Month: November 2021

I didn’t really get behind Pat O’Brien’s over zealous portrayal of Spot Cash Cutler the crooked auctioneer, but I did enjoy the heist-quality and double crossings in this story. O’Brien is stuck running auction scams on the lowly rubes of 2nd Avenue until 5th Avenue rich girl Claire Dodd pulls one on him and then convinces him to move on to richer fare. The ending is completely contrived and suspect, but the ride is cute and fun and not bad for its relatively short runtime.

I thought Sally Field and Jeff Bridges couldn’t make for a bad film together. I was wrong. This is a stinker. Sally is a widow preparing to marry Jeff and move back in to the home she shared with her previous husband. Unfortunately, that husband, James Caan, is haunting the house. Caan is an annoying, unbelievably cast showman named Jolly who takes to tap dancing randomly around Field and Bridges’s courting. Bridges is all stuffy as an museum Egyptologist and given little to do. Field is the most reasonably cast, but has no chemistry with Caan and not given enough chance to gel with Bridges. The film picks up when Jeff pretends to see his own former lover and has a colleague perform an exorcism, but I was already too annoyed by the first half of the film to care. 

Proclaiming that it is not meant to take sides, this film does not seem to live up to that promise. Richard Barthelmess is the intelligent son of a sharecropper. When the sharecropper dies from overwork, the plantation owner takes Richard under his wing and has him educated, mostly because of a push by his daughter Bette Davis. Richard is a bit old for the role as a young man torn between the community he was raised in and the people who helped him improve his station, but the film itself is not torn. The owners are one-dimensionally determined to hold on to any benefits and profits themselves, maintaining practices of usury that keep the tenants in debt to the grave and lynching anyone who dares to get in the way. It’s only through the threat of jail that they can be bribed to consider a profit sharing plan.

One thing that watching the remake so close to the original did was make me appreciate how closely they followed the original story in the other version. It makes it more interesting that they were able to cleanly reset the film into the 1980s Miami drug trade. Here in the original the setting is amongst Italian immigrants in Prohibition era Chicago, inspired by the life of Al Capone. Paul Muni is great in the title role, fully encompassing his single minded rise to the top of the Chicago crime world. Though it’s interesting to ponder how the film would have been different as effected as it was by the early days of the Hays Code, but I still found it plenty violent and effective as a gangster film.

During a Florida heat wave, unscrupulous lawyer William Hurt meets and begins an affair with the married Kathleen Turner. They have sultry chemistry and before long, she is convincing him to murder her husband for the inheritance. The setting is ripe for sweat and slow moving fans. Together with a sax-y John Barry score, the scene is perfect for a 1980s noir. In a pair of great supporting roles, J.A. Preston and Ted Danson offer unheeded, level-headed advice and support as Hurt’s friends. The twists and turns are fairly predictable, but that doesn’t stop the gasps from coming when they happen. 

In yet another entry in the ‘prisons are hellish nightmares’ series, this film has Richard Dix as a career criminal planning an escape from the brutal prison camp he currently inhabits. At the moment of egress, he discovers his young brother has recently been ensconced in the same camp. The film depicts the horrors of forced labor camps, here building the satirically named Liberty Highway, and the murderous results when the prisoners couldn’t perform. The ending is hokey and contrived, but the film isn’t bad beyond that. Plus Louise Beavers appears, albeit very shortly, in a non-maid role.