Waterhole #3

Throw together elements of It's a Mad, Mad World, Mackenna's Gold, and The Great Race and more or less you get 1967's Waterhole # 3. It comes from my not so favorite sub-genre, the comedic western, but that isn't what bothered me the most. Two major flaws trip up this otherwise pretty decent western.

A U.S. Army gold shipment of four gold bars valued at $100,000 is stolen by a gang and buried near a waterhole by their leader, Doc Quinlen (Roy Jenson). Through a run-in that gets violent quickly, gambler Lewton Cole (James Coburn) discovers a map that will lead him to the buried gold, but he's obviously not the only one looking for it. He steals a horse from Sheriff John Copperud (Carroll O'Connor) and heads off into the desert for the gold. Copperud and his daughter, Billee (Margaret Blye), are not far behind, both with their own motivations. Not far behind them? The double-crossed members of the gang and a cavalry troop looking to get its gold shipment back.

As a fan of westerns, I'll give them all a try; epic or small scale, heavy on action or more artsy, deathly serious or straight comedy. Mostly I was intrigued by this one because of the cast despite all the mixed to negative reviews I was reading. Even Netflix didn't think I'd love it, much less like it too much. For a comedic western, it isn't grating like so many other efforts. It is genuinely funny at times. The cast is too talented for it not to be at least funny by accident, even unintentionally. So where does it go wrong? Pick your poison. There's two guesses, one annoying and one somewhat ethically questionable.

Using the term 'ethically questionable' in any review sounds a little off to me, but it's all I can come up. As Coburn's Lewton heads for the gold in the desert, he's caught in the process of stealing O'Connor's horse, meeting Blye's Billee in the process. He forces himself on her, and even though she kisses back because his kiss must be just so magical....it's a rape scene. Lewton rapes Billee. So how to follow it up? Make it a funny rape scene. In a comedic western, I object to a main character raping a woman. Check that, I object to any character doing that, but you get my point. Is that worth being funny over? I don't care if it's a goofy, stupid movie. I felt funny rooting for Coburn's character after that scene. Oh, and he basically does the same thing toward the end of the movie. It hit a sour note with me, her father more interested in the gold, Billee discovering she loves him after being raped, Lewton playing it off like it was nothing. Ah, rape, one of the lighter topics to deal with.

Now in comparison to a comedic rape, my next objection is going to sound stupid and particularly tame. Making this comedic western more folksy and goofy is country singer Roger Miller's song Waterhole #3 (Code of the West) that basically plays over all the action in the 96-minute movie. Nothing like a folk country western song to rev things up! It talks about killing and raping not being so bad, and does a fantastic job of describing everything going on on-screen, what we've seen and what we're about to see. It's like closed captioning on steroids and set to a tune. Trying to show everyone how awful the song is, I of course cannot find a link to it anywhere on the plains of the Internet. Maybe that's a good thing.

The thing preventing me from completely trashing this movie was the cast. That whole rape thing aside, Coburn brings a certain charm to Lewton, a no-account gambler who's able to manipulate and twist anyone around him. O'Connor too gets to ham it up as the not-so-honest Honest John, Sheriff of Integrity, Arizona. The more obvious physical humor aside, I enjoyed Coburn and O'Connor's back and forth more than anything. In a horrifically written character, Blye is nice eye candy as Billee. Claude Akins plays Sgt. Fugger, the inside man on the robbery, with Jenson and Timothy Carey as the imposing but slow Hilb rounding out the gang. Bruce Dern is funny in his one scene as Tippen, the deputy who disappears on a never-seen posse. James Whitmore appears for two scenes as cavalry captain Shipley, while Joan Blondell is funny as Lavinia, the owner of a whorehouse where everything comes crashing down.

Too bad overall, two bad choices crippling this movie's chances. Take the incredibly unfunny rape/revenge storyline out, replace Miller's mind-numbing score, and you've got a pretty decent comedic western. That pains me a little to say. I'm not typically a fan of comedy being thrown in with a western, but Coburn and O'Connor make this at least partially worth watching. They're very good together, very funny, but it's still a mess of a movie.

Waterhole #3 <---Youtube clip (1967): **/****

Kona Coast

An underrated actor who shot to fame via a 1950s TV show and eventually settled into a career playing bad guys and heavies, Richard Boone doesn't get the credit he deserves much of the time. His role as Paladin, a traveling gunman in Have Gun Will Travel, was ahead of its time during the show's six-year run. He specialized playing some truly bad dudes in his movie roles, but even his good guys had an edge to them that screamed 'Don't mess with me!' I grew up watching him as Sam Houston in John Wayne's The Alamo and as the vicious leader of a brutal gang in Big Jake so I've always been a fan.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, Boone often got his best work as part of a bigger ensemble.  He could play both good and bad, almost always making his characters interesting to watch, keeping you guessing as to what they're really up to.  They weren't always good movies, but they can't all be winners, right? With that, I can introduce 1968's Kona Coast, a movie with Boone in the lead. This movie was awful, just plain awful. I watched it mostly for Boone's presence, but even he can't save this one.

A goods transporter and a known and respected man in Hawaii, Sam Moran (Boone) is someone who is not to be tangled with. He always gets the job done no matter the difficulty. Sam gets a call one day from a young woman clearly stoned out of her mind. She turns up dead on the shore one day, needle tracks up and down her arm.  The police (no Steve McGarrett in sight) are curious why he's so interested, Sam revealing the young woman is his estranged daughter. Who gave her the drugs? Sam intends to find out, and he doesn't have any of the limitations on him the police do. Who is responsible? A man named Kryder (Steve Ihnat), a rich, spoiled nut who organizes parties where girls are given the chance to pump their systems with as much drugs as they want. Watch out, Mr. Kryder, here comes Sam Moran.

My first thought when this showed up on TCM's schedule in August was a positive one. Richard Boone gunning for the bad guys who killed his daughter? And it is in Hawaii? Translated to me, that sounded like an early version of Death Wish with a tropical setting as opposed to dirty early 1970s New York City. I was even more encouraged when the IMDB rating came in at a low 4.4 out of 10. I love a good bad movie. Well, it is bad. But it's not even bad enough to enjoy for some laughs. I couldn't have been more wrong about this movie. I ended up fast-forwarding through huge chunks of an already short 93-minute movie.

The reasoning for that goes two ways. Made in Hawaii in 1968, the movie does serve as a very cool, very stylish look at Hawaii in a different time. As a fan of the original Hawaii Five-O TV series, I'm a sucker for that so I did enjoy seeing all kinds of cool different locations in Hawaii.  The bigger issue is that the story never really develops into anything.  I counted three different montages of Boone's Moran walking around, talking to people, "investigating," and serving as our tour guide for 1968 Hawaii.  That would be fine in most situations, but not this one. Instead, Moran ends up on one of the smaller Hawaiian Islands where he can't get back to Honolulu.  Party detour! That whole murder investigation of his daughter gets put on hold while he parties, drinks and carouses with a whole bunch of different ladies.

Now if you couldn't tell from my lead for the review here, I'm a fan of Richard Boone.  This movie would not be a great introduction to Boone's otherwise pretty solid career.  Like the movie itself, his Sam Moran character is just surreal.  For one thing, he wears a ridiculous looking yellow windbreaker the whole movie with some short shorts.  That's quite a look for anyone, much less an angry, pissed off gunning for his estranged daughter's murderers.  That isn't enough though. The "script" calls for Sam to be all that is man. It gives him this animal magnetism that attracts women left and right (ex-wife Vera Miles, young and beautiful Gina Villines) without any rhyme or reason. Surreal is all I can come up with. Then, snap your finger, he's pissed off again and looking for revenge.

Writing this review is making me realize how bad this movie really was.  Sometimes you watch a bad movie and realize, but I always think about it some, maybe realizing it wasn't as bad as I originally thought. With Kona Coast? Not so much. It's awful.  Joan Blondell, Chips Rafferty and Kent Smith all got roped into this dreck in supporting roles, making me question how bad they needed the work. This was just bad. Weird 1960s psychedelic scenes, drifting, meandering storyline, wasted cast, and basically only worthwhile to see Hawaii.  It's hard to mess that part up.

Kona Coast <---trailer (1968): */****

Cry Havoc

One of the United State's most embarrassing military defeats in our country's short history came at the beginning of WWII in the Philippines at Bataan and Corregidor.  Overwhelmed in the months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, American forces in the Pacific were forced to improvise, fighting back against the Japanese in losing efforts with little supplies and no guarantees of reinforcements.  After a four-month siege, surviving forces surrendered and became part of the infamous Bataan Death March. One of the darkest chapters in U.S. military history has been the basis for several movies, including 1943's Cry 'Havoc.'

Released in 1943, this Richard Thorpe-directed drama is typical (mostly in a good way) of most war movies released while the war was very much still up for grabs as fighting raged on in Europe and the Pacific. At the homefront, American audiences went to the movies and saw stories like this in hopes of boosting the war effort, seeing the courageous actions of our soldiers.  There's a long list of similar movies -- check it HERE -- but this one gets points for its originality in its propaganda message, even if it is a somewhat tamed message. In a time-span where Rosie the Riveter was an instantly recognizable figure, Cry Havoc is told from the perspective of the female personnel on Bataan.

Working at an army hospital some 25 miles from the front line on the Bataan peninsula, Army personnel Capt. Marsh (Fay Bainter), Lt. Smith (Margaret Sullavan), Flo (Marsha Hunt), and cook Sadie (Connie Gilchrist) are part of a dwindling force helping the wounded American and Filipino forces, both those wounded in combat and those sick from disease. As thousands of people try to get off the peninsula before the Japanese overrun Bataan, the hospital receives nine female volunteers from a local city to help with the wounded, among them Pat (Ann Sothern), a flirty but tough New Yorker and Grace (Joan Blondell), a burlesque dancer. With what little medical knowledge they have, the limited staff keeps on working as the siege continues. A Japanese victory seems inevitable, but can they be saved in time?

Excluding a few throwaway lines from wounded soldiers, there are NO male characters here.  Thorpe's story focuses exclusively on the lives of the 13 female soldiers and volunteers during the Bataan siege. Along with those already listed, there is Connie (Ella Raines), a young woman who is the most visibly shaken at the approaching war, Helen (Frances Gifford), a married woman who dreams of seeing her husband, Nydia (Diana Lewis), a naive, innocent Southern belle, two sisters, Andra (Heather Angel) and Sue (Dorothy Morris), Steve (Gloria Grafton), and Lusita (Fely Franquelli), a young Filipino woman. With so many characters, not all of them are given large roles, but of the supporting parts Raines, Gifford, Lewis and Angel come off the best with the screentime they do have.

This was a movie based off a play from Allan Kenward, much of the story being set in the underground, damp dugout where these women live during the siege. It was filmed in black and white and does its best to show that not just the men are fighting for the cause at this early stage in WWII.  One monologue comes from Sothern's Pat, pointing out on a map to the characters (and to us as the viewer) exactly what happened during the Bataan campaign.  Because it's always nice to see something different out of a familiar genre -- in this case World War II -- I really enjoyed the movie.  I'll go into this more later, but there is a boatload of strong female characters forced to deal with a hellacious situation with a propaganda message that never goes overboard.  At one point when the battle is all but lost, all the volunteers decide to stick it out rather than leave for safety. The simple scene is not overdone, just this small group that has bonded so well deciding to sacrifice themselves to help save others.

That said, the story and the portrayal of the women comes off as a little out of a soap opera.  This is war from the losing perspective, and 'Havoc' still finds a way to make these women catty in their interactions.  Sullavan's tough, hard-edged Lt. Smith is dying of malignant malaria and has secretly married an Army officer (heard but never seen). Sothern's Pat is quite interested in Lt. Holt, thinking there's no way he could even be interested in Smith. It was disappointing that with a story as potentially powerful as the one being dealt with that it resorts to a love triangle.  This is by no means the main focus of the story, but enough time is spent focused on that angle that the movie does suffer a bit.

This next statement comes along knowing that a 1943 movie released to American audiences is not going to be the most realistic portrayal of the Bataan situation.  On the other hand, the story is whitewashed a bit much for my liking.  Yes, I understand, the reality would horrify anyone seeing the movie.  The situation for these nurses and volunteers never seems as horrific as it should. My assumption going in was that this group would eventually start getting picked off one-by-one like 1943's Bataan (this story from the male perspective).  Instead, most of the ladies make it to the end and surrender to advancing Japanese forces.  They march out of their dugout proudly with their hands over their heads, Sothern's Pat and Sullavan's Smitty putting their differences aside.

The ending does not come across as well as it should have, some of that being chalked up to the knowledge we have now of what would have happened to these women.  Seeing the actual actions would have traumatized movie audiences.  These women would have been brutally beaten, raped, abused and eventually murdered.  To show this would have been a bad choice -- no doubt about that -- but the ending as is doesn't seem appropriate enough. It tries too hard to end on a positive note when history shows there was no positive note coming. On a brief sidebar, look for a young Robert Mitchum as a wounded soldier in an air raid. Look quick though, or you'll miss him.

Cry 'Havoc' <---TCM trailer (1943): ***/**** 

Advance to the Rear

Comedies seem to go through their ups and down patches like any genre movie does.  In the last 10 years or so, R-rated comedies have seen a resurgence in popularity while in the 1990s it was romantic comedies and in the 1980s raucous, mind-numbingly stupid sex comedies.  The 1970s and even the tail end of the 1960s? I guess it depends on the movie.  Prior to that though in the age of big screen spectacles and epics, there was an innocence to comedies that was lost over the years.  Epic comedies (how weird does that sound?) like The Great Race, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World, The Russians are Coming and many more dominated movies.

Take 1964's Advance to the Rear, a comedic spoof of one of the funniest times in American history...the Civil War. There's no way that should work, right?  America's bloodiest conflict doesn't seem like its ripe for the picking for a big-screen spoof.  Somehow it does though, even if it isn't on the level of the previously mentioned comedies.  It's no classic, but it accomplishes what it sets out to do.  It is funny in a ridiculously stupid way, full of slapstick humor, some romance, and a cast full of recognizable names, all of them playing bumbling idiots. That's a formula for success if there ever was one.

It's 1862, and lawyer turned infantry soldier Captain Jared Heath (Glenn Ford) is the aide to a veteran of West Point and all-around clueless officer, Colonel Claude Brackenbury (Melvyn Douglas). Supposed to lead an attack on a Confederate position, Brackenbury's regiment instead turns and runs from the field of battle thanks to a simple miscommunication.  The unit is made an example of for their cowardice and receives order to go west to a remote outpost, also taking along misfits and screw-ups from other units in the Union army.  Dubbed Company Q, they head west by riverboat. Confederate intelligence catches wind of the new unit and assumes they're some sort of specialized unit meant to perform a dangerous mission. A beautiful Confederate spy, Martha Lou Williams (Stella Stevens), is sent west to investigate, and see exactly what these "special soldiers" are up to.

Slapstick comedy is completely hit-or-miss with me. I grew up watching The Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy shorts so I do like some of it.  But if it isn't handled correctly, it's going to go poorly, and do it fast.  The problem is that you have to fully commit to doing the slapstick so you open things up to look completely stupid if it isn't funny.  The physical humor here isn't bad, but it certainly isn't good either.  Director George Marshall uses all sorts of wacky techniques, almost telling us when to laugh. Sound effects seem like they were used from a Batman TV episode and are painfully out of place. A soldier skis down a hill on tree branch skis? Add the sound of a plane taking off. Someone goes flying through the air? Cue the sound barrier being broken. Sound effects and sped-up action screams out desperation to me, and there's a good amount of it here.

When I think of Glenn Ford, I typically think of an underrated dramatic actor, someone able to move across genres and be believable and successful in all types of movies.  Comedy?  Not really the first thing that comes to mind.  I was pleasantly surprised then when Ford as Capt. Jared Heath, a ladies man and the rare competent soldier in the bunch, ends up carrying the movie.  By far, he's the biggest bright spot going for this 1960s comedy.  He delivers his lines in such a deadpan fashion while also handling the more physical scenes that it seems effortless.  Ford has a great chemistry with the always beautiful Stella Stevens (who poses as a showgirl briefly) in the romantic scenes and also with Douglas' clueless Colonel Brackenbury, the experienced officer who can't stand his aide and his way of going about things.  Their exchanges of cracks back and forth help make up for some of the worst examples of slapstick, as do the scenes with Ford and Stevens.  Ford's Heath quickly figures out she's a Confederate spy, but because he wants to marry her lets it go by the wayside. I don't blame him.

There was some wasted potential with the supporting cast to develop them into some better, even funnier characters.  Jim Backus and Whit Bissell are the equally idiotic Union generals who send Company Q out west only to realize they've sent them to lead an actual dangerous mission that could turn the tide of the war. Joan Blondell plays Easy Jenny, the leader of the showgirls who take a shining to Heath and his men. Michael Pate has a small part as Charlie Thin Elk, an Indian chief who went to West Point in the 1830s. James Griffith plays Hugo Zattig, the leader of a group of Confederate renegades. As for Company Q, there's Alan Hale Jr. as Sgt. Davis, Andrew Prine as Pvt. Selous, always hiccuping, and Jesse Pearson as Cpl. Geary, a soldier who always has horses following him around because of his unique smell. There were some other interesting soldiers -- a klepto, a firebug, a boxer, a brawler -- who are introduced but never get much to do.  If the movie was longer (it's only 100 minutes) like other 60s comedies, it's safe to say there would be some more development among Company Q.

It feels funny watching a Civil War comedy no matter how much of the humor does or doesn't work.  Marshall films it in a great-looking widescreen fashion -- in black and white at that -- making it feel like an epic action/adventure flick, not a spoof.  It is funny at times, but not as funny as it could have been.  I wanted to like the movie more than I did.  It's decent enough but nothing more. Also worth watching to see John Wayne's stunt man Chuck Roberson get a speaking role as a Confederate guerrilla. It is available to watch at Youtube starting HERE.

Advance to the Rear <--- TCM trailer (1964): ** 1/2 /****