Screen Screed: Thoughts on Movies From a Lifelong Eater of Cinema

      Tarzan's Revenge      From 1938, Tarzan's Revenge has several problems.  In the eponymous role it lacks Johnny Weissmuller, who, being an athlete, at least acquired rudimentary acting skills over time.  Glenn Morris, 1936 Berlin Olympics decathlon gold medalist, portrays Tarzan in this film without any acting ability, out-acted even by his non-actress costar, the "Jane," although she goes by Eleanor, played by Eleanor Holm, 1932 Olympic gold medalist in the 100 meter backstroke.      Based loosely on Edgar Rice Burroughs' first Tarzan novel, Eleanor travels with her parents and fiancé, Nevin Potter (George Meeker), on a safari westwards into Africa's heart to collect wild animals for zoos.  Watching this practice in 2020, it's sickening to contemplate the casual disruptive actions of these white American and British assholes as they thread their way into unknown country, assuming they can do whatever they want. ...

      Horror High       Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson provides the basis for Horror High (1973).  As if audience members might not pick up on this, the film opens in an English classroom where the teacher, Miss Grindstaff (Joy Hash), shows the 1941 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde .  The folding screen at the front of the classroom isn't pictured, but Spencer Tracy's background voice is unmistakeable.      Horror High cost $67,000 and took two weeks to film on location in Dallas and Irving, Texas.  It tells the story of a picked upon science nerd, Vernon Potts (Pat Cardi), his biological experiments with his guinea pig, Mr. Mumps, the animal's transformation into a vicious, though small, monster, and Vernon's drinking of the transformative potion enabling him to strike back at his tormentors.      Miss Grindstaff, in her forties, what used to be called a spinster, looks like a...

     Diamonds Are Forever      Guy Hamilton (1922-2016) had already directed ten films before making his first James Bond movie, Goldfinger (1964).  He went on to direct three more Bonds: Diamonds Are Forever , Live and Let Die , The Man With the Golden Gun .  He directed, too, the Michael Caine spy thriller, Funeral in Berlin , and the amazing Battle of Britain , one of the two best aerial combat films ever made, the other being The Blue Max .      That Hamilton worked well with action scenes cannot be sensibly disputed.  I'd put his abilities against Michael Bay's any day.  A fight in an old-fashioned hotel cage lift in Diamonds Are Forever  (1971), wherein Bond (Sean Connery) fights to the death a man he's impersonating, nearly dying himself, is one of the most realistic one on one combat scenes in any Bond film, surpassed only by Connery's fight in a train compartment with Robert Shaw in From Russia With L...

      The Golden Coach      Anna Magnini was special.  Earthy, a mother figure at the same time she was a sex goddess who could act more skillfully than most, a force of nature, dramatic, tragic, funny.  I saw her in Open City , Rossellini's film.  The shot where she runs after the truck might be the cinema's best single shot indicating that war shouldn't happen, but also what war does to women.  War is the most misogynistic force rationalized into action for the profits of the wealthiest, evil, most of them.      Getting a little preachy there, Vic!      I write now about The Golden Coach , Jean Renoir's vivid technicolor 1951 film with Magnani as a Commedia dell-arte actress performing with a troop of wandering Italians in 1700 Peru, a piece of the Spanish Empire.  Peru is run by a viceroy, a man only half-interested in his administrative and government, plus figurehead, job.  He happens to s...

      Needed Some Laughs       The Patsy (1964) by Jerry Lewis, directing and starring, deals with a bellboy, Stanley Belt, becoming an entertainer after recruitment by six former behind-the-scenes colleagues of a big time entertainer killed in a plane crash, in Alaska of all places.      Stanley is pure Jerry Lewis; cross-eyed faces, mouth contortions, sudden cries rising in pitch, a weird way of walking when he's surprised by a fresh piece of information, such as when he's offered $175 a week to learn comedic, singing, and dancing techniques, not long before his nightclub and TV debuts.  He bombs in the nightclub; Lewis's performance here is funny and painful.  Nobody laughs or applauds, no one even heckles him.  The nauseating failed comedy routine happens in silence punctuated by Stanley Belt's barking way of talking.  His handlers sit embarrassed and disgusted at a table, looking up at what they've wrought.  ...