been the star of the silly B-picture Bedtime for Bonzo (1951). He countered with memories of his turn as George Gipper in Knute Rockne: All-American (1940), but politics aside: this is the role he should be remembered for. He’s good throughout but delivers one of the most spine-tingling lines in all of movie lore.

The Magnificent Ambersons

****1/2

directed by Orson Welles

starring Joseph Cotten, Delores Costello, , Tim Holt, Anne Baxter, Ray Collins, Agnes Moorhead

Maybe you watched Citizen Kane hearing it was “the greatest movie ever made” and were disappointed.

And then you find out the same critics who say Kane was so great also say that, this, Welles’ second film is a disappointment, because the ending was reshot and the film was re-edited without his permission before release.

Welcome to FranxFlix re-education camp.

Watch this, Welles’ second feature, and you may get an inkling of what you were supposed to feel with Kane. The deep-focus shots, the way the camera moves, the overlapping dialogue, the way your eye is looking at some obscure detail in the corner while your ear is listening to off-camera dialogue; the contrast between what characters are saying and what we as the audience “know”.

Almost every scene is mesmerizing in it’s own way, and each scene contributes a piece to the greater puzzle we see being assembled.

Indeed, the final version is not at all what Welles intended; he went off on vacation to South America and in his absense, RKO Studios excised and subsequently destroyed 43 minutes of film and hired a director to slapdash a new happ(-ier) ending.

The truth is that Welles’ genius could not be repressed. It’s still one of the best movies of the year and then some.

If you watch for it, you can see exactly where that new ending is tacked on. If you’re not looking for it— and why should you— it’s still a fine movie with a slightly eyeroll ending but trust me no worse than many, many you’ve seen since and in fact have become inured to. It’s not even disruptive enough to qualify as a “Hollywood” ending.

There have been rumors for eight decades of an existing print of Welles’s original movie surviving somewhere, possibly Brazil (it’s the Holy Grail/Arc of the Covenant of filmdom) but honestly, when you lop off the last four minutes of the existing version it’s still wonderful cinema, plot holes, bad make-up, and all.

In fact, I can’t imagine that another 43 minutes of it would have made it better— it’s kinda on the long side already— and perhaps would have made it worse. I can’t help but think there was some wisdom in crowds among the producers and studio executives and test audiences knowing that too much of a good thing may be a bad thing.

Watch it and judge for yourself.

But at least watch it.

The Major and the Minor

****

directed by Billy Wilder

starring Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland, Rita Johnson, Diana Lynn, Robert Benchley, Edward Fielding

This is the first American movie directed by one of the all-time greats, Billy Wilder, and he comes out with a bang. It would be easy to dismiss this is as a meaningless soft screwball comedy, but we are so much more appreciative of these things in hindsight, aren’t we?

It has long been my contention that Ginger Rogers was one of the great actresses of the Golden Age, hiding in plain sight. She’s so easily dismissed as Fred Astaire’s dancing partner, which right off the bat is unfair because their onscreen chemistry was established and maintained off the dance floor even more than on it. And wonderful as those movies are, her ouevre without him is just as impressive, dramas and comedies alike. Especially the comedies.

Ginger plays Susan Applegate, a working girl in Manhattan who’s had enough of dodging passes from city middle manager lechers and decides to return to Iowa. The trouble is the train line has raised its fare so she can’t afford the ticket; an adult ticket, that is, so she disguises herself as a twelve-year-old girl for half-fare. Screwball plot twists being what they are, she finds herself at an all-male military academy being wooed by three hundred pubescent cadets; patriots all, but each of them also a lecher in training. Once she (Ginger as Susan) gets the hang of things, she becomes quite adept at throttling back and forth between innocent baby-snookums and woman of the world as the situation calls for.

Billy Wilder co-wrote all of his movies, this is the first with writing partner Charles Brackett. Accordingly, it is filled with the many puns, innuendos, and call-backs that make him so great, including one of my favorite sight-gags in all cinema, referring to an “epidemic” that has broken out at the local girls’ school, in which they all think they’re Veronica Lake.

Mrs. Miniver

****1/2

directed by William Wyler

starring Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Teresa Wright, May Whitty, Reginald Owen, Henry Travers

The Minivers are a lovely family, living in a lovely English village, with lovely English servants, and a lovely vicar, where the closest thing to a villain is the wealthy widow who wins the flower competition every year because no one has the gall to run against her. Then comes Hitler. Man, that guy was everywhere in 1942.

Similar to 1927’s Cavalcade, which recounted the disruption of English life resulting from World War I, this one recounts in almost real-time the resulting disruption of World War II, including the rescue at Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain which had only just occurred.

The women are the backbone of the movie. Old Lady Belton (Dame May Whitty), Mrs Miniver (Greer Garson), Carol Belton (Teresa Wright), and housekeeper Gladys (Brenda Forbes) represent three generations of women preserving the home front while the men smoke and drink and fight and get killed and what-not.

Beautifully shot and wonderfully acted, it was as good a propaganda piece that the Allies could have produced opposite Hitler’s clinician Leni Reifenstahl, and yes, it still holds up today as a reminder of what makes Western liberal democratic culture worth fighting for.

There’s a part of me that wishes to be Walter Pidgeon, spending nights in a backyard bomb shelter wearing a tweed suit and smoking a pipe and sipping tea while reading Alice in Wonderland to the kiddies. But that’s why the women take charge of the practical matters, isn’t it.

This was the Academy’s Best Picture in 1942, and easy to see why given the emotional and political turmoil at hand. In 20/26 hindsight and on purely cinematic levels…it’s still great. A touchstone to remember what’s important in life, whatever extenuating circumstances may exist.

Road to Morocco

****

directed by David Butler

starring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, Anthony Quinn

Crosby and Hope made four “Road to…” pictures set in exotic locales but filmed unashamedly on a Hollywood soundstage. (Among other fourth-wall breaking gags, there are plenty of cheeky references to the hokum sets).

Dorothy Lamour is always the love interest they wrangle over in between mutual insults and double-dealing, so it’s hard to keep track of which movie is which. This is the one where Bob finds himself with a harem, plays his own dead aunt in a dress and wig, and Bing, Bob, and Dorothy sing “Moonlight Becomes You” in each other’s voices, and camels talk. (There must have been a lot of Moroccan hashish in the writers’ room). It’s also the one where their patented “Pat-A-Cake” gag that served them so well in the first two films backfires on them, and Bing doubles down by cracking wise about it to the audience.

My favorite quip that snuck by the censors is when Bing sprinkles some gunpowder into the thugs’ tobacco and Bob says, “What are you making, reefers?”

Jean Paul Sartre apocrophaly said that “3:00 is either too early or too late to start a new endeavor.” Put this movie in front of my eyeballs at either 3 AM or 3 PM and good luck trying to pry me away.

The Palm Beach Story

****1/2

directed by Preston Sturges

starring Joel McCrea, Claudette Colbert, Mary Astor, Rudy Vallee, William Demerest

Stick with it: the annoying chaos of the first minute that leaves you disgruntled about not really knowing what just happened is resolved in the final minute - literally. Along the way you may get bored, annoyed, and distracted, but slowly you’ll come to realize there is a lot more happening on the screen (in the background, in little muttered asides) that draw you in.

This is the Sturges genius at work, and he gets the actors to work with him. Joel McCrea is at his peak as chief mutterer-asider, Claudette Colbert is the slightly-over-the-hill gold-digger (inside Hollywood joke that tabloid audiences would have been wise to), and Rudy Valee plays the uptight “rich millionaire” who “used to sing a little” in college (in real life, he was the pre-Crosby pop sensation 15 years earlier, another inside tabloid joke).

The special seasoning of Sturges’ concoction are the character actors in the background: William Demerest and his English gun club on the train, Sid Arno as Toto the European boy-toy, and versatile Mary Astor, who within a three year span could equally play a noir femme fatale (The Maltese Falcon/Across the Pacific), an Edwardian matron (Meet Me in St Louis) and a devil-may-care playgirl (this one).

I guarantee you’ve never seen a movie start like this or end like this, so just sit back and enjoy the little moments along the way waiting for the payoff you didn’t see coming.

Saboteur

****

directed by Alfred Hitchcock

starring Robert Cummings, Priscilla Lane, Otto Kruger, Alan Baxter, Clem Bevans, Norman Lloyd

An innocent man, accused of a crime he didn’t commit, sets out to clear his name in a cat-and-mouse game against the actual guilty parties while the law is on his tail. That pretty much sums up half of Hitchcock’s films. including this one, as well as several others in 1942.

Neither the best nor the worst of the old man’s canon, it is an overt piece of wartime propaganda. A team of writers, ironically including the renown cynic Dorothy Parker, inject patriotic soliloquys whenever they can. Added to Hitchcock’s growing sense of confidence and daring, it results in a film with a peculiar… lack of restraint? Hitch & Co. turn it up to eleven in every sequence, til by the end you may look back to the beginning and realize how over the top it has become.

Which is great.

It’s never not fun, and 1942 audiences were not primed to spot plot holes and non-sequiturs and such so just enjoy the ride.

There is a strange interlude, totally inefficient narrative-wise, of the denizens of a train-car full of circus freaks that have a debate about the importance of democracy. I used to hate this scene, but now it’s my favorite part. Completely unnecessary, clumsily handled; wonderful.

Robert Cummings plays the role that Gary Cooper and Joel McCrea turned down, and Priscilla Lane is the most wholesome blonde femme Hitchcock ever used. Both were minor draws at the time, neither one went on to greater stardom but I kinda like them both and wished they’d done more. (Cummings was also quite good in this year’s Kings Row, and worked with Hitchcock again in 1954’s Dial M For Murder).

Hitch admitted to his interlocutor Francois Truffaut in their famed 1966 interview that his North By Northwest (1959) was essentially a remake based on the Saboteur template, including the finale that takes place atop a National Monument.

Talk of the Town

****

directed by George Stevens

starring Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Ronald Colman, Edgar Buchanan

The movie is usually described as a screwball comedy, and with Cary Grant and Jean Arthur, how could it not be? Well, it is and it isn’t, and it’s handy to remember that labels and genres are usually applied well afterwards by critics and historians to make their own lives easier.

Rest assured: Grant and Arthur are at their best and play together very well, are both as delightful and funny as you want them to be, but let’s keep in mind that each had a deep reservoir of pathos they could draw up as needed— and here they are with Ronald Colman, an actor whom audiences knew from dramatic roles, in a plot that involves a dialectic about what role respect for the law should play in our lives.

How does that all pan out? Franxflix is happy to report: splendidly.

In the full spirit of the season of ‘42, one of the best moments is when Jean Arthur mockingly tries to picture herself in a mirror as Veronica Lake while trying to imitate Katharine Hepburn’s voice— a mash-up of the perfect 1942 Hollywood woman.

Lloyd Bridges has a small role, and gosh is he young— and tall. Who knew?

To Be Or Not To Be

*****

directed by Ernst Lubitsch

starring Jack Benny, Carole Lombard, Robert Stack

Jack Benny, the “master of exasperation”, didn’t make too many movies; as a popular comedian who had already made the hard transition from vaudeville to radio, he mostly skipped movies as his next vehicle and made the prescient leap directly to television — except for a brief period in the early 40s when he dabbled for a few. They are all treasures.

This is the best of the bunch, helmed by the subtle director Ernst Lubitsch. Benny’s co-star was the then-reigning queen of screwball comedies, Carole Lombard (Mrs Clark Gable at the time). This was her last film; she died in a plane crash in Nevada while campaigning for war bonds just three weeks before the film’s premiere.

Setting that tragedy aside, this is one of her best roles, playing fictional stage actress Maria Tura, wife to renowned fictional Polish over-actor and ham Josef Tura (Benny). Theirs isn’t a frictionless marriage, to say the least, and his eternal fretting over his reviews is not helped by her roving eye for a better situation, both onstage and off.

The play their troupe is currently presenting in Warsaw is a satire of Hitler’s recent rise to power and the threat it presents to Poland and all of Western Europe. Real life intervenes in the form of Hitler himself appearing in the flesh for a command performance. Josef and Maria have to put their bickering aside and use their powers, as well as those of their meagerly endowed troupe, to save the West.

Tarantino fans: I guarantee that if you see this film, it will increase and multiply your love of Inglorious Basterds tenfold.

The movie was remade in 1983 with Mel Brooks in Jack Benny’s role (though Mel did not direct it): also a fine film. This one’s better.

Woman of the Year

*****

directed by George Stevens

starring Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Fay Bainter, Reginald Owen, Minor Watson, William Bendix, Gladys Blake, Dan Tobin, Roscoe Carns

When Katharine Hepburn met Spencer Tracy for the first time on the set of this movie, she was embarrassed that her heels made Spence look short. “Don’t worry,” said producer Joseph L Mankiewicz, “He’ll cut you down to size.”

Thus began their twenty-five year romance, onscreen and off.

Kate plays Tess Harding, an erudite globetrotting newspaper editor who is “second only to Mrs Roosevelt” on the list of admired women. (“They’re giving them numbers now, like Public Enemies”, says brilliant character actor Roscoe Carns )

Spence is Sam Craig, a sportswriter for the same paper. Despite their obvious differences in lifestyle and attitude, they marry. Almost instantly the inevitable clash happens.

Beyond the mesmerizing hilarious banter of the two leads, the script is a sophisticated look at the rise of feminism in the workplace and society without all of the shibboleths we have come to accept. It really is a fascinating piece of forensic sociology.

The great dynamic between Hepburn and Tracy is that she is always more, more, more while he is less, less, less, to the point where he often appears to trip on his own words, yet these somehow always occur in perfectly timed places without undermining Kate’s prominence.

Spence always seems like a little boy flying a kite who pushes on the string to judge the kite’s reaction, and then decides whether to reel in, let out slack, or duck if necessary. Kate is the wind that toys with the boy at the end of the string. Tracy and Hepburn are the purest representation of the Tao on film.

The last eight minutes, much of which occur in silence and culminate in the great “launching of Gerald” is among FranxFlix’s favorite endings in movie history.

Yankee Doodle Dandy

****1/2

directed by Michael Curtiz

starring James Cagney, Walter Huston, Joan Leslie, Jeanne Cagney, S Z Sakall

It is reasonable for you, rooted in the 21st century, to resist watching a mid-20th century biopic about a musician/producer named George M Cohan that you’ve never heard of, chock full’o references to even older cultural touchstones you’ve never heard of. Sometimes one must set aside reason.

When this film came out, Cagney had spent 10 years as the Warner Brothers greatest draw as a gangster. The studio had tried its hand as musicals, but had thrown in the towel to MGM, RKO, Paramount and even little Columbia who had the likes of Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Dick Powell, Mickey Rooney, Ruby Keeler.

And then Jack Warner says, oh by the way, get a load of what our tough guy can do.

James Cagney is a proto-Christopher Walken. His best roles are as a vaguely charming but inscrutable, potentially volatile psychopath who at any given moment may hug you or kill you.

You know why? Because underneath that seething volcanic veneer is the restrained passion of a man who yearns to dance. At any moment, he may clip you with a left hook or launch into soft-shoe. It’s up to you, see?

The film is constantly entertaining, whether Cagney is dancing and singing or not (he doesn’t really sing so much as recite lyrics rhythmically). His energy is pugnacious, clipped, boundless and keeps the action moving.

He floats like a butterfly, and stings like a bee.

One of my my favorite lines is when George M is dismissed as by kids of a new generation as having “corny, convential” songs, which had been revolutionary when he wrote them: Yankee Doodle Dandy, Over There, Give My Regards to Broadway among them.

One day when you’re grandchildren don’t want to watch Bohemian Rhapsody with you because Bohemian Rhapsody, We Will Rock You, and Another One Bites the Dust are too corny and conventional, remember FranxFlix and put this on.

Preferably on the Fourth of July.

The Corrected Oscars

FranxFlix is in FranxFlux, so bear with me.

Many of you have told me that this is your favorite feature, where I call ‘em as I see ‘em and out the Academy in 20/26 hindsight what they got wrong.

A few months ago I came up with the concept of judging actors/directors on more than just one film per year - some folks have banger years and should be rewarded. On the other hand, someone shouldn’t be commended merely for having a great agent who got them a lot of work. On the third hand, if they got the work, perhaps they deserved it.

And so we’ve come to the fourth hand (“Say, how many hands have you got in that thing?”, says Bob Hope in a movie in my mind).

FranxFlix has been working on a new secret formula that includes relevant work, those “hey, I know that guy, he’s always good!” actors that make any movie just a bit better: Henry Travers in the ‘40s, Ned Beatty in the 70s, Joan Cusack in the 90s.

This goes for directors too, who were often under contract to a studio and were sometimes given a clunker to work with yet managed to shine, and then you look at the amount of “given what they did overall, they would have won for their recent work if they weren’t up against ‘X’ that year”.

So as I say, it’s in flux, but I really like the formula that is developing. And when I don’t like the answer I stomp on the formula and make a ruling from the bench, because opinions, like art and popular film, can only get so formulaic before they lose their magic.

So here it is for 1942…

This is a strange thing to say: some of the almost-great movies of 1981 maybe better than the great ones.

I think this may be the year when things really began to tear at the seams, when audiences really became particularized by the marketing wings of the studios whom had somehow become the most important division outside of the real estate investment wing. (This was decades before Human Resources had even been conceived of).

Picture, if you will, a multiplex cinema. You are accompanied by your spouse, your teenage son and your teenage daughter, your mother-in-law, your offbeat uncle by marriage, your grandfather’s brother who never talks to anyone other than in WWII references, your nephew whom you wouldn’t leave unaccompanied in your own house. You have each been awarded tickets to whatever one wants to see. Guess what: everyone goes to a different movie, and loves it. And each is happy that none of the others is there to complain about the choice.

Me, I would sneak in and out of each one and enjoy it for what it is on its own terms, but am also happy to know that none of the others is there to ruin it. So here’s what Franxflix would have seen.

~as always, click on the movie poster for a preview~

An American Werewolf in London

****

directed by John Landis

starring David Naughton, Griffin Dunne, Jenny Agutter

Suggested alternate title in the spirit of the times: [A/n (Post-Modern) American (adaptation/re-interpretation) of {classic} Werewolf (movie/s) <set> in (proximity of) London].

Let the record show: the Warren Zevon song “Werewolves of London”, which had been released three years earlier, appears nowhere on the soundtrack. BUT: There are three versions of Blue Moon, plus CCR’s Bad Moon Risin’. So you will come out of this gory movie hummin’ a happy tune…and for the subsequent four decades whenever you recollect this movie you’ll get Warren Zevon stuck in your head anyway. There is a certain level of genius at work there.

The movie is good - very good, and let me count the ways:

1) Acknowledging and dismissing the werewolf movie tropes we all knew, and then bring them back in spades.

2) The makeup and special effects, in spades.

3) The not quite breaking the fourth wall but doing it onscreen among characters, e.g., referring to previous werewolf movies. (See note 1)

4) Mocking the British police— er, bobbies— for their eternal fecklessness.

5) Apologizing in the end credits for having called Prince Charles a fag earlier in the movie, and saying that any persons living, dead, or undead is purely coincidental. How can you not love that.

It is exactly its inventiveness that keeps it from being great; it can’t quite decide whether it’s a funny horror movie or a horrific funny movie.

But the two big sticklers for me go to “willing suspension of disbelief”. One, as in any werewolf/zombie/vampire movie, I can’t help but run the numbers as I wait between kills and conclude it’s an exponential impossibility and if people keep getting infected and feeding themselves then the whole world (or at least a populated continent) would be dead within weeks.

Two, comic fourth-wall breaking notwithstanding, the whole media-driven world would now know that werewolves actually do exist, what with the public killings in broad daylight in Piccadilly Circus, and that should ruin the fun for all future lycanthropes and horror directors.

Sadly, that did not happen, and we’ve had forty years of Chuckie movies.

Chariots of Fire

***1/2

directed by Hugh Hudson

starring Ben Cross, Ian Charleson, Nigel Havers, John Gielgud, Ian Holm

I’ve watched this movie several times and by the third time I kinda got the plot down. Which is a pretty embarrassing admission since it’s a movie about people running on a beach and in the Olympics so it shouldn’t be that complicated, but they do insist on talking on so between laps.

Class distinctions at an elite academy, don’t you know. There’s a Welshman, a London gentleman, and most importantly, a Jew. They hate each other until they overcome their prejudices and it’s all jolly, what, what. They go to Paris and have a smashing good time and one guy sacrifices for another and before you know it there’s that damned catchy synthesizer title theme by Vangelis playing again.

Many, many, people I respect love this movie; and indeed it is very well done.

Bully to you if it fills your sails. Just not my cup of tea, I suppose, as they say.

Das Boot

****

directed by Wolfgang Petersen

starring Jürgen Prochnow, Herbert Grönemeyer, Klaus Wennemenn

One day I plan to do a Special Edition about submarine movies, and this one will be on there as the acknowledged master of realistic portrayal.

The thing about submarines is that the concept of being on one for months at a time plays into many of my phobias: agoraphobia, thalassophobia (fear of large bodies of water), claustrophobia, claustro-homophobia, and osmophobia (fear of bad odors).

The thing I enjoy about good submarine movies is their ability to shove all of those potential phobias tightly into the background while a nifty thriller plays out: everyone has to stay quiet as they listen for pings and stalk a prey or jettison their underwear and what-nots through tubes to fake deaths to the enemy and all that.

That all happens in Das Boot— several times over— but they forget the part about storing the phobias in a footlocker. In fact, they make a point of reinforcing how miserable life is at every waking moment: these guys are in a tube fifteen feet wide and 150 feet long, with one toilet at each end, and no showers. Men going to the engine room (or toilet) at the rear have to ask permission to pass through the officers’ quarters and wait for the return salute and possible small talk while there is a raging fire and/or hole in the hull letting in tons of water. The sub creaks and rivets start popping when they have no choice but to submerge beyond its tested abilities. This happens more than once; they’re at sea for six months.

These are Nazi Germans in a thirty-year old boat, to be sure, but it reminds me of the contemporaneous Soviet joke: “The pessimist says, ‘Well, things can’t get any worse’. And the optimist replies, ‘Oh yes they can.’”

It’s four hours long, which I suppose is an effort at realism in some ways.

My advice is to watch this while eating a big bowl of sloppy nachos in a recliner in an air-conditioned room, just to keep yourself grounded in reality.

Escape from New York

***1/2

directed by John Carpenter

starring Kurt Russell, Adrienne Barbeau, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasance, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton

Willing suspension of disbelief. Willing suspension of disbelief. Willing suspension of disbelief…

OK, now that we have our mantra down, let’s enjoy this silly movie: Kurt Russell is Snake Pliskin, the silly eyepatch-wearing action hero that vaulted Kurt out of silly Disney movies into silly action movies, before he eventually become the well-respected Elder of film we deservedly know him as now. Lord help us.

Donald Pleasance is inexplicably the President of the United States, who is being held prisoner inside New York, which has been turned into a maximum security prison. No one is allowed in, and fewer are allowed out. Which is how I’ve always felt about New York City, Franxly.

Ernest Borgnine plays a New York taxi driver in post-apocalyptic NYC. When you reflect on his career, it was the role he was born to play, and he plays it to the hilt. Lee Van Cleef is always great in a villain role. There’s super-cool R&B star Isaac Hayes as a post-apocalyptic gang leader. He’s one bad mother— shut your mouth! And of course there’s Adrienne Barbeau…. ahem, her eyes are up there.

This movie reigns supreme among stumble-on-it-and-can’t-turn-it-off Saturday afternoon or late night fare. Reheat those nachos you made for Das Boot and settle in.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman

****

directed by Karel Reisz

starring Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons

There is a school of thought in film studies that actors are the most dispensable component of movie-making: Alfred Hitchcock certainly subscribed to that; even the great Spencer Tracy admitted it, once remarking that all it takes to be a good actor is know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.

What has this to do with the movie at hand? Well, I think that even as a youngster this was the movie that made me think that perhaps a focus on “ACTING!” is a bit too much. I also think this movie is where I developed my distaste for Meryl Streep, a predilection that I have only recently overcome, mostly by seeing her films that she made prior to this one.

There is no question that Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons are Great “ACTORS!!”. They truly underplay each scene with impeccable resolve and perfect accents.

The story, like My Dinner with Andre [see below] is Post-Modern; that is, it is consciously self-referential and de-constructionist. It portrays a tragic 19th century love story being filmed within the confines of a tragic 20th century love story between the starring actors of the film-within-the-film that we are watching. This was groundbreaking in the early 80s, don’t you know, and was considered the Triple-Lindy among Hollywood literati, many of whom had tried and failed for years to turn the complicated John Fowles novel into a film. ‘Twas director Karel Reisz who managed to pull the sword from the stone by (apparently, I’ve never read it) completely shredding and reassembling the novel into a celluloid-friendly version that was close enough but totally different. That’s Po-Mo, for ya.

My big takeaway from the film is that the upper-classes pronounce it as “Lef-tenant” while the enlisted blue-collar folk say “Loo-tenant”. Thus is solved one linguistic mystery of Anglo-Saxony.

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior

****

directed by George Miller

starring Mel Gibson, Bruce Spense, Kjell Nillson, Emil MInty

When this was released stateside with a full Hollywood budget and pyrotechnics behind it, US audiences forgot that they had never heard of Mad Max nor hadn’t seen the original 1979 low-budget Australian original. The marketing materials downplayed the “Mad Max II” angle.

Franxly, it’s hard for me to decide which of the “first” two I prefer. As an epistemoligist at heart, I guess I have to go with the 1979 for all it’s cheesy costumes and effects, but as someone who prefers the American release of The Beatles’ Rubber Soul to the British version there is something to said about the power of the almighty dollar enticing higher-paying audiences with a tailored product.

This movie was like nothing else at the time; four years after Star Wars, twelve years after Planet of the Apes, it brought apocalyptic sci-fi down to earth. Mel Gibson is cheeky and ballsy. The cars are recognizable but completely outlandish.

A good time is had by all. Except for everyone in the movie.

Reheat those nachos; if this is on, I’ll watch it.

My Dinner with Andre

****

directed by Louis Malle

starring André Gregory, Wallace Shawn, Jean Lenauer

Inconceivable! Two guys have dinner in a restaurant and talk.

That is, quite literally, it.

It’s been mocked as being the most boring movie in history, but why does it have a 93 rating on Rotten Tomatoes? Why do critics fall over each other praising it, with Roger Ebert naming it his Movie of the Year?

Because there’s something oddly compelling about it.

Wallace Shawn and André Gregory play two guys named Wallace Shawn and André Gregory; the former is a playwright who plays a cynical playwright (how many plays can a playwright write if a playwright can write plays?), and the latter is a director/teacher/theater guy who has spent a lifetime searching for whatever it is that director/teacher/theater guys search for. They are both unabashed New York Intellectuals - Gregory even off-handedly uses the phrase as a badge of trust referring to a third party the way a gangster uses “wise guy” to vouch for someone’s bona fides. They talk about theater as a metaphor for life and being, and life and being as metaphors for theater. A waiter serves them food.

You know Wallace Shawn: the short, bald, lisping guy who plays the Sicilian Vezzini in The Princess Bride. Woody Allen would cast him in movies whenever he had to present himself as the more virile of New York intellectuals. That scenario gets funnier with the passing of age.

In my most recent watching, I identified several factors that make it so oddly compelling. One: Louis Malle’s direction. The camera cuts and slow dollies, especially to timely closeups, punctuate the conversation (which is mostly monologues) to keep it moving.

Two: The cadence of the speaking, especially Gregory’s, is mesmerizing. At some point, you realize there are no cue cards, no cuts, and yet this is clearly not improvised. In fact, the two (who are both credited with the screenplay) had precisely scripted every stutter and verbal tic, so it comes across very much like watching a play, which gives it a sing-song cadence, and goes to the heart of what they are talking about.

Three: Watching it from the Substack/X/TikTok era where we all feel compelled to pontificate about every eructation (our own or others), it is a sheer delight to see how thoughtful discourse could be, and often was, an art of its own.

Four: The waiter. No spoilers here, just watch him over the course of the night. OK, spoiler: he increasingly hates them. It’s up to us to determine why; I have my thoughts.

Buy me dinner at a fine restaurant and I’d be happy to share them.

Ragtime

***

directed by Miloš Forman

starring Elizabeth McGovern, Mary Steenburgen, Debbie Allen, James Cagney, Norman Mailer, Brad Dourif, Donald O’Connor, Pat O’Brien, Frankie Faison, Mandy Patinkin, Fran Drescher, Jeff Daniels, Samuel L Jackson, John Ratzenberger, Bessie Love

I want to love this movie. It features Stanford Hope White, a top 4-seed among American architects. How often do architects get to be heroes, or villains, or both? It also roves across major public figures such as Harry Houdini, Booker T Washington, Henry Ford, and others. Right up the ol’ Franxflix alley.

It’s the last movie of both James Cagney and Pat O’Brien, and one of the last of Donald O’Connor. It’s an early if not first movie for future luminaries Mary Steenburgen, Brad Dourif, Elizabeth McGovern, Mandy Patakin, Debbie Allen, Frankie Faison, Jeff Daniels, Fran Drescher, Samuel L Jackson, and John Ratzenberger. That’s a span of 100+ years of great Hollywood talent!

It was based on the best-selling sprawling historical novel by E.W. Doctorow that incorporated numerous historical figures intertwined with fictional characters named Mother, Father, Younger Brother. It also simultaneously follow the tribulations of a black family struggling for dignity in a very white world. (In fact, there was an entirely separate marketing campaign of the film to attract black audiences).

It was directed by Miloš Forman, six years after Cuckoo’s Nest. Randy Newman meticulously crafted a clever and subtle score. Gene Siskel named it his movie of the year. So what say you, FranxFlix?!

It’s… fine.

I’ve just added the book to my list of “read the novel to see what the movie was trying to do” list. I’ve got a feeling I’ll love the book, and that it just couldn’t convey.

Reds

****

directed by Warren Beatty

starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Edward Hermann, Maureen Stapleton, Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Paul Sorvino, George Plimpton, M Emmett Walsh, Bessie Love

You’ve got to hand it to Warren Beatty for the cojones, er, yáytsa to make a movie at the height of the Cold War about an American who sympathized with and participated in the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Beatty wrote, produced, directed, and starred in the film based on the true story of John Reed, a dilettante socialist reporter living the bohemian life in Greenwich Village who is frustrated that his peers are long on talk, short on action, and a bit too reliant on realpolitik to bring about the inevitable worldwide worker’s revolt. He goes to the heart of the swelling movement, Petrograd, and finds himself to be the unlikely hero he had himself been looking for. Along the way, he meets free spirit Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), and thank God he does, for their evolving relationship is what keeps the story interesting as they weave in and out of political events beyond— or occasionally within— their control.

It’s very good: Roger Ebert called it the thinking man’s Doctor Zhivago. It’s long: over three hours. It’s beautifully shot, compellingly acted, and poignantly framed by documentary-style interviews with “witnesses” - old folks piecing together their overlapping memories of John Reed and Louise Bryant from sixty-plus years earlier.

This may be the best performances of Beatty, Keaton, and Nicholson of their respective careers, as well as Maureen Stapleton who deservedly won Best Actress as real-life communist Emma Goldstein (who was also a character in Ragtime but cut in the final version).

Why don’t I love it?

It’s overlong.

It scares me.

So tell me, what did I get wrong?

April 10, 2026.

Friends of film:

Gotta be honest here: it’s kind of a thin year. But as Spencer Tracy said of Katharine Hepburn in Pat and Mike (1948): “Not much meat on her, but what’s there is cherce.”

The best movies of 1981 were funny, except for the ones that weren’t.

This is one of those years when I have to revisit my mission statement: to preserve deserving films for future generations. Hmm. Yes, many are good, and unique, but preserved for the ages? But again, hmm.

Take the Oscar-winning Best Picture, Chariots of Fire. Good: yes. Great? Maybe. Forgettable? Totally.

Or the critical darling, the German film Das Boot: Good, ostensibly. Great? Undoubtedly. Could you go on living your life without having seen it? Well, yeah.

The ones that I’ve included here have stick-with-you-ness. Maybe an odd or striking phrase, a cock-eyed way of looking at the world, something that makes you say, well I’ve never quite looked at it like that before, except that I have because of the previous six decades of movies. What original statements exist are revealed in comedic moments, even if couched within a film that was not sold as a comedy. Increasingly, the line between drama and comedy has become blurred.

I assume my older followers are familiar with the phrase by Samuel Taylor Colerige “Willing suspension of disbelief,” but for the younger folks who may not have had an entirely solid liberal arts upbringing, it means you accept the broader untrue premises of a story in order to latch onto the more particular pleasures within. Hold onto that as your mantra as you watch films from 1981.

Which is ironic because that’s my point: film has become calcified to a degree: it’s all been done before, and done well. So if you want to call attention to yourself: mock the canon, and perhaps audibly pass gas.

In hindsight, It’s almost like there was too much worldly context to just go see a movie without thinking about the world outside. May as well share a wink with the audience. Some adopt this directly; others poke you with unexpected jabs. But the evidence is there: movies had in a sense become… self-aware.

A term was coined for this around the time: “Post-Modernism,” a term which crossed over all the major arts: literature, drama, film, painting, architecture, poetry. (It killed poetry, RIP). Short-lived as it was, it was a slogging off of the I Am So Serious in Rejecting Everything That Has Ever Come Before attitude of Modernism. The Post-Modernists, or “PoMos” (not a label anyone signed onto or endorsed or was en courant outside of academia) said: Let’s step back and laugh at ourselves a bit, even if it means cutting corners, cheating, and showing the audience we’re cheating. Think Saturday Night Live, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Venturi, Cindy Sherman, Talking Heads and An American Werewolf in London.

See what just happened there? I’m after lecturing about “movements” and “attitudes” instead of talking about movies! That’s how 1981 does ya.

Thus I present one of my shortest FranxFlix on record to date, with only nine films worthy of eternal preservation. (And I have my doubts about some).

Let’s call 1981 a reset year. I don’t know what that means, but it’s probably absurdly post-modern, if you have a willing suspension of disbelief, and is very funny.

Enjoy.

FXD

Arlington VA.

~ As always, click on the movie poster for previews~

N.B.: It’s recently got harder to find licensed clips, especially since the Paramount/Nextflix deal has gone down. It’s like the movie people don’t want you to watch movies, or something. So I’ve had to include some trailers instead of clips, which I am loathe to do.

Absence of Malice

*****

directed by Sydney Pollack

starring Paul Newman, Sally Field, Bob Balaban, Wilford Brimley, Melinda Dillon

“A wonderful thing, a subpoena.”

Tommy Gallagher (RIP) was a “wiseguy” (you know, a mobster) in Miami. His son Michael (Paul Newman) is a wise guy in the more literal sense who has ostensibly taken the family bootlegging business legit. No one really buys it. He is implicated for murder of a union boss in the court of public opinion courtesy of the press, specifically of one Megan Carter (Sally Field). She breaks all kinds of ethical rules to chase the story she is fed by the unethical guys in the FBI field office to catch the presumably unethical mobster. Circumstantial evidence amounts, relationships are made, and everyone believes they are the sole actor working for the greater good and once their side of the story is told it will vindicate them but in the end…well, the last half-hour is a humdinger.

If nothing else, this movie is worth watching for the mesmerizing and gasp-worthy opening credit sequence of how a newspaper was physically created daily at the temporal intersection of printing presses and computers. And can you consider what it was like before computers?! It makes you realize how much was at stake every day in the journalism industry, and how less…fragile…the stakes have become.

Arthur

*****

directed by Steve Gordon, Dudley Moore, Liza Minnelli, John Gielgud, Ted Ross, Barney Martin

This comedy has gotten lost in the cracks over time, but in when it came out it was one of the funniest things to hit the screen.

At the time, Dudley Moore was something of a phenom. A 5’-2” classically trained pianist (I could make a joke about a guy walks into a bar and pulls a tiny piano out of his pocket and…but this is a family-friendly forum so let’s leave it to IYKYK) who had been in a highly successful British comedy troupe before making his way to Hollywood. Hot on the heels of his 1979 hit ’10’, this movie is pure Dudley as a drunken wealthy man-child who pines for love.

He is attended by his butler Hobson, played by Shakespearean legend (future Sir) John Gielgud, and the girl he picks up on the street in the form of Liza Minelli.

Usually watching drunks on film is cringe-worthy, but Moore plays this to perfection— and some of the funniest lines come not from him, but straight man Gielgud who won an Oscar for his efforts. (I can only imagine Gielgud’s soliloquy to his wife as they went to bed that night):

Future Morty Seinfeld (Barney Martin) is also in it.

Blow Out

*****

directed by Brian DePalma

starring John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow, Dennis Franz

Everytime I think I don’t like Brian DePalma, I remember this film. A remake of Blow-Up (1966), the lead character is reimagined as a sound editor who may have captured a murder on tape, rather than on film as in the original: the crime in question bears a striking coincidence to Ted Kennedy’s mishap at Chappaquiddick (look it up, kiddies).

Jack Terry (John Travolta) painstakingly recreates the events he aurally witness by merging them with a bystander’s coincidental film, leading him down a rabbit hole of political intrigue and double-crossing, and cover-ups of cover-ups with tragic consequences.

It’s a gentle reminder that if one can’t handle the truth about living in a world of swirling conspiracies, proto-conspiracies, quasi-conspiracies, red herrings, proto-red herrings, quasi-red herrings, then perhaps one should stick to one’s day job. Which technically, Jack does. And technically, succeeds at.

I shan’t divulge the ending.

Body Heat

****1/2

directed by Lawrence Kasdan

starring William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Richard Crenna, Ted Danson, Mickey Rourke

This movie sticks with you like fine linen on a sultry day in Florida. A “modern” film noir that doesn’t stray far from it’s 1940s black-and-white progenitors, it is only modernized by the intervening 60s social and sexual revolution. The dialogue is the same. The situations are the same. The anti-hero (William Hurt) is almost the same, but he’s rather…soft-boiled? when compared to say, Bogie or John Garfield. And especially when confronted with femme fatale (Kathleen Turner), who has most definitely been supercharged, even as she mostly keeps it in low-gear. The slightly off-kilter dynamic may have caused some eye-rolls and guffaws among the smug when it debuted; ah, but we were so much older then, we’re younger than that now. Bring back movies like this.

The Cannonball Run

****

directed by Hal Needham

starring Burt Reynolds, Dom DeLuise, Roger Moore, Farrah Fawcett, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Jackie Chan, Jamie Farr, Mel Tillis, Terry Bradshaw, Peter Fonda, Bert Convy, Jack Elam, John Fiedler

Film snobs hate this movie: go read some of the contemporary reviews. Joke’s on them; from the day it debuted it has been fun as hell.

Written by Car and Driver magazine’s Brock Yates, it was based on a real event that Yates had concocted as a protest against the new national 55 MPH speed limit on interstate highways which Yates felt violated the whole concept of the interstates to, you know, move fast. He did the first one alone with his son, and then turned it into competition.

A cross-country road race from New York to California with no rules: drive any car, use any ruse, take any route, see ya in Redondo Beach in 35 hours. Drivers must arrive in the same car they departed in, must pay for their own speeding tickets, and are likely to stick to Interstates but that’s up to them. It’s still being run to this day.

In the fourth running, in 1979, he came up with the ingenious idea to do it in an ambulance to thwart police attention. Then he wrote a screenplay and cast Burt Reynolds as himself. It’s good to be the king.

Sometimes the film flags: you forget about characters for long stretches and they appear for a bit that isn’t necessarily funny or plot-driven, but…it kind of contributed to the whole concept. Decades before there was a camera on us at every moment, we longed for an omniscient cameraman who would say “Let’s check in on the so-and-so team.” The best we got was “Wide World of Sports” and “News of the World” and “Wacky Races” and we ate it up.

This was the (fictional) version that tapped into that desire. Who are Dino and Sammy really? (They are drunks who pose as priests driving a Ferrari, natch.) Who is Roger Moore? He’s the fake James Bond pretending to be Sean Connery whos a nice guy protecting is mother but is neither James Bond nor Sean Connery. Who is Farrah Fawcett? She’s a stunning feathered blonde who’s dumb as a rock. Who’s Terry Bradshaw? He’s the greatest quarterback since Joe Namath who spent twenty years of his life making fun of his own premature baldness. And they’re all in this crazy race!

Frank Sinatra was reportedly so annoyed that Dino and Sammy made a Rat Pack movie without him that he persuaded the producers to make a sequel, which he is in. (It’s not nearly as good).

History of the World, Part I

****1/2

directed by Mel Brooks

starring Mel Brooks, Dom DeLuise, Madeline Kahn, Harvey Korman, Cloris Leachman, Ron Carey, Gregory Hines, Shecky Greene, Sid Caesar, Orson Welles, Carl Reiner, Jackie Mason

“It’s good to be the King”.

Mel Brooks was indeed the king, literally and metaphorically in this romp from pre-history through all of the major European eras: Classical Rome, the Spanish Inquisition, the French Revolution. He leans heavily on borscht-belt has-beens and humor alongside most of his usual ensemble of Korman, Leachman, Kahn et al. Abounding in deliberate anachronisms, potty jokes, Hollywood spoofs, cultural slurs, and sight gags, this is DGAF Mel at his naughtiest and best.

Offscreen, the best anecdote associated with the production is that Brooks absolutely had to have his idol Orson Welles as the unseen narrator. Welles, famous for perfectionism that resulted in many, many cost overruns and delays, played hard to get: why should he deign to give his great talent to this low-brow comedy? Unknown to Brooks, he was in dire financial straits at the time. Mel reluctantly agreed to $25,000 for five days’ work, paid up front in cash, off the books. Welles arrived at the studio on time, was handed a brown paper bag full of cash, went into the soundbooth and nailed all of his lines within three hours. When Brooks said, my gosh, I could have paid you only $5000 for a day’s work, Welles consoled him by saying he would only be using the money on Cuban cigars and Sevruga Caviar as his weight had become too great for his other favorite indulgences.

Back to the movie: Guaranteed to offend everyone who is prone to being offended. If you can’t laugh at an old Jewish guy hanging on a prison wall during the Spanish Inquisition delivering a rap about his testicles being used for ping-pong, then uses ghetto slang to transition into a scene of nuns doing an MGM Esther Williams-esque synchronized swimming musical number, you may need to reconsider your priorities in life.

On Golden Pond

****1/2

directed by Mark Rydell

starring Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, Jane Fonda, Doug McKeon, Dabney Coleman

This is one of those films that I go in to warily: a story about people I probably wouldn’t like in real life talking about problems of their own making for two hours.

However, people in real life have the disadvantage of not being Henry Fonda or Katharine Hepburn, and that makes all the difference.

Henry, in particular, is a cranky old son-of-a-bitch who takes no prisoners in his eternally concocted battles of wit that he suckers everyone he meets into playing. I used to aspire to being Walter Matthau in my old age, but ol’ Hank takes it to the next level and offers a more appealing goal.

And Kate, well, it is very clear that Kate did all her own stunts. That may sound facetious but watch the movie with that in mind.

We have the added bonus (?) of watching the previous ten years’ tabloid fodder of (real-life) liberal Hank upset with his (real-life) radical daughter Jane’s anti-American antics play out in a way onscreen.

Jane’s good, but Hank wins.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

****1/2

directed by Steven Spielberg

starring Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, John Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliott

Confession: I was the target demographic for this film on its release and I didn’t love it. I’d been weaned on classic Hollywood and by age 14 was dismissing Spielberg as derivative and manipulative.

Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger then that now. I’ve grown to know that derivative and manipulative is often as good as it gets. Years later I sat back and watched it and yeah, it’s not just good, but great. Fun, engaging, colorful and masterfully constructed. The linchpin on which all the great adventure movies of the next decades would be based.

I confess that I still don’t love it. If I were marooned on a desert island and this were one of the discs assigned me, I’d probably watch any of the others first. But this is where Franxflix defers to the wisdom of crowds.

Without a doubt, it is the most iconic movie of the year.

Stripes

*****

directed by Ivan Reitman

starring Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Warren Oates, PJ Soles, Sean Young, John Candy, John Larroquette, Judge Reinhold

“That’s the fact, Jack!”

Stupid, stupid, stupid, unreal at every turn. And oh so good. My favorite kind of movie.

This is pinnacle Classic Bill Murray (the first of my self-defined Three Phases of Bill Murray), playing to every high school kid sitting in the back of class with a bored-cum-quizzical look just this side of insolence. And here he is, doing it in basic training in the US Army. There’s hope for us all! Gee, maybe I should join the army.

John Candy is peak John Candy. Harold Ramis gives his funniest performance on the front side of the camera (better than his Egon in Ghostbusters, IMO). Bill’s love, er, lust, er, romantic interest is PJ Soles. (That’s all I have to say about that; regular readers know).

About 2/3 of the way into the film, the producers decide they have to have some form of Serious Plot about how supreme the US Military was at the time, so there is a concocted story line about invading Czechoslovakia. The obviousness of the formula tees up the joke which Murray delivers: “C'mon, it's Czechoslovakia. We zip in, we pick 'em up, we zip right out again… We're not going to Moscow. It's Czechoslovakia. It's like we're going into Wisconsin”.

The eighties was a different world.

Let the record show: This is the first time FranxFlix has explained his reasoning, following the chart.

This was a tough one. Yes, you have to sit through Reds (upcoming in Cutting Room Floor), but worth it for Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson’s possibly best performances, who both play against type— so kudos to director Beatty for that, and to the Academy for recognizing him for Best Director.

Chariots of Fire is fine. Best picture? Nah. With 2026 hindsight, there is only one film that really stands out, and it’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. Though I did waver a bit over Blow Out and On Golden Pond, and did give due consideration to Arthur, Body Heat, and even Stripes and Reds.

Actor of the Year: Henry Fonda. Possibly his best role after five decades of great roles.

Actress of the Year: Of course Kate is good, but Diane Keaton really digs deep here after her passive Godfather role and weird (in a good way!) Woody Allen character. Nails it.

Supporting Character Actor: We love Gielgud for playing across type. We really want Dom DeLuise to be recognized for his so significant comedic contributions, hence his nomination for two great stupid films. But…Nicholson, man. Who knew he could be so subtle, especially playing a known recently historically-significant figure?

Supporting Character Actress: You’re welcome, PJ! You deserve it! Everyone here is wonderful. It wouldn’t be wrong to give it to Jane Fonda, but… her part is kinda written into the script for her to make her a sympathetic character… and she plays it as less sympathetic! What the hell kinda gall is that, Hanoi Jane?

Madeline Kahn, on the other hand, is on screen for what, maybe 10 minutes, and I can still recall every nuance and chuckle out loud in front of strangers. Hail, Madeline.

Humphrey Bogart once said, “A hot dog at the ballpark is better than roast beef at the Ritz”.

Franxflix couldn’t agree more.

And George Will once said, “Winter is the period between the last play of the Michigan-Ohio State football game and the reporting date for pitchers and catchers.”

So what do we do in that gloomy period? Watch baseball movies, of course!

No other sport takes to the screen quite like baseball. Oh sure, you’ve got your basketball (Hoosiers) and football (The Longest Yard) and definitely boxing (Golden Boy, Raging Bull) but they’ve got nothing on baseball. The pacing of the game, the colorful characters, the length of the season all lend itself to a perfect framework on which to hang stories.

All sports are metaphors for combat, which can be extended to life in general, but baseball steals a base on the others. Think about it: it’s a team sport, but each player has to take a turn at bat facing all of the opponents alone. And in return, the pitcher has to face that one guy with faith in his entire team to back him up. In that sense it’s like Biblical combat, in which ancient armies would send out their champions to face each other.

Yet it’s entirely American. Developed in the early 19th century, it took off during the Civil War as the respective armies roamed the countryside waiting to face their fellow countrymen in battle. During the downtimes, one of the most popular pastimes was a game sometimes called Base Ball. The rules were codified several years later by former Maj. Gen. Abner Doubleday, and the sport lives on as an echo of that conflict.

Comedy, drama, love stories, personal tragedy all graft neatly and metaphorically onto America’s pastime, set in (corporate facsimiles) of an expansive rural pasture.

There may be no crying in baseball, but there’s plenty of crying from watching baseball movies. Correlation is not causation, but I find it interesting that I rarely have a dry eye at the end of most of these. (Including from some that have generated the tears from laughter).

Let’s take a look at some of the best ones.

Note: since Franxflix’ mission is the 20th century, some of your more recent favorites might be missing. (Moneyball, The Rookie, 61* etc).

So what’s your favorite?

~ As always, click on the MOVIE POSTER for a sneak preview ~

Your starting lineup, in alphabetical order:

The Bad News Bears (1976)

directed by Michael Ritchie

starring Walter Matthau, Tatum O’Meal, Vic Morrow, Joyce Van Patten, Jackie Earle Haley

Regular readers will know how much I love this movie from my Best Movies of 1976 post.

Social, personal, and comedic intentions aside: let’s focus on the baseball. This film captures that feeling of youth endeavors like no other - that thing your parents signed you up for that you didn’t really want to do, with all these kids you have nothing in common with, and the “moral victories” that mean so much in any endeavor. The use of Bizet’s Carmen as the soundtrack is the chef’s kiss to the whole thing, with its allusions to feats of valor in the bullfighting arena in contrast to these 11-year-old boys (and girl!) who just want to get a crummy hit.

Bang the Drum Slowly (1973)

directed by John Hancock

starring Michael Moriarity, Robert DeNiro, Vincent Gardenia, Danny Aiello, Phil Foster, Selma Diamond

I’ve had so many conversations over the years defending Robert DeNiro against folks who say he always plays the same character. That’s fair, to a point, especially as he’s gotten older and relies on a caricature of his younger gangster self. But this is my ace in the hole in the argument: have you ever seen him as a dumb country boy who just wants to play baseball and happens to be dying of cancer? Argument over.

A terrific heartfelt movie that uses the passing of a baseball season as a metaphor for life: we know the trajectory, and the potential paths, but neither the timing nor the outcomes. You get up day by day and bang the drum. Slowly.

This movie begs the question: why wasn’t Michael Moriarity a bigger star? If you know him at all, it’s probably from the early days of the NBC crime drama Law & Order. He’s a very good actor who should have gotten more exposure; the only other thing I remember seeing him in is as one of the a-hole townsfolk in Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider.

Funny footnote: Even though the team is wearing pinstripes and have an interlocking NY in a headline-ish font on their chests, the team is called the Mammoths; the uni’s are juuuust different enough to avoid copyright infringement from MLB and the Yankees. The away shots were filmed in Yankee Stadium (and RFK in Washington), but the home games were shot across town in Shea Stadium.

The original filmed version of the novel was as a play for television in 1956, starring Paul Newman. You can still find versions of it online. It’s pretty good but lacks the magic of the ballpark that the movie presents.

The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976)

directed by John Badham

starring Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones, Richard Pryor, Stan Shaw, Ted Ross, Mabel King

I mentioned this in my 1976 Cutting Room Floor.

You got three of the hottest African-American commodities of the day on a barnstorming baseball trip around the country.

It’s not often that the esteemed James Earl Jones plays a goofball (other than this, did he ever?) which is a shame.

It’s a fun romp across the early 20th century landscape.

Bull Durham (1988)

directed by Ron Shelton

starring Kevin Costner, Susan Surandon, Tim Robbins, Robert Wuhl, Trey Wilson, Max Patkin

My original write-up here.

I’ve spent the past several months informally polling folks about what their favorite baseball movies are. Almost universally, Bull Durham enters the conversation, as it should be.

It is kinda the one.

So many great situations, great lines, great acting.

The Court Martial of Jackie Robinson (1990)

directed by Larry Peerce

starring Andre Braugher, Ruby Dee, Bruce Dern, Daniel Stern

You’ve probably never heard of this one, because it was made for HBO rather than theatrical release. Starring the incredible Andre Braugher as Jackie Robinson, the man who would one day break the major league baseball color barrier, the movie is set during Robinson’s tenure as an officer in the army during World War II. After refusing to move to the back of a bus when ordered to do so by a (white, civilian) bus driver, he is dragged off by the MPs and faces court martial.

That’s it: nothing fancy. Lots of flashbacks to Jackie’s early career. Andre/Jackie defends himself in court against the whole hypocritical Jim Crow system, laying the groundwork for his later more famous achievement.

A baseball/courtroom drama - that’s Franxflix’ sweet spot!

Eight Men Out (1988)

directed by John Sayles

starring John Cusack, D B Sweeney, Clifton James, Christopher Lloyd, Michael Lerner, Charlie Sheen, David Strathairn

“Say it ain’t so, Joe”.

As famous in its day as “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”

The mid-late eighties were a great time for baseball movies.

John Cusack stepped away from his usual Gen-X angst roles for a minute to play Buck Weaver in this fictionalized account of the Chicago “Black Sox” scandal, which resulted in eight players (who were acquitted in court) being banned from Major League Baseball for life, stripped of their futures and reputations, for reputedly throwing the 1919 World Series. The most damaged was “Shoeless” Joe Jackson (D B Sweeney) who woulda/shoulda been in the Hall of Fame.

John Sayles is a methodical story-telling director, and he unfolds this at the pace it deserves. It ends in a courtroom, but unlike The Court Martial of Jackie Robinson the courtroom seems are almost an aside. The real focus is on the joy of players when they were playing for love of the game, willing to be slaves to forces beyond their control in pursuit of fleeting euphoria. Gossamer wishes dispersed and crushed by the buy-’em-out moneyed-class is old news to us but imagine it at the time. No, don’t imagine it: watch this movie.

Jackson died penniless after playing under pseudonyms as an intinerant player who would show up to try out for minor league teams, and then move on once his identity was discovered.

I’ve long maintained that the Hall of Fame (which is run by the Baseball Sportswriters Guild, not MLB itself, should install a Wall of Shame outside the Hall to memorialize the players whom they’ve deemed unworthy to be inside but everyone knows should be in. Jackson. Rose. All of the 90s asterisks: Canseco, Sosa, Bonds, McGwire, Clemens. Let Jackson and Rose in and keep dem bums outside.

Field of Dreams (1989)

directed by Phil Alden Robertson

starring Kevin Costner, Amy Madigan, James Earl Jones, Ray Liotta, Burt Lancaster, Timothy Busfield

Kevin Costner’s second baseball movie is arguably good in spite of him, not because of him. On a superficial level it’s not even that good— almost all of the characters are slightly annoying entitled boomers, even the great James Earl Jones as a reclusive J D Salinger-esque writer who is obsessed with how culturally great “The Sixties” were. (It was Salinger in the novel; he threatened to sue if his name was used in the movie).

With an introduction like that, why should you watch this film? Three reasons, right down the middle.

One: the spine-tingling voice that whispers “Build it, and he will come”, and all that stands for: a pristine ballfield in a cornfield in Iowa that summons the ghosts of great players of the past, including “Shoeless” Joe Jackson played by Ray Liotta. (To this day, no one quite knows who “The Voice” is, but it is rumored to have been Ed Harris).

Two: Burt Lancaster, in his final role, playing Doc “Moonlight” Graham. The role was intended for James Stewart (who had played a pitcher in 1949’s The Stratton Story), but Lancaster owns it. This is a great exit from one of the greatest film icons, walking off into the cornfields and whatever lies beyond.

The entire premise of Robert Kinsalla’s book on which the movie is based is his noticing Graham’s entry in the Baseball Encyclopedia: One game, with otherwise zeros across the line: no plate appearances, no hits, no runs, no nothin’. (Fun FranxFlix fact: I have the last printed edition of the Baseball Encylopedia, c. 1996, and can verify this).

Who was this ghost? Kinsella fleshed did as much research as he could pre-internet, traveling to Minnesota, talking to folks and finding out that Graham was a beloved small-town doctor who maybe used to play baseball; that was all he got. He fleshed out the details in his imagination for himself, leading to a story that ends in a cornfield in Iowa.

Three: If you are a father, or a son, or a daughter, and you don’t choke up or outright bawl at the “Want to have a catch?” line at the end, then you just may have no soul; at the best may God have mercy on whatever is left of it. Yes, there is absolutely crying in baseball. But moment’s over, get over it.

No other movie ties baseball to the promise of the American concept of chasing one’s dreams, and our blessed physical environment, whether that be writing novels in New York, owning a farm in Iowa, or chasing a little leather ball in warm summer fields.

For Love of the Game (1999)

directed by Sam Raimi

starring Kevin Costner, Kelly Preston, J K Simmons, John C Reilly, Vin Scully, Steve Lyons

It was the best of baseball movies, and it was the worst of baseball movies. It was universally panned, and lost money at the box office. The only award it received was Costner’s Razzie for Worst Actor of the Year. (You have to understand, it was fashionable for many years to hate on Costner, sometimes with good reason: The Postman, Waterworld, even Academy Award winning Dances with Wolves. But this ain’t one of them.

Clear the mechanism. If we confine ourselves only to the baseball part, as I suggest in Best Movies of 1999, this makes Kevin Costner 3 for 3. In the end, a walk is as good as a hit.

Costner plays Billy Chapel, an aging, broke-down Tigers pitcher playing what could be his last game, a meaningless one at the end of a losing season. (Oh, and he’s having woman trouble or something. Who cares).

The movie is as much of a film-baseball singularity as can be. Other movies such as Bang the Drum Slowly and Major League had come close to matching the realism of what we see at the park or on tv, but this one looks like it is an actual episode of Sunday Night Baseball, complete with real announcers Vin Scully and Steve Lyons (and Yankees announcer Bob Shepherd). This is interspersed with Chapel talking to himself on the mound, “clearing the mechanism”, and facing each batter one by one, with occasional encouragement from his long-time catcher Gus (John C Reilly). If you know the game, you can’t not love these parts.

Clear the mechanism.

And yeah, even the tidy rom-com ending is aight.

A League of Their Own (1992)

directed by Penny Marshall

starring Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, Madonna, Lori Petty, Rosie O’Donnell, Jon Lovitz, Garry Marshall, Bill Pullman, Ann Ramsay, Ann Cusack

My original take is here, Best Movies of 1992.

This is a movie populated by actors I don’t like (Madonna, Rosie O’Donnell, and the overly-sanctified Tom Hanks); yet I love it. Each of the aforementioned are perfect at what they do, abetted by the real stars, Geena Davis and Lori Petty as competitive sisters who can’t let go of their real-life childhood rivalry even when they’ve both granted access to the male-child dreamworld of Majorish League Baseball.

Major League (1989)

directed by David S Ward

starring Tom Berenger, Charlie Sheen, Wesley Snipe, Corbin Bernson, Renee Russo, Margaret Whitton, Bob Uecker

Crass. Predictable. Formulaic. Wonderful.

Fun FranxFlix Fact: I’ve mentioned before that I worked in a second-run movie theater for a year in college. When we got a picture, I was guaranteed to see it at least a dozen times. This was one of those movies, so perhaps it’s brainwashing that makes me like it. But not likely. It’s one of those films that over the years has become as quotable as any, especially Bob Uecker’s gleefully irreverent announcer. "Juuuuuust a bit outside”.

Many pro ballplayers say that Charlie Sheen’s “Wild Thing” Vaughn demonstrates the most believable pitching form shown by an actor onscreen. (Sorry, Costner).

The Natural (1984)

directed by Barry Levinson

starring Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, Glenn Close, Kim Bassinger, Wilford Brimley, Barbara Hershey, Richard Farnsworth, Joe Don Baker, Michael Madsden

As I mentioned before, I have a love/hate relationship with this movie. From a film perspective, hackneyed in so many ways. And yet when I take informal polls of regular folks, it always rates right up there. Sometimes you don’t care that you’re getting played.

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)

directed by David Zucker

starring Leslie Nielsen, Priscilla Presley, Ricardo Montalban, George Kennedy, OJ Simpson, Laurence Tierney, Reggie Jackson

Hey, if Die Hard is a Christmas movie, then The Naked Gun is a baseball movie.

No major character is a baseball player. There are no scenes in a locker room or dugout. And yet, this is a baseball movie.

Reggie Jackson, the greatest player of all-time (“Just ask him”, was the common joke; “They should name a candy bar after me,” he said, and they did) enters the movie late and plays kinda himself, as a hypnotized would-be assassin of Queen Elizabeth II, whom in real life wouldn’t be caught dead at a baseball game. So many layers of funny already.

Enter Leslie Nielsen, as Police Squad captain Frank Drebin, alias famous operatic tenor Enrico Palazzo, alias the greatest MLB umpire ever.

Comedy gold in a baseball setting, and another gem from 1988.

Pride of the Yankees (1942)

directed by Sam Wood

starring Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright, Babe Ruth, Walter Brennan

The documentation of one of the most sublime events in the American twentieth century, told as realistically as 1940s Hollywood could be expected to do. Released a mere three years after the events depicted, it had to gel with what the public knew, just juicing it up a bit for maximum emotional impact.

The true story of Lou Gehrig, one of the most integral players of the Yankees infamous Murderer’s Row. His seventeen-year career was still going strong in 1939 when he was diagnosed with the debilitating disease that would be named for him, and he had to sit out his first game after the astonishing 2,130 he had played consecutively— a record that would hold for 56 years until surpassed by Cal Ripken Jr.

Stoic Gary Cooper was the perfect - some might say only - choice to play the Iron Horse, which he does with dignity. His “luckiest man on earth” speech is nearly as haunting as the original.

I know I was griping about how the love story ruined For Love of the Game, but in this one it absolutely makes the movie work. Teresa Wright is lovely as Lou Gehrig’s wife.

Babe Ruth and several other Yankees play themselves.

The Sandlot (1993)

directed by David Mickey Evans

starring Tom Guiry, Mike Vitar, Patrick Renna, Chauncey Leopardi, Brandon Quinton Adams, Denis Leary, Karen Allen, James Lee Jones

On a film level, one could dismiss this as totally derivative of Stand By Me and A Christmas Story and even the TV series The Wonder Years: Aging narrator recounts an impossibly wondrous summer coming of age. But you know what? There should have been thousands of similar movies made and we’d call it a genre.

Just like The Bad News Bears, you’ve got the fat catcher, the mouthy runt, the geek, the black kid, and the superstar outfielder. But you’ve also got James Earl Jones, who can’t seem to stay away from baseball movies. And then there’s Wendy Peffercorn…

Take Me Out to the Ballgame (1949)

directed by Busby Berkeley

starring Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Esther Williams, Betty Garrett, Jules Munchin, Edward Arnold

It’s 1910. You have a choice between two jobs that take a lot of effort for very little reward: vaudeville, or baseball. Which do you choose?

Why, both, of course! I mean hey if you’re Frank Sinatra or Gene Kelly, something’s gotta take, right?

One of the best things about this film is how they elliptically refer to how “old-fashioned” the game had been thirty years earlier- the uniforms, equipment, rules, etc. This was seventy years ago.

It’s all relative, isn’t it? No talk of steroids, AI umps, strikes, million-dollar contract negotiations. Same game though. <sarc>

Films that didn’t make the post-season.

“Let’s face it kid, it’s just not you’re night”.

Angels in the Outfield (1994) - starring Danny Glover, Tony Danza, Christopher Lloyd, Matthew McConaughey, Adrien Brody

The Babe (1992) - directed by Arthur Hiller, starring John Goodman

The Babe Ruth Story (1948) - directed by Roy Del Ruth, starring William Bendix

Cobb (1994) - directed by Ron Shelton, starring Tommy Lee Jones

Damn Yankees (1958) - starring Gwen Yverdon

Fear Strikes Out (1957) - starring Anthony Hopkins

Headin Home (1920) - starring Babe Ruth

It Happens Every Spring (1948) - starring Ray Milland, Jean Peters.

The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) starring Jackie Robinson

Mr Baseball (1992) - starring Tom Selleck

The Naughty Nineties (1945) - Not really a baseball movie, but contains Abbott and Costello’s classic Who’s on First? routine.

Rookie of the Year (1993) - starring Gary Busey, appearances by Pedro Gurrero, Barry Bonds, & Bobby Bonilla

Speedy (1928) - starring Harold Lloyd and Babe Ruth

The Stratton Story (1949) - starring James Stewart

The Corrected Oscars MVP Awards

Going to do something a little different this time. Rather than actor, director etc, let’s take a look at the outstanding players by position:

In the latest FranxFlix, Best Movies of 1954, I agreed with the Academy that On the Waterfront was the Best Picture, and for all the usual reasons: the story, the dialogue, the cinematography, and above all the cast.

But one of the things that I find especially interesting are the supporting cast: the dockworkers, the neighbors and bartenders, and the thugs surrounding union president/mobster Johnny Friendly (Lee J Cobb), many of whom are uncredited.

We have a very young Fred Gwynne, seven years before he was Officer Muldoon on the great overlooked sitcom Car 54, Where Are You? and ten years before he was Herman Munster. That alone is fun to see.

But there are four other thugs who stand out. Their names onscreen are Truck, Tillio, Moose, and Barney.

One of them, Moose, was a legit actor named Rudy Bond who came out of Elia Kazan’s Actor Studio in New York.

You’ve seen him in other films, like Kazan’s Streetcar Named Desire, and as Don Cuneo in The Godfather, one of the heads of the five families who gets whacked during the “Baptism of Fire” sequence at the end. (He’s the revolving door guy).

Let’s talk about boxing for a moment.

You have to understand how big prizefighting was in the first 2/3 of the century, especially in the New York-centric Italian-, Jewish-, African-, and Irish-American communities. Yes, it was rigged by the mob. But there was no doubt these guys could fight and most of the big fights were on the level.

The biggest and baddest fighter of them all was Joe Louis aka the Brown Bomber.

From 1934-1946, he went 52-1, his only loss coming in 1936 to German Max Schmeling before a crowd of 45,000 (!) in Yankee Stadium. (Jesse Owens would snatch Afro-American pride back from the Nazis a few weeks later at the Berlin Olympics).

Twenty-one of those fifty-two wins were with knockouts, including his revenge match against Schmeling in 1938 whom he KO’d in the first round. He was so indomitable that his challengers were labeled by the press as “The Bum of the Month”.

Back to the movie, and Johnny Friendly’s Thugs.

Marlon Brando’s character Terry Malloy is a washed-up prizefighter living in Hoboken in his formerly Irish neighborhood which had by now become also Italian, Puerto Rican, Black, Polish, which is true to life.

Note that the character Jimmy Dugan’s nickname is KO, highlighting the importance of the boxing culture on the docks.

The reason the other three thugs I mentioned earlier (Tillio, Truck, and Barney) appear so menacing is because they were not actors at all: they were, in fact, all former prizefighters.

Not only that, each of them had challenged Joe Louis for the Heavyweight Title. Yes: they were all members of the Bum of the Month Club.

1 Tony Galento

First is Tillio, played by Tony “Two-Ton” Galento. He has the biggest minor role in the movie, always by Johnny Friendly’s side with a cigar clamped in his jaw.

Galento’s boxing claim to fame is that he knocked Louis down in the third round of their 1939 title bout, the first person to do so since Schmeling three years earlier. He caught Louis off-guard with a short left hook. Louis was up after the count of two and wiped out Galento in the fourth.

Galento was said to be a press-agent’s dream; all he smiles, he loved the limelight and and what he lacked in brains he made up for with “pois-onality” and an endless supply of Yogi Berra-esque malapropisms.

Not gonna lie - for years I thought he was Clemenza in the Godfather.

2 Tami Mauriello

Next up is Truck, played by Tami Mauriello, who was also always around Johnny Friendly but at more of a watchful distance. He comes across as the guy you definitely don’t want to mess with, in his black coat which you know contains a significant piece of hardware.

When Mauriello was 23, he challenged Joe Louis, 32, for the Heavyweight Title in 1946 in, yes, Yankee Stadium. (I’m telling you, boxing was huge). He was knocked down twice in the first round and that was that. He retired from fighting the next year and went into professional wrestling, with one minor acting role in an Oscar-winning movie: On the Waterfront.

3: Abe Simon

Abe Simon played Barney, the biggest thug of them all. He barely speaks in the movie; mostly just looms in the background.

This guy is fading from the annals of history, which makes Franxflix wistful and more determined to carry on with our mission of preserving whatever little scraps of analog history we can. Looking up someone called Abe Simon on the internet is a mostly fruitless endeavor. (I actually got several pictures Paul Simon, which I guess is halfway reasonable, but then I got some of Art Garfunkel as well. Oh yeah, AI is going to kill it; just not in the ways we meant or expected).

Needless to say no pictures of him with Sinatra.

Here he is in his prime. He looks like a cross between Andre the Giant and a Rock’Em Sock’Em Robot.

He went the distance with Joe Louis, losing in the 13th round on a technical knockout. He faced him again the next year, going 6 rounds to another TKO, and retired. He went into law enforcement and was appointed Deputy Police Commissioner in Long Beach in 1942 while acting as a part-time boxing referee. After retiring from the police force under his worsening arthritis, he worked as a detective at Roosevelt Raceway, retired in 1966, and then died of a heart attack in 1969 at the age of 56.

All I can think of when I see that chest is “Ha! I’d like to meet his tailor”.

All of this would have been known to the audience watching this in 1954; the equivalent of seeing Scottie Scheffler, Jack Niklaus, and Rory McIlroy in Happy Gilmore II, the difference being that it wasn’t played for laughs but to instill a sense of menace. Everyone watching knew what these guys had once been capable of.

I can’t help but think of how these guys became templates for the gangster types that would develop through Coppola and Scorsese. Not only is there the similarity between Tillio and Coppola’s Clemenza as I eluded to earlier, but it’s a short hop to Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas. “Barney” morphs into Luca Brazzi in the Godfather: big, dumb, earnest, and as Michael Corleone tells Kay, “a very scary guy”. Truck is very Danny Aiello/Robert DeNiro-esque in his vigilant silence.

Am I the only one who finds this stuff fascinating? Now watch the movie again, keeping an eyes on those guys.

February 12, 2026.

Friends of film:

There are only ten movies here, but every single one of them is a gem.

FranxFlix usually dips down into the 3-1/2 star range for some particular nugget or sentimental favorite, but in this case everything is four-stars or above. They run the gamut of genres, from musicals to monsters to mysteries and war. We’ve got a couple of Japanese movies and an Italian. Audrey Hepburn makes her debut, and Brando is riding high alongside veterans like Bogart and Stewart and Crosby, who are at their peak.

Overall there is a sense of maturity about these films— even the musicals have some heady themes alongside the lighter moments. Directors have been doing this a while; some since the silent era. Even newer guys, like Robert Wise and Federico Fellini, have been writers, assistant or second unit directors for decades and know what they are doing.

As for the Oscars Revisited: I am quite pleased with my recent shift judging singular performances against one another, and instead looking at an actor or director’s output for the entire year. It really seems to be a clarifying lens that shows who was really at the top of their game, and a wider view of shifting trends.

Given that, it was a difficult years to choose actresses, because so many are so good. Judy Garland had her best role since Dorothy. Ava Gardner is at her peak. Audrey Hepburn is everything we could want in her scintillating sophomore effort. But this was clearly the year of Grace Kelly, in three memorable and diverse roles.

As for the menfolk: while Brando was still on fire as the hottest new thing with his Method Acting, the real contest is between Bogie, Bing and Bill Holden. I give the edge to Bing, but not lightly. Bing’s performance in the Country Girl, where he plays a broken man who can switch on charm and bon vivance in a snap, reveals how much his usual easy-going roles are actually acting. It’s one of the strongest performances in history, but I’m glad he only took this kind of role once and let his light, bubbly persona, as shown in White Christmas, keep center stage in his legacy.

What a great year. I’m not going to do a “cutting room floor” follow up because there is so much to chew on here. See all of these (again, if you have to) and make your life all the richer.

Enjoy.

FXD

Arlington VA.

~As always, click the movie poster for a preview~

The Barefoot Contessa

****

directed by Joseph Mankiewicz

starring Humphrey Bogart, Ava Gardner, Edmond O’Brien, Rosanno Brazzi

The barefoot girl from North Carolina plays the barefoot girl from Madrid in this echo of Ava Gardner’s own rise to fame, and it is often considered her finest role (Franxflix can think of at least half a dozen others that are equally as good).

Bogie plays Harry Dawes, the director of her first film and something of her guardian angel in the shark tank of Hollywood as best he can. It’s a cruel world, and he can only do so much.

The Caine Mutiny

*****

directed by Edward Dymtryk

starring Humphrey Bogart, José Ferrer, Van Johnson, Fred MacMurray, Tom Tully

“Ah, but the strawberries, that’s where I had them!”

Captain Queeg is one of Bogart’s finest roles, as a lifelong naval captain who finds himself in wartime with an officer crew of short-timers, college men who get promoted through the ranks without appreciating the rigors of true naval captaincy. One might understand the old man’s peevishness, but there’s the odd paranoidal tendencies that make them question his fitness for service.

It starts off on a ship, and ends in a courtroom: how can it get any better than that?

Ah, but there is a twist. Not a plot twist, per se, but a perception twist which we as the audience share. There’s a lesson in here about chain-of-command snobbery and stereotypes, but it may not be what you expect.

The Country Girl

*****

directed by George Seaton

starring Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, William Holden

Don’t let that casual crooner, boyish parish priest persona fool you: Bing Crosby was a real actor and this is the role that proved it to the world. He plays Frank Elgin, a washed-up alcoholic actor trying to summon the courage for a comeback under the prodding of director Bernie Dodd (William Holden, as solid and passionate as always).

The titular role belongs to Grace Kelly as his long-suffering and controlling wife Georgie. Kelly goes to great lengths to look dowdy and hide her high society accent— and pulled it off well enough to win Best Actress. Similar to what I said about The Caine Mutiny, truths begin to emerge that change our perception of the characters and themselves as the story progresses.

The dialogue, originally written for stage by Clifford Odets, is taut and smart. But the real magic comes when we see a few musical numbers in the play-within-the-film. Insecure fragile Elgin transforms into and out of “Bing Crosby” before our eyes. Der Bingle even deigned to not wear a toupee— well, a much smaller toupee.

Creature from the Black Lagoon

***1/2

directed by George Seaton

starring Julia Adams, Richard Carlson

It’s a ‘B’ movie, to be sure. But it comes to the surface and breathes air despite what it is supposedly capable of. Precisely situated between King Kong (1933) and Jaws (1975) as a “monster movie” about the hubris of scientists exploring the unknown, much of the dialogue is a dialectic about reasons, means, and ends of scientific discovery.

It makes for a perfect 1954 companion to Godzilla and Executive Suite, the message being that just because you “can” doesn’t mean you “should”. But don’t worry— it’s not all heady gobbledegook. With almost no special effects, the creature looks great, and there are are plenty of (G version) jump scares accompanied by dramatic orchestral flourishes.

Dial M for Murder

****

directed by Alfred Hitchcock

starring Ray Milland, Grace Kelly, Robert Cummings, Anthony Dawson, John Williams

It has been said that if a picture is well-directed, you don’t notice the camera work. Hitchcock says, “Hold my White Lady”. (That’s a cocktail; his favorite. No reference at all to the blondes he favored in leading roles, I’m sure).

It’s the camera work— the angles, the pans, the dollies, the cuts— that bring on the suspense. You know you’re being manipulated, and you love it. As for the cast: Kelly is a bit stiff, but that’s the character she’s playing. Ray Milland is appropriately malevelent. I always think of him as “Bizarro World James Stewart”: they have a similar build, similar look, same hair, same suits, but Milland always has a dangerous glint behind his natural charm.

Milland plays a man who discovers his wife has been having an affair, and sets about to plot the perfect murder as revenge. Murphy’s Law kicks in, and he’s forced to go with Plan B. That’s all I’m going to reveal.

Executive Suite

****1/2

directed by Robert Wise

starring William Holden, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March, Walter Pidgeon, Louis Calhern, Nina Foch, June Allyson, Paul Douglas, Dean Jagger, Shelley Winters

The chairman of the board of a major corporation is dead, and his seven fellow board members have to vote on his replacement. Each of the contenders is flawed in his own way; intrigue and foibles abound as we approach the climatic conclave. Even if you’re too young to recognize most of their names, trust me: this is an all-star cast who play well together even as their characters are decidedly not playing well together.

Click on the poster link for a speech that should be watched by every business school, AI farm, and every sworn-in politician across the land, more applicable today than when it was first delivered.

Godzilla

****

directed by Ishiro Honda

starring Akira Takarada, Momoko Kochi, Akihiko Hirata, Takashi Shimura

One would have to have a heart of stone not to love this giant atomic-breathing lizard stomping on Tokyo. Made less than a decade after the horrors of Nagasaki & Hiroshima, director Honda made no secret that Gozira (his Japanese name) was a metaphor for nuclear weapons, and a warning about escalation. That aside, it’s great fun with brilliant special effects. You know what happens, but have you ever actually seen it?

NOTE: be sure to watch the original Japanese version, not the American one! (Watch it later and you’ll see what I mean).

La Strada

*****

directed by Federico Fellini

starring , Giulietta Masina, Anthony Quinn, Richard Basehart

It is hard to define what is the most Fellini movie of all time, but if you asked the maestro himself, he would name this one. Get prepared to have every emotion within you to be prodded and played in this story of a simple girl Gelsomina (Giuletta Masina, aka Mrs Fellini) who is bought from her mother for $10,000 lire (about $20) by a cruel busking strongman (Anthony Quinn who could play any nationality) trying to adjust to an unexpected life on the road. Along the way she is befriended by a kind clown (Richard Basehart, later the dad in Lost in Space). Nino Rota’s soundtrack, as always, does a great deal of the work to infuse every scene with poignancy.

On the Waterfront

*****

directed by Elia Kazan

Starring Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden, Lee J Cobb, Rod Steiger

First, a history lesson: Elia Kazan had been a member of the Communist Party, briefly, in the 1930s. He quit when he saw that they were decidely authoritarian and anti-American. Fifty years later, he was called, along with dozens of Hollywood actors and directors, to testify before Congress and he named names; as a result, he was shunned socially and professionally. This movie was his apologia.

Now, the movie itself: absolutely brilliant on every level. Former prizefighter Terry Malone (Marlon Brando) works on the docks in Newark under the watchful eye of his brother Charlie (Rod Steiger), consigliere to mob boss/union leader Johnny Friendly (Lee J Cobb). Local priest Father Barry (Karl Malden) and young Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint) help Terry open his eyes to what’s really going on around him. Atmospheric location shots, taut dialogue, and incredible acting make this one of the all-time greats. Top 50, if not top 10.

Rear Window

*****

directed by Alfred Hitchcock

starring James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Wendell Corey, Raymond Burr

I once knew a girl who put forth the proposition is inherently either a voyeur or an exhibitionist; I never thought to ask if this was her favorite movie. (Jimmy Stewart) is an adventurous photographer by trade who has had a bad break - of his leg. He is wheelchair-bound in a body cast, tended to only by his reliable housekeeper Thelma Ritter and his girlfriend Grace Kelly, (poor guy!).

His apartment faces a courtyard inhabited by a cast of characters he assigns nicknames to as he passes his day watching them, until his imagination gets the best of him and he suspects one of them of foul play. It is just his imagination, right? Of course not. This is a Hitchcock movie. His best, in Franxflix’s opinion.

Sabrina

*****

directed by Billy Wilder

starring Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Walter Hampden, John Williams, Marcia Hyer, Francis X Bushman, Nancy Culp

A year after her smashing debut in Roman Holiday, Audrey Hepburn proves her success was no fluke. She appears here in perhaps the finest romantic comedy of all-time, playing a chauffeur’s daughter from Long Island who goes to cooking school in Paris and comes back transformed. Brothers David (William Holden, hilariously cast across type as a carefree playboy) and Lionel (Humphrey Bogart, hilariously cast across type as a fuddy-duddy company man) are her shipping magnate employer’s sons who find themselves vying for her attention, though not for purely romantic reasons— there are shareholders to be considered.

The Seven Samurai

*****

directed by Akira Kurosawa

starring Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Tsushima, Isao Kimura, Seiji Miyaguchi, Yoshio Inaba

A medieval village cannot defend itself against a marauding bandit gang, so they turn to a samurai soldier for protection. He recruits six others for this low-return job, and we eventually learn why he accepted the offer. It was remade as a John Sturges Western in the form of The Magnificent Seven in 1960. If you want an intro into Japanese film and culture, this is about the best doorway available, one that opens up an entirely new, wonderful way of looking at the world and its universal problems.

A Star Is Born

*****

directed by George Cukor

starring Judy Garland, James Mason, Jack Carson, Charles Bickford, Tommy Noonan

Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Judy Garland had lived a thousand lifetimes by the time she made this movie at age 32, and she was banking on it being her comeback film. Bankrolled by third husband Sid Luft, it could/would/shoulda been—but times move on. Regardless, it is a masterpiece. Judy is wonderful— as always— and finally has a vehicle to showcase it beyond the “Hey gang! Let’s put on a show!” musicals that MGM made their bank on while destroying her physical and mental health.

In hindsight, its hard not to watch this to think that both characters, Garland’s Vicki Lawrence and James Mason’s Norman Maine, aren’t both portrayals of Judy herself on her assent and decline with this movie as the nexus of both arcs.

White Christmas

****

directed by Michael Curtiz

starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, Vera-Ellen, Dean Jagger

Bing makes everything he does look effortless (except dancing, but they always shoot around that). Danny Kaye makes everything look fun. Vera-Ellen has a snap to her; Rosemary Clooney is fine. Dean Jagger has a nice role as the old man they would do anything for.

Would I like this movie as much if I didn’t see it every few years? Probably not. But I do, and I do. And you should too.

I agonized over all of the supporting actors in Executive Suite and On the Waterfront. (sorry Rod Steiger and Walter Pidgeon).

It also gives FranxFlix to let his id run a bit amok, and give a little guff to movies he quite likes but wishes were a bit…better.

1976 may be the best year for FranxFlix also-rans since 1939. Great films to watch: not great-great, in a critical sense, but great in a “yeah I could watch this again”, weathering the bad parts for the good performances, scenes, plot twists that make it worthwhile. Or, in another sense, the ones that make you appreciate the ones that do make the cut as having that little bit extra.

1900

***1/2

directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

starring Robert DeNiro, Gerard Depardieu, Dominique Sanda, Francesca Bertini, Laura Betti, Stefania Casini, Sterling Hayden, Donald Sutherland, Burt Lancaster

If it’s over five hours long, it better be the best movie I’ve ever seen in my life. To borrow from Jules in Pulp Fiction, “Well we'd have to be talkin' about one charming mother———-in' pig. I mean he'd have to be ten times more charmin' than that Arnold on Green Acres, you know what I'm sayin'?”

But five hours charming? Hand me a chop of Arnold.

317 minutes detailing multiple generations of two Italian families. As one critic put it, Coppola did the same thing in the first two Godfathers, in less time and with a much more compelling story.

BUT (I like big buts and I cannot lie): that critic saw the US theatrical release, which had been dubbed into English and shaved down to 247 minutes (4 hours, 7 minutes) as a compromise with Paramount to whom the producer was contractually obligated to 195 minutes for release in America. Capisce?

I digress. I settled in to watch the full director’s cut, which is divided into Parts I & II as intended, just like the Godfather and Kill Bill. And:

It’s long, and not very good. Overwrought and annoying. I do not like any of these people or any of the causes they espouse. TL,DW: the rich become fascists and the poor become socialists and they’re all bastards, some literally, some merely figuratively. As an added “bonus” we are exposed to full frontal from Bob DeNiro and Gerard Depardieu. Oddio!

If you choose to watch this, I just want to say good luck, and we’re all counting on you.

Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings

****

directed by John Badham

starring Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones, Richard Pryor

I have an upcoming edition about baseball movies, and anyone who doesn’t have this on their list is a booger-eating moron. Is it a great movie? No! Does it have Richard Pryor? Yes! Does it show you a side of what it’s like to be a minor leaguer when race relations were in issue? Yes! Is it funny? Hell yes! I’ve lost count, but two out of three means the ayes have it: Watch it.

Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or, Sitting Bull’s History Lesson

****

directed by Robert Altman

Starring Paul Newman, Joel Grey, Harvey Keitel, Geraldine Chaplin, Will Sampson, Burt Lancaster

Robert Altman has alienated and antagonized many a critic and audience over the years, but most eventually find a film in which they recognize his genius. This is not that film.

Let’s see what the critics said at the time:

Now you’ve got my attention. These are the kind of reviews that make me think, ok smarmy print media critic from fifty years ago, let’s see how far up your ass your head really was.

Guess what: pretty far up there. I can see how it may not be everyone’s (or even anyone)’s cup of tea, but I quite like it; me being silly, cynical, puerile, emotionally empty and all.

Paul Newman’s charlatan Bill is a treat; it’s quite fun whenever St. Paul of Hollywood gets a little nasty. Geraldine Chaplin’s Annie Oakley is brilliant; Harvey Keitel and Joel Grey try to out-nerd each other, if you can believe it; and Will Sampson has a meaty role a year after playing Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. (That’s two great roles for Sampson this year; he also played Chief Ten Bears in The Outlaw Josie Wales). Altman as always keeps the action flowing with his trademark overlapping snatches of dialogue, swirling cameras and a stream of oh-so-subtle gags.

I think what probably caused a little chill on its release was the industry realized that the satire was not aimed at some long-forgotten Wild West show, but at Hollywood itself.

The Eagle Has Landed

***1/2

directed by John Sturges

starring Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasance

With a great cast and a talented director, this film based on a best-selling novel about a Nazi plot to kidnap Winston Churchill should have been glorious. The basic problem is that our most beloved actors are playing… Nazis. Not the humanized, we-are-all-one-human-family-kind like Marlon Brando portrayed in The Young Lions, but the we-heart-Hitler inner circle and their loyal officers kind. It’s also a bit unwieldy as the plot unfolds. But if you’re a WWII movie lover, or an alt-history lover, this is a check-the-box must-see.

It just occurs to me… Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds was an inversion of this film: a plot to kill Hitler, with a bank-shot nod to a quote from the movie Patton for the title: “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!” I’ve never seen him acknowledge that, (and I did read his magnificent book, Film Obsessions), but of course it must be.

Freaky Friday

***

directed by Gary Nelson

starring Barbara Harris, Jodie Foster, John Astin

This the Disney movie that introduces the trope of adults-and-kids mysteriously swapping bodies for a day to find out how the other half lives, which would best be done in 1988’s Big with Tom Hanks. In contrast to Hanks’ version, in which he brilliantly portrays a childlike demeanor in an adult body, this one works because Jodie Foster already acts like an adult. (See this as a double-feature with The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane and blow your mind at the girl’s breadth).

Gator

***1/2

directed by Burt Reynolds

starring Burt Reynolds, Lauren Hutton, Jerry Reed, Ned Beatty

If you’re a fan of Archer, you know this is the quintessential Burt Reynolds movie. And perhaps it is: Burt plays the ex-con son of a moonshiner racing speedboats through the Florida swamps, and it’s glorious. Unfortunately, that’s the first twenty minutes; if only that mojo could have sustained the next ninety minutes.

Ned Beatty, as always, is great. And it’s fun at first to see Jerry Reed, the country music star turned actor, as the bad guy in his debut role; and he’s good. Too good. He’s a real s.o.b., maybe one of the worst movie villains of the era. Clearly someone wise said, hey Burt— your pal has acting chops. How about he play your best friend in the next movie? Maybe make people like him? And so he did, the following year in Smokey and the Bandit.

Jerry also wrote and sang a song or two for this one, just like Smokey and the Bandit.

Gus

**1/2

directed by Vincent McEveety

starring Ed Asner, Don Knotts, Tim Conway, Dick Van Patten, Harold Gould

Disney cranked out so many crappy live-action movies in the 60s and 70s that it’s tempting to want to wave a wand and say bibbidy-bobbedy-boo! and wish them all away. But if you happened to be a 6-12 year old boy at that time, you might be tempted to say— save this one.

It’s pretty darned stupid after a lifetime of watching movies, but maybe that’s the point of saving it. If you have a five-year-old, I implore you, put this on the screen and see what happens. It’s better than that weird blue dog cartoon.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane

****

directed by Nicolas Gessner

starring Jodie Foster, Martin Sheen, Alexis Smith, Scott Jacoby

The only people creepier in the small Maine town than precocious Jodie Foster who lives with her never-seen father are members of the blue-blood family that run the town. Let’s just say that everyone gets their just desserts. Tea served with peach ice cream and almond cookies, to be exact.

This is a PG movie, but there appears to be brief nudity by 14-year-old Jodie Foster. It is shot from behind and is actually her body double, her sister Connie who was 21, so…somehow that makes it all right? It was the seventies, man, give the censors’ lawyers enough Columbian gold and they’ll strike the deal.

Logan’s Run

***

directed by Michael Andersion

starring Michael York, Jenny Agutter, Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Peter Ustinov

Sci-fi is not my bag, so I try to overcome my prejudices where I can. I do love me some post-apocalyptic futuristic epics. This one has those Star Trek and Sleeper vibes of plastic weapons, polyester uniforms, & Moog synthesizer sound effects.

It’s a good premise, good cast. It’s flaw is that it in trying so hard to be imaginative, it reveals exactly its lack of such. It feels like it was made in the 50s alongside classics like Lost in Space, Forbidden Planet, The Day the Earth Stood Still, which in their day were imaginative. Twenty years after those came out, this just feels tired... which became all too clear the following summer when Star Wars was released.

It does give me an excuse to share one of my favorite memes from a few years ago. We are currently situated between Soylent Green and Children of Men. Seems about right, although Idiocracy can’t be that far in the future.