Movies

[Rusty]

346 - First Love (1939) - 7.5/10 - Deanna Durbin stars in this Cinderella tale about an orphan girl named Connie who goes to live with her wealthy uncle and his family after she graduates from a girls boarding school. Her aunt is obsessed with astrology, her cousin Barbara is a 'mean girl', and her cousin Walter is extremely lazy. Her uncle is the only nice one apart from the staff and he likes to be left alone. There is a ball and a lost slipper and a handsome 'prince', etc. I thought it was a good movie.


347 - A Chef in Love - 7.5/10 - A French opera singer and chef opens a restaurant in Georgia (the country) during the time of its brief independence from Russia early in the 20th Century. He lives with his lover, a Georgian princess. The story is told in flashback after the chef's niece meets his lover's son and shares journals and letters written by the lovers many years before. I thought it was pretty good.


348 - Dear Heart - 7/10 - Evie Jackson (Geraldine Page) arrives in New York City from a small town in Ohio for a postmasters convention. She meets Harry Mork (Glenn Ford), a former traveling salesman who is moving to New York to take an office job and to get married. The two hit it off and spend some time together. There are a number of complications and somewhat humorous moments, but overall I thought the film fell kind of flat. It wasn't bad, but it seemed a bit lifeless at times.

[Rusty]

349 - So This is Washington - 6/10 - Abner Peabody invents synthetic rubber and so Lum and Abner leave Pine Ridge to head for Washington to do their part for the war effort by sharing this with the government. A number of problems naturally arise. I don't really find the Lum and Abner films that entertaining. This one was okay.

[Rusty]

350 - Daens - 8/10 - Adolf Daens was a Catholic priest who decided to return to his home in Aalst, Belgium in the early 1890s. He was shocked with the high level of poverty and the poor working conditions in the city's factories, including poor pay, long hours, child workers, and even some deaths on the job. He preaches against these injustices and eventually runs for parliament to try and do more about it. I thought this film was very good and is well acted.

[Rusty]

351 - Close to Eden - 8/10 - A Russian truck driver driving through China gets stuck in a pond and gets help from a Mongol shepherd who lives nearby. The two become friends, even with the differences in culture and incomplete understanding of each other's language. We also get to see the shepherd's family and a bit of the life there on the plains and the differences in a nearby city. I thought this was a very nice film.

[Rusty]

352 - Entre Nous - 7/10 - Two French women meet in Lyon in 1952 and become friends. One of them married a French prison guard during WWII to avoid deportation to Germany. The other lost her first husband to a stray bullet during the war. Their friendship come between their marriages, but allows them some freedom. I thought it was a decent film, but one that had the potential to be a lot better.

[Rusty]

353 - Blue Skies - 7/10 - Fred Astaire is the narrator and a dancer. Bing Crosby is a man who opens and then sells nightclubs. Each of them falls in love with a showgirl (Joan Caulfield). The movie features a lot of Irving Berlin songs. I found it to be pretty slow through the first half, but I thought it got a little better after that. Overall, it's not a great film, but is watchable.

[Rusty]

354 - Birth of the Blues - 7.5/10 - Bing Crosby plays a talented clarinet player with a flare for Dixieland music. He puts together a band, but they initially have trouble gaining acceptance for their music in New Orleans around the turn of the century. I thought it was a fun movie, certainly more than Blue Skies, and the music was good, too.


355 - To the Shores of Tripoli - 7/10 - A wealthy playboy joins the Marines, but is definitely lacking in discipline. His sergeant is an old friend of his father. He also tries to start a romance with a navy nurse who outranks him. The movie came out a few months after Pearl Harbor, though it was in postproduction when the attack happened. Despite the movie's flaws, I enjoyed it. John Payne, Maureen O'Hara and Randolph Scott star. This was also Harry Morgan's film debut.


356 - The Thief - 8/10 - Ray Milland stars in this noir film as a nuclear physicist who works for the Atomic Energy Commission, but has also been selling secrets to a foreign power. A traffic accident with one of the couriers leads to his being investigated by FBI agents, leading to a climactic scene at the Empire State Building. I thought that this film was very good. There is no dialog in the film, but it does contain ambient sounds as well as a nice soundtrack.

[Rusty]

357 - The Well - 7.5/10 - A five year old black girl falls down a well and goes missing. People are searching for her and a white man is suspected of having kidnapped her, leading to escalating racial tension and violence as rumors spread. Richard Rober did a nice job as the sheriff who tries to keep things under control. Harry Morgan plays the stranger who is accused of taking the girl. I thought it was a pretty good film.

[Rusty]

358 - The Dark Mirror - 8/10 - A doctor is found murdered in his apartment and there are several eyewitnesses who identify the young woman that he is with. However, it turns out that she has an identical twin and one of them has a perfect alibi, but they won't tell which one. A psychiatrist becomes involving in analyzing the two women in part to see if he can determine which one could be the killer. I thought that this was a very entertaining film. Olivia de Havilland does a nice job as the twins and we get good performances from Lew Ayres as the psychiatrist and Thomas Mitchell as the police lieutenant in charge of the case.


359 - I Love You Rosa - 7/10 - Late in the 18th Century, a young Jewish woman is widowed. An old Jewish law dictated that her husband's brother should marry the widow, but Nissim is a young boy of 11 or 12. Nessim is in love with Rosa, but she sees him as a son and helps raise him as such. I thought that it started pretty slow, but got better as it went along.

[Rusty]

360 - Pathfinder (1987) - 8/10 - The movie takes place around the year 1000 AD in the northern part of what is now Norway. Aigin is a teenage boy of the Sami people who returns home to find that a group of foreign soldiers/raiders have killed his family. He escapes to another Sami village, but is pursued, thus endangering them as well. I thought that it was a pretty good film. The enemies are pretty one dimensional, but the movie was entertaining.

[Rusty]

361 - Red Dwarf: The Promised Land - 7.5/10 - The crew of the Red Dwarf encounters a fleet of ships filled with the cat people descended from Lister's cat. While this wasn't the best of Red Dwarf, it was comfortable and fun. It's good to see the crew back in action and I definitely hope that they keep creating more Red Dwarf for many years to come.


362 - Wild in the Streets - 5/10 - A popular rock star starts a movement to lower the vote to 14 and get the power in the hands of the youth. He seems to have tons of followers who cause problems for the establishment through protest and violence. Liberal use of LSD helps bring about changes that he wants and gains him power in Washington, D.C.. The movie is kind of ridiculous and I didn't really enjoy it very much, except for the soundtrack, which I thought was good. The movie fits in okay with the counterculture in the 1960s I guess. A young Richard Pryor is the drummer in the band.

[Rusty]

363 - Banjo on My Knee (1936) - 6.5/10 - Ernie and Pearl are getting married in a small Mississippi River community. Ernie has a temper and runs away on his wedding night when he thinks he's killed a man. Pearl waits a long time, but when Ernie finally returns, he plans to leave again almost right away so Pearl runs off to New Orleans to get away from him. I thought that Barbara Stanwyck did a decent job as Pearl and Walter Brennan was good as Ernie's eccentric father, Newt. Ernie (Joel McCrea) was pretty unlikeable though and that detracted from the story. I couldn't really see why Pearl would stay with him. There was enough in here so that it wasn't a horrible movie, but it wasn't that great either.


364 - It Happens Every Spring (1949) - 7/10 - Ray Milland stars as a college professor who discovers that an accident has caused chemicals to mix in such a way that the resulting liquid causes objects to avoid wood. He decides to use this to become a star baseball pitcher, leaving behind his old job and girlfriend (Jean Peters) for an 'emergency leave of absence'. The movie is enjoyable enough, though pretty formulaic and not really anything special.


365 - Johnny Come Lately (1943) - 8/10 - James Cagney stars as a drifter named Tom Richards who visits the town of Plattsville in 1906. The town is run by the crooked W.M.Dougherty (Edward McNamara), though a small newspaper run by elderly resident Vinnie McLeod (Grace George) stands up to the corruption as best they can, though they are in financial difficulty. Richards takes over running the paper and the fight with Daugherty. I thought that this movie was very entertaining with plenty of humor. It's a fairly simple story and runs along familiar lines, but is done well and the performances are pretty good. Marjorie Main has a nice turn as saloon owner, 'Gashouse' Mary, and Hattie McDaniel is pretty funny as Aida, Vinnie's live-in maid.

[Rusty]

366 - Tunes of Glory (1960) - 8/10 - Alec Guinness stars as Major Jock Sinclair, the temporary commander of a Scottish Highland Regiment. He is a coarse sort of officer and finds himself in conflict when Colonel Barrow (John Mills) takes over and tries to reinstill discipline. Guinness and Mills are both in top form and the other actors do a nice job in this battle of wills. Susannah York made her film debut as Sinclair's daughter who is having a relationship with one of the pipers.


367 - Obsession (1976) - 6.5/10 - Cliff Robertson stars as a businessman whose wife and daughter are killed after they are kidnapped and the rescue attempt goes wrong. While in Italy 16 years later, he sees a young woman who looks amazingly like his late wife and he gets to know her and then courts her. The movie moved at way too slow a pace much of the time with the music enhancing it. I guessed a number of the plot twists early on as well. Genevieve Bujold stars as the wife and lookalike.


368 - The Power and the Prize (1956) - 7.5/10 - Robert Taylor plays a business executive named Cliff Barton who is sent to England to negotiate with a company about mining rights and his boss tells him to use shady practices to get a much better deal. While there, he falls in love with a refugee (Elizabeth Müller) working to get jobs for other refugees from central Europe. He falls in love even though he is engaged to the niece of his boss (Burl Ives). Charles Coburn also has a small, but important role as the owner of the company. Cedric Hardwicke and Mary Astor also have small roles. The movie doesn't have a great rating on IMDB, but I thought it was a good drama/romance and I enjoyed it.


369 - The Policeman (1971) - 8.5/10 - Azulai is a patrolman in Jaffa who is so inept that he has been on the job for 20 years and hasn't received a promotion. He is very kindly, but naive, and his superiors are trying to see that his contract isn't renewed, but the criminals want to keep him on the job. I thought it was a very funny movie. Azulai is a likable guy, but definitely exasperates some of the other officers. Shaike Ophir does a great job as Azulai.

[Rusty]

370 - What's the Matter with Helen? (1971) - 6.5/10 - Adelle (Debbie Reynolds) and Helen (Shelley Winters) are the mothers of two young men convicted of killing a woman in the 1930s. When they receive threats, they leave town and head to California, changing their last names. Adelle opens a dance studio for little girls with Helen playing the piano. Helen is obsessed with religion and slowly seems to become somewhat divorced from reality while Adelle finds love in the father of one of her students. I didn't really enjoy this psychological drama that much, though it did seem to get more interesting in the second half of the film.


371 - Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) - 8/10 - In this Italian drama, the chief homicide detective kills his mistress and plants clues that lead to himself. The detective is soon promoted to the political division, but he seems to start coming unglued as the movie progresses. The backstory between the detective and the mistress is told in flashback throughout the movie. I thought that it was pretty well done.

[Rusty]

372 - Sundays and Cybéle (1962) - 8/10 - Pierre was a pilot whose plane was shot down in the Indochina War. He suffers from amnesia, vertigo, and other ailments from his experiences. He spends a number of evenings in the local train station and happens to see a young girl whose father is taking her to a boarding school where he plans to abandon her. Thinking that she might be able to help him with his problems, he goes to the school and is mistaken for her father which the lonely girl does nothing to dispel. While others might look at Pierre thinking he has sinister motives, his motives are nothing of the sort. I thought that this was a good film and you get to know the two main characters fairly well. Their relationship is convincing and both actors do a nice job.


373 - Papa's Delicate Condition - 7/10 - Jackie Gleason and Glynis Johns star in this adaptation of silent film star Corinne Griffith's memoir about her childhood in early 1900s Texas. Jack Griffith is a good man, but somewhat eccentric and extravagant when he has been drinking. When he spends the family saving to buy a circus, his wife leaves him to return to her father's home with the children. This isn't a bad movie and is decent enough to watch, but there isn't a lot of substance there either. The best acting job in the film was Linda Bruhl as the 6 year old Corrie Griffith.