A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight

Film: In Old Chicago
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

I’ve set up my NetFlix queue to be frontloaded with all of the “very long wait” films at the top. What this means is that I typically get one of those films because there are so many of them. That’s great, but it also means that what shows up on a given day is something of a crapshoot. I’m never sure what I’m going to get, and sometimes I get something that’s not really what I’m in the mood to watch. Such is the case with In Old Chicago, a bizarre little film that combines a lot of plots and a spurious legend.

What spurious legend? That’s not too difficult to figure out. The film takes place in Chicago in the 1870s and the main characters last name is O’Leary. Think there’s going to be a fire? Think it might get started by a cow kicking over a lantern? The shame of In Old Chicago is that it isn’t specifically about the Chicago fire, because that might have been more interesting and certainly would have been a hell of a lot less misogynistic.

Off Script: Phantasm

Film: Phantasm
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

Everyone had holes in his or her viewing history. The main reason I started this blog was to fill in a bunch of those holes and to do so in a way where I couldn’t weasel out of watching something. That’s the reason for the horror lists, too. I caught up on a few biggies going through the 1001 Movies list, but there are some genre classics that didn’t make that list. It’s always good when I can knock one of those bona fide classics off the list. In this case, that classic I’d never seen is Phantasm.

Oh, I’d heard all about it, of course. The most famous parts of the film are the presence of a character called The Tall Man (played by the awesomely named Angus Scrimm) and the flying silver ball that kills whatever it strikes. What I didn’t know was just how weird this film really is. It’s the sort of film that doesn’t really make sense no matter how one looks at it. It just gets crazier and crazier as it continues. I should have realized this when I discovered it was written and directed by Don Coscarelli, who is the man behind The Beastmaster, Bubba Ho-Tep, and John Dies at the End.

Casey Jones

Film: The Train
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on laptop.

The Train is the third war film I’ve watched in as many days. It occurred to me halfway through the film that in addition to watching three war films, I’ve hit three of the main branches of military service. Where The Sand Pebbles was a Navy film and Twelve O’Clock High concerned the Air Force, The Train is firmly rooted on the ground. It’s a film that is firmly involved with the French Resistance rather than any Army. It’s an unusual film in a lot of ways. It’s other difference from the two I’ve watched recently is that it focuses almost exclusively on action, giving us chases, air attacks, and explosions at a solid clip.

The plot is almost high concept in its simplicity. Allied troops are rapidly approaching Paris in 1944. As the Allies advance, Colonel Franz von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) concerns himself not with his troops or the retreat of materiel, but of the many art treasures looted from French museums. It is his intent to smuggle as many of these back to Berlin as he can, both for cultural reasons and because such paintings can effectively be used as currency in the waning days of the war. A museum curator learns of this plan and tells a local Resistance group headed by train engineer Paul Labiche (Burt Lancaster). This particular group has been ground down over the course of the war and has only three members left. They decide that despite the monetary and cultural value of the artwork, they don’t have the manpower to stop it.

Bombs Away

Film: Twelve O’Clock High
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

So the goofy post titles are back. Final results were 13 in favor, 3 against, and 3 who didn’t care.

I appear to be on a war film kick lately. I’m not sure what appealed to me about Twelve O’Clock High today, but since it was streaming I figured I’d give it a go. This is much more of a standard war movie than yesterday’s film. As someone who grew up watching military films, it was not unlike slipping into an old pair of comfortable shoes. This is World War II all the way and air combat all the way. I felt right at home.

At least for the first couple of minutes, that is. We learn right away that while Twelve O’Clock High isn’t going to show us a lot of graphic violence, it’s not going to pull its punches with regard to the men flying bomber missions over Europe. We start with a short framing story. A man unknown to us discovers an old mug in an antique shop and buys it. He then travels out to an open field that used to be a World War II airbase. This takes us into the past and we see a group of bombers returning from a mission. Any illusions we may have had that this will be straight propaganda are blown out right away. The bomber group has been hit hard.

The Sand Pebbles

Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

I have come to realize that a lot of the films I’ve been watching lately are extremely short. I do plan to watch everything on these lists, but watching too many short films leaves me in a position of only having the longest films left. When I did the 1001 List, I made it a point to watch a few of the longest films on the list I had left every month. It worked then and it should work now. With that in mind, it made sense to watch one of the longest films I could get hold of today in The Sand Pebbles, a very unusual war film and a very long one.

This is a very strange war film in that it takes place between World War I and II. In a real sense, it’s not an actual war film because there isn’t a great deal of war that happens with the main characters of the film. We start with machinist mate 1st class Jake Holman (Steve McQueen) who is in Shanghai attempting to get to his new ship, an ancient gunboat called the San Pablo, nicknamed the Sand Pebble by the crew. The ship is an American presence in China, where a great deal of trouble is brewing. The country is torn apart by factions, predominantly the Nationalists and the communists. Holman finds his ship and discovers a few important points.

Off Script: Kwaidan

Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin flatscreen.

The pedigree of the film Kwaidan (also called Kaidan and roughly translated as Ghost Stories) is unique to say the least. The four tales in this anthology come from collections of Japanese folk tales compiled by a man with the awesome name of Lafcadio Hearn. Hearn was originally from the Ionian Islands, married a black woman (illegal in the 1870s), worked in New Orleans, and eventually emigrated Japan. Hearn is a big part of the reason Japan and the East were romanticized and made exotic at the time.

Anyway, Kwaidan is a collection of four stories. The film is a good 160 minutes long, though, so rather than feeling like a typical anthology, it feels much more like four short films, each roughly 40 minutes long (although the third story is longer and the last story is quite short). I’d love to say that the stories get better as they go along, but they’re uneven in that respect. In a lot of ways, the fourth story is the worst, and for me at least, the third was the most interesting.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1981

The Contenders:
Atlantic City
Chariots of Fire (winner)
On Golden Pond
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Reds