THE GIANT OF MARATHON (La battaglia di Maratona, 1959)

People may still know that the length of the modern marathon race is based on the distance from the Persian War battlefield of Marathon to ancient Athens, and that a messenger from the battlefield, having run the distance, dropped dead immediately after announcing the Athenian victory. If so, those same people may take Jacques Tourneur's peplum (assisted by Mario Bava) as the ultimate travesty, since the runner lives and gets the girl at the end of the picture. For the record, however, the legend of Phillipides dates back only to the second century of the Common Era, something like 500 years after the facts. Herodotus, the great historian of the war, mentions no such dying messenger. Tourneur, Bava et al really are no less entitled to exercise artistic license than the Roman writer Lucian was. Their writers thus make even more of Phillipides (Steve Reeves), who in their account is a peasant landowner whose past heroism against the Persians earns him leadership of the mythical Athenian Sacred Guard and a rallying point for supporters of the city-state's still-fledgling democracy. There remains an anti-democratic opposition that hopes for the restoration by Persia of exiled tyrant Hippias. Leading the opposition in the city is Theocritus (Sergio Fantoni), who schemes to co-opt Phillipides by marrying him off to the courtesan Charis (Daniela Rocca). Our hero already has his eye on blond, athletic Andromeda (Mylene Demongeot), the daughter of Theocritus' friend Creuso (Ivo Garrani). Phillipides can't be swerved from resistance, however, and Theocritus gradually alienates everyone before taking refuge with Hippias and the Persian army. Crucially, the bad guys fail to double-tap Charis after putting an arrow in her back when she tries to escape to warn the Athenians. She comes the nearest to performing the familiar Philippidean feat, while Philippides himself saves his energy for fighting. Marathon is noteworthy for having unusually good battle scenes for a peplum. I don't know whether Tourneur, Bava, or some second-unit person deserves the credit for this, but credit is definitely due given how feeble the genre's battle scenes often are. Strangely enough, Marathon climaxes with a sea battle, showing off a decent budget with full-scale ships and an underwater-attack sequence, along with a captive Andromeda sort of living up to her mythic namesake by being tied to the prow of a Persian ship. Steve Reeves's films apparently got bigger budgets in the wake of the global success of his Hercules films, and while he is what he is -- clean-shaven this time -- the money and a certain creative enthusiasm shows even in a faded pan-and-scan print on digital cable. It's hardly history, but it's fun on a matinee-movie level without being overblown in all the ways you'd expect from a more recent film.

NIGHT AFFAIR (Le desordre et la nuit,1958)

Jean Gabin's film career lasted from the 1930s to the 1970s and had two major phases. In the first, he was a leading man. In the second, from 1954's Touchez pas au grisbi forward, he was a middle-aged tough guy in films presumably appealing primarily to men. Unsurprisingly, Gabin could still play the leading man at least early on in this latter stage, even though he'd become a thicker, courser looking figure. The Gabin character's romance with the female lead in this Gilles Grangier detective story may be its most challenging feature, not just because of the 25-year age difference between the star and Nadja Tiller, but also because of the initially violent way these kooky Frenchpersons bond with each other.

Like many a French crime picture, Night Affair focuses on a nightclub. This one's a jazz club operated by Marquis (Robert Berri), who has a stable of black entertainers including floor show dancers, a band and star singer Valentine Horse (blacklisted U.S. chanteuse Hazel Scott). It boasts a racially mixed clientele, though it's hard for an outsider to tell whether this marked the place as progressive or decadent in the eyes of the original audience. The club hosts a tense meeting between a drug dealer (Roger Hanin) and his impatient buyer, Blasco, (Robert Manuel), after which the dealer, with his moll in tow, goes out to pick up his supply. From out of nowhere the buyer is shot down, and the moll, Lucky Fridel (Tiller) abruptly drives away.

The vice squad assigns Inspector Vallois (Gabin) to the case, despite his enduring affection for "grape juice." He ends up taking the flirtatious Lucky to her apartment, where they exchange slaps -- she starts it -- before going to bed. It looks like it'll only be a one-night stand when Vallois discovers, to his disgust, that Lucky, a German girl who aspires to singing like a Negro, is a cocaine addict. Still, the lonely detective follows her to a party at Valentine Horses's apartment in the hope of finding more out about her milieu. When the party ends violently, Blasco goes for treatment to a private physician or pharmacist (Danielle Darrieux) who may hold crucial pieces of the drug ring and murder puzzle.

Night Affair is more whodunit than crime story -- there's little urgency felt among the criminal element about the abrupt interruption of the drug supply -- and even more than that it's Vallois' crusade to redeem Lucky. Even though Gabin is technically a romantic lead, his is really a patriarchal role. It's telling that the film ends with Lucky entering a rehab facility, with the promise of a happy reunion with Vallois, rather than with the reunion. That finish is reminiscent of those relatively sympathetic morality plays where the repentant outlaw agrees to serve a light sentence on the understanding that he'll live happily afterward. The important thing here seems not so much that Lucky and Vallois might live happily ever after, but that by convincing Lucky to take her medicine, so to speak, Vallois has restored some moral order to the world. On some level you could call it a conservative film for that reason, but regardless of that the music is quite good and the spectacle of Gabin righteously slapping folks around -- men, too -- is entertaining on your choice of levels.

DVR Diary: TAMANGO (1958)

On one hand, John Berry's Tamango feels like a film about a decade ahead of its time in its blunt treatment of slavery and resistance. On the other, it might be of a piece with such contemporary pictures as Salt of the Earth and A King in New York, gestures of nothing-to-lose leftism from filmmakers blacklisted or effectively exiled from Hollywood. This was a time when the film mecca could still produce stuff like Band of Angels with Clark Gable as a sympathetic slaveowner. In Europe, Berry and a team of writers adopted a story by Prosper Merimee, the original author of Carmen, about a blighted romance between a slave ship captain and his black mistress Ayesha -- she who must obey. The girl is Dorothy Dandridge, going farther afield in search of work after Hollywood failed to do much with her. The captain is that improbable international he-man, Curt Jurgens. She thinks she has a privileged position as the captain's lover, but is told he plans to dump her and get married when he finishes the current middle passage, his last. That is his plan, but he finds Ayesha more difficult to dump than he thought. Meanwhile, a captive warrior, the title character (Alex Cressan) appeals to her sense of morality and racial solidarity. When Tamango leads an uprising, Ayesha must choose between her white lover and the outgunned but adamant Africans. She chooses the Africans, which is to choose death.

Jurgens carries the film, making his slaver something more subtle than a seaborne Simon Legree. He has a great scene when he tries to cajole some hunger-striking prisoners to eat. He addresses them patiently, soothingly explaining how good the food is. When one still refuses to eat, he lets it slide, merely suggesting that he might try it later. But when the next man knocks his bowl away, the captain gestures to his crew and the victim is abruptly grabbed and unceremoniously thrown into the sea. It's a great shock moment to remind the viewer that lethal force never lies far below the slavers' civilized surface. During the revolt, he's determined above all to make sure that Ayesha survives, and you can see some quiet agony as it becomes clear to him that she won't leave the hold and prefers to share the rebels' fate. Yet it seems he can write her off all too easily after he orders a cannon fired into the hold. Dandridge has a much more flamboyant moment of agony moments earlier as Ayesha's survival instinct struggles with her conscience, with a feeling that she should not abandon the rebels even if it means her death. In a way it's a camp moment out of classic cinema, almost out of silent cinema as she marches toward the steps to the deck while the rebels chant some sort of defiant death song. She's about to climb up as the song seems to possess her. Haltingly she babbles the syllables, almost not knowing what she's saying, until finally she gives in completely as if ironically liberated by her choice of certain death. I can't quite say hers is a great performance, but that's a great melodramatic movie moment. It's right, however, to close the film with Jurgens and the cannon in Berry's abruptly matter-of-fact fashion. Snuffing the romanticism of Dandridge's big scene that way drives home the indifferent injustice of slavery in effective fashion. Tamango's grim finish helps make it seem more like a Sixties of Seventies film than the Fifties film it is, though Dandridge's histrionics are more in keeping with that decade. Compared to later slavesploitation cinema, Tamango is arguably more politically correct because it insists on the dignity of the enslaved in a way more hard-hitting treatments of the peculiar institution would not. That doesn't make it a better film than, say, Farewell Uncle Tom, but Tamango definitely deserves more attention from movie buffs than it's received in the last sixty years.

EDGE OF ETERNITY (1959)

The main selling point for Don Siegel's thriller was that  it was shot, in Cinemascope, on location at the Grand Canyon. This was probably not as impressive as it could have been had a Cinerama camera not already been flown through the canyon several years earlier. Still, many people probably hadn't seen any Cinerama by 1959, so there was no doubt some thrill and novelty to seeing planes fly through and stuntmen cavorting on a cable car above the abyss. These thrills aside, Edge of Eternity is a pretty basic mystery story. It opens with a failed attempt at vehicular homicide at the canyon's edge, the intended victim eliminating his attacker only to be done in a few scenes later. It's up to Deputy Les Martin (Cornell Wilde) to figure out whodunit despite the distraction of speed-demon heiress Janice Kendon (Victoria Shaw). After leading him on a merry, picturesque chase early on, Janice provides Les an entry into her wealthy gold-mining family, including her crabby dad and her drunken brother. People get on Les's case for failing to crack the murder case quickly, but Janice's eye for fashion finally provides a crucial clue tying the victim, if not his initial attacker, to the mining interests around the canyon, ranging from gold to guano.

Siegel's writers try to keep things mysterious by having a later killing carried out POV camera = killer style, but it only looks awkward and evasive. Toward the end, the killer is revealed without anyone on the screen having deduced his identity from clues, though I suppose some in the audience may have guessed the culprit by process of elimination. His discovery sets up the big thrill climax on the guano car, but the thrill of actuality is undermined every time Siegel cuts from the long shot of the stuntmen to the studio close-ups of Wilde et al in front of rear projections. The location stuff is nice to look at, though, thanks to Burnett Guffey's cinematography, and seeing the juggernaut cars of the era in action is always fun. Even with the special attraction of the Canyon this is little more than a B picture, and as such its diverting enough without lasting long enough to waste your time.

CHINA GATE (1957)

There had been Hollywood films set in Vietnam before, but Samuel Fuller's China Gate is arguably the first "Vietnam movie" to involve an American protagonist in the effort to prevent a Communist takeover of French Indochina. Fuller opens his picture with a prologue history of Indochina up to the Viet Minh uprising against French colonial rule, but he seems a little unclear on what Vietnam is. For one thing, he doesn't really use that name. For another, he writes as if the people of Indochina are "Chinese." On the other hand, China Gate takes an interesting attitude toward ethnicity in general. The Asian characters are written mostly in an entirely unstereotyped way, with none of the stilted conventions of Hollywood or pulp writing. The Viet Minh soldiers we see -- the time is early 1954, before the decisive siege of Dienbienphu -- talk and pretty much act like dogfaces anywhere: happy to see a dame, especially if she's brought alcohol. Meanwhile, singer Nat "King" Cole has a big supporting role as an American fighting with the French Foreign Legion, and his blackness is never remarked upon. His role probably wasn't written for a black actor, and strange to say, Cole's craggy features and raspy speaking voice arguably make his character, identified as a veteran of the "Big Red One" during World War II, even more of a surrogate for Fuller himself. The singer actually gives a credible performance as a tough soldier (he survives a booby-trap spike through his foot without crying out) marred only by a probably-obligatory performance of the rather bleak title song, and even that isn't inconsistent with Fuller's use of song in the same year's Forty Guns.

Where Fuller probably won't pass muster with many modern viewers is his casting of white actors in two crucial "half-caste" roles. Angie Dickinson gets the romantic lead playing Lia, a lithe lush better known as "Lucky Legs" or "Lucky" for short. Everyone remarks on how Lucky can pass for white, but her son is not so Lucky. Although the boy's no more than one-quarter Asian -- his father is American -- he looks so entirely Asian that the father, Sgt. Brock of the Legion (Gene Barry) freaks out and runs out on wife and child. That fact makes him a heel to everyone else in his unit, and it definitely complicates his mission to penetrate enemy lines to find the Communist weapons depot beyond the China Gate, with Lucky, a fixer who travels often between the lines, as their guide and shield.

Fuller quickly establishes his anti-communist credentials -- many of the Legionnaires are Korean War veterans who went to Vietnam so they could keep killing commies -- and that gives him cover from which he attacks his real target, American racism. By comparison, we never really encounter a dogmatic communist. As noted, the Viet Minh grunts we meet are simply grunts, no better or worse than other soldiers.  When we get to the final boss, Major Cham, he's shown to be no more than an opportunist who had formerly hated communism, as Lucky notes in an embarrassing moment in front of Cham's masseuse, but now sees it as the wave of the future and his surest path to success. On the evidence of China Gate, communists are bad guys mainly by virtue of being more ruthless and indiscriminate, for some reason or other, in their violence.

It's probably for the best that Fuller didn't try to make any ideological statement when his main commie villain, the other half-caste in the story, is played by Lee Van Cleef. While the actor's name actually resembles a Vietnamese name, the resemblance pretty much ends there, which makes it unintentionally preposterous when Cham tells Lucky that he gets along better with the Reds because he looks more "Chinese" than she does. Cleef actually tries hard here to pull off a character who has actual feelings for Lucky, apparently his sometime lover, and for her son, whom he'd like to give a chance at advancement by getting him educated in Moscow. I have a feeling, however, that the naturalistic, non-stereotyped dialogue Fuller gave him made him even more damningly unconvincing as an Asian in the eyes of contemporary audiences, so that what actually looks now like a halfway decent performance probably looked like the worst in 1957.

By modern standards, given China Gate's anti-racist line, any ending that falls short of a happy ending for Lucky, Brock and their son probably will look like a cop-out. Does it undercut Fuller's message that Lucky sacrifices her life, after tossing Cham off a balcony, to blow up the ammo dump, even if the ending makes clear that Brock will take his Asiatic boy home with him after all? Some people are bound to think so, but let's remember that Fuller comes from an older tradition that values pathos and aims for bittersweet effects. If anything, you can argue that Lucky's death will only remind Brock even more of the wrong he did her earlier and the debt he owes their child. Tragedy was more commonplace in pop culture back then, especially when the one-and-done format of TV drama meant that heroes and heroines often loved and lost in a single hour. The same format also encouraged people to shrug off tragedy rather than wallow in it, and something like China Gate probably should be taken in the same spirit. It's not really a Fuller masterwork but it has a lot of interesting stuff going on, including the best performance I've ever seen from Gene Barry. The guilt trip he takes in this picture breaks down that typical smugness that makes his Bat Masterson so insufferable and suggests that he could have done more with his career if wanted to or was goaded into it. Cole also shows potential he got very little chance to develop further beyond his W. C. Handy biopic of the following year. I doubt anyone accepts Angie Dickinson as even partially Asian but she gives the right kind of charismatic performance for the familiar type of pulp heroine she plays. Overall China Gate is the typical "primitive" Fuller mix of impressive tracking shots, intense action, mostly decent art direction, badly integrated stock footage, etc. The film won't really tell you anything about Vietnam, but it's a diverting yarn on its own terms.

DVR Diary: PILLARS OF THE SKY (1956)

George Marshall's film is an idiosyncratic western for its time in several ways. It may be most noteworthy for its take on American Indians. Set in Oregon territory in 1858, Sam Rolfe's adaptation of Will Henry's pulp novel retains the original's fresh approach to native dialogue. The good Indians, Nez Perce scouts attached to cavalry sergeant Emmett Bell (Jeff Chandler), speak fluent English in a much more casual fashion than one usually heard even from good-guy movie Indians of the period, e.g. Chandler's own career-making Cochise in Broken Arrow. They even show a sense of humor occasionally, though the film as a whole strays pretty far from Henry's more sardonic tone. That's because Rolfe is more interested in the religious aspect of the story than Henry was. Most of the Indians are Christians and have taken Christian names (Timothy, Jason, Lucas), the great and terrible exception being the hostile chief Kamiakin (Michael Ansara), whose conflict with the Americans is more overtly a war of religion than it is in Henry's story or the history on which that was based. Rolfe and Marshall foreground religion by spotlighting a character who is only mentioned but never appears in the original story: the Protestant missionary Joseph Holden (Ward Bond), shown in the film as beloved by the Christian Indians, particularly a boy who rings the church bell and prints an amateur newspaper. In the story (and the expanded novel version, To Follow a Flag) Emmett Bell is irreverent if not cynical about religion, constantly joking with Timothy (Sydney Chaplin) about the scout's own devout faith. In the film, that irreverence is the starting point of a character arc that ends with Bell at least symbolically taking Holden's place after the missionary is murdered by Kamiakin during an aborted peace parley. In a finale that most likely raised Henry's eyebrows -- and as a writer for Tex Avery he probably could raise his eyebrows quite dramatically -- Emmett leads the Indians in prayer in the ruins of Holden's mission.

This reversal follows the most unexpected change from prose to film by this period's standards. Simply put, in the story Emmett gets the girl, but in the movie he does not. In the story, his rival for Cally (the late Dorothy Malone) dies in the running fight that takes up most of the narrative. In the film, the rival lieutenant (Keith "Vaal is All" Andes) survives and wins Cally simply by showing more (i.e. some) concern for her welfare during the Indian attacks than Emmett does -- after he'd gone to the trouble of rescuing her from Indian captivity earlier in the picture. You wonder what inspired such a creative adaptation of source material (speaking euphemistically) by Rolfe, who charged out of the gate as a screenwriter a few years earlier with Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur and went on to create Have Gun Will Travel and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. My only guess is that movies could not as easily take Indian Christianity for granted, or treat it as lightly, as Henry did. There are other cosmetic changes, as might be expected, from the expunging of an embarrassing Negro servant character (After his progressive treatment of Indians, Henry wrote minstrel dialect for her) to giving Lee Marvin's Irish sergeant (complete with brogue) a death scene that went to another character. To be fair, the film is all right on its own terms, even if the religious angle bears more weight than it should, but it's sure to leave anyone who read (or, in my case, later read) Will Henry scratching his head. Still, there's enough of a difference about Pillars, mainly because of the choices Rolfe made, to make it recommended (if not essential) viewing for fans of Fifties westerns.

FERRY TO HONG KONG (1959)

In the late 1950s, on the strength of Roger Vadim's ...And God Created Woman and Dick Powell's The Enemy Below, Curt Jurgens became an international film star. Apparently a real-life "good German" during World War II, Jurgens seemed to Hollywood to be the next Emil Jannings, to the extent that he was cast in a remake of The Blue Angel. Star he may have been, but he's still a tough sell as the two-fisted he-man hero of Lewis Gilbert's shot-on location sea saga. Mark Bertram Conrad (he's half-English) is a gruff, belligerent alcoholic, the former captain of a junk confiscated by the Chinese government after the communist revolution. Ordered deported by the British government of Hong Kong for starting a brawl in a nightclub that may have influenced the opening scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Conrad is put on board of the Fa Tsan, a ferry operating between Hong Kong and Macau, to be dumped in the Portuguese colony. When Macau rejects him as an undesirable, Conrad becomes a kind of flying dutchman, making a makeshift home on the "Fat Annie" and making life miserable for its captain while befriending some of the regular passengers, especially algebra teacher Liz Ferrers (Sylvia Sims) and her schoolgirl charges, and renewing his acquaintance with ship's engineer Skinner (Noel Purcell), who keeps separate families in each city. As the captain grows desperate in his efforts to remove Conrad, the old reprobate gradually redeems himself, pressuring the captain to rescue survivors of a burning junk, then overriding the captain's orders to steer the ferry to safety during a typhoon, and finally organizing the resistance to a takeover by Yen, the Chinese pirate (played by Britain's answer to Tor Johnson, Milton Reid).

Jurgens is more convincing as a surly bum than as an action hero, but previous roles as military men presumably qualified him for such a part. But if you find him unconvincing in the hero's role, consider the alternative. According to Wikipedia, the original plan was for Jurgens to play the ferry captain -- a role originally intended for Burl Ives, who ended up playing something like it in Ensign Pulver -- while the man who actually did play Capt. Cecil Hart was supposed to play the hero. His name was Orson Welles.

A Rank Organization executive, presumably examining Touch of Evil, insisted that his lead actors switch roles. While this may have spared us a reprise of the Wellesian action hero as seen (and worse, heard) in The Lady From Shanghai, his new role gave the great man even greater temptation to indulge his hobby of silly accents. The discrepancy in quality between Welles the director and Welles the actor may not be as vast as in the case of, say, Quentin Tarantino, but when Welles was bad he was horrid, and he's pretty bad here. He reportedly had only himself to blame, since according to Gilbert and Jurgens Welles did his usual thing and rewrote his own dialogue to make his character more comical. This reportedly caused conflicts with Jurgens -- Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that this was the only time he feuded with a fellow actor while performing in a picture -- who wanted to keep the picture a straight drama, regardless of whatever impression he himself made on the audience.

Ferry may well feature Welles's worst-ever performance. His British accent is erratic, veering from a Charles Laughton impersonation to a more plummy approximation of Richard Haydn. If the latter name means nothing to you, think of the professor who makes super carrots that turn Bugs Bunny into a superhero. The voice actor, presumably not Mel Blanc, was imitating Haydn and doing a better job of it than Welles does. The characterization also sprawls all over the place, as Welles can't seem to make up his mind on whether Captain Hart is merely a pompous ass or a complete nincompoop. The film itself, on Welles's initiative or Gilbert's, resolves itself in favor of the captain as a nincompoop to a cartoonish degree -- he even gets blown up in classic cartoon fashion, largely unharmed but left dirty and disheveled -- before treating him with more pathos as the erstwhile Singapore Cecil loses his ship but redeems himself somewhat toward the end. At worst, he gets to wear a plank stuffed down the back of his shirt as a back brace. His recovery and redemption are signified by the removal of this impediment so he may bop a pirate on the bean with it, while Conrad's complete redemption, after leading the rout of the pirates, depends on a final fight with "the dragon." He's fallen in love with the algebra teacher, but as the film closes their union must wait until he cleans himself up fully. His decision not to enter the Dragon nightclub where his recent troubles began is our assurance that a happy ending will follow the actual ending at some point.

At least the location work is nice and Otto Heller's cinematography is often nice. Gilbert could write this nautical adventure off as a tryout not only for his subsequent Sink the Bismarck! and Damn the Defiant but also for a run of James Bond pictures, including a reunion with Jurgens in The Spy Who Loved Me. Fans of Orson Welles have mostly, and fortunately, forgotten this film, which presumably got some more of Don Quixote filmed, if nothing else. There probably were the makings of a better adventure film in the Max Catto novel Gilbert and others adapted, but a proper film required a sharper clash of stronger personalities than Ferry actually delivered. In the end, Welles's grotesque antics are the film's most interesting, if not most entertaining feature.

THE OREGON TRAIL (1959)

During the late 1950s, before he was rescued by Walt Disney and redeemed by Billy Wilder,  Fred MacMurray had been relegated to B-western stardom. To be fair, his films probably qualified as B+ westerns, but they were definitely programmers. The Oregon Trail, the last of that run of films, was a collaboration between writer-director Gene Fowler Jr. and co-writer Louis Vittes, who had worked together on their own run of movies including I Married a Monster From Outer Space, the early Charles Bronson vehicles Gang War and Showdown at Boot Hill, the juvenile delinquency drama The Rebel Set and the aviation adventure Here Come the Jets. That's a pretty eclectic filmography, and Oregon Trail has a few idiosyncracies of its own, as well as serious structural flaws.

The film is inspired, in a peculiar way, by Francis Parkman's travelogue of the same name, which is credited in the script with inspiring people to take the dangerous westward journey to Oregon. The filmmakers overstate their case just a little. Their film, set in 1846, opens with the aftermath of an Indian attack on a settler family. Amid the wreckage is a scorched copy of Parkman's book. The problem with this is that while Parkman had already published his narrative in serial format, The Oregon Trail wouldn't appear in book form until 1849. Parkman, who isn't a character in the film, is denounced by newspaper editor James Gordon Bennett, who perceives a greater danger on the trail to Oregon. He assigns ace reporter Neal Harris (MacMurray) to join a wagon train and investigate whether the U.S. government is infiltrating troops into Oregon for a showdown with Great Britain, which disputes the border between Oregon Territory and Canada. As it turns out, Bennett is right. President James K. Polk assigns Captain George Wayne (William Bishop, who was dead within months of the film's release) to make his way to Oregon with the very same train in which Harris is traveling. So far, so nearly the stuff of Seventies conspiracy films.

Harris and Wayne meet a variety of characters in the train, including a potential love interest for either man in Prudence Cooper (Nina Shipman), the grizzled guide Seaton (Henry Hull) and the eccentric Garrison (John Carradine), for all intents and purposes the legendary Johnny Appleseed. There's also the obnoxious Brizzard (Tex Terry), who likes to pick fights with Harris and favors a bullwhip. As Harris grows suspicious of Wayne and his sidekick, who can't help calling Wayne "Sir," the party encounters the grisly remains of the massacred family from the prologue and has to go on short water rations when a waterhole Seaton depends on finding turns out to have gone dry. Brizzard goes berserk when he sees Garrison watering his baby apple trees, assuming that the old crank is stealing water when he's actually sacrificing his own ration to keep the trees alive. Harris comes to Garrison's defense and brawls with Brizzard until a sudden rainstorm resolves the matter. The scene closes with an amusing, almost Brueghelian moment as the pioneers scramble to catch rainwater in any available basin while Harris and Brizzard, still brawling, roll obliviously through the fresh mud in and out of the frame, until Garrison finally breaks things up with a swat to Harris's rear.

After a while you wonder what the film is building up to, what the consequences might be of Harris exposing Wayne and the stealth American military buildup. The filmmakers themselves seem to have wondered about that before finally giving up and starting a virtually new story for the last half hour of the picture. At Fort Laramie, the troops are leaving to take part in the newly-declared Mexican War ("What's an Alamo?" a fur trader left behind asks) just before the sinister squaw man Hastings (John Dierkes) arrives with his half-breed daughter Shona (Gloria Talbott) in tow. The film doesn't hold anything against squaw men as a class; Seaton was one and a good guy, but Hastings, brusque with his daughter, quickly proves vicious, offering to shelter Harris, who'd been driven from the wagon train by Wayne, among his Indian friends, only to leave him to be tortured (alongside erstwhile enemy Brizzard) while pocketing the reporter's bankroll. Hastings decides that the cavalry's departure creates a perfect opportunity to play the red man's champion by organizing a massacre of the fort's civilians. However, he hasn't reckoned upon Shona's rebellious, righteous nature, expressed by stabbing an Indian guard in the back and freeing Harris so he can warn the fort of the impending attack. Despite the warning, Wayne and the handful of soldiers left behind at the fort are fooled by the reappearance of Brizzard, pressed into driving a Trojan wagon full of Hastings and hostiles through the gates to start the slaughter.

For much of the film Henry Hull guides the brave pioneers through the dangers of the great outdoors (above) 

and the perils of the 20th Century-Fox soundstage (below).

The Oregon Trail is an often brutal picture that doesn't flinch from the idea of showing children getting killed, though much of its grim spectacle is only suggestively gruesome. It has a maddeningly erratic look, mixing some effective location work -- and, I assume, some stock footage from more expensive westerns -- with miserably unconvincing studio sets with painted backdrops. The film's biggest problem is a screenplay that, unlike the pioneers, set out with no clear destination in mind. While Dierkes makes a good maniacal villain in his brief time onscreen, you could believe that his whole storyline was added just so Harris could get a girl of his own, Shona, after Fowler and Vittes decided to keep Wayne and Prudence together. While Oregon Trail has its moments and MacMurray was at worst a serviceable western star in this period, it's ultimately too much of a mess to recommend in good conscience.

DVR Diary: THUNDER BAY (1953)

The fourth collaboration between director Anthony Mann and star Jimmy Stewart is set in 1946 and thus doesn't get the admiring attention of their classic run of westerns, but it's probably the nearest thing to a western of their team-ups outside the genre. It has the same sort of driven Stewart hero the westerns have, though he has no vengeance agenda to drive him. Instead, Steve Martin -- no relation to the American journalist who covered Godzilla's rampage through Tokyo a few years later -- is a heroic if somewhat ruthless entrepreneur. Down to his last dime -- if that -- he and his sidekick Gambi (Dan Duryea) have to convince an oil baron (Jay C. Flippen) to finance the construction of an oil rig off the coast of Port Pleasant LA. Steve clearly knows his stuff but there's still something of the huckster, if not the con man, to him, but that hustling quality earns him the oil baron's sympathy. "You've never had the pleasure of gambling your last dollar on a dream," he chides his corporate bean-counter, recognizing a kindred risk-taker. Steve doesn't earn the trust of the locals so easily. They're shrimpers and worry about the oil riggers disrupting the shrimp beds. Worse, the educated daughter of one of the shrimpers (Joanne Dru) spreads the impression that oil workers are trash. She seems to speak from personal experience, but Gambi, a party animal, doesn't help the oil men's case by promptly stealing another shrimper's girl. They shouldn't worry, since Dan Duryea is pretty much a good guy for once, but the conflict continues to escalate as the shrimpers make repeated efforts to sabotage the drilling while Steve's backers run out of money and patience.

Thunder Bay arguably was ahead of its time in portraying a conflict between energy prospectors and locals concerned about the environmental impact of oil drilling, but as a product of the 1950s it predictably reconciles all conflicts, revealing a harmony of interests as the drillers actually make it easier for the shrimpers to harvest a rare, valuable catch. This is actually one of the most pro-oil films you'll probably ever see, since the writers found it necessary to have Steve defend his drilling with a speech bluntly announcing America's dependence on oil. Without it, he says, the country begins to die, including the shrimpers. That speech may give the film a retroactive camp quality, or worse, for the politically or ecologically sensitive, but it really only makes the film a document of its time, dating it relative to Mann and Stewart's more timeless westerns.

Take away the stark landscapes that give those westerns an outdoor-expressionist quality and for a while Mann looks like a more ordinary filmmaker. Thunder Bay doesn't really come to life until the oil rig is built, and then Mann takes every advantage of his new toy. The picture's visual highlight is a fight between Steve and one of the shrimpers, the man who lost his girl to Gambi, who tries to plant dynamite on the rig just as a hurricane bears down on the site. Mann and cinematographer William H. Daniels give the fight an elemental quality, making the most of his rain effects and the roiling waters below. They achieve something similar when the riggers have to stop a salt-water blow and, on a more exhilarating note, once the well comes in and an oil-soaked Stewart shrieks with joy. This may not be a western, but it's definitely not as tame as The Glenn Miller Story or Strategic Air Command. It's not as good as the westerns, either, but those who love the westerns may still like this one a bit.

BEYOND MOMBASA (1956)

Here's an unpretentious but colorful programmer George Marshall directed for Columbia Pictures that features a fun star turn by Cornell Wilde, one of Christopher Lee's more substantial pre-Dracula parts, and a vivid combination of African location shooting by Freddie Young. The story, adapted by Richard English and Gene Levitt from an apparently unpublished story, is pure pulp. Wilde plays Matt Campbell, an amiable boor who arrives in Kenya to learn that his brother, a uranium miner, had just been killed. He was the victim not of the Mau-Mau, those predictable villains of a contemporary cycle of African movies, but of a resurgent cult of leopard men, sacred killers who don leopard skins for their dirty work. Matt wonders whether that's the truth of a story someone else made up, as his brother had some questionable business associates, particularly the sleazy white hunter Gil Rossi (Lee) and fellow miner Hastings (Ron Randell). Possibly more dependable are the missionary Ralph Hoyt (Leo Genn), an expert on the leopard cult, and his anthropologist neice Ann Wilson (Donna Reed). Rossi, Hoyt and Wilson take Matt to the site of the mine, which "clicks" according to the last letter from Matt's brother, which means whoever owns it has a fortune. Matt's his brother's heir, Hastings was his partner and Rossi was a 1,000 pound investor in the project. Matt instinctively looks on the other men with suspicion, but they're not the only people he has to worry about, as the leopard men seem to be all too real...

Cornell Wilde flirts with Donna Reed in Beyond Mombasa

Once Ralph Hoyt admitted he was only a lay missionary you could add him to the list of suspects, especially since Genn gives the sort of meek-and-mild performance that becomes increasingly suspicious as the film proceeds into the jungle, arriving finally in the ruins of an older civilization where our protagonists end up besieged by the leopard men and a white ally. I will spoil things only partly by letting you know that even before audiences identified him with movie villainy, Christopher Lee made a good red herring.

Wilde, who would famously return to Africa for his own project, The Naked Prey, is easily the best thing about Beyond Mombasa. His Matt Campbell is a bit of a goon, a tough guy who'd been working in Saudi Arabia before this opportunity turned up, a master of drunken fighting but also terrified of the local wildlife, including a chimp the Reed character decks out in a dress for nebulous purposes of scientific observation. Once they're on safari and under fire -- from spears, blow darts and rocks, that is -- Matt becomes more of a standard he-man hero, but his blatantly flawed nature earns our interest and sympathy more than if he'd been too good at everything to be true.

The three-way bickering of Wilde, Lee and Randall keeps things pretty hard-boiled most of the way, and when the film finally goes over the top it has the lurid flavor of men's adventure magazines of the period. I like that in a Fifties movie, and while Mombasa has no delusions of grandeur it does provide 90 minutes of two-fisted fun for those who appreciate that sort of thing.

DVR Diary: GHOST OF YOTSUYA (1959)

Starting in the late 1950s the horror genre exploded into a bold new world of color. Japan's answer to Fisher, Bava and Corman was Nobuo Nakagawa, who brought an oft-filmed 1825 kabuki play to livid life at the end of the decade. It's a simple story of greed and its supernatural comeuppance that wouldn't be entirely out of place in an American EC comic of the time. An ambitious ronin, Iemon (Shigeru Amachi) wants to marry Oiwa (Katsuko Wakasugi) won't take no for an answer when her dad. apparently a good judge of character, turns him down. Encouraged by his mephistophelean minion Naosuke (Shuntaro Emi), Iemon kills the old man, and a few others, covering his trail so Oiwa is none the wiser. Married life proves less comfortable than Iemon hoped for, as he's quickly reduced to walking the streets as the Japanese equivalent of those guys who wore sandwich boards in old American movies, advertising that wonder remedy, "Dutch medicine." When an opportunity arises to marry into more wealth, Iemon decides that it's time to move on and leave no loose ends behind. Resourceful Naosuke provides him with some European poison to mix into Oiwa's face cream to ensure a painful, disfiguring demise, but Iemon's taking no chances. He recruits the hapless Takuetsu (Jun Otomo) to seduce Oiwa so the aggrieved hubby can rush in, in a cruel variant on the old badger game, and exercise his conjugal prerogative by killing his adulterous wife. Takuetsu quickly loses his enthusiasm for the project when Oiwa applies the face cream and is, as planned, painfully disfigured. Deranged by pain, she tries to kill Takuetsu but ends up impaling herself on a knife. Not to worry: Iemon promptly arrives to make sure Takuetsu doesn't tell the truth. We learn that Iemon's prerogative extends to nailing the "adulterers" to shingles and cutting them in half, but he's content to dump their bodies in a swamp.

The problem for quickly-remarried Iemon is that Oiwa died cursing him, and in Tokugawa Japan you can't write that stuff off as mere delirium. She and Takuetsu have a bad habit of turning up on intimate occasions, while Iemon has the worse habit of trying to kill ghosts with a sword. Worse still, his aim is pretty accurate, but there usually are living people -- temporarily living people, that is -- standing where he sees the ghosts.  In short, Iemon goes Sword of Doom on his new family. Meanwhile, his old family isn't done with him. Oiwa's brother, whom he and Naosuke had thrown down a waterfall earlier in the picture, reappears as a living, angry avenger. He teams up with both a live sister and, indirectly, a dead sister to mete out samurai justice to the villain. In many respects Yotsuya is basically a samurai film or the cynical, debunking variety with supernatural trappings, but some of the spooky stuff is quite effective, particularly the surprise reveal of Oiwa's ghost crawling on Iemon's ceiling. The best scene from the horror standpoint is Iemon's out-of-control rampage, which has you fearing helplessly for innocent people once you realize that whenever he starts waving his sword at a ghost, somebody real is going to die. Tadashi Nishimoto's cinematography strikes a stylish balance between natural locations and expressionistic set lighting, but overall Nakagawa's work in color here is a dry run for his real calling-card effort in Jigoku the following year.Yotsuya is still a nicely done film in its own right that did much, in retrospect, to put Japan on the global horror film map.

DVR Diary: BAYOU (1957)

Turner Classic Movies ran Harold Daniels' film last weekend as part of an "Underground" double-feature, along with Timothy Carey's legendary World's Greatest Sinner. "Presenting Tim Carey" is the future auteur's screen credit in Bayou, even though Carey had already appeared in several films, most notably in Stanley Kubrick's The Killing. Edward I. Fessler's screenplay is set in the Cajun country of Louisiana, and Cajuns were still sufficiently exotic in 1957 that their name and ethnic origins have to be explained with some expository dialogue. Suffice it to say that for the film's purposes they are hillbillies with even funnier accents, perhaps more developed technologically yet just as slovenly. Lording it over the film's community is Ulysses (Carey) who runs the general store and has something like the power of life and death over the crabbers and shrimpmen through the power of credit. It's best to think of Ulysses as the Bluto of the Bayou. He's willing to extend credit to old man Emil Hebert (Douglas Fowley) if Emil will get his daughter Marie (Lita Milan) to go out to the big dance with him, and show him other attentions. Into this serpent's eden comes an architect from Poughkeepsie, Martin Davis (Peter Graves), who's come to the territory to pitch his design for a nearby project. Martin's ultimate audition for the commission is a test of character: a pirouge race in which he must compete against the mighty Ulysses and others. Martin's defeat costs him the commission, but he stays on because he feels romantic and protective toward Marie. Recognizing a rival, Ulysses intimidates him with a mating dance during a traditional chivaree for a newlywed couple. But during another showdown at Emil's funeral Martin finally makes a stand....

It is ridiculously easy for Carey to overshadow Graves, having a height as well as a charisma advantage over the future Mission Impossible star. His overwhelming dark-side-of-the-life-force performance also overshadows everyone else in the picture, few of whom make any real impression. At the same time, Ulysses is pretty unconvincing as a ruthless man of business or as someone enamored with anyone but himself. Carey's fans will see his mating dance as the highlight of the piece, anticipating similar antics in World's Greatest Sinner, but the artless exhibitionism of it really takes you out of the picture, which isn't hard when the picture's as flimsy as Bayou. Maybe it was different when the movie was new and few knew who Tim Carey was, and none knew what he would be, but to me now it's obvious that the film needs a more basic, truly threatening villain, but in Carey it has a buffoon. But maybe it wasn't so different back then. Daniel's exercise in pulp ethnography reportedly bombed at the box office until it resurfaced several years later and was sold on its new title, Poor White Trash. Bayou is described as one of Carey's largest roles, but it seems to prove that, unless you want to go all the way and OD on Sinner, he's best taken in small doses like those prescribed by Kubrick in Killing and Paths of Glory. For some, Carey may be spectacle enough to make Bayou worthwhile, but he doesn't really do the film any favors.

DVR Diary: A STORY FROM CHIKAMATSU (aka The Crucified Lovers, 1954)

I get the impression that Kenji Mizoguchi's adaptation of a classic 18th century puppet play is not considered one of his home-run pictures like its contemporaries Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff. It doesn't merit its own Criterion Collection DVD release, for instance, and its appearance on TCM last weekend was my first chance to see it. Perhaps the subject matter is too much like a 19th century European novel -- or something by Theodore Dreiser, if your tastes run American -- its actual pedigree notwithstanding, for world cinema fans seeking something more echt Japanese. Yet it's exactly that quality, its clash of intense romanticism, bourgeois repression and brutal traditional values, that impressed me the most. Of course, I can't say whether Mizoguchi and his screenwriters added those layers to Chikamatsu Monzaemon's original, but given Chikamatsu's reputation as Japan's greatest dramatist I suspect all that stuff was there all along. Basically everything revolves around a successful entrepreneur, Ishun (Eitaro Shindo) who as the official Scroll Master has an exclusive franchise to publish calendars. He's so wealthy that the nobility borrow money from him, and despite their manners they clearly resent their dependence on this arriviste. The opportunity to destroy him comes when his neglected wife Osan (Kyoko Kagawa) falls in love with one of his top salesmen, Mohei (Kazuo Hasegawa). Initially, embezzlement brings them together, as Mohei dabbles in forgery to help Osan's brother pay off a loan. This first transgression escalates into adultery after some farcical contrivances, but the affair is no laughing matter, since the Tokugawa Shogunate punishes adultery with death. It's also potentially a huge embarrassment for Ishun. It could even ruin his career if the authorities determine that he knew of his wife's infidelity without reporting it. Come to think of it, the fact that I found Ishun's predicament more fascinating than the lovers' romance may expose a problem with a film presumably sold (especially under the more exploitative English language title) as a tale of blazing passion. The romantic leads are fine, but passionate doomed lovers are almost a dime a dozen in cinema. What intrigued me to the end was they way everything shaped up against poor selfish, mean-spirited Ishun. At first he thinks he'll avoid embarrassment or ruin by cancelling some nobles' debts in return for their covering up the scandal. That plan falls apart when Mohei and Osun turn themselves in to the authorities, preferring death by crucifixion to life on the run or under Ishun's thumb. Once they've done that, the nobles pounce on Ishun, terminating his franchise, confiscating his wealth and exiling him. On one hand you can say the bum had it coming, but at the same time this is clearly an unfair, unjust system at work for the exclusive benefit of the upper class, and that makes Ishun's comeuppance nothing to celebrate. By comparison, and unlike a condemned couple we see paraded through the streets earlier in the picture, Mohei and Osun seem almost beatific at the end, their parade to the crosses almost like a triumph. Mizoguchi, I think, is canny and objective enough to let us question that even as bystanders comment on the lovers' apparent bliss. It may not have the spectacular camerawork or spooky grandeur of Mizoguchi's more canonical movies, but I found plenty to chew on in Chikamatsu Monogatari, and I'd recommend it to those with similar cinematic tastes.

DVR Diary: GUN FEVER (1958)

Many actors want to direct, and a fair number get the chance. Not all can be a Charlie Chaplin or Cornel Wilde or Clint Eastwood; most probably worked so infrequently or unimpressively ever to be considered as an auteur. Consider Mark Stevens, who established himself as a performer in the 1940s and learned the trade behind the camera as a director of many episodes of Big Town, a series he starred in in the mid-1950s, and the 1954 noir Cry Vengeance.  For his third feature film, Stevens became a triple threat, co-writing Gun Fever as well as directing and starring as the vengeful hero. This B western reveals a grim, grimy sensibility somewhere between its "adult western" contemporaries and, at least on a visual level, the debunking revisionist westerns of a generation later. Gun Fever itself isn't revisionist; it's actually a little embarrassing in its treatment of Indians and Mexicans. But its low budget black-and-white imagery prove a virtue, and its most memorable scene probably is the long bar fight between co-hero Simon Waller (John Lupton) and Amigo, a Mexican bandit, across a realistically filthy floor. The fact that Amigo is played by Larry Storch of F-Troop fame is one of the embarrassing aspects of the picture. Storch plays the ruthless role as straight as he can but can't help sounding clownish with his none too convincing accent -- but at least he's out of the picture early. Amigo is an expendable minion of a monster of a villain, known only as Trench (former pro wrestler Aaron Saxon). Perpetually sweaty and dirty and often drunk, Trench unites Simon and co-hero Luke Ram (Stevens) in hatred. He killed Luke's father (and mother) and he is Simon's father, who had forced him into his gang until Simon finally gathered up the courage, after the latest massacre, to refuse the loot and quit. Both younger men want to kill this beast -- Saxon's nothing special as an actor but as a repulsive physical presence he suits this film perfectly -- and they're joined on the vengeance trail by a Christian Indian maid, the newly widowed Tanana (Jana Davi), married to another of Trench's former partners until Amigo kills the guy. On top of that, Trench stomps into her home, demands a meal, and pours coffee straight from the pot onto her forearm when she doesn't comply. In stoic tribal style she doesn't cry out but she's bound to carry a grudge. She's well spoken and mission educated but the rest of the film's Indians (led by Iron Eyes Cody) are a dismal lot, led on by Trench. The villain's leadership style is well summarized by the way he talks very slowly, with hand gestures that clearly mean nothing, to convey his instructions to Iron Eyes and his band. The momentarily skeptical Cody actually asks, "How do we know you don't speak with forked tongue." I hope that wasn't one of Mark Stevens' contributions to the script. As a director he doesn't contribute much visually that can't be credited instead to the film's grungy art direction, but he deserves some credit for putting together one of the more thuggish westerns of the genre's golden era.

DVR Diary: WAR DRUMS (1957)

When sympathetic portrayals of Native Americans became fashionable in 1950s westerns, the Apaches became the most fashionably sympathetic of Indians. Why that should have been the case I can't say. Maybe it's because they looked different from most movie Indians, more civilized somehow because they didn't wear the stereotypical war bonnet or feathers in the hair. Whatever the idea was, it led to a cycle of Cochise films and continued with this colorful Bel Air production from the people who gave us The Black Sleep: producers Howard W. Koch and Aubrey Schenck, writer Gerald Drayson Adams and director Reginald Le Borg.

The protagonist this time is Cochise's father-in-law, Mangas Coloradas (Lex Barker), and the main story of the picture is an interracial romantic triangle that isn't quite equilateral. Mangas and his white friend Luke Fargo (Ben Johnson) are friendly rivals for the Mexican spitfire Riva (Joan Taylor). Mangas has the advantage here because he saw her first, rescuing her from virtual slavery in a comanchero camp despite her best effort to kill him. His shield with its three layers of buffalo hide fends off her close-range rifle blast, and despite his traditionalist ways he's as impressed by Riva's fighting spirit as Fargo is by her looks. No amount of trade goods will persuade Mangas to give her up, but Fargo, this film's good white man, is a good sport about it.

Speaking of the Apaches' relative degree of civilization, they seem positively bourgeois in their conservative disdain for Riva, a liberated woman in more than one sense. Apache women warn her constantly that she'll have to do all the household work, including building a wikiup from scratch after gathering the raw materials, now that Mangas intends, again to the women's disdain, to make Riva his wife. But Riva has had enough drudgery in her life with the comancheros, and Mangas apparently agrees with her. After she gets into a fight with some tribal women over her indifference to domestic chores, the young chief decides she's better suited for a warrior's role. He teachers her to hunt and shoot and she proves a quick study, while Mangas fights two tribal rivals to the death to defend his right to marry the outsider.  Not even a fine horse Fargo offers in his latest trade package will turn Mangas from his marital purpose. Again a good sport, Fargo turns the trade goods into wedding presents. Meanwhile, playing the usual white-man's role in such encounters, Riva teaches the nose-rubbing Mangas how to kiss.

Inevitably some no-account white trash find gold in a stream on Mangas' territory, terrorizing the residents of a nearby wikiup and shooting a little boy. They won't believe Mangas when he tells them there are richer gold deposits not far away and flog him for a liar, the worst humiliation an Apache can endure.Now Mangas makes war, donning the red shirt that earned him the "Coloradas" nickname to hide the scars on his back, and so does Riva. She shoots one of the offending whites in the back with an arrow, but it doesn't go deep enough to keep him from going crying to the Army. Fargo agrees to lead a party under a white flag to get Mangas' side of the story, but the Apaches anticipate a sneak attack and the Cavalry obliges. Fargo, unwilling to fight, gets wounded and is healed by Riva. This is the white man's best chance, but it's still no dice. He's fascinated by her blend of beauty and bloodlust, and she explains this by revealing her half-breed nature as the daughter of a Mexican and a Comanche. Fargo's response: "You're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen." Later, it's Mangas's turn to be wounded, but this time he needs modern medical skills to save his life so his tribe takes a white settlement hostage, the settlers' lives forfeit unless their doctor can extract a bullet from the war chief's chest. Despite the distraction of a woman in labor, the doctor does the job. Fargo arrives with fresh cavalry to find what still looks like a hostage situation, but Mangas explains that the doctor had fulfilled his end of the bargain, so he has no power over the settlers. On his own initiative Fargo arranges a safe-conduct for the Apaches, offering them the friendly advice to stay high in the inaccessible hills for a while.

In reality, the whites captured Mangas and reportedly tortured the old man into making the escape attack that customarily allowed you to kill an enemy, but the Fifties Apache cycle (which continued into the next decade with 1962's Geronimo) often tries to have things both ways, acknowledging the injustices done to Native Americans while allowing them happy endings of sorts. Cochise, who died undefeated, made the perfect hero for this cycle, while erasing the actual end of Mangas Coloradas makes him an easier fit for the formula. By 1957 the novelty of articulate, intelligent, sympathetic Apaches must have worn off a little, though it may still have been a novelty for some to see recent Tarzan Lex Barker give an articulate performance in any role. Neither he nor Johnson (whose career seemed to be in freefall after an early push) is very charismatic, but the real novelty that makes War Drums worth seeing today is Joan Taylor as an all-out woman warrior in an explicit repudiation of the traditional female role in a Fifties film. She makes a modest outdoor western just a little bit more than that.

DVR Diary: THE WORLD'S GREATEST SINNER (1959-62)

Timothy Carey may be best known to movie buffs as the tall crybaby French soldier doomed to execution in Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory. Some with different tastes may recall him as South Dakota Slim from the AIP beach party movies. Carey seems to have been some sort of crackpot, so it should come as no surprise that when he resolved to produce, write, direct, star in and distribute his own movie, it should be a film about a megalomaniac. Making the picture was a long act of pure will by the aspiring auteur, and its subject is a man who seeks to live and transform the world through sheer will. Clarence Hilliard is a sales manager for an insurance company, apparently happy with his bourgeois life with wife, daughter and horse, but the Devil (voiced by Paul Frees) is watching. Hilliard sells life insurance, but has grown tired of talking about death, tired of others thinking about death and building their lives around it. His mounting mania gets him fired, but that only frees him up to take up his new calling as a prophet preaching a new populist religion in which every man is a god, or at least a Super Human Being. Improbably, Hilliard builds a following preaching on the streets, drawing disciples with the promise that you can become a god by saying you are. Mesmerized by a rock concert, Hilliard reimagines himself as a "rock god" with a gold lame jacket, a fake soul patch and volcanic Elvis moves -- the shambolic Carey looks like he's going to erupt out of his clothes as he jackhammers across the stage to the music of Frank Zappa. Now that he's God Hilliard, the next natural thing is to run for President, promising to mobilize science and medicine to make Super Human Beings a reality. His appeals to the forgotten common man, uttered by a charlatan high on his own supply, have a fresh prophetic resonance now, nearly sixty years after Carey shot the film. Godhead has a price, however, as Hilliard's wife rebels against his divine ways with other women, young and old, and his apparent rejection of the real God. Hilliard doesn't want to be bothered by her petty protests, but he is bothered when she leaves him. Her departure provokes a crisis of faith in himself that can only be resolved by challenging the God of the Eucharist, incarnate in a consecrated wafer.

Just as in many a monster movie, holiness actually prevails, but it's hard, even in that light, to see Sinner as a tract against the demonic ambitions of God Hilliard. As in many monster movies, you're probably supposed to root for the monster, though Carey, admittedly charismatic in his own eccentric way, does everything in his power to make Hilliard repulsive. What's compulsive, and compelling, about the picture is how transparently the morality tale gives Timothy Carey a platform to act out on, to play the rock star, the preacher man, the demagogue. The World's Greatest Sinner is aueturism as shameless exhibitionism. It's one of cinema's greatest ego trips, though Carey tries to art it up in various ways that only emphasize his rawness as a filmmaker, e.g. leaving the reel ends in the finished (?) picture. Amateurish in many ways, it's elevated by Carey's own talent as a performer and by young Zappa's genuinely effective score -- though the great man dismissed the picture as "the world's worst movie." Somehow I don't think Carey took offense; it was a superlative after all, and it meant he had done something memorable.

DVR Diary: LAW AND ORDER (1953)

Seminal crime author W. R. Burnett (Little Caesar, High Sierra, The Asphalt Jungle) also wrote westerns. His 1930 novel Saint Johnson is based on the Tombstone legend, starring a fictional analogue for Wyatt Earp, who had only recently died. Universal Pictures turned the novel in to Edward L. Cahn's Law and Order, an early collaboration between star Walter Huston and co-writer John Huston. I've never read Saint Johnson and only dimly remember seeing some of the Cahn film when I was a kid, but my understanding is that Nathan Juran's 1953 film is a remake almost in name only. If the film is remembered it's mainly because Ronald Reagan starred as Frame Johnson, the Earp counterpart. He's actually pretty good as a stone-cold laconic lawman who wants to get away from that life and doesn't care what people think of him for doing so. Having cleaned up Tombstone, Frame decides to move on to Cottonwood, accompanied by brothers Luke (Alex Nicol) and hotheaded Jimmy (Russell Johnson), as well as their own personal undertaker, who sees no future in Tombstone after the Johnsons have annihilated the outlaw element. In Cottonwood Frame just wants to start a ranch and settle down with his girl -- Dorothy Malone's term of endearment for him is "You're big, you're ugly and you're stupid and I happen be in love with you" -- but the Johnson blood is inflamed by the unjust domination of Cottonwood by the Durling brothers, Kurt (Preston Foster) and Frank (Dennis Weaver), and their pet sheriff. Frame tries to keep out of it as long as he can, but when Luke is killed, and while Jimmy flirts dangerously with Frank Durling's sister, Frame enters the fray.

Interestingly, the ultimate showdown isn't between Johnsons and Durlings, but between Frame and Jimmy, who kills Frank Durling when caught with Frank's sister. Frame believes in the rule of law -- and it may alarm Reagan's idolators today to see the great man enforcing an aggressive gun-control policy in Cottonwood -- and so is determined to make sure that Jimmy stands trial -- his girl will testify in his favor so he'd likely get off if he isn't lynched -- but the Durling faction paradoxically breaks him out of jail in order to discredit Frame. Jimmy is a borderline misfit who'd joined a lynch mob himself earlier in the picture. He's turbulent, impulsive and impatient with a yearning for peace on Frame's part that sometimes looks like cowardice to the younger man. It's worth noting here, in light of Russell Johnson's now-total identification with the Professor on Gilligan's Island, that before that show he had become virtually typecast as a heavy on TV westerns. He seemed to project a certain mean weakness of character that here, early in his career but possibly his biggest and best role in movies, is redeemed by a romantic spirit. There's a certain anticlimactic integrity to Law and Order as it retreats from its fratricidal setup. Fugitive Jimmy wounds Frame, who refuses to draw on him, and immediately repents and surrenders to the happy ending awaiting all the surviving Johnsons. The film isn't much more than a B movie, but Juran directs with satisfying efficiency, apart from an overblown brawl between Reagan and Foster's stuntmen, and the film looks good overall. Reagan reportedly didn't think much of the film, probably seeing it as a comedown from his Warner Bros. pictures, but it's a perfectly respectable oater with a decent cast -- young Dennis Weaver is especially nasty --  that suggests that the future President wasn't the best judge of his own work.