Trailers: P.J., The Groundstar Conspiracy
The first of my two Peppards, and I liked this a lot. Peppard is a classic semi-ordinary guy who gets mixed up in a complicated and deadly situation. His character Reno is a retired boxer who has decided to become a writer. He takes a job as a tutor for a young boy and it turns out to be way more trouble than he bargained for because the boy’s family is connected to a fascist group that’s planning to take over Europe (one of whom is played by The Orson Welles, who is in the movie for like five minutes). Finding himself framed for his best friend’s murder, Reno and the boy’s mother try to find her now kidnapped child while being hunted all around France. This was really engaging and Peppard is a great leading man.
Trailers: 23 Paces to Baker Street; Sleep, My Love
The plot of this movie resembles a whole lot of the erotic thrillers of the 80s and 90s, though this is no erotic thriller – if only the defense attorney had been a woman. This moves kind of slow, and I could take or leave the whodunit plot, but there’s still some good stuff going on and it really kicks into gear by the third act. Madeleine Sherwood (who I’d only ever seen as Sister Woman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) is by far the MVP of this movie, playing the mother of a convicted and recently released rapist and murderer. What a performance!
Trailers: The Deadly Trap, Fargo
My goodness, this was silly! And reminded me a bit of the Star Trek episode “The Way to Eden” (the one with the space hippies). George Maharis, who is the real life person Rick Dalton is a proxy for, was less interesting to me here (until the final scene) than the other three actors who play his accomplices – Faye Dunaway (just a few months before Bonnie & Clyde), Michael Parks (a Tarantino regular), and Robert Walker Jr. (who I remembered from the “Charlie X” episode of Star Trek). Everyone seems to be having a good time here and “understands the assignment,” as they say – especially Michael Parks, who is the most entertaining of the four young characters. He and Maharis, Dunaway and Walker play beach bums who, out of boredom and through a series of misunderstandings, end up kidnapping a former gangster who is now a respectable businessman. Things get more complicated when it turns out no one is that interested in paying the ransom. And it mostly looks like little more than an excuse to poke fun at Middle America and people who are no longer young.
Trailers: Two Flags West, Rio Conchos
I liked this one, even though it has its problems, and I feel like it’s a much better showcase for what kind of actor George Maharis is than The Happening (Land Raiders was Tarantino’s inspiration for “Red Blood, Red Skin” – one of Rick Dalton’s Italian movies). Maharis costars with Telly Savalas and they play estranged brothers of Mexican descent (ahem). Savalas plays a real sumbitch who puts out bounties on Indian scalps and then buys up the land that has been made cheap due to all the conflict. Maharis’s character is adrift, unable or unwilling to return to his home due to the tragic end met by his lover (an end that many people think he caused). There’s some good story here and definitely some good acting, but the movie has inconsistent quality and sometimes looks like it was made for TV. Then there are the Native Americans. I appreciate that the movie acknowledges that these characters have genuine grievances but the movie doesn’t portray them as much more than violent vigilantes.
Trailers: The Hawaiians, 55 Days at Peking
I actually liked this quite a bit. I got weary of Charlton Heston’s character pretty quickly, but I think that’s the idea here – that he’s a fossil, stuck in outdated norms, and he’s also a hypocrite. It’s a pity he’s the main character and we have to spend so much time with him. (He’s actually a teddy bear compared to his sister-in-law, though, and I was thrilled when she was no longer in the movie.) Yvette Mimieux has the same charm she has in Three in the Attic, but the stakes are much higher here. It was nice to see Star Trek: DS9’s James Darren in this, even if he’s in brownface. And George Chakiris is the best part of the movie to me. Every moment he is on screen, I was riveted, and I was very pleased to have called his true role in the film early on. It’s always touchy to deal with white people living in Hawaii, especially when those white people have lived on the land for over a century and feel like they’re just as entitled to it as true natives. This movie deals with a lot of those issues (including Hawaii’s then-new statehood) in a surprisingly thoughtful way. (Side note: I'm bummed I had to use a black and white photo, but just about everything else was either too small or watermarked.)
Trailers: Bunny Lake Is Missing, Strait-Jacket
There’s a pretty cool story here buried in a lot of psychedelic silliness. Chakiris plays a drug-dealing womanizing villain here, but the star of this show is Lana Turner. She plays an actress who is retiring from the stage to get married (to Dan O’Herlihy, archvillain of Halloween III). When her wealthy husband dies, it falls to her to give consent for his adult daughter to marry (at least if the daughter expects to inherit her share of daddy’s fortune). When Stepmom Lana refuses, the daughter and her fiance dose her with psychedelic drugs to have her declared mentally incompetent so they can get married *and* get the money. I liked some of this, especially the ending. A few of the characters wore on my nerves, but Chakiris is a pretty good villain who meets a fitting end.
Trailers: The Crimson Ghost, The Adventures of Captain Marvel
This is a fun little (just under an hour) Roy Rogers western, with some good action sequences. I just wish there were a better version of it to watch. As far as I can tell, there’s no physical version available (except the actual film reels someone is selling on eBay). The only version on streaming (same version on all the platforms) is a TV broadcast, with lots of interstitials of Roy Rogers, Dale Evans and Gene Autry. Which is great, but the fact that it’s a TV broadcast means the movie looks like it was shot on a toaster. I imagine a lot of people don’t like this kind of western, with its total moral clarity and lack of nuance and ambiguity (I found it cloying at times myself), but it’s fascinating to think that there was a time when this was perfect entertainment. All hail Trigger, king of horses!
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