drednm Reviews

There Ain't No Justice (1939)

Jimmy Hanley Stars

[20 March 2024]

This British quota quickie stars Jimmy Hanley as a young guy who turns to boxing to make some money. Of course he doesn't realize he's signed a contract with a crooked manager.

He's trying to help his parents (Mary Clare, Edward Rigby) and his sister (Phyllis Stanley) who's desperate to get married (to Michael Wilding) but needs money to set up housekeeping. But Hanley is so green he doesn't understand the crookedness and that he's being set up to make a name for himself only to be forced (by contract) to take a fall in a big match while the manager places bets on the other boxer. The fix is in.

The manager has also set his floozie (Nan Hopkins) on Hanley to lead him astray and get him away from his girlfriend (Jill Furse). But the heat is really turned up when Wilding steals the payroll where Phyllis Stanley works and so Hanley decides to accept the big match he's supposed to throw .... but he ain't gonna throw it.

A real slam bang finale is a highlight as Hanley determines to win the bout while the manager brings in a gang of thugs to break up the arena and stop the fight. Hanley is terrific. He was a major juvenile star in British films of the 1930s and 40s. Too bad he seems to be largely forgotten now.

Say It with Diamonds (1927)

The Great Betty Compson

[22 February 2024]

Say It with Diamonds (1927) is a fun marital comedy mix-up starring the great Betty Compson as a wife who suspects her husband (Earle Williams) is cheating on her because of a mix-up in gifts.

He's bought her a Spanish comb studded with diamonds but when playboy Armand (Armand Kaliz) explains that Betty has bobbed hair and the comb won't work, he buys it off Williams to give to HIS girlfriend (Jocelyn Lee). Unfortunately Betty has already seen the comb. So when Williams presents her with a "tiara" she thinks something's up. And when they all meet in a restaurant and Lee is wearing the comb, she's REALLY suspecting something is up.

The mix-up goes on from there. Compson and Lee are just plain stunning in this film, dressed in the latest flapper fashions and showing off their legs. Kaliz is surprisingly funny as the playboy who gets trapped in his own trap. Williams (in his last role) has the boring part of the dull husband.

The Broken Silence (1922)

Zena Keefe Stars

[21 February 2024]

The Broken Silence (1922) is another of the Pine Tree Pictures productions filmed in Maine 1921-23. Based on a story by James Oliver Curwood and directed by Dell Henderson, it's a complicated plot about murder and revenge in the Canadian wilderness.

Zena Keefe stars as Jeanne Marat, a young woman living with her husband (Jack Hopkins) in a remote and wintry Canadian location. A local Mounty (Robert Elliott) has a crush on her. She's visited daily by an old priest and an old Cree Indian named Joe who's always snooping around. At the local Mounty base, the Inspector (J. Barney Sherry) calls for the priest to confess an old crime he committed and in flashback we get the story.

Twenty-five years before he lusted after a woman (Gypsy O'Brien) who was married and had two kids. In a blind rage of jealousy he kills her husband so she can be free to marry him but she commits suicide instead. After he tells the story to the priest he's shot dead and someone sees Keefe running away.

When confronted, Hopkins claims he did the shooting, but Keefe claims she did it. Then the truth comes out that they are mot married ... they are brother and sister and that Indian Joe has been watching over them all these years and that the Inspector was indeed the man responsible for their parents' deaths.

A review in the Portland Evening Express recalls that a sequence was filmed during the "famous freak blizzard of April 1" and that the film captures its "awe-inspiring fury."

The story is too much for a 52-minute film. I suspect there may be some missing bits. Zena Keefe is an attractive leading lady.

The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy (2000)

Really Bad

[8 February 2024]

Sanitized and trivial look at a group of friends in LA who moan about their sex lives while they party and go to the gym and you know, hang out.

There's not a whisper of AIDS, homophobes, right-winger politics, or gay bashers. The sun shines every day and their worst problems seem to be picking out what clothes to wear with their baggy old-man jeans. And they talk and talk and talk.

The acting is right out of a TV movie and has as much dramatic depth as an episode of "The Love Boat" or a Lifetime TV movie.

There's also a horrible music track with some women mangling Karen Carpenter hits.

Bleh!

The Vagaries of Fate (1914)

Edgar Jones and Fate

[7 February 2024]

Edgar Jones stars as a district attorney who's come back from his honeymoon with Louise Huff (his real-life wife at the time). He's about to prosecute a group of crooks. But he gets a letter threatening he'll go to his grave if he goes through with the trial.

After the men are convicted, the rest of the gang goes into action. One crook gets Jones' chauffeur drunk and another takes his place. When Jones boards his car, he's kidnapped off to a shack in the country where he's bound and gagged. The crooks delight in showing him the bomb they've made connected to a clock. They give him 20 minutes to live.

But outside the rowdy crooks begin to fight and a rifle is discharged. We see the shack window it has smashed and Jones is slumped over in his chair. Alas! Eventually the cops have a shootout with the crooks and get Jones' location from the one wounded survivor. But but they get there, they find Jones alive. The bullet smashed the clock. A cop hands Jones the bullet and tells him to wear it as a charm.

Slick little 1-reeler is packed with action.

Coming Home (1998)

Joanna Lumley, Penelope Keith, Carol Drinkwater

[21 January 2024]

Sprawling but superficial mini about an unlikable family at the verge of WW II. They live on an estate on the Cornish coast and are impacted by the war.

Despite top billing for Peter O'Toole, the main characters are the daughters plated by Emily Mortimer and the unlikable Katie Ryder Richardson. As the gals maneuver thru the war, we also get the stories of the other family member and the men in their lives.

Despite some good production values, the story just seems flat. There's not much detail. We just glide along like an ocean breeze while the characters live their lives. The three star actresses mentioned above just don't get much to do and we wallow in the daily doings of the uninteresting younger set.

Co-stars include Paul Bettany, Patrick Ryecart, David McCallum, Susan Hampshire, and Charles Edwards.

Arthur's Whisky (2024)

Arthur's Wispy

[3 January 2024]

Arthur's Whisky (2024) is a mess of movie despite the cast. Badly written and directed and with that annoying non-stop Disney pixie music.

Yet another story where three old friends meet at a funeral (apparently older women only meet at funerals, at school reunions, or when they go on road trips) to bury Joan's eccentric husband. Joan (Patricia Hodge) has never been especially happy. There's also Linda (Diane Keaton) and Susan (Lulu) who are also alone. When they decide to clean out the husband's shed (where he invented things) they come upon a bottle of whisky and of course quickly drink it.

The plot starts way to fast. We have no real idea who these women are. So with virtually no backstory, we learn that the whisky turns them into 20-year-olds. Off to the clubs we go. But the transformation only lasts 6 hours.

From there on we get a bunch of disjointed narratives about wasted lives and lost youth and then we end up in Vegas at a Boy George drag show. Nothing flows. Nothing makes much sense. We never know who these women are except at the end when the Hodge character meets up with an old friend (Hayley Mills).

Wasted talent in a film that was never developed.

Murder Is Easy (2023)

Bleh

[1 January 2024]

The name actors in the 2-part miniseries that you might tune in to see are hardly in it at all and play tangential characters to the main plot.

If you're hot to see Douglas Henshall, Mark Bonnar, and Penelope Wilton, blink and you'll miss them. What you WILL see is a lumbering adaptation that has been "updated" to allow for odd casting.

A Nigerian (David Jonsson) comes to England in the 1950s (?) to work for the government but gets sidetracked into investigating a series of murders in a small village. There's also a post-Colonial plotline that clumsily ties into this racial narrative.

Otherwise it's the usual Christie stuff. The rest of the cast is blah (and with bad teeth to boot) and we get some outlandishly bright costumes and the usual impeccably clean cars driving on dirt roads. There's also some ugly statuary added for no reason to the entrance of the country manor.

Not the worst, but it's not very compelling.

Maestro (2023)

Jewish Ham!

[25 December 2023]

Maestro (2023) seems a very flimsy "biography" of Leonard Bernstein. We learn just about nothing of his life. Music. Wife. Boys on the side. Other than that?

The film stars Bradley Cooper and a fake nose. He (Cooper, not the nose) also co-wrote, directed, and produced and is being hailed for his work and artistic ambition. Coincidentally, I'm reading Barbra Streisand's new 970-page memoir and in her section on Yentl, she recalls the reviews that lambasted her colossal ego to star in a film she also co-wrote, directed, and produced.

Anyway, I found Cooper's performance to be hysterically hammy (yes, I know Bernstein was flamboyant) and Mulligan's wife just plain annoying. Such self-centered people who were always "on." They were exhausting to watch ... but that's the whole film. There's no background material, Just them swanning about like characters out of Auntie Mame screaming "I was never in the chorus!"

This will likely reap a slew of Oscar nominations and Cooper will probably beat of DiCaprio and Cillian Murphy for best actor. Wry. Hold the ham!

God's Country and the Law (1921)

Beautiful Maine Scenery

[23 December 2023]

Based on something by James Oliver Curwood (opening credits are missing and I don't see anything with these characters in his published stories), the story is set in Quebec (though we have North-West Mounted Police) and follows bad guy Jacques Doré (William Tooker) who wears a rattlesnake amulet and is running from the Mounties when he comes upon a cabin and asks for shelter. The couple (Gladys Leslie, Fred C. Jones) are a tad naive but don't catch on until Doré attacks Gladys. They have a big fight and throw him out.....

Doré then comes upon happy old 'Poleon (Cesare Gravina) and his half-Indian daughter Oachi (Hope Sutherland) and pulls the same thing on them. Ultimately he ends up back at Gladys Leslie's camp when the husband is away and kidnaps her but she escapes by jumping off a cliff into the Saco River rapids.

Some beautiful photography (Sebago Lake, Maine) and the performances are quite good. The city sequence is of Montreal. The French broken English intertitles get to be a bit wearying. Gladys Leslie is very good in this one.

May December (2023)

Two Women: Weird and Weirder

[3 December 2023]

May December (2023) is a Netflix film about an actress who visits a woman she's about to play in a movie. The woman is infamous for serving a 5-year jail term for molesting a 13-year-old boy when she was 36. When she gets out of jail, she marries the kid. 20 years later, they are still married and about to celebrate the high school graduations of their twins (they have another kid a year older). But something is roiling beneath the seemingly placid waters.

Natalie Portman plays the actress who gets a little too involved in her study of the woman and family. Julianne Moore plays the woman approaching 60 whose OTHER family still lives nearby and her kids from THAT marriage were classmates of her current husband. Quite the mess.

While neither Portman nor Moore are favorites of mine, they both turn in good performances and play complex characters. The child groom is played by Charles Melton. Maybe an awards contender in the upcoming season, Melton's performance is wildly overrated.

Where the Road Divided (1915)

Edgar Jones and Louise Huff

[28 November 2023]

WHERE THE ROAD DIVIDED (1915) is a 1-reeler from Lubin and is a morality tale about the city slicker and a country gal. Directed by and starring Edgar Jones at the end of his association with Lubin (which went bust in 1916).

Jones plays a country schoolmaster who loves his student Rose (Louise Huff, his real-life wife). But she's something of a flirt. She's also loved by country boy Jed (George Gowan) but it seems his love is from afar. Anyway, into this rural patch comes an engineer (Earl Metcalfe) checking out "mineral prospects." But he becomes enamored of Rose and fills her head with visions of the big city. As he's whisking Rose away in his snappy car (with a Pennsylvania plate), they pass Jones and Gowan, who run up and over the mountain pass so they can head them off.

The boys roll a stump down into the road but when the slicker can't shift the stump and the boys come running down the hill, he (for some reason) starts shooting at them and Jed fires back .... but guess who takes the bullet? With her last breath she says "I'm glad you came in time."

The Song of Love (1923)

Sog of Love

[16 November 2023]

THE SONG OF LOVE stars Norma Talmadge at the height of her stardom in a heap of hokum with a lot of sand. She's a famous dancing girl in Algeria, sort of promised to Ramilka (Arthur Edmund Carewe), but she falls for another man (a limp Joseph Schildkraut) who is posing as an Arab but is really French. Ramilka is about to rally the clans and drive the Whites out of the city in the name of allah but of course Norma gets in the middle of everything and fouls up the plans. In the end, she sacrifices her great love for Schildkraut to go off with Ramilka and thereby saving his life. There are two endings and neither is very satisfying. Co-directed by Frances Marion, so this film is included in the recent women film pioneers collection. Carewe's name is misspelled as Carew in the credits and one intertitle omitted the word "do" and gave us "So with me as you will!" I know what I wanted to with it!

This is definitely the weakest of the Talmadge feature films I've seen. A major downfall is the casting of Schildrkaut as the romantic lead. He always reminds me of Michel Serrault in LA CAGE AUX FOLLES, so all ideas of a romantic leading man are dissolved.

A Haunting in Venice (2023)

Nice Sets. That's It

[1 November 2023]

Very atmospheric (IF DARK) but also way too talky and dull. The characters were not well presented, so I couldn't tell who was who until halfway thru the film.

Kenneth Branagh (who also directed) is an effective Poirot but that's about where it stops. I'm tired of Tina Fey. She plays the same character over and over again and here is amazingly unbelievable as the venerable writer (30 books) and long-time friend of Poirot. Michelle Yeoh has a small part as the fake medium named Joyce Reynolds (oh really?) and Jamie Dornan plays the the shell-shocked doctor. Never heard of any of the rest of them.

I found myself paying more attention to the sets than the story. Christie's original book ("Hallowe'en Party") takes place in England and there's no psychic medium or seance. Changes for the sake of change. Amazing that all those Venetian orphans spoke English in 1947.

A dull affair, bad casting.

Circe the Enchantress (1924)

Mae Murray in One of Her Great Hits

[14 October 2023]

Circe the Enchantress (1924) was one of Mae Murray's biggest hits and it's easy to see why, thanks to the film's streaming from Pordenone.

Originally 74 minutes or so, only 54 minutes survive but it's enough to get the major points of the story. Directed by Robert Z. Leonard, Murray stars as Cecilie Brunner, a convent girl who goes to New York after the death of her mother and becomes a vamp (we can only guess how this happens). As the Circe in Greek mythology turned men into swine, the vampy Cecilie does the same at lavish parties where the jazz is hot and the champagne is as ice cold as she is. She has a cluster of men around her (including William Haines in a very straight role), but it's the sedate Dr. Van Martyn (James Kirkwood) she secretly pines for. He won't have anything to do with her; he seems to be mourning his saintly wife.

Anyway, one wild night she gambles away her fortune in a crooked game of dice and in a moment of drunken bravura badly cuts her hand on a broken glass. The doctor comes to stitch her up but again tells her she's trash. She steals away in the night and disappears. Later she's run over by a car when she saves a little girl from getting hit and told she'll probably never walk again....

Murray's wild party dance sequence is just sensational. Sensational. Great music score by Donald Sosin.

History of the World: Part II (2023)

Absolutely Terrible

[13 October 2023]

What an embarrassment!

Hammy improv-style acting of unfunny scripts depicting various moments in history

A few name actors ... Danny DeVito, Wanda Sykes, Marla Gibbs, Kym Whitley, Rob Corddry ... get stuck in this mess but most of the cast are a bunch of nobodies who likely have Youtube shows or something of that ilk.

While Mel Brooks' original 1981 movie was one of his worst, this TV series makes that film look like a masterpiece.

I barely made it through the first episode. Schmucky schtick about Abraham Lincoln, Rasputin, Shakespeare and a Russian shtetl (with inane musical numbers) make this just about unwatchable.

The Miracle Club (2023)

Love Never Dies

[13 October 2023]

Beautifully acted film about faith and the ties that bind ... despite the secrets and lies.

An Irish parish is holding a talent contest and the winner gets a trip to Lourdes. Three friends are hoping to win but one dies before the contest. Her estranged daughter (Laura Linney) returns to the village after 40 years for the funeral.

She's met with resentment from her old friend (Kathy Bates) and her first love's mother (Maggie Smith). The women don't win the trip but end up going anyway and each one faces the limits of faith and love when they expect miracles to happen at Lourdes.

The star actresses are all terrific and make this film worth watching. Co-stars include Stephen Rea, Niall Buggy, Agnes O'Casey, and Mark O'Halloran.

Theater Camp (2023)

Beyond Dreadful

[2 October 2023]

At one point I said aloud, "Are they making up this dialog as they go along?" Then I read in the trivia that yes they did.

Did they also make up the plot as they went along?

Absolutely terrible film filled with annoying characters (adult and juvenile) and painfully bad dialog.

Co-written by and starring Broadway darling Ben Platt, he plays a co-head of a theater camp in the Adirondacks that is in danger of being taken over by a neighboring camp. His female co-head (Molly Gordon who also co-directed this mess) make up the camp's "show" as the summer goes along. The camp is filled with those annoying professional children who break into show tunes at the drop of a hat.

Truly bad.

Dash and Lilly (1999 TV Movie)

Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont

[26 September 2023]

DASH AND LILLY is a very good TV movie from A&E that profiles the lives of Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman. It stars Sam Shepard and Judy Davis. They are very very good. While the 100-minute story skips tither and yon its main focus is the Un-American crap era of McCarthy and the imprisonment of Hammett.

Directed by Kathy Bates, we get a few clips from The Thin Man, which Hammett supposedly based on Hellman and himself. There's also a story arc where our heroes labor as writers in Hollywood and Dorothy Parker (Bebe Neuwirth) pops in now and then to drop witticisms. The film garnered 9 Emmy nominations and rightly so.

However, one HUGE oddity jumped out at me at the beginning of the film. As we're whisked to a big Hollywood premiere for the Hollywood arc, the premiere is of The Royal Rascal starring Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont! Is this supposed to be a joke?

This is a fictional movie in the classic SINGIN' IN THE RAIN.

Alias Jimmy Valentine (1928)

William Haines, All is Not Lost

[22 September 2023]

Famous for being MGM's first foray into talkies (goat-glanded the last two reels) and for being lost. While the complete film is, so far, lost, a 9.5mm 40-minute cut-down exists and I've been privileged to see it. As for the Vitaphone soundtrack, I believe a few bits survive.

The plot has William Haines as a snappy safe cracker. The cut-down that survives (a French print) opens with Haines setting up a safe cracking with his gang (Karl Dane, Tully Marshall) in an American Express sort of office. Haines then rushes to the local precinct to report a stolen valise just as the bomb he set up goes off and his team rushes in to clean out the safe, He's got a cop (looks like Fred Kelsey) as a witness. Pretty slick.

Next we jump to a new town where Haines has plans for the local bank but he meets and falls for Leila Hyams, who happens to be the daughter of the bank president. As in many films of the era, she also has a sister and brother 20 years her junior. Eventually he's offered a job in the bank (how sweet) but a police inspector (Lionel Barrymore) is on his trail. One day, while they are playing cat and mouse......

The little girl gets locked in the bank safe and Hyams is having a hissy and Haines is trying to figure out what to do: let the kid suffocate or crack the safe and give away his real identity. Oh, what will he do?

Based on a story by O. Henry and directed by Jack Conway. What's left is a skeleton, but we can only hope it will some day be fleshed out. The film was among MGM's biggest hits of 1928.

Filmed in 1915 with Robert Warwick and again in 1920 with Bert Lytell.

The Celluloid Closet (1995)

A Good Start

[16 September 2023]

This is such a big topic Vito Russo's book should be made into a multi-part series and updated. A three parter would work with Gays as Sissies, Gays as Victims, Gays as Killers or something like that.

It's mind boggling that the documentary never mentions gay actors like William Haines, Ramon Novarro, or Alla Nazimova. Or how about the perceived gayness of Rudolph Valentino in playing MONSIEUR BEAUCAIRE?

No mention of Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, who were roommates for years? No mention of studio manipulation to "encourage" lavender marriages to shield stars. Janet Gaynor and Adrian are good examples. That's a topic unto itself.

As far as it goes, it's fine ... it just doesn't go far enough.

Dynamite Smith (1924)

Bessie Love Is Sensational

[10 September 2023]

Charles Ray stars as Gladstone Smith, a mild-mannered book reviewer for a San Francisco newspaper. When there's a big to do on the waterfront all the reporters rush out to cover it but then a report of a murder comes in and the editor is forced to send Ray. We next meet the killer (Wallace Beery) who runs a saloon where he displays his abused wife (Bessie Love) on stage. She's pregnant and terrified but agrees to talk to Ray with an idea of escaping Beery. But Beery catches on and the two flee for Alaska.

Beery eventually tracks them down and finds the wife dead and Ray installed running a newspaper and something of a local hero for helping save some people who were snowed in. There's another woman now (Jacqueline Logan) who's interested in the baby and Ray. Eventually Ray is forced to man up and devise a plan to get rid of Beery. It's a hell of a plan.

Ray and Beery are excellent and Bessie Love is sensational as the pathetic wife. A long-lost film discovered in an 8mm print in a private collection.

Sitting in Bars with Cake (2023)

Don't Bette on it......

[9 September 2023]

Cutesy poo to the max even with a brain tumor.

BEACHES with a cake thrown in makes this a crumby affair of two female pals to try to bait men in bars by baking cakes and handing out slices. What's wrong with this picture?

Would bars and other venues actually allow people to bring in cakes and hand them out for free? Seems doubtful. And while this plot issue is never addressed, what about the female perp date rapist? I guess it's OK if the perp is a female?

The only ones in this film who come off as real are the parents played by Martha Kelley and Ron Livingston. All the others are duds.

And what's with Bette Midler in this nothing role? It's basically just a cameo and serves no purpose.

Watch this 2-hour dirge and you'll be screaming at the screen DIE! DIE ALREADY! .... even before the tumor shows up!

Designing Women (1986–1993)

Landmark TV

[5 September 2023]

For five seasons this TV comedy was a solid hit starring Dixie Carter, Delta Burke, Annie Potts, and Jean Smart as four friends and co-workers in an Atlanta interior design firm.

They shared their lives in a series of funny episodes that involved their work, family, friends, romance, and the sling and arrows of outrageous fortune.

The semi-regulars during these years included Meshach Taylor, Alice Ghostley, Hal Holbrook, Douglas Barr, and Richard Gilliland.

Starting around season 5, Burke and show creator Linda Bloodworth Thomason started fueding about Burke's weight and the zaniness of her character, Suzanne Sugarbaker. By the end of the season, Burke was out of the show and was soon followed by Smart, who wanted more time with her family.

Season 6 brought in Jan Hooks to replace Smart and Julia Duffy to replace Burke. While Hooks was mostly annoying, Duffy was an outright disaster as the unlikable Alison Sugarbaker. Neither actress came close to capture the warmth and humor of Burke and Smart.

Season 7 saw Duffy gone and with Judith Ivey coming in as a blowsy millionaire widow. An improvement, but the bad writing that plagued season 6, continued into season 7. Stupid storylines and predictable plots defeated anything the cast could do with the material.

Also, by season 6 the women talked about their design firm but their work was virtually erased from any plots. Taylor's character of Anthony also descended from a lovable and hapless man to a smug jerk. They eventually married him off to a Vegas showgirl (Sheryl Lee Ralph) which went nowhere.

Even the beloved and zany character of Ghostley's Bernice went from being loopy to being just one of the women.

In most shows in the last 2 seasons, they just sit around yapping. Meanwhile the production values of the show plummeted with sets that look like high school productions.

An attempt to spin off Taylor and Ralph into their own show, with Della Reese and Sherman Hemsley as her parents, flopped. The hit show went out with a whimper.

Haunted Mansion (2023)

Beyond Bad

[20 August 2023]

Within the first few minutes I could tell this was a stinker. The acting is atrocious and the story is stupid. Then add the mud-colored color scheme and the Gary Coleman lookalike and you have every reason to flee the theater or turn it off on your device.

All the actors smell with Owen Wilson confirming once and for all he cannot act at all. Most of the other actors were unknown to me and I couldn't tell them apart.

With the cartoon music I couldn't tell if this swamp was meant to be a comedy or what. And who was the proposed audience? 5-year-olds? And the lead is supposed to be a scientist? Ya right!