Month: November 2021

Jesse James, his brother Frank, the Younger brothers, and Kit Dalton travel to Kansas to join up with the Confederate guerilla raiders lead by William Quantrill. Somehow Quantrill’s methods are too savage even for the likes of Jesse James and he wants to leave the group, but not before committing a couple more war crime atrocities. Despite all that, it still portrays these men in a relatively heroic light, similar to The Lawless Breed, with Brian Donlevy’s Quantrill and Audie Murphy’s Jesse forming somewhat of a father-son relationship. It’s always weird reading the real life history of such characters where Donlevy is almost 50 playing someone who died at the age of 27. I enjoyed seeing Audie Murphy’s performance. He has quite the baby-faced star quality. It’s unfortunate that he starred in mostly middle level Westerns, but I’ll probably seek out some of them regardless. 

With this movie, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the episode of The Brady Bunch where Bobby sees Jesse James as a hero so his parents bring in the offspring of two of James’s victims to set him right. “A mean, dirty killer” is how I feel John Wesley Hardin probably should be remembered as, but here we have Rock Hudson playing him heroically, someone who only killed a couple of men because he had to. I guess we’re supposed to ignore the fact that Hardin himself claimed to have killed at least 42 men. It’s an okay western that’s made better by having Hudson as its lead.  

I’m still craving for a decent romantic comedy to watch, because this wasn’t it. Chris Messina is a silver-painted, street performer whose girlfriend has recently broken up with him. Jenna Fischer is a temp worker who gets fired from that gig for not being personable enough. They have a couple of random meet-ups before they both take jobs at the zoo and strike up a friendship. Half of the movie these two come across as so deeply unhappy they don’t even realize they’re depressed, then suddenly Messina falls into a character he’s played dozens of times before and is dating Pam Beesly. She manages to fall into a job that there’s no reason to believe she’s seriously underqualified for. Or maybe she is, because there’s almost no background to either of these characters except that they don’t want the life that her sister and brother-in-law want to push her into. There’s also Topher Grace with awful long hair being an awful egocentric writer who Fischer is forced to date, his only reason for existing seeming to be that you can do worse than dating a street performer Chris Messina. 

Michelle Williams is an alien-human hybrid created in a lab from which she escapes after the scientists there attempt to euthanize her. It’s not long before she’s grown up to be Natasha Henstridge and is searching for a suitable man to mate with. The film tries to be a version of Aliens where someone has tried to merge the alien DNA with a human and it comes nowhere near the quality of any of that series of films. The cast, mostly as scientists tasked to hunt down Henstridge, is incredibly stacked but wasted. Forest Whitaker is appealing, but given the thankless role of being an ’empath’. Sir Ben Kingsley, as the leader of the expedition, is probably his most mentally inept character ever. The special effects, even for the time, are awful. Even if you can see the genius of Giger’s design for the alien part of Henstridge’s character, it has been completely wasted and cheapened in this film. There are a lot of naked breasts in this film, for those who are interested in that in their films. 

Though I can’t say from experience, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film try to portray so accurately portray what life can be like for a Black man in the United States, particularly in the 1960s South. Ivan Dixon is a railroad worker who falls in love with and marries a local preacher’s daughter. His larger troubles begin when he takes a job at a local sawmill so he can settle down in family life. Unfortunately he is unable to play the rules of the game and shrug off the microaggressions and expectations that he lower himself around the local white population. Along the way, there are a couple of interactions with his alcoholic father, a man so downtrodden who can’t be helped but be seen as an older version of Dixon’s character, and his young son who is currently being cared for by another woman. The performances are incredibly good and Dixon plays his with a perfect mix of desperation, anger, hope, stubbornness, and strength.

There are a lot of gothic tropes in this film where Gene Tierney is a young woman living in Connecticut farm country with her religious family and dreams of there being more to life. (Un)luckily for her, she is soon whisked to Dragonwyck Manor by her distant cousin Vincent Price to be the companion to his young daughter. Before long, Price and Tierney grow close and he’s confessing to her his disappointment that his wife has not been able to produce a son. Tierney doesn’t do much with her role beyond looking wide eyed and innocent but a young Price is of course excellent, becoming more and more crazed and unhinged as an unrepentant drug user who finds his life of luxury threatened at every turn.

There is a lot of fun to be had with this film about a ginormous grizzly bear who terrorizes a National Forest after developing a taste for human flesh. Since it’s a 1970s horror film, the first victims of course fit into a category with sexy coeds. Inexplicably the first scenes with the bear don’t show the creature at all beyond a giant (fake) paw swiping off body parts hither and yon. Eventually the bear is shown, but only after there are so many deaths that we’ve lost track of victims and drunken hunters are deputized to help find the monster. The ending climaxes in a way that can only be seen to be believed. It’s quite wonderful.   

I’ve had a copy of this (as part of a set with The House Without a Christmas Tree) for many years, but it wasn’t until buying the other two films in the series that I felt the push to put this one in. In all of the films, Lisa Lucas is a young girl living in 1940s Nebraska with her widowed father Jason Robards and her grandmother Mildred Natwick. In this one, Lisa, inspired by a school lesson on the first Thanksgiving, secretly reaches out and befriends a local misanthrope, despite her father’s feud with the man. Though they are relatively low budget made for television specials, the cast is appealing, especially Lucas in the lead. There are so few good Thanksgiving themed movies that I’ll probably be visiting this one again regularly in future years.

I considered turning off this film, about two adult brothers who chose very different life paths, a number of times, but managed to get through it. The brothers are David Morse, a farmer turned cop living in his hometown with his wife and young son, and Viggo Mortensen, a restless Vietnam vet who returns to town after being released from prison. Their parents are admirably played by Charles Bronson and Sandy Dennis in her last role. Valeria Golino inexplicably plays Morse’s Mexican wife while Patricia Arquette is Mortensen’s pregnant and somewhat unhinged love interest. There’s not much to the film beyond the brothers trying to figure out themselves and their relationship to each other and their families. Those two performances are strong, particularly Morse’s, and offer the main reason for watching the film.