skjam | Entries tagged with california

The Adventures of Rex and Rinty (1935) dir. Ford Beebe

On the island of Sujan in the Indian Ocean, the natives worship the horse god. They venerate all horses, but only one is the incarnation of the horse god, the God-Horse Rex, King of the Wild Horses (Rex). Wealthy and unscrupulous polo player Crawford (Harry Woods) has come to buy some of the island's fine horses, but high priest Tanaga (Mischa Auer) would never part with one of the sacred animals for mere money, and especially not Rex! Crawford contrives to steal the God-Horse, and succeeds but abandons one of his henchmen for dead.

No sooner has Crawford gotten Rex to his ranch in the hill country of California than the wily horse escapes. He soon makes friends with Rinty (Rin-Tin-Tin Jr.), a homeless German Shepherd. The two intelligent animals find some refuge at the Bruce Riding Academy, run by Mr. Bruce (Allan Cavan) and his daughter Dorothy (Norma Taylor). The riding academy employs bumbling stable hand Jensen (Smiley Burnette) and also stable the horses of popular and goodhearted polo player Frank Bradley (Kane Richmond).

Frank and Dorothy win over the animals with their kindness and good hearts. But Crawford is determined to have Rex back and break him into a proper polo horse by any means necessary.

To make things more complicated, the abandoned henchman shows up; he's been promised his life with be spared if he helps Sujan native Pasha (Pedro Regas) rescue Rex and restore the God-Horse to the island.

This sets the stage for multiple chases, abductions, fistfights, fires and general excitement before Rex is returned to Sujan, only to face one last test of his godhood.

This 12-episode black and white serial was the next to last produced by the Mascot studio, and the second teaming up the two animal stars. Rin Tin Tin Jr. was of course the son of the great movie star who'd passed in 1932.

While Rex and Rinty are depicted as being smart for their respective species, to the point of uncanniness for Rinty, their stunts are still within the plausible limits of animals. On the other hand, there is a fantasy element. Sujan is depicted as being in the same spot Seychelles is in the real world, but its culture is nothing like the real-world country. Also, Pasha has a mental link to Tanaga, able to report back to the high priest from across the globe. In general, the treatment of the Sujanese isn't bad by 1930s standards.

This is middling stuff as serials go, with okay action but dull characters. Crawford just never makes "evil polo player" come across as over the top as that phrase would indicate. There's at least one blantant cliffhanger copout at the end of Episode 11/beginning of Episode 12.

Content note: Loads of violence, some lethal (first corpse in Episode 6) but no animals die. Be aware though that animals are frequently in peril, and there's what amounts to animal abuse. One child in peril, he's fine though. Sexism only in that Dorothy is the only plot-relevant female character.

This is not the best Rin Tin Tin serial, so you may want to wait until you need it to complete a checklist (Ralph Byrd has a cameo as a forest ranger!)

Current Location: Sujan, somewhere in the Indian Ocean
Current Music: "Horsetamer's Daughter"

Larceny in Her Heart (1946) dir. Sam Newfield

Noted private detective Michael Shayne (Hugh Beaumont) and his adoring if sarcastic secretary Phyllis "Phil" Hamilton (Cheryl Walker) are five minutes away from starting a two-week vacation visiting her aunt in Niagra. Naturally, that's when a wealthy would-be client walks through the door. Burton Stallings (Gordon Richards) wants Mike to find his missing stepdaughter Helen (Marie Hannon). He gives Mike a photo of the missing girl and a $500 retainer check, then goes out for some urgent business. Phil reminds Mike they've been planning this vacation for a long time, but Mike could really use the 5 Cs. Phil goes home to pack.

While his secretary is out, Mike suddenly receives a new visitor, a young woman who's stinking drunk and only manages to slur that she needs to see Michael Shayne before passing out. He puts her on the couch in his apartment (the front room of which is his office) and notices that she looks remarkably like the photograph he was given. Wow, that was easy.

When Phil returns, Mike tells her he's got a hot lead, so he should be done within 48 hours, and drives her to the train station. When he gets back to his apartment, though, his guest is dead--strangled! Worse, the cops, led by Detective Sergeant Pete Rafferty (Ralph Dunn), have received notice of a disturbance here, and Rafferty is hopeful that this time, finally, he'll prove Shayne is a crook. Mike manages to trick them into leaving, but recruits his reporter friend Tim Rourke (Paul Bryar) to help him move the body so he won't be in jail while he investigates the murder.

This results in the corpse disappearing and reappearing at inconvenient moments, another corpse popping up, and eventually Michael Shayne having to be committed to a sanitarium for alcoholics.

This was the second of five Michael Shayne movies produced by PRC, a low budget studio known for producing short B-movies (this one's just over an hour long.) Hugh Beaument (who older readers like me may best remember as Ward Cleaver in Leave It to Beaver) plays Shayne as a light-hearted wisecracker who's in love with Phil, but still willing to flirt with other pretty women when the opportunity comes up. Mike's kind of callous about murder, treating the two deaths as more of a personal inconvenience than tragedies.

Mike does several blatantly illegal things over the course of the movie, but suffers no legal consequences. Rafferty only manages to get one cuff on him before being told he can't arrest Shayne. On the other hand, his investigation does get Mike beat up a few times, so he's not getting off entirely unscathed.

Content note: Murder, fisticuffs. Alcoholism, period treatment of alcoholic patients that may disturb some viewers. Mike is shirtless a couple of times. Teens on up should be okay except for the medical scenes.

This is light mystery good for an hour's entertainment, but not much deeper than that. It would make a good double feature with a more serious crime drama. See if you can get the Classic Flix restoration for the best viewing experience.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) dir. Steven Spielberg

Elliott (Henry Thomas) is a middle child. He's old enough to want to participate in his teen brother Michael's (Robert MacNaughton) Dungeons and Dragons game, but not old enough to be welcome there. He thinks of his little sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore) as babyish, and hasn't noticed yet how smart she is. The kids quarrel a lot, exasperating their separated mother Mary (Dee Wallace). But Elliott is about to become one of the most important little boys on Earth. An alien has been stranded near their Northern California suburb, and Elliott is the key to saving this extra-terrestrial.

Somehow, I had just never gotten around to seeing this much-beloved movie during the year it ran in theaters or on TV or home video. My knowledge of it was all from pop culture references and ripoffs. So it's nice that I was randomly challenged to finally give it a watch.

E.T., as it will come to be known, is a member of a group of peaceful explorers who were examining an Earth forest when the ship was forced to take off before meddling humans could get to close. In the excitement, E.T. was left behind, and evidently the aliens do not possess a way to return to the same coordinates. E.T. senses a kindred spirit in the nearby town, and slowly reveals itself to the shocked pre-teen.

Elliott is forced to admit the existence of the alien to his siblings--despite their own tensions, they quickly bond over protecting the visitor. They try to hide E.T. from their mother, though Gertie tries the other approach and Mary completely misses what's going on due to her own pressing concerns. Meanwhile, shadowy figures infiltrate the neighborhood, led by the mysterious Keys (Peter Coyote).

E.T. has seemingly miraculous powers, but separation from its people is slowly killing it. The kids need to help it "phone home." Fortuitously, Halloween has arrived, making it easier for weird creatures to go out on the street, but will it be too late?

Good: Neat special effects, excellent music, some lovely shots. Keeping the government agents shadowy and a bit sinister until the last third of the movie works well. I also like that said agents turn out to be well-meaning, if overbearing and not willing to listen closely enough to the children.

Oh, and one of the first D&D scenes in media and mostly positive!

Less good: I found my attention wandering during the early "cute kid" scenes. Elliott seems a little too invested in E.T. being "a boy" (officially, its species does not have gender as we understand it.)

Content note: Some naughty language from children. E.T. comes close to dying and Elliott suffers with him. Younger children should have a grownup for support during darker moments.

I think I missed the window to consider this a really great movie, but it is pretty good and suitable for families to watch together (if your family is okay with "penis-breath" as dialogue.)

Current Mood: hot
Current Music: "Flow"

The Return of Dracula (1958) dir. Paul Landres

It is a known fact that Count Dracula (Francis Lederer) is a real person, a vampire who drains the blood of the living and creates others of his kind. He's been terrorizing central Europe for decades, evading attempts to permanently destroy him. At the beginning of the movie, a well-trained and disciplined squad of government vampire hunters just misses Dracula as he boards a train towards his next destination. As it happens, also aboard the train is one Bellac Gordal, an artist who has been given permission to emigrate to America. Bellac bears a resemblance to the vampire. Dracula seizes the opportunity to kill and replace Bellac to go to a new country where no one will be prepared for him.

Once in America, "Bellac" comes to Carleton, California, a small town where his cousin Cora Mayberry (Greta Granstedt) lives. Cora moved to America as a child, and is fully Americanized down to her Californian accent. A widow, Cora takes in sewing to supplement her income, and lives with her teenage daughter Rachel (Norma Eberhardt) and preteen son Mickey (Jimmy Baird). Rachel and next door neighbor Tim Hansen (Ray Stricklyn) are sweet on each other, and Tim does chauffeuring of the family members as he has a car. Mickey's primary interest is playing with his cat Nugget, which has the bad habit of exploring the local dangerous cave. (Looks like an attempt at mining was made there, but no one ever calls it "the mine.")

Cora barely recognizes her cousin, but it has been decades since she's seen Bellac and no photographs of him as an adult. He was peculiar even as a child, and between being a foreigner and an artist, his eccentricities are easily shrugged off.

Dracula installs his coffin in the nearby cave, and kills Nugget (offscreen) for trespassing. (See, folks, this is why you shouldn't have an outdoor cat.) He soon kills and turns lovely but blind local girl Jennie Blake (Virginia Vincent) into one of the undead, but his true target is Rachel, who he wants to be his eternal companion. This is played almost as creepy as it sounds.

The vampire doesn't have it all his own way. John Merriman (John Wengraf), a representative of the European Police Agency and one of the vampire hunters we saw earlier, has figured out that Dracula was one of the immigration group on the train an unidentified corpse was thrown out of, and is working with the American immigration agency to check up on Bellac. Mack Bryant (Charles Tannen) doesn't seem to catch on that Cora knows more about Bellac's childhood than he does, but does snap a picture of the immigrant with his concealed camera.

Dracula orders Jennie to murder Bryant in case he has second thoughts, but this just tells Merriman he's on the right track. Especially when it turns out that Bellac doesn't show up on film.

The forces of law and the church start closing in on Dracula on Halloween night, but will they be in time to save Rachel?

This is a solid B-movie. Lederer is a sharp presence who knows how to stare creepily--not quite Lugosi level, but well enough. This Dracula has kept up with the times and knows how to not look or act entirely out of place but just enough to be uncanny but explainable. His interest in teenage girls is depicted as predatory rather than romantic. He might speak prettily but that isn't the behavior of someone who wants an actual partner. A nice touch is that while we never see Dracula painting as part of his cover as an artist, we do eventually see that he has been painting, and why we have not seen it before.

Wengraf is also good and understated as the experienced vampire hunter. He doesn't make amateur mistakes like trying to confront Dracula while the monster is awake and able to fight back.

The rest of the cast ranges from adequate to okay. Mickey and his juvenile antics are on screen surprisingly little, so he doesn't overstay his welcome. The teen romance angle is a bit more wearisome, but appropriately awkward and believable. Cora should probably be more suspicious of Bellac than she is, with all the odd hints, but she's juggling a lot of balls.

The one character I would like to have seen more of was Jennie post-vampirism. She can now "see" after years of blindness and being basically bedridden. What's she doing with her nights besides being Dracula's attack dog?

Special effects are kept to a minimum to keep the budget down. No elaborate makeup, dry ice, a couple of camera tricks. There's one special shock moment, but I won't spoil it in this paragraph. This works pretty well.

Political: While it's never directly said, it's implied that the Central European country Bellac and Cora come from is a Communist one (or became one since Cora left) as there's a frequent mention of how Bellac wasn't "free" there. The immigration agent is surprisingly polite and deferential compared to current day portrayals.

Content note: Several deaths, a couple bloody. A cat dies horribly offscreen. That whole thing with Dracula preying on teenage girls. Teenagers on up should be okay, and younger watchers with adult guidance.

Overall: Again, a solid B-movie. The Halloween timing of the story makes it a good choice for a spooky season watch that's not too graphic or likely to cause nightmares.

Clueless (1995) dir. Amy Heckerling

Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) is popular, pretty and well off, which is important if you attend high school in Beverly Hills. Her father Mel (Dan Hedaya) is a prominent litigation attorney, but Cher's mother passed in a tragic liposuction accident when she was little. There was a short remarriage for Mel, but it didn't work out and the only reminder of it is that Mel bonded with temporary stepson Josh (Paul Rudd), who's now moved closer by to attend college. Josh and Cher don't get along, but mostly tolerate each other for Mel's sake.

Cher isn't much for book learning, but is good at persuasion and negotiation and her heart is in approximately the right place, as seen in her poorly prepared but heartfelt debate performance on welcoming refugees to the United States. When her attempt to raise her quarterly grades via negotiation hits a snag in the person of grumpy teacher Mr. Hall (Wallace Shawn), Cher comes up with the idea of convincing him and lonely social studies teacher Miss Geist (Twink Caplan) that the other likes them and they should consider dating.

This matchmaking attempt works, Mr. Hall's improved happiness makes him amenable to a grade raise, and the entire student body benefits from the sunnier atmosphere. A win-win situation, and Cher learns that doing good feels good, so sets out on her next project, a makeover for dorky new student Tai (Brittany Murphy). That goes well at first too, initially.

But the bitter truth is that not all problems can be solved with negotiation. Sometimes you don't get what you want, and there are people who are simply unpersuadable. Cher's going to learn some sad lessons and have a less good time before a happy ending can be reached.

This romantic comedy is loosely based on the novel Emma by Jane Austen, with a setting change and making the main character and her social group teenagers. It did very well with young audiences, and spawned a television series.

Cher's a fun character. She's bright-spirited, funny, and trying her best. Unfortunately, her self-absorption (not selfishness) and failure to understand the actual personalities of the people she's trying to matchmake often get in the way of her good intentions, and she behaves carelessly (like driving without a license) because she assumes she can talk her way out of trouble.

In some ways, this is very much a movie of its time. Nineties music and fashion is dominant, for both good ("Kids in America") and ill (extra-baggy, saggy pants for boys). 2020s teenagers watching this movie for the first time might not realize that most of the high school students having cell phones is meant to show how rich and spoiled they are. (A good old-fashioned payphone comes in handy at one point.) Also, Cher has a personal computer which she uses...to check her wardrobe for good matches.

Content note: There's a couple of glimpses of girls in underwear, and some of the outfits are risqué. There's sex talk and jokes, and two of the underage characters are mentioned as having lost their virginity. Underage characters smoke and drink, and there's reference to illegal drugs. A boy tries to force himself on Cher and reacts badly to rejection, tossing her out of the car, after which she's mugged (no physical violence.) Tai is (jokingly?) pushed partway over a high place's railing. One of the characters is revealed to be gay, and another is heavily assumed to be a lesbian due to stereotypes. While Cher is not ever shown to be racist, she does show ethnic insensitivity (and is properly anguished when that's pointed out) and uses an ableist slur for herself. Parents of younger teens might want to screen it first.

Overall, a fun movie, and I suspect I would have liked it even more if I'd been in the target audience in the 1990s. Older teens who like the Marvel movies might find Paul Rudd's performance especially interesting.