Strait-Jacket.

Review #2301: Strait-Jacket.

Cast: 

Joan Crawford (Lucy Harbin), Diane Baker (Carol Cutler), Leif Erickson (Bill Cutler), Howard St. John (Raymond Fields), John Anthony Hayes (Michael Fields), Rochelle Hudson (Emily Cutler), George Kennedy (Leo Krause), Edith Atwater (Mrs. Allison Fields), and Mitchell Cox (Dr. Anderson) Produced and Directed by William Castle (#369 - House on Haunted Hill (1959), #1071 - 13 Ghosts, #1418 - The Night Walker, #1703 - Undertow, #2261 - Macabre, #2300 - Homicidal)

Review: 

Sure, William Castle got to reap the benefits of making a movie that seemed a bit familiar to Psycho (1960), which you might remember was a loose adaptation of the famed Robert Bloch novel. Bloch had just finished his first screenplays with 1962's The Couch (where he worked off a story that had been devised by Blake Edwards and Owen Crump) and The Cabinet of Caligari (which had its own litany of troubles). So anyway, here is a movie written by Bloch directed by Castle. Oh, but this one has a gimmick far more noted than buzzers and skeletons: it has the same star from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) in established stars dipping in suspense: Joan Crawford (cast after Joan Blondell, star of, well, not Baby Jane, dropped out somehow). Crawford, if you remember correctly, had a hell of a time with her final decade in filmmaking, which resulted in a good deal of horror movies that come with casting old familiar names, which saw her career close out in film with I Saw What You Did (1965, re-uniting with Castle), Berserk! (1967), and, well, Trog (1970). Crawford had enough influence to make sure that Anne Helm (apparently nervous being cast opposite Crawford) was quickly replaced with Baker before rewarding the production with commitment in promoting the film (this went with a plastic ax giveaway of course). As for Bloch and Castle, the two worked together once again in The Night Walker, which came out the same year involving a different accomplished actress in the main role (Barbara Stanwyck) in his first film away not distributed by Columbia Pictures after five years (his last seven films were either distributed by Universal or Paramount); Bloch would soon work in collaboration with Amicus Productions on a regular basis, most notably doing six film scripts from 1965 to 1972.

The body-count is five, although two come for the prologue that just gives you a quick rundown of one person's solution to adultery way back when: the ax. How could I resist? Sure, Crawford may have been stuck playing for scripts that weren't exactly Mildred Pierce, but there is never a moment where you find her looking like it is beneath her talent to give commitment (and yes that includes the scene where they give her a wig to make her look years younger, but would you really think Crawford was in her late fifties with this?). Audiences did flock to the film despite such devastating critiques that called the movie "inexcusable for its scenes of violence" (seriously, did people just watch horror movies with blinders back then). It's very amusing to see a movie past and future Academy Award winners (Crawford and Kennedy, respectively) mixed in with a PR vice president for Pepsi in Cox (Crawford was a board member, incidentally) for a movie that goofs around with axe-murdering (Homicidal had a stabbing early, this one has fake heads chopped off with a sound effect that would be fun to guess about). Crawford is enjoyably on point for a film that relies on commitment to really make it work in vulnerability among a returning member of society and in family. She never looks foolish or makes one think they are wasting their time in seeing her play horror, and Baker clearly is game to match with her in reasoned timing that goes along with the rest of the seasoned cast. I like the bubbling tension in just what is going on in what you expect for a movie about nuts and axs and what you end up with in passive sadness in adjustment, albeit one that is undoubtedly a Castle film through and through (hokey is not a mean word when you like it). Strangely enough, the one thing that bugs me about the film is the exact last scene of it all, because it really doesn't need a tight-winded explanation of what you saw (hey, let it play out), it could've just ended right as that twist crashes into you; apparently, it was Crawford who "suggested" that scene be in the film to end it all. As a whole, I think it actually is a neat film, managing to get a worthwhile performance from Crawford in gnashing the screen that makes for a capable Castle experience.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

Special Announcement: For the second straight year, you get to enjoy a Halloween Triple-Threat Spectacular: The Cabin in the Woods goes first.

Trog.

Review #2143: Trog.

Cast: 

Joan Crawford (Dr. Brockton), Michael Gough (Sam Murdock), Bernard Kay (Inspector Greenham), Kim Braden (Anne Brockton), David Griffin (Malcolm Travers), John Hamill (Cliff), Thorley Walters (Magistrate), Jack May (Dr. Selbourne), Geoffrey Case (Bill), Simon Lack (Lt. Colonel Vickers), Chloe Franks (Little Girl), and Joe Cornelius (Trog) Directed by Freddie Francis (#854 - They Came from Beyond Space, #856 - The Evil of Frankenstein, #860 - Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, #1145 - Tales from the Crypt, #1419 - Dr. Terror's House of Horrors)

Review: 

"What a terrible film that was. I did it because of Joan Crawford, and poor Joan by this time was a very sad old lady. We had to have idiot cards all over the place because she couldn't remember her lines. It was the last thing she ever did and she shouldn’t have done it. Neither should I. She had no friends, and she kept writing sad letters to my wife and I until she died."

Okay, so you might be wondering just what the appeal for this film is. Well, it was a horror film that just happens to be the last film appearance of Joan Crawford. By the year of 1970, she had appeared in over eighty films in nearly a half-century of work in films to go with a handful of television appearances (one of those notably saw her perform a role several years younger than her - she was filling in for her sick daughter on a soap opera!). But this was her last film before her death in 1977 at the reported age of 69. The 1960s saw her go from starting with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) to ending with Berserk! (1967). That latter film was produced by Herman Cohen, who happened to produce this film. Three writers were credited for this film: Peter Bryan, John Gilling, and Aben Kandel (the first two had previously collaborated on The Plague of the Zombies while the latter was a mainstay on Cohen productions, even at the ripe age of 73). It's a shame for Francis to be here directing a horror film like this, because while he wasn't exactly pleased to be pigeonholed as a director of the medium (he was once quoted as saying horror films liked him more than he liked horror films), he was an acclaimed cameraman. This is the man who shot Sons and Lovers (1960) and later Glory (1989), winners of Academy Awards for cinematography. Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1970), his previous effort as a director, was one he was quite proud of even though it took a few years to become a cult favorite. While this film wasn't exactly a hit for anyone, Francis would stay busy as a director for the rest of the decade, which included The Vampire Happening (a West German comedy horror film that apparently was just as bad of an experience for Francis released in 1971), and, well, Craze (1974), the last production spearheaded by Cohen.

You're kidding me, right? This is the way a vaunted actress such as Joan Crawford went out? Wearing her own wardrobe while apparently enjoying quite the amount of alcohol? This is such a miserable film when it comes to the amount of time it spends in trying to establish credibility with some sort of ungodly presentation of nurture and nature that has no sense of tension or doing anything beyond making one wonder just long before you get to see the silly mask again. Supposedly, the outfit for the title character was cribbed from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but I guess they got the worst outfit of the bunch, because it is a very sad looking thing to say the least. The fact that the film has the balls to re-use footage that had been produced by Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen for The Animal World (1956) for a sequence involving dinosaurs is probably the most hilarious part of a movie that has nowhere to go but digging up from the pit that it has buried itself by the first half of a 93-minute movie of amusement. Crawford may or may not be under the influence of some liquor (vodka, reportedly) or cue cards, but there is definitely something stilted about her role in the film, which never really manages to make a compelling argument for why anyone would care for Trog in the first place (this is a beast that we first see kill folks in a cave, remember). Seeing her try to show the creature colors and play catch with it only furthers this amusement that comes full circle when you realize, yes, she really did bring her own colorful clothes for this. Honestly, I was expecting her character to become another victim of the beast to close the circle, because, well, wouldn't that be a surprise to have someone who was completely on Trog's side just get blindsided? Gough just comes off as the most obvious strawman when it comes to "beast bad", most amusingly coming for the court scenes that see him continuously interrupt the proceedings until he finally gets kicked out after like the 4th time this happens. I think the death sequence (hell, you know it was coming) is especially amusing, because he lets the beast go and seems completely unplanned for, well, getting the hell away from the one thing that could kill him like it was a cockroach ASAP. Kay and the others don't chuckle at the material in the same way one might see from even the lesser Hammer film experiences. This is the kind of thing that can appreciated for folks such as, say, John Waters when it comes to the cheapies, but this is just one of those dubious British films where the material lives and dies on just how much the actors care, and the answer here is "slim". Kitsch for some sure, but this is just crap.

Overall, I give it 3 out of 10 stars.

Turkey Week 4 is upon us, folks. From November 19 to November 25, enjoy a round of cruddy "turkey" films to enjoy the Thanksgiving season. Trog is merely an appetizer for some rancid films to come, which will see a return of such great voices like Uwe Boll and Neil Breen and more. Enjoy the suck, because the next few films are much worse than this. House of the Dead, for example....

Tramp, Tramp, Tramp.

Review #1784: Tramp, Tramp, Tramp.

Cast: 

Harry Langdon (Harry), Joan Crawford (Betty Burton), Edwards Davis (John Burton), Tom Murray (Nick Kargas), Alec B. Francis (Amos Logan), Brooks Benedict (Taxi Driver), and Carlton Griffin (Roger Caldwell) Directed by Harry Edwards.

Review: 

You may be wondering just what is so important about a movie like this, considering its inauspicious title. Well, it really is more about the star more so than the director, although the star and director generally should each have their own share of credit for when a comedy does as well as it should. So here we are with Harry Langdon, a presence in vaudeville and film for nearly four decades. Sure, folks will probably remember Chaplin, Keaton & Lloyd first as the silent comedy icons, but Langdon had his own measure of importance as a silent icon, albeit with less feature films to consider. The Iowa native started work in shows and stock companies as a teenager in the turn of the 20th century. A run in vaudeville was later followed his most famous association: Mack Sennett and his studio, where his pantomime act being quite popular in various short films. It was his work with Harry Edwards and writers Frank Capra and Arthur Ripley that is best known today. He also did a series of features in the latter part of the 1920s, for which three are generally known: this one, The Strong Man (1926), and Long Pants (1927) - the middle film incidentally was the debut of Capra as director. Langdon soon decided after two films with Capra to direct his own films; his three silent efforts (one short) did not fare well (although none are available to see for oneself), and the impending transition to sound in Hollywood likely did not help either; Capra once stated Langdon did not know why his persona was funny, while a producer once described him as "not so funny articulate". While he never became a major star after the end of the silent era, he did keep busy with roles (supporting ones in features and shorts) alongside writing until his death in 1944 at the age of 60. As for Edwards, this was one of only two feature films that he directed, since he was more of a shorts director (doing 150 of them in a three-decade career), although his reputation was not the highest, as his work with the Three Stooges would suggest - they made two shorts together before the group requested that he never work with them again.

Langdon has a persona was certainly interesting for folks to try and pin down about his appeal, one that certainly had a clownish and unique sensibility (one whose attempts at drawing amusement from his little gestures certainly seems different from Keaton). In a sense, it was a persona that was a bit child-like and perhaps just offbeat enough to generate laughs for the time. Of course, one may be wondering just what this film is about. Well, it is about a guy trying to help his dad save his shoe store and woo a woman by winning a cross country foot race across the country with a $25,000 cash prize. Yep, that's about it. The movie, running at an hour in length, is basically composed of a bunch of vignettes involving a child-like pantomime in Langdon going around getting into weird situations, whether involving sheep, prison work, or a cyclone. While one can see pretty easily why his persona may not have been long for the cinema world past the silent era (in terms of the time and as star), one can still find a good deal to appreciate about the efforts of Langdon and Edwards in crafting an energetic and quirky feature with plenty of interesting amusing sequences that he does well with, moving around with confidence and a face ripe for gesture to make useful gags. Strangely enough, it also features Joan Crawford in an early role, one in the midst of her attempts to promote herself as a film star that would merit success soon enough; she doesn't have much to really do, but she at least matches fine with Langdon in those attempts at warm chemistry. The segment with the prison (where he switches tools a few times) is quite amusing, although the cyclone sequence at the end does seem to be the most effective chuckler among the group of vignettes designed to show our quirky hero. The film ends with him playing a baby (because the two leads fell in love, as was pretty much every silent comedy of that time), which is probably just as weird to consider as it is to write that sentence, although it is amusing. At any rate, no matter where one considers Langdon's place in terms of the noted silent comics of Hollywood, one can't deny that Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926) is a solid effort worth checking out.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

Next Time: I Was Born, But... (1932)

Grand Hotel (1932).

Review #1338: Grand Hotel.

Cast: 
Greta Garbo (Grusinskaya, the dancer), John Barrymore (Baron Felix von Geigern), Joan Crawford (Flaemmchen, the stenographer), Wallace Beery (General Director Preysing), Lionel Barrymore (Otto Kringelein), Lewis Stone (Dr. Otternschlag), Jean Hersholt (Senf, the porter), Robert McWade (Meierheim), Purnell B. Pratt (Zinnowitz), Ferdinand Gottschalk (Pimenov), Rafaela Ottiano (Suzette), and Morgan Wallace (Chauffeur) Directed by Edmund Goulding (#1332 - Hell's Angels)

Review: 
"Grand Hotel. Always the same. People come. People go. Nothing ever happens."

Theatricality goes a long way when you have the star-power to go with it. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the studio for stars in the 1930s, and Irving Thalberg was precisely the person to create big films through the power of picks - selecting scripts, gathering staff, etc. He had purchased the rights to adapt the novel Menschen im Hotel (1929) by Vicki Baum (who had been a chambermaid at a few high-class Berlin hotels), which was turned into a play by William A. Drake the following year (a musical of the same name was also adapted from the novel and play in 1989). Drake, alongside un-credited writers in Béla Balázs and Edgar Allan Woolf, helped to turn it into a film through writing, which comes together like a series of vignettes or an anthology piece, but it was one of the first films to utilize more than two stars to serve as headliners, which now seems like a common thing (as proven by future big-name productions in the following decades to be covered another time). It also has one key distinction - the only Best Picture winner to have no nominations in any other category. MGM would continue this trend with the comedy Dinner at Eight (which also features both Barrymores and Beery) the following year, and it would be re-made by the studio in 1945 as Week-End at the Waldorf. In any case, this is a film that has an undeniable staying power with its core five cast that a lesser cast or less capable director would've turned into plain old-hat melodrama. At 112 minutes, it pulls off entertainment that worked for Great Depression audiences and still works for modern audiences, where one shining star doesn't shine too bright over everybody else, mostly because not all of them share the stage at one point in the film. One starts with Garbo, who had risen from parts in films in her native Sweden to star in Hollywood in the span of six years, with her naturalistic acting (which worked well for silent and sound) being just as known as her reclusive nature, right down to the most memorable line of the film being how she just wants to be alone. She fares just fine, mostly when sharing the passion and focus with Barrymore, with her personally requesting red front-lighting for her love scenes, which certainly work. J. Barrymore (nicknamed "The Great Profile" with a noted career of stage and film since 1903) fares just as calmly, where one does not dwell on the considerable age difference between him and Garbo but instead focuses on his charm, which can go for either romance or dialogue with L. Barrymore. Crawford (a resilient star through self promotion alongside talent) shines with resourcefulness, a lady for the moment, whether it is hope or desperation (a role that was trimmed by the censors of the time for various reasons). L. Barrymore proves to be a fair surrogate for the audience, where one wants to see someone's attempt at a mild-mannered attempt at a first and last great gesture of life, although that makes it seem more tragic than it really is, particularly since this part could've been more grating (or on the other hand a sad one) with a different actor. Beery goes for the ham with a German accent in tow (with a promise that only he would have to put on an accent convincing him to sign on), with mixed results, really, although if a heavy is needed, one can't go wrong with someone like Beery. In any case, one will find themselves pulled into a film with spectacle to spare, from its production quality (most signified in its lobby scenes, along with art direction from Cedric Gibbons) down to its reasonable direction from Goulding that keeps everything going to the right room without missing a beat, which makes it endure to this very day.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

Movie Night: Mildred Pierce.

Review #529: Mildred Pierce.

Cast
Joan Crawford (Mildred Pierce Beragon), Jack Carson (Wally Fay), Zachary Scott (Monte Beragon), Eve Arden (Ida Corwin), Ann Blyth (Veda Pierce Forrester), Butterfly McQueen (Lottie), Bruce Bennett (Albert Pierce), Lee Patrick (Maggie Biederhof), and Moroni Olsen (Inspector Peterson) Directed by Michael Curtiz (#125 - Casablanca and #416 - Yankee Doodle Dandy, and #505 - The Adventures of Robin Hood)

Review
Mildred Pierce is a classic film noir (Which is why this film is in the National Film Registry, along with other films such as The Maltese Falcon, D.O.A, and other various films) that also manages to be a very gripping drama. Joan Crawford has a powerful performance as Pierce, she makes the movie whole, and she gives her all to make this more then just a film noir. The other actors are good, they certainly work well with Crawford, and they are also fun to watch. Ann Blyth is really effective at her acting in this film, especially with a character so brutal. Curtiz does a fine job directing and the film itself never has a bump or a sluggish moment in it, and the ending is certainly satisfying.

Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.

Movie Night: The Unknown (1927).

Review #516: The Unknown.

Cast
Lon Chaney (Alonzo the Armless), Norman Kerry (Malabar the Mighty), Joan Crawford (Nanon Zanzi), Nick De Ruiz (Antonio Zanzi), John George (Cojo), and John St. Polis (Surgeon) Directed by Tod Browning (#071 - Dracula and #470 - Mark of the Vampire)

Review

I get to revisit Lon Chaney, and watch Joan Crawford in arguably one of her breakout movies. What she said about Chaney in this film is certainly interesting, saying that she learned more about acting from watching Chaney work than from anything else in her career. Chaney certainly shows a lot of facial expression that carry their own emotion. He and Paul Desmuke (the armless double for this film) go well together in the scenes required for this film, he gets a chance to shine, doing that effectively. Crawford certainly shines, even with a limited role, but she works fine with Kelly. The film may run short and may be disturbing, but it's an impressive and an intense film that is fun to watch.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars. 

Movie Night: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Review #105: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Cast
Bette Davis (Jane Hudson), Joan Crawford (Blanche Hudson), Victor Buono (Edwin Flagg), Maidie Norman (Elvira Stitt), Anna Lee (Mrs. Bates), B. D. Merrill (Liza Bates), Marjorie Bennett (Dehlia Flagg), and Dave Willock (Ray Hudson) Directed by Robert Aldrich.

Review
The film is a thriller and an excellent drama with Bette Davis doing a great job as the twisted Baby Jane (even if she looks like Betty White...). Anyway, the film delivers slight chills (Not like a horror film...A good one anyway) It's stunning, it's madness, and it's wonderful for it. The mystery develops over the film, and at the end it delivers it with a twist that's not so Shamalyan at all in the sense that it makes a good end for a good film. Hard to believe this is the first film I've seen on Davis or Crawford's. And I didn't regret seeing it one bit.

Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.