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Viewing Log:

36 Hours (George Seaton, 1965): Despite having a totally implausible premise, I can't help but have fallen head over heals in love with this one. The film stars James Garner as Maj. Jefferson Pike, one of the architects of the D-Day invasion. In the dark as to how/when/where the actual invasion will occur, the Nazis abduct Pike and plant him in an operation two years in the making: a false US army base in the remote German countryside populated by Nazi actors who speak English with perfect American accents. Led by psychologist Maj. Walter Gerber (Rod Taylor) and his assistant Anna Hedler (Eva Marie Saint), the company convinces Pike that it's ten years in the future, a time that he's spent going in and out of bouts of amnesia. Their plan is successful, but when Pike uncovers the truth he finds himself on the run unsure of who is really an enemy and who might be an ally. The suspense is tremendous here, with the convincing and even sympathetic performances from all three leads. This may be one of the best wartime thrillers ever made.

Destination Tokyo (Delmer Daves, 1943): A very representative film of the sort that were coming out of Hollywood during the American involvement in WWII, Delmer Daves's film tells the story of a ragtag troop of seamen unafraid to risk life and limb in quest to carry out a mission off the shores of Tokyo without the aid of the rest of the the Navy. However, the sheer familiarity that we now have with this subgenre makes this one wear a little thin as it hits more or less the same exact notes of a dozen other films from the same era. The only thing that might make this film stand out from the pack is the presence of Cary Grant as Cassidy, the ship's captain. However, he mostly give a by the numbers performance here as well. Those who haven't see many war films from this era might find some of the inspirational patriotism novel. Me? I felt like I had already watched this one again and again and again.

Devils on the Doorstep (Wen Jiang, 2000): The setting is occupied China during WWII, where a late night knock on the door of farmer Ma Dasan (Wen Jiang) sets a serious of events in motion that threaten to destroy his entire village. We never see the face of the malevolent force at the other end of the door as he shoves a gun into Ma's forehead. Instead we see his shadowed form instruct Ma that he will leave two packages with him that are to be left unmolested and away from the Japanese soldiers until New Year's Eve. Of course Ma opens the burlap sacks as soon as the mystery man departs only to find that each contains a man abducted that night. Neither knows who took them or why. When this devil fails to reappear as promised the village is left with a choice. Do they kill the men? Let them live, but keep them in confinement? No matter what decision they make, it will have profound consequences for them all. This gorgeous B&W film should be essential viewing for the project. While there are better films (I may even find 50 of them!), it does an outstanding job of capturing the paranoia, fear, and hatred that ordinary people feel during war.

Flags of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood, 2006): Though probably the less celebrated of Eastwood's two Iwo Jima films, this is still a decent enough film to earn a recommendation. Although it is told in flashback through the eyes of a child one of the main characters, the film uses an ensemble cast to tell the oftentimes tragic story of those who posed for the famous photo of the marines planting the American flag at Iwo Jima. Not everything works here, but the director's decision to tell the warts and all truth about the men and the way our country used them more commendable than a hagiographic approach would have been.

Halls of Montezuma (Lewis Milestone, 1950): Although this one is another film about the US's experiences in the Pacific theater of WWII, the half decade distance between it and the end of the war affords it quite a bit of freedom to move away from the propaganda pieces that populated the war years and into a more complex and honest assessment of what happened. This is not to say that it's a morally complex tale or one that attempts to reassess our involvement. No, the Americans are clearly the good guys, but the Japanese soldiers aren't treated as subhuman monsters anymore. Here Richard Widmark plays Lt. Anderson, a soldier tasked with leading a group of marines (including Jack Palance, Robert Wagner, and Karl Malden) with locating hidden Japanese artillery cannons. The action works well here, and Widmark and Malden are terrific in particular.

The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (Mark Robson, 1958): Ingrid Bergman stars in a film that could just have easily been viewed for the next genre project as this one. Here she plays Gladys Aylward, a British woman with an inexplicable Swedish accent, who believes that God wants her to serve as a Christian missionary in China. Since she has no money or training, she finances her own trip by working as a servant, but quickly finds herself tested upon arriving as her predecessor dies, leaving her in charge. This rather long movie involves a lot of twists and turns, but gets to the material germane to the project at hand in its final act when Aylward leads a contingent of her village's children through a lengthy march through the mountains to avoid the Japanese occupiers. This is far from a great film, but Bergman--who's always a welcome screen presence--does a splendid job in her role (despite that accent!).

The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002): I'm not sure how this one slipped through the cracks for me last decade, but I've finally caught up to it. The story tells of the true life story of Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), a Polish pianist who loses his entire family to the concentration camps. He escapes, however, due to a random act of kindness by a fellow Jew working the train stations, and then spends the rest of the war wasting away while hiding in Warsaw's ghetto. I suppose that the film was very personal for Polanski who also survived the ghetto as a child, but Bordy never felt right to me. I'll still give it a mild recommendation.

Redacted (Brian De Palma, 2007): Brian De Palma's Redacted divided critics at the time of its initial release, with some critics going after it for being a bad movie while others seemed ready to burn the director in effigy for making Anti-American agitprop. Having now seen it, I find myself not liking it just for being a bad movie. The film recounts events in which a group of four soldiers leave their base in Iraq at night. Two go with the expressed purpose of raping a teenage girl, a third wants to try and talk some sense into them, while the fourth just wants to film everything in Iraq as a means of getting in to film school. I'm less offended here by the subject matter which was handled about a thousand times better in de Palma's Casualties of War, than I am by the clunky writing, absurdly unrealistic archetypes of the leads, and annoying first person video gimmick that the director employs. Stay away.

Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012): Becoming a father pretty much eliminated my ability to see films in the theaters that aren't animated. Hence, I'm just catching up to this one now. As we all know by now, the film, made with heavy CIA involvement, details the intelligence work that led up to the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Bigelow is a fine director and does a great job here as do her leads. However, the liberal guilt inside of me couldn't stand the false narrative given to them by the CIA which held that torture started the ball rolling in the hunt for the terrorist mastermind. I realize that this isn't the filmmaker's fault, but it left a very bad taste in my mouth.

bamwc2 wrote:Bigelow is a fine director and does a great job here as do her leads. However, the liberal guilt inside of me couldn't stand the false narrative given to them by the CIA which held that torture started the ball rolling in the hunt for the terrorist mastermind. I realize that this isn't the filmmaker's fault

Whether its good or bad, you have to give her much more credit than that. Its not like the CIA forced her artistic choices on her. She told exactly the story she wanted to tell.

Numero Trois wrote:

bamwc2 wrote:Bigelow is a fine director and does a great job here as do her leads. However, the liberal guilt inside of me couldn't stand the false narrative given to them by the CIA which held that torture started the ball rolling in the hunt for the terrorist mastermind. I realize that this isn't the filmmaker's fault

Whether its good or bad, you have to give her much more credit than that. Its not like the CIA forced her artistic choices on her. She told exactly the story she wanted to tell.

It's my understanding that she wanted to make a film that stuck to the truth as closely as possible. She was misinformed about what the truth was. I bear her no ill will for it, nor do I understand how I'm selling her short.

Though you are ever so slightly mischaracterizing the film. Yes, it does feature scenes of torture, but it never states a correlation between information received and torture.

Knives, it's been a few weeks since I watched it, but I believe that if not outright stated that the information obtained through the opening waterboarding was the starting point of getting bin Laden, then it is at least heavily implied.

I think it is discussed earlier in this thread, but the information obtained through torture remains unacted on until years later when a character notices a piece of evidence that provides a name that was previously mentioned during the interrogation. Whether or not this evidence would have led to Bin Laden's location without the corroboration of the torture victim is something that is open to interpretation.

Yes, as already discussed the opening scene doesn't provide any information that wasn't gotten in other fashions. It basically amounts to a redundancy.

Some Mexican stuff that will be at the top of my list. There are enough movies out there to constitute a Pancho Villa sub-genre.

La cucaracha/The Soldiers of Pancho Villa (dir. Ismael Rodríguez, 1959) - The Mexican Revolution from a woman's pov. Maria Felix is a prostitute soldier and film director Emilio Fernández portrays Villa. This stands at #1 on my War list now.

Let’s Go with Pancho Villa (dir. Fernando de Fuentes, 1936) - Mexico is loud on the western front. Like Rossellini's Viva L'Italia!, more of a reenactment of revolutionary movement than a war movie.

Enamorada (dir. Emilio Fernández, 1946) - Armendáriz portrays a Villa-like figure and Maria Felix is his wildcat. Mexico's Gone With the Wind, but far superior.

Atomic Age Classics Vol 7: How to be a Soldier (Various) Potluck collection of solider training films from several wars. Like any compilation of educational films, the results are varied, but the two that stick out here: Pick Up offers a fairly fleshed out take on how a soldier picked up gonorrhea from a real classy young lady, and I was getting a kick out of the mildly salty language the producers were able to get away with for the period and then, bam, actual footage of an open sore on a penis. The other standout is a documentary on procedures for incoming Vietnam fighters, where they are instructed on how to identify booby traps and arm bombs and all sorts of terrifying things. These videos did their job and I no longer wish to pick up VD-ridden good girls at train stations or serve in the Vietnam War.

CSA: the Confederate States of America (Kevin Willmott 2004) Oh boy, this one gets one of those internet "You Tried" gold stars. The basic concept is sound: presented as a British TV doc on America, this film is a speculative faux documentary presenting an alternate history of the last ~150 years after the South wins the Civil War. Unfortunately, the film is stuffed with crudely inauthentic attempts at showing "old clips from old movies" that exhibit little understanding of what they're imitating, and a lot of the leaps they make in speculation are pretty suspect: If the South "won," they'd claim the North? Abe Lincoln would flee to Canada in blackface? Ugh, so many of the twists and turns sound even dumber in retrospect. The TV show format allows the film to interject modern ads (well, actually they seem to be circa 1987 or so for whatever reason-- maybe if the South won, we'd just lose fifteen years in the carryover) and these are mostly tone def and awful. I think there's a real danger when mocking racism to gleefully enjoy a little too much the racist "parody" you produce, and I got that feeling a few times here. It's telling that all the reviews mention the Home Shopping Network slave auction sequence, as it's one of the few moments in the film in which a clear comic and satiric target is utilized with a competency that indicates familiarity. There are a couple other parts of the film that hit their target-- I thought the dog collar-esque chattel tracker commercial managed to actually resemble what an ad for such a product would look like, complete with silly synchronized hand motions, and the film's proposal for how the South got Northerners to re-embrace slavery via offering an optional tax dismissible upon purchase of slaves seems smarter and more likely than anything else on display here. But I feel worst of all for the Weinsteins, who paid a lot of money for a feature length YouTube video.

Sunshine on Leith (Dexter Fletcher 2013) Scottish jukebox musical featuring the songs of the Proclaimers. Two Scot Iraq War vets return home and deal with loves lives and future plans, all with the warm gloss of a Hollywood musical. I must confess I only knew one Proclaimers song going in, the same one everyone knows (and which, despite the best efforts of the finale of this film, will forever be associated with its brilliant and cathartic use in Bachelorette's finale), but most of the songs sounded decent at worst and you could see where the script was molded and moved to fit some of the more outlying choices. Despite Moulin Rouge! being a cinematic abortion, I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with having popular pop songs used in a musical (Hell, Singin' in the Rain more or less does) and I was more bothered by the shortcuts the filmmakers took in between the numbers (there seems to be about 10-15 minutes of connective tissue missing along the way to rush in everything else). As ever with modern musicals, it's not particularly well staged or shot, but this is a film that's pretty much impossible to be too mad at, as it's a rousing crowd pleaser that entertained me in spite of my myriad misgivings. Plus it has Freya Mavor (Mini from the criminally underrated third generation of Skins) in a lead role, so it can't be too bad (and she is the only reason I even watched it in the first place)! I'm guessing the high number of Scottish-specific references (many of which went whizzing over my head) has kept this from getting American distribution, which is odd because it seems like exactly the kind of mainstream "feel good" movie every distro falls over themselves to import from other countries. Maybe it's because no one else here knows more than one Proclaimers song either.

Thanks of a Grateful Nation AKA the Gulf War (Rod Holcomb 1998) From the creative team behind China Beach comes this 3+ hour mishmash of dramatic reenactments, modern day interviews, conspiracy theories, and legislative courtroom dramas concerning the US government's failure to acknowledge and treat Gulf War Syndrome. There's plenty of recognizable names present-- Jennifer Jason Leigh, Ted Danson-- and the true life story is an interesting one. But this film is a real mess of bad dialog and scenarios-- the film's darkest hour finds Marg Helgenberger conversing with a callous doctor who literally tells her Bible-thumping sister to Steven Weber's victim to pull the plug on her brother and "Where's that God of yours now?" to which she replies, in all sincerity and without intended mockery of her character, "I know who you are. You are Lucifer!" Subtle all around! I managed to keep watching because the underlying storyline is compelling, but it needs a movie that matches it. This ain't it.

Time Limit (Karl Malden 1957) Produced by star Richard Widmark, this is Karl Malden's only credited work as director and as far as stagey play adaptations go, it's… okay, I guess. A ringing endorsement! POW Soldier Richard Basehart is accused of treason during the Korean War and refuses to defend himself, which inspires military investigator Widmark to dig deeper. A very young Rip Torn and Martin Balsam also factor in. This is the kind of safe, serious adult entertainment Hollywood was putting out to compete with TV at the time, but this movie could be an episode of Playhouse and it would have had the added benefit of being shorter.

Wing and a Prayer (Henry Hathaway 1944) The story of the carrier that went around Japan prior to Midway in order to trick the Japanese into believing falsehoods concerning the Navy. After the jolt of the film opening with the world criticizing the US Navy (!), the film settles down into an extremely familiar patter. Camaraderie movies like this typically offer some extreme novelty in their motley crews so as to differentiate between the literally dozens of films just like this, and I liked the idea of making one of the cocky flyboys an Oscar-winning hearthrob (And Fox contract player!) who, despite his fan mail and ego, is a mess behind the wheel. There's nothing really wrong with this film, I just can't really muster up much enthusiasm about it.

Sorry that you didn't like Time Limit. I loved it and will definitely be voting for it, though I'd rather rewatch it before giving it a full throated defense.

domino harvey wrote:Time Limit (Karl Malden 1957) Produced by star Richard Widmark, this is Karl Malden's only credited work as director and as far as stagey play adaptations go, it's… okay, I guess. A ringing endorsement!

So basically what you're saying is that filmed theater is a mistake, even when the play is Denker's great Time Limit?

What I'm really saying is D'Angelo gave Pickpocket a "B+" and I learned my lesson and didn't click through to see why

Another pair of top ten lists from the good folks at the BFI:

Vietnam Films

P.O.W. Films

Désirée (Henry Koster 1954) Released the same year Marlon Brando starred in On the Waterfront and the Wild Ones, this quasi-epic take on Napoleon through his titular first love Jean Simmons gets somewhat lost in the shuffle. Not that anyone but the most generous would find much to praise in Brando's portrayal, which is somewhat limited to furrowing his brows a lot. But Simmons does a nice job as the girl who goes from working in a silk shop to becoming Princess of Sweden. I watched this via Twilight Time's Blu-ray, and if you're going to see it, there's no other way to bother with, as the elaborate costumes and art decor are the most interesting things here. But, unlike a lot of historic epics from Hollywood, this one has less bloat than expected and Simmons keeps everything moving a long nicely (I was reminded often of her in Young Bess the previous year). I can't quite recommend it, but I enjoyed it for what it was.

the Sea Wolves (Andrew V McLaglen 1980) It makes sense to fill a WWII film with aging Hollywood actors, as in the period this film was released, war pics were pretty much only in vogue with those old enough to have served. The film's surprisingly true story tells of how early in the war the Brits got around a German code-breaking ship being held in neutral waters by employing a gaggle of aged former servicemen who last fought in the Boer War to board and and blow up the ship, with the probable excuse if they were caught that they were on holiday and just boarding the ship on a drunken boast. Gregory Peck is allegedly one of the Brits here, but that mainly means he speaks like Gregory Peck and just pronounces "clerk" as "clark." In the other starring role, Roger Moore carries on a leaden romance with a double-agent (not a spoiler) that grinds what momentum this film has to a halt every time he tries to be charming. I have never seen a Roger Moore Bond film, and based on this I'd like to keep it that way. David Niven and Trevor Howard also show up because, you know, they were still alive at that point. I found myself enjoying this one a lot more than I can rationalize, though-- as far as caper-y wartime potboilers go, it's pretty entertaining and would give a slight recommendation for those sympathetic to its old fashioned Hollywood approach.

Sirocco (Curtis Bernhardt 1951) Reminiscent of the damnation in Westerns of those who refused to pick a side in the Civil War, here Humphrey Bogart plays a cavalier gun-runner who plays for both the Syrians and the French whenever it best suits him. And in the Western tradition, he's the only one who really ends up paying for it. The film gets accused of invoking a lot of Casablanca's basic components, but the film is so lifeless and poorly paced that it certainly is not evocative due to matters of quality. Also features what must be the most subdued Lee J Cobb performance I've ever seen-- forget if he was awake during this, was I?

Tokyo Joe (Stuart Heisler 1949) Bogart again, this time as a former nightclub owner in Tokyo who finds himself operating a shill freight-running operation for a local Japanese gangster so as to allow him to stay in US-Occupied Japan. There's a suspense story of sorts, I guess, involving the eventual kidnapping of Bogart's illegitimate child, but the film's real raison d'etre is to allow for many baldfaced proclamations in favor of US occupation of Japan and showing "Good" and "Bad" Japanese in relation to how they treat their conquerers. It's interesting in those regards, but as a film, well, not quite. However, if you want to see the most comically unconvincing stunt double this side of I'm Gonna Get You Sucka, check out Bogart's judo fight-- about halfway through the battle the filmmakers just completely abandon any attempts to hide it and it's… embarrassing.

the Devil With Hitler (Gordon Douglas 1942) Reasonably tasteless gag-fest from Hal Roach Studios in which Hitler, Mussolini, and Japanese representative Suki Yaki basically run around like the Three Stooges, getting into all sorts of physical comedy scenarios, some of which are amusing, most of which aren't. The plot here concerns a board meeting in Hell where all the lower demons agree Hitler is far more worthy of being the Devil than the Devil himself. The Devil takes great offense to this and arranges to have himself materialize on Earth and orchestrate a good deed for Hitler to commit so as to prove he's not as evil as the Devil. The film gets points for audaciousness, at least! Any Hollywood movie where the Devil basically acts like an angel and has to trick Hitler into doing something good is doing something pretty subversive (The Devil pretty much comes off as a great guy with no criticism applied at any point in the film, putting me in mind of Eugene Pallette in In the Meantime, Darling: "War: the great leveler!")

Spoiler

I kind of doubt anyone is going to see this film, but I'll spoiler it anyways: the film ends with an Inglourious Basterds-esque coda where Hitler dies and immediately claims Hell for Germany upon arriving. The Devil responds by having all his minions chase him into the fire while poking him with pitchforks. It's a happy ending all right!

Force of Arms (Michael Curtiz 1951) The tale of a heartbreaking, tenuous romance between a lieutenant on leave in Italy and the beautiful WAC who catches his eye. William Holden and Nancy Olson team up a third time for this gorgeous-looking pic from Curtiz, who films everything with an eye to underlying sadness. This is a fascinating film because the romance at the center of it is so desperate and fragile and the two caught in the spell of love struggle just as hard with their emotions at being vulnerable as they do with the assorted war-time efforts. The film is structured around two long and wonderful sequences in which Olson and Holden just spend a lot of time talking to each other amidst the ruins and military occupied zones, and it comes off a bit like a precursor to those Richard Linklater films. Holden's central struggle is agonizingly frustrating too, as he punishes himself for his happiness in really perverse but sadly understandable ways. This is a great romantic film precisely because it is so hopeless and depressing-- it's the kind of film where you're not hoping for a happy ending because whatever joy present has already been kicked in the mud or slapped around, you're just hoping to get through it at all. This was a fantastic discovery and will be making my list.

Hitler: the Comedy Years (Jacques Peretti 2007) British TV doc about how Britain embraced comedic representations of Hitler both during and post-war. This film might have been a passable trifle it had played it straight, but instead every last goddamn moment of this doc is filled with the narrator making shitty, ignorant, often anti-intellectual "jokes" instead of just presenting the jokes of its examples (probably because most of the examples given are not only not very funny, but they're often only tangentially related to the alleged subject of this already short doc). I will confess I laughed exactly four times, three times at the Fawlty Towers clips and once at a rather wicked visual joke in a Father Ted clip (Never watched either series, perhaps I should?). I was hoping for a the Devil With Hitler finish for the narrator/writer/director by the end of this though!

Monkey On My Back (Andre de Toth 1957) This half-assed biopic necessitates the need for better fractions, as it's really three different half-assed movies (boxing drama, war pic, junkie expose) joined together (but it doesn't equal one and a half whole-assed movies). This story of Barney Ross, a champion boxer who joins the Marines and later develops a morphine addiction while recovering from Malaria, is an obvious cash-in on the success of the Man With the Golden Arm, but it's unfortunately more Synanon than A Hatful of Rain. The film's worst anti-asset is Cameron Mitchell as the ex-boxer dope fiend. Mitchell does an okay job with cocksure braggadocio early in the film, but he is comically inept at anything dramatic or especially involving his withdrawl drug prowls. Oh lord, if you like me hate derisive laughter from an audience at something unintentionally funny in a film, skip this if it ever plays a rep house near you. Dianne Foster does okay in the thankless role of the harried wife-- I mean, there's no good way to play an awful scene like spying on your dastardly husband as he smashes your little daughter's piggy bank to get money for a fix, but she does her best. The film's real saving grace is its central wartime sequence, a fifteen minute sustained action scene involving Ross and his company attempting to navigate a jungle full of Guadalcanal snipers in the pouring rain. It's a good sequence, but you'll just be going through good sequence withdrawal during the rest of the film as a result.

Natzy Nuisance (Glenn Tryon 1943) Ignoring the events of the previous Hitler/Mussolini/Suki Yaki Hal Roach pic, this outing is far less devoted to physical comedy and has a lot less of interest to contribute in general. It's pretty easy to speculate while watching that the first film was popular enough to merit a quickie sequel with most of the same cast and this is the best they could come up with: Hitler sneaks out to an Island nation (?) where his attempts to sign a treaty with an overly-particular Island ruler are complicated by both an American soldier who is trying to assassinate him and Mussolini and Suki Yaki's assorted attempts to both kiss up and undermine his actions. This was just dreadful and lacked the gleeful tackiness of the Devil With Hitler (which featured executions of innocents as a running gag, among other jaw-droppers) that kept it propelled forward through some rough patches. This is all rough patches.

On an Island With You (Richard Thorpe 1948) I actually watched this a month ago and forgot to write it up. This Esther Williams vehicle is unfortunately so fleeting that I'm at a loss as to what to say it about now. Peter Lawford is a total stalker pilot hired to do wardrobe checking for a military film (uh huh) who kidnaps Williams after she refuses to remember a fleeting encounter between the two on a USO show. It's about as icky a film as that makes it sound. Cyd Charisse is also on hand in an early role, but she doesn't lend much to the film either I'm afraid. I wish they had an advisor on the set for this one to double-check if the movie they were making as worth the effort. Spoiler: it wasn't.

Submarine Command (John Farrow 1951) Fourth, final, and weakest by far pairing of William Holden and Nancy Olson. Holden is a sub captain who is haunted by his actions on the last day of the war which resulted in the original captain of the sub dying. Though he's in the right and there's even a narratively convenient meeting with the man's widow who pleads with him to forgive himself, Holden eats himself alive mainly because one of the men under him, William Bendix, keeps giving him dirty looks and refuses to shake his hand &c. William Bendix seems like your girlfriend's father: he's fun, you like him, but you wouldn't want to piss him off. So I get it. But I don't get it. You needn't ask if Holden eventually wins back favor in the eyes of some guy who's really good at holding a grudge once Holden and his ship get recommissioned back into duty for the Korean War, for you already know the answer.

Father Ted is indispensible! (Yesterday I was just rewatching the one with the 'lovely girl' contest and Dougal simultaneously selling the house to a visiting feminist rockstar obviously based on Sinead O'Connor!)

Is the Father Ted visual joke the one about the speck of dirt on the window that makes a ranting Ted look like Hitler to some visitors? Or the end of that episode with all of the lounge dressed up in Nazi memorabilia?

Both are in the special but the latter is the one that made me laugh

domino harvey wrote:Monkey On My Back (Andre de Toth 1957) This half-assed biopic necessitates the need for better fractions, as it's really three different half-assed movies (boxing drama, war pic, junkie expose) joined together (but it doesn't equal one and a half whole-assed movies).

I think maybe you need to multiply rather than add when you have a situation like this. So it's a sixteenth-assed movie.

Five Branded Women (Martin Ritt 1960) Five Slavic women are accused by guerrilla partisans of fraternizing with an occupying Nazi lothario. As punishment, the five women have all their hair cut off and are left in the hands of the Nazis, who feeling the women's appearance might undermine their own, kick the women out of town. They fare better than the Nazi lover all five share, however, as he gets castrated by the partisans! From there the film follows our Hollywood and International stars (including Vera Miles, Barbara Bel Geddes, and Jeanne Moreau) as they gradually become more and more violent, eventually joining up with the same partisans who exacted the hair-cropping punishment. Despite the recognizable names, this isn't really an ensemble, as the film's protagonist is clearly Silvana Mangano's Jovanka (who has the most intimidating death-stare I've ever seen), who transforms into a total killing machine and is quite effective as the film's center.

In many ways this film anticipates much of the Grindhouse movement a full decade early-- rape revenge, a posse of girls with shaved heads and guns, nudie scenes (well, you know, it's 1960 so almost nude), and a perverse sense of justice and punishment. And the finale, involving the covert bombing of a Nazi film screening, surely must have influenced you know who. And while the film is not without its problems, I found myself highly entertained and surprised at how violent and unrelenting many of the girls' perils were. The film gives hard but logical answers to narrative problems that are far from Hollywood (and no surprise, since it was funded by Italy) and as a result feels exceedingly modern and ahead of its time. Recommended.

Inflation (Cy Endfield 1942) Edward Arnold stars as the Devil in this wartime short encouraging American consumers to not spend money. While chatting on direct line with Hitler (in direct contradiction to their relationship in the Devil With Hitler) the Devil makes the Goofus case for how Americans can visit Hell more quickly (ie let the Germans win and conquer us)-- buy on credit, hoard rations, buy things you don't need, cash in war bonds, etc. Esther Williams is even in this in a small, non-swimming role as a mink coat recipient. And oh that Devil, he cheats by taking human form and enticing mere mortal Americans into committing these egregious economic sins ("Come on, cash in those war bonds, what's a couple thousand in the face of billions?" and so on). I wouldn't say this is anything worth going out of your way to watch, but I find this kind of stuff fascinating (see: my obsession with post-war educational shorts).

the Pigeon That Took Rome (Melville Shavelson 1962) Vanity pic for Charlton Heston, who was looking to separate himself from Biblical epics at the time. Here he's a reluctant spy hanging out in Italy and trying to get messages to the Allies via specially-trained carrier pigeons. And this is a bawdy sex comedy, so there's lots of dirty jokes (Heston narrates about seeing the hills of Italy as his face is pressed up against a woman's chest in a crowded streetcar, &c), few of them actually funny. This is all pretty broad and the central story involving the use and eventual consumption of said pigeons (capped with a hideously rendered food-smacking sequence that can best be described as vomitrocious) is not particularly captivating or interesting.

Secret Agent of Japan (Irving Pichel 1942) Enjoyable but slight b-pic about a Shanghai nightclub owner who finds himself involved with British spies, Japanese villains, and also a German because why not, it's Shanghai, every country's represented. The film moves along at a pleasingly quick pace and outside of the ending there's not much I suspect I'll remember about this in a day's time.

Spoiler

I did appreciate how the film is crashing along to its happy Hollywood conclusion when all of a sudden the Japanese police invade the police headquarters and it's revealed that our heroes were too late and Pearl Harbor's already been destroyed and everyone's under arrest. A nice touch, though it seems like a bit of salt in the wounds to the poor American audiences at the time!

Is the Ritt available on disc or is that another one for going down that other road?

Other road and hard-subbed in Spanish to boot (I didn't find it too obtrusive, but I've been known to watch transfers that others find literally unwatchable)



I feel like whoever put this out on disc could make a decent buck advertising it to the right markets though as it really has a wild side to it and I could see it going over really well with a big audience too

Yeah, it sounds like fun and since Paris Blues finally got a release it doesn't hurt to not stop hoping. Also that screen shot looks fine to me. Worst case the subs might help me better hear the audio.

God Is My Co-Pilot (Robert Florey 1945) Well, the film has a great title, but the praise ends there. This has to be one of the least-interesting war films ever made, cinematic white bread about real life pilot Robert Lee Scott Jr and his work with the Flying Tigers during the second world war. Nothing happens, no real conflict emerges, and other than Alan Hale and a black plantation worker spoutin' off about God to Scott, religion doesn't even factor in (unless you count a cloud parting as a miracle and the proof of God, which outside of Kirk Cameron I doubt), probably because that'd be too interesting. I cannot remember the last film I Barmy'd out on and nearly fell asleep during, but I came dangerously close with this one.

Resisting Enemy Interrogation (Bernard Vorhaus 1944) As exciting a war film as I've ever seen, this out of nowhere masterpiece is a dramatic representation of the perils of Careless Talk Costs Lives. Five downed American fighter pilots (Arthur Kennedy among them) are brought to Nazi headquarters. Despite their Captain telling them to say nothing but their name, rank, and serial number, all five eventually fall victim to exceedingly clever methods of information gathering. This film runs a little over an hour and contains no credits either before or after the picture, as it was intended to be used in-house as training for troops. But by virtue of presenting a work of dramatic fiction in as stripped-down a presentation as possible, the film is fat-free and nothing but lean, wonderful nourishment. Resisting Enemy Interrogation presents the Nazis as unstoppably clever and deductive, and the film is really a detective flick in which the audience finds itself in the bizarre position of having Nazis in the surrogate audience role by virtue of genre convention (a methodology the emerging film noir movement would make popular in post-war years) regardless of the intended function of the picture. Some of the mistakes the Americans make in the course of the narrative are obvious and foolish, but many are so casual and understandable that it hurts all the more when we see everything stack up. I've mentioned before that I love a film that can teach me something, and this movie is a straight-up catalog of manipulative behaviors and (mostly) non-violent interrogation methods, all presented brilliantly against a ticking clock countdown for the Nazis. As a tool to convince captured soldiers to not talk, boy does it ever work-- this is the war movie equivalent of Surviving Edged Weapons. I'm not planning to go to war anytime soon but this film still legit made me believe this by heart: NAME, RANK, AND SERIAL NUMBER ONLY you guys, trust me! And as a film? It's witty, clever, well-acted and staged, and the best discovery I've made yet for this project. A lock for my list and highly recommended.

Stand By All Networks (Lew Landers 1942) Awful b-picture about an annoying radio news reporter who runs afoul of some home-front saboteurs. Shoddy production values and talent and script all compete for worst thing going here. I can think of nothing to mention in its favor other than that it was relatively painless to suffer through and only about an hour at that.

Tonight We Raid Calais (John Brahm 1943) French-boosting cheapie about a Brit spy sent to prepare a French village's Nazi-occupied munitions factory for destruction from above. This is another pretty creaky b-film with phoned-in everything, though Howard Da Silva's got a kinda amusing running storyline concerning his Nazi's puppydog devotion to Annabella. Wikipedia informs me this is one of Tarantino's five favorite World War II movies, which must mean he has only seen five movies about World War II.

Von Ryan's Express (Mark Robson 1965) Entertaining action film that moves downed pilot Frank Sinatra through Italy starting with his arrival in a somewhat comical Italian concentration camp and into some fairly exciting complications as he escorts a mass of British soldiers through German-occupied Italy via Nazi train. This is classic movie serial stuff, with a new obstacle coming up every ten minutes, and I must admit they were able to come up with a lot more complications than I would have guessed at the outset. Would make a good double feature with Emperor of the North: Two-Hour Movies About Hiding On Moving Trains That Somehow Justify That Length.

That Vorhaus sounds a lot like the John Krish film Captured which BFI recently put out on Blu. Like your description here it is a military training video that is a successful horror house thanks to how thin the narrative is. Obviously I don't know how it compares, but it sounds like you need to see it too.

To be clear the narrative isn't thin (I used "lean" because it's a positive descriptor), it just is structured entirely around the access and imparting of information for and from all the characters. It's scary because the most damaging remark in the entire film is one so seemingly innocuous that it just sells home for the thousandth time in an hour to just. not. talk. I will seek out that film, though, so thanks for the rec!