Movie Review: Interiors (1978)

Directed by Woody Allen                                              

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

Mama Eve (Geraldine Page) is an elegant, highly vaunted interior decorator who proves to be a handful for her husband Arthur (E. G. Marshall) and three adult daughters Renata (Diane Keaton), Flyn (Kristin Griffith) and Joey (Mary Beth Hurt). Maintaining an icy façade, Eve is overbearing, manipulative and controlling. One of her chief activities is staging elaborate suicide attempts in which she knows she will be rescued at the nick of time. It comes a no surprise that papa shortly declares at the dinner table that he will be leaving Eve for a trial separation. While the delusional Eve pines for reconciliation, dad shortly arrives at the family’s seaside home with his fiancée Pearl (Maureen Stapleton). The clash is immediate from the get-go; whereas the other characters dress in limpid grays, whites and browns, Pearl is first introduced in a blood-red dress (future superstar director Joel Schumacher served as the costume designer for this film, and Woody Allen gave him a prominent credit at the beginning of the film – and for good reason.) The sassy, brassy and outspoken Pearl grates upon the clan’s nerves. As Julie Kirgo points out on in the liner notes to this Twilight Time release – 3,000 copies, snap them up quick), while it is never made evident, Pearl is implied to be Jewish, and anti-Semitic sentiment seems to bubble just beneath the surface. Eve faces the fact that she and her husband will never be reunited and high tragedy ensues – but in a surprise twist, Pearl grants life to one of the daughters in the manner of the real-life Eve.

Movie Review: Chilly Scenes of Winter (aka Head Over Heels, 1979)

Directed by Joan Micklin Silver

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

While many would come to this expecting a “rom-com,” as Julie Kirgo mentions in the liner notes to this Twilight Time release – limited to 3,000 copies, Chilly Scenes of Winter is every inch a painful “coming-of-age” comedy very much in the manner of Withnail and I (1988).

On the outside, Charles (a very young John Heard) is as white and pleasant as Salt Lake City, the place in which he works as an office drone. Scarcely underneath it all lurks dysfunction at every turn. His roommate Sam (Peter Riegert) is a perpetually unemployed “jacket salesman.”  His beyond eccentric mother’s (the great Gloria Grahame) favorite pastime is submerging in a bathtub while wearing satin gowns. Things are proceeding roughly, until Charles meets fellow office worker Laura (Mary Beth Hurt). The two meet cute, and spark a relationship, despite the fact she remains very married to a man nicknamed “Ox (the likewise great mark Metcalf, who also produced).”

After sneaking around friends and coworkers, the sensible Laura gives Charles up to get on with her life. But Charles is having none of it, starting a campaign that he thinks will make Laura leave her somewhat abusive marriage in a series of stunts that are outright stalker-ish.  It all culminates when both Charles and Sam attend an “open house” hosted by Laura and Ox in disguise as gay roommates!  Our erstwhile hero grows even less sympathetic by the minute until he too, must come to grips that he and Laura’s affair is essentially over before it began.

Movie Review: Our Man in Havana (1960, Twilight Time)

Reviewed by: Hal Astell

Set in Cuba before 'the recent revolution', it would appear from first glimpses that this just couldn't fail. Produced and directed by Carol Reed, with a screenplay by Graham Greene that was adapted from his own novel, and starring no less a Great British trio than Alec Guinness, Noel Coward and Ralph Richardson. Also credited before the title are Burl Ives, Ernie Kovacs and Maureen O'Hara, hardly minor names themselves. It's as great as it ought to be, but I was seriously surprised at the content. I thought it was a spy film, and it is, but it's also a comedy which I really wasn't expecting.

Greene introduces us to the characters through humour. Guinness is Jim Wormold, a mild mannered vacuum cleaner salesman and Coward is Hawthorne, a spymaster who comes to visit him with strange questions and an offer to meet him in the gents. What he's really doing is hiring him to work for the British secret service as the title character, part of his Caribbean network, and Wormold accepts so as to be able to finance his daughter Milly's expensive equestrian dreams. Ives is a friend of Wormold's, some sort of German doctor doing research into cheese or some such, and Kovacs is the Red Vulture, a notorious Cuban official with an interest in everything and everybody, most obviously Milly.

Movie Review: 9 to 5 (1980)

Directed by Colin Higgins

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

The 1980s comedy classic 9 to 5 comes to Blu-Ray courtesy the fine folks from Twilight Time! At 37 years old, a lot of the subject matter here, such as blatant discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace, seems unconscionable at this point in American history, but one must sadly admit was this was how it was in the workplace on the eve of the Reagan Administration.

To recap: freshly divorced housewife Judy (Jane Fonda) ventures back into the workplace at a large corporation, She is taken under the wing of worldly wise widow Violet (Lily Tomlin), the “gal Friday” of the repulsive Mr. Hart (Dabney Coleman in the role that only could be played by Dabney Coleman) who routinely steals all her ideas and passes her over for promotion. Sassy country gal Doralee (Dolly Parton), unfairly singled out as the office “desk polisher” by her coworkers, strikes up a friendship between Violet and Judy, and over drinks, dope and barbecue share their fantasies of murdering Mr. Hart. An unfortunate series of events the following day actually lead the trio do believe they DID murder Mr. Hart. When he reappears and threatens blackmail against them, the women abduct him and begin to put their own version of “employee relations” into practice.

Movie Review: The Mad Magician (Blu-ray, Twilight Time)

Reviewed By: Hal Astell

If you're going to make a movie in 1954 about a tortured artist screwed over by life, who could you possibly cast in the lead but Vincent Price? He's Don Gallico, known as Gallico the Great, but only recently as he's previously been a designer of illusions for other magicians, working for a company called Illusions, Inc. Unfortunately he's an artist, a genius even, but he's hardly a businessman. As his first show is closed down by court injunction by Ross Ormond, his own employer at Illusions, inc, he discovers that Ormond owns him and everything he creates, even when designed and made in his own time. Not much has changed in the entertainment business over the last fifty years, it seems.

Price is great here as the artist driven mad by those who seek only to exploit his genius, but then that's hardly surprising to us looking back because it's precisely what we see him as. In 1954 when this was a brand new 3D movie (and it later became the first 3D movie to be shown on television), Price was still new in the horror game. He had plenty of solid credits behind him but the first horror picture was only a year earlier in 1953. Given that it was the massively successful House of Wax about, yes, an artist driven mad, this one must have been a decent consolidation of his new reputation as a master of the macabre, and we know how that built.

Movie Review: The Keys of the Kingdom (Blu-ray, Twilight Time)

Reviewed By: Hal Astell

I recorded The Keys of the Kingdom because it's one of those intriguing opportunities to watch Vincent Price in something other than a horror movie. One of the icons of the genre who's never less than magnetic, he came to it after a surprising number of other films which are a varied and fascinating bunch to work through. He was an important name at this point, this film released a mere month after his excellent showing in Otto Preminger's Laura and a year after The Song of Bernadette, which may explain why he's third credited amongst a strong cast, even though we don't get to see much of him: one brief early scene and he's gone for over an hour and a half. What I soon found was that he's one of the least reasons to watch this film, as a Roman Catholic bishop called Angus Mealey, who knew Fr Francis Chisholm as a young Scots lad. Fr Chisholm is who the film is all about and while we first meet him as an old man, this is the story of his life.

As the film begins in 1938, Fr Chisholm has recently returned to Tweedside, his home parish in Scotland. The monsignor has been checking him out and decides that he should retire, though the good father has different ideas. He sounds just like Gregory Peck but doesn't look remotely like him because he's plastered with some capable aging make up. I should add that nobody at the time would have recognised him anyway because he was new in Hollywood, with only a single film six months behind him, a Jacques Tourneur war picture called Days of Glory in which he played a Russian fighting the Nazis, hardly how we might imagine the typical Gregory Peck role. He's a little unlike Peck here too, with despair in his voice as he asks the monsignor to talk to Bishop Angus. Of course the monsignor has already made up his mind, at least until he heads up to bed and picks up Fr Chisholm's journal, a huge volume that goes all the way back to 1878.

Movie Review: 10 Rillington Place (Blu-ray, Twilight Time)

Reviewed By: Hal Astell                      

Somehow I let this feature get past me and I have no idea why. I can safely get a pass from seeing it on initial release because I was too busy being born, but it must have played on British television while I was growing up and, as a boy who had both an interest in true crime and a tendency to read the Radio Times each week to figure out what I wanted to watch (this was in the dark ages before VCRs let alone DVRs), I would surely have noticed it. After all, the address of the title is a standard trivia question in the UK. Where did John Christie commit eight murders between 1943 and 1953? That one’s a gimme. However, I find it more chilling that I’d also let the importance of what the film, and the book by journalist Ludovic Kennedy upon which it was based, has to say get by me too. Perhaps like many, I’d associated it with murders rather than hangings and it’s the latter that has more resonance. Put simply, the hanging of Timothy Evans, an innocent man, is a key reason why capital punishment was abolished in the UK.

Movie Review: The Hawaiians (1970)

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

Directed by Tom Gries

The first film adaptation of the sprawling James Michener novel, Hawaii was the epic of the same name in 1966 (see my previous review here). That entry concentrated on the influence of American Christian missionaries on native islanders in the early 19th Century. The Hawaiians, which followed in 1970, would concentrate on the impact of Chinese and Japanese migrants arriving in the tropical paradise at the turn of the century. Presenting a wide diorama of various cultures struggling for dominance in an enchanting land, The Hawaiians maintains an intimate narrative while thoroughly entertaining its audience.

Preeminent American screen star Charlton Heston stars as Whip Hoxworth, an irascible seaman eager to leave his business of transporting Chinese immigrants – who are essentially “indentured servants,” or “slaves” to keep the bustling island's capital of Honolulu running. Among whip's latest batch is the shrewd Mun Ki (Mako) who plans to make the at-first slovenly and unappealing “mountain girl” Nyuk Tsin (Tina Chen, the film's true star) into a first-class prostitute. But as history proves, there are lots of variables, and in short order Nyuk Tsin becomes Mun Ki's “wife.” The Hawaiians then focuses on Nyuk's journey from a hapless victim to a strong-willed, industrious woman who galvanizes the large family she starts with Mun Ki into prosperity – in spite, or perhaps because of the limitations placed upon her as a low-caste Chinese woman.

Movie Review: A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982)

Directed by Woody Allen

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

It is the Edwardian Age. Academic Leopold (Jose Ferrer), a proponent of secular humanism just as tedious as any religious fundamentalist, is off to the countryside to marry the far younger Ariel (Mia Farrow). They are set to reconnoiter at Leopold’s cousin Adrian’s (Mary Steenburgen) country manor for a weekend of fun before the nuptials. Adrian’s husband Andrew (Woody Allen) is a wealthy Wall Street investor and part-time inventor who terrorizes the local wildlife with his flying bicycles. Thrown into the mix is randy Doctor Maxwell (Tony Roberts) and naughty nurse Dulcy (Julie Hagerty). The sultry summer air weaves its spell on the sextet. It appears that Andrew and Arial are going through marital troubles, inflamed by the fact that Ariel and Andrew are former lovers. Everyone wonder aloud if it’s appropriate that Arial and Leopold are set to be wed, the differences in their ages at least three decades! Maxwell, while trying to pitch and woo to everything in a skirt (“He’s never lost a patient,” Andre declares. “Made a few of them pregnant, yes!”) however, befalls a series of comic injuries.

Things come to a head when Andrew presents his latest invention, a “Spirit ball,” a device that can reach into the unseen world to see the past, present and future. The resolutely non-metaphysical group is treated to a ghostly vision of a couple meeting clandestinely at the nearby lake. There is a death – but the film has a happy ending regardless.

Movie Review: The Bounty (1984)

Directed by Roger Donaldson

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

In this more “historically accurate” version of the HMS Bounty incident of the late 18th Century, Commanding Lieutenant William Bligh (Anthony Hopkins) goes before court at Greenwich to face charges that he let his ship slip into mutiny. Electing his friend Fletcher Christian (a young Mel Gibson) to lead the expedition to gather breadfruits for good King George – the one who let the American colonies slip through his fingers, the Bounty sails for Tahiti. The Bounty’s mostly young crew is lacking in discipline, and Bligh is forced to resort to strict corporal discipline.

When the ship fails to navigate around Cape Horn due to inhospitable weather, the Bounty must resort to take the longer eastern route. Finally arriving in Tahiti in October of 1788, the Bounty’s crew grows dissolute drinking rum, chasing after the local Pacific Islander beauties and getting tattoos – very much like the twenty-somethings of today.

It is here that Christian fails Bligh by falling in love and conceiving a child with local orchid Mauatua (). Gathering the men for the trip back to Great Britain – after several months of luxuriating in a tropical paradise, the crew grows increasingly rebellious. Floggings and harsh disciplinary actions fail to do the trick, and when Bligh threatens to sail around Cape Horn, knowing that the harsh weather will lead to the loss of crewmate, Christian rebels and sets Bligh and his followers on a raft with minimal provisions. Aware that their actions will lead to executions back in England, the various crewmembers resort to drastic measures to cover their tracks …

Movie Review: Places in the Heart (1984)

Directed by Robert Benton

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

Edna Spalding (Sally Field, in her second Oscar win for Best Actress) is a Depression-era mother of two small children who suffers an incredible tragedy. Her sheriff husband is killed by accident in a drunken altercation with a black teenager. Justice in small town Texas in 1935 being what it is, the kid is dragged behind a truck as her husband’s body is laid out on the kitchen table prior to burial. Unable to write a check, let alone earn a living, the town’s slimy banker (Lane Smith) reminds Edna she has less than $200 saved and suggests she sell her farm, move in with relatives or put her kids in an orphanage. Edna balks at this, and sticks to her guns.

Opportunity literally comes knocking in the form of black hobo Moze (Danny Glover), who pesters her for work in exchange for a hot meal. Stealing some spoons off her table before high tailing it, a sheriff catches him, drags him before Edna and in an amazing act of compassion, she denies the charges, which sets him free. Moze proves to be a Godsend, as he has a hands-on experience in cotton farming, just the thing to turn around the unused land on her property to keep her creditors at bay.

Movie Review: When the Wind Blows (1986)

Directed by Jimmy Murakami

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

As author David J Moore states in his authoritative book on Apocalyptic cinema, “World Gone Wild,” “This is no bag of candy for the kiddies, friends.” Indeed.

Jim (voiced by Sir John Mills) and Hilda Bloggs (voiced by Dame Peggy Ashcroft) is an elderly couple who live on their storybook farm outside of London. The talk, bicker and remember the good old days when they learn about the possibility of nuclear war in three days’ time. Jim busies himself by following official government pamphlets by painting all the windows white and constructing a shelter of three doors lying on their side in a hallway. The unspeakable happens, their home and farm is reduced to rubble. The Bloggs continue on talking, bickering, and remembering the good old days … until they eventually crawl into paper bags to await their deaths from radiation poisoning.

Cartoonist Raymond Briggs decided to let the world have it with both barrels after the winsome yuletide fantasy The Snowman in 1982. Taking his all-round circular figures and overly pleasing pastel colors, Briggs took on the Ronald Reagan Cold War era for an altogether bleak and despairing vision. When the Wind Blows runs neck and neck with Grave of the Fireflies as the most despairing animated feature film EVER.

Movie Review: The Fortune (1975, Twilight Time)

Directed by Mike Nichols

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

It's the Roaring twenties, and lovable con men Oscar (Jack Nicholson) and Nick (Warren Beatty), intend to separate sanitary napkin heiress Fredericka “Freddie” Quintessa Bigard (Stockard Channing in her big screen debut) from her many millions. Freddie loves Nick, but Nick is already married – and so she weds wild-haired Oscar instead. Mindful of the Mann Act – transporting females across state lines for immoral purposes was taken very, very seriously back then – the trio head for Los Angeles, California. Settling into a crumbling apartment block, much like the one in The Day of the Locust (1975), things quickly go south. Freddie rarely puts out, Oscar is not keen on finding and keeping employment, and Nick is a bit of a washout as a used car salesman. The three get on each other's nerves big time, until Nick and Oscar decide that outright homicide is the way to speed things along. Their rotten luck follows them in this regard as well …

A bit of trivia on The Fortune is the fact that the role of Freddie was originally offered to Bette Midler. Things were going just swimmingly until Midler asked Mike Nichols what pictures he had done previously. Nichols, one of the hottest tickets in Tinseltown at the time, was justifiably miffed. Hadn't she heard of his previous successes, such as The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? As Julie Kirgo points out in the liner notes to this Twilight Time release, limited to 3,000 copies, The Fortune had a very respectable pedigree. Stars Nicholson and Beatty, coming off major motion pictures such as Shampoo and Chinatown, cinematography by John A. Alonzo, a script by Adrien Joyce and a stunning debut performance from Channing. It all went for naught. The film failed to click with audiences and critics, and The Fortune failed to make one at the box office. Vaguely remembered today, it’s stuck in a big pile of films about the 1920s and 19302 made by Hollywood in the Seventies – Locust, The Great Gatsby and Chinatown among them.

Movie Review: Under Fire (1983)

Directed by Roger Spottiswoode

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell


Nicaragua, 1979: The populace is under the iron-fisted rule of President Anastasio Somoza. Photographer Russell Price (Nick Nolte) is on the scene to capture scenes of the burgeoning civil war for the American mainstream media. It’s not all work and no play. Price has his eye on the gorgeous journalist Claire (Joanna Cassidy) who’s in the process of breaking up with the egotistical Alex Grazier (Gene Hackman), indifferent to the death and upheaval around him as he plots his career as a news anchor. The trio is pulled into the conflict when it becomes obvious that they can’t remain neutral to the fascistic forces of Somoza and the Sandinista rebels. Throwing their purported, professional objectivity into bold relief are the actions of cheerfully amoral mercenary soldier Oates (George Romero discovery Ed Harris), who guns down unarmed civilians for quick cash. Using his photographic skills to prolong the rebel’s efforts, Price and his friends face an even bigger quandary: Are they merely unseating the old boss, who in the words of The Who, “is same as the old boss?”

Movie Review: The Vanishing (1993)

Directed by George Sluizer

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

The 1988 Dutch original, Spoorloos: Rex (Gene Bervoets) and Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) are on vacation when they have a spat. Stopping at a roadside convenience store, Saskia mysteriously disappears. Rex searches and searches but Saskia has seemingly vanished off the face of the Earth. Years later, local academic Raymond (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) telephones Rex saying that he knows what happened to Saskia contacts him. After a mysterious car ride with the apprehensive Rex and the coolly evil Raymond, the academic says that her disappearance was an experiment in evil he undertook after his daughter proclaimed him a “hero” after saving a drowning child. Rex finds out what happened to Saskia – and the audience stumbles out of the theater as if kicked in the stomach. 

The 1993 American remake, same director: Jeff (Kiefer Sutherland) and Diane (a young Sandra Bullock) are on vacation when they have a spat. Stopping at a roadside convenience store, Diane mysteriously disappears. Jeff searches and searches but Diane has seemingly vanished off the face of the Earth. Years later, local academic Barney (Jeff Bridges) telephones Jess saying he knows what happened to Diane. After a mysterious car ride with the apprehensive Jeff and the coolly evil Barney, the academic says that her disappearance was an experiment in evil he undertook after his daughter proclaimed him a “hero” after saving a drowning child. Jeff finds out what happened to Diane – but in the meantime, his hard-as-nails waitress girlfriend Rita (Nancy Travis) has followed Jeff’s tracks, and turns the tables on the professor. The film ends with laughter and smiles.

Movie Review: Follow That Dream (1962, Blu-ray)

Directed by Gordon Douglas

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

Pop Kwimper (Arthur O’Connell), his son Toby Elvis Presley), his sort-of adopted children, 19-year-old Holly (Anne Helm) two twin boys and a little girl are motoring down on Florida interstate when they happen upon a pleasant seaside beach. They pitch camp, and decide to claim the area as their own under an obscure “homesteader” law. Within a matter of days, the family throws together a rather ritzy ranch home from castaway junk and begins to charge big bucks to the locals for the privilege of fishing on their land. Soon enough, there’s trouble in paradise: gangsters, led by Nick (Simon Oakland) take advantage of the area’s laissez-faire atmosphere to bring their gambling casino on to the premises. It falls on the King’s shoulder to drive away the gangster, rebuff a lecherous lady psychologist’s advances (Joanna Moore) and defend his patchwork family in court against all those pesky custody laws. Will he succeed? This is an Elvis Presley movie, what do you think?

Indeed, it is an Elvis Presley, albeit with a lot on its plate. An atypical Presley vehicle, Follow That Dream has only five songs, and a decent budget – in contrast to his later films that squeezed in 14 songs that were shot on blue suede shoestrings. It’s the familiar poor-but-honest rural folk against the sophisticated city slickers story, but Follow That Dream seriously examines American society. In its running time, Follow That Dream addresses property rights, self-determination, law, child custody, psychologists (director Gordon Douglas must have had a thing against lady psychologists – remember the hopelessly ineffectual one just before the little girl survivor cowers in the corner screaming “Them! Them! THEM!” in his 1954 giant ant extravaganza of the same name?) organized crime and the U.S. judicial system. The story itself is ridiculous – Presley waltzes through the whole affair with naïve aplomb, unaware of the dangers that face him, only to be acquitted time and again by his simple, honest heart. The gangsters in this film wouldn’t last very long in real life. Presley effortlessly grabs their guns out of their hands without sweat beading on his pompadour. Presley is also amazingly chaste in this film. A running gag  has Elvis reciting multiplication tables whenever he’s aroused by women.

Movie Review: Born Yesterday (1950, Twilight Time)

Directed by George Cukor


Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

The classic tale! Corrupt, kind-of gangster Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford) breezes into Washington D.C. to buy a congressman – or two to facilitate his growing junkyard empire. Renting out the top floor of a luxury hotel, Brock becomes concerned that his unpolished chorus line girlfriend Billie (the incredible Judy Holliday in her Academy Award-winning performance) may not go over well with the local intelligentsia. Hiring journalist Paul Verrall (William Holden) to school her in the finer things, Billie hits the books big time. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge, Billie goes from dumb blonde to an increasingly aware, socially responsible woman. No longer blind to Brock’s corrupt dealings, Billie decides to take a stand. Confronting the bully, and hatching a scheme to keep herself immune, Billie confidently sails out of Brock’s life with Paul on her arm, in order to marry.

No doubt about it, Born Yesterday is one of the most wonderful movies ever made. Based on playwright Garson Kanin’s hit Broadway play, the celebrated movie adaptation is above all else a tale of redemption. Movie audiences in the past had long laughed at a long parade of dumb blondes and gangster molls before. Born Yesterday was among the first films to suggest that intelligence and wise decisions are available to the least aware, provided they set their minds to it. It also offers a timely message to the viewer as well: In order to defeat bullies, it’s essential to educate yourself and then follow through on what you know is right.

In this sense, Born Yesterday is a far more radical film than My Fair Lady (1964), to which it is frequently compared. In My Fair Lady, Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) is transformed from a hardscrabble Cockney to regal lady-in-waiting under the tutelage of Dr. Henry Riggins (Rex Harrison) – but remains a common girl at heart. Not so in the case with Billie, whose slow transformation ultimately dismantles Brock’s ruthlessly constructed fiefdom of corrupt lawyer, for-sale politicians and gun thugs.

Movie Review: Man Hunt (Blu-ray, Twilight Time)

Reviewed By: Hal Astell

I've seen a lot of Fritz Lang movies, having been stunned by M and Metropolis and so deliberately seeking out as many more as I could find. I was impressed to no small degree by films like Hangmen Also Die!, Scarlet Street and The Big Heat. I even thoroughly enjoyed 1956's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, the most recent film of his that I've seen thus far, though the quality of his films generally decreased as time went on, other films from the fifties like The Blue Gardenia, Moonfleet and While the City Sleeps leaving me surprisingly disappointed. The problem is that while some of his films are perennials on TV, my supply of Fritz Lang movies dried up at sixteen and I've only managed to see one more since 2007: Human Desire, again not one of his best, especially now I've seen the far superior original French movie that it remade. This one thankfully is much better.

Shortly before the war, as close as late July 1939, a British hunter called Alan Thorndike is holidaying in Bavaria and there is gifted with the biggest game of them all: Adolf Hitler, right there in the sights of his Hammond & Hammond. He even shoots him dead from 550 yards, or at least would have done had he a bullet in his rifle. When he loads that bullet, he's still only doing it to play the game, because it's the thrill of the chase that drives him. If he can get close enough to a game that doesn't want him to get close enough, then he knows he can kill and so actually doing so isn't necessary. Given what we know from history it won't surprise you too much to find that Hitler lives and we'll never know if Thorndike could have made the shot or not because he's interrupted by a patrolling German soldier, this being one of the most guarded buildings in the world, after all, and he's promptly delivered into the care of George Sanders.

Movie Review: All the King’s Men (1949, Twilight Time)

Directed by Robert Rossen

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

Earnest reporter and spoiled rich kid Jack Burden (John Ireland) asks later in this feature, “Doesn’t good come out of evil?” The occasion is marked by Governor Willie Stark’s (Broderick Crawford) nakedly aggressive attempts to quash his rivals during a time of extreme crisis. All the King’s Men, the Best Film of its year as dictated by the Academy Awards, offers a succinct introduction to the United States political system.

When we first meet Stark, he’s a poor but honest rube who wants to make life better for his fellow sustenance farmers. He’s not afraid to tear down idols in high places, and accuses his government of taking bribes in order to build the new school house. Running for office, he’s defeated – until a terrible tragedy at the school house brought on by faulty construction propels him back into the spotlight. He’s recruited by the local corrupt government in order to draw “the hick vote.” Ruthless political flack Sadie Burke (Mercedes McCambridge) pours liquor down the usually teetotaler Stark and is duly impressed the next day when he’s able to deliver a rousing speech on the plight of the working man. No turning back, Stark rises to the echelons of big government in his state, building roads and schools – but resorting to dishonest methods in order to do so. Do the ends justify the means?

Movie Review: Save Your Legs! (2012, Twilight Time)

Directed by Boyd Hicklin

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

Lovable loser Edward “Teddy” Brown (Stephen Curry) lives for his local neighborhood cricket club and his two best friends, Rick (Brendan Cowell) and Stavros (Damon Gameau). Teddy’s world is shaken when the substance-abusing, drunken Rick announces his impending marriage to a girl he recently knocked up. In lieu of thinking there may be more to life than getting pissed on the weekend with his fellow Aussie mates, Teddy leads his “D-string” team to a tour of India. Setting up a three match tour, coupled with the chance to meet cricketing legend Sachin Tendulkar, the usual “fish-out-of-water” shenanigans take place. Rick remains a surly, drunken piece of work, Teddy samples some of the local Indian cuisine and spends the majority of finding serviceable areas in which to defecate. Unaccustomed to the chaotic civilization of modern-day India, there is lots and lots of gags surrounding cultural differences. Local lovely Anjali (Pallavi Sharda) is thrown into the mix, and gives the boy something to ogle to perhaps draw away attention from Teddy’s, uh, somewhat inappropriate fixation on Rick. The clueless Australians stumble and fall adorably, and they take up a challenge from an arrogant Bollywood star to take on his cricket team. Everything turns out alright at the end … was there any question it wouldn’t?

Visiting Hollywood’s Amoeba Records DVD section, this reviewer saw a shelf full of discs with the title, “Sports Team is led by a Caring Individual to Victory.” Save Your Legs! Is one of those, and is exceptionally plain and unremarkable in spite of the many exotic locales and unique situations. The cricket team is a bunch of middle-aged losers who spend their weekends drunk and “attempting” to play the game (it doesn’t matter if the viewer doesn’t understand cricket as it doesn’t appear that any of the characters do). Well into their thirties, they cling to youthful hopes and ambitions, but must accept the fact that “the train has left the station” at this point. The guys get into scuffles, patch up their differences, and find plenty of time to look with startled expressions at the culture of India. Save Your Legs! Is painfully predictable, and is intended solely to provide diversion on a weekend night. The closest thing it makes to a statement on the team’s “Peter Pan” syndrome is when Teddy confronts the boozing Rick on what type of father he’ll make for his forthcoming child.