The Raid (1954)

My movie list of hard to find films and hidden gems seems to get shorter every year. One, I'm proud of my persistence in tracking some down that aren't readily available. Two, I'm realizing how many movies I actually watch. Yeah, I kinda have a problem in that department. I read about this Civil War drama years ago when I stumbled across its ridiculously cool tough guy cast. Where'd I find it? Fox Movies Retro On-Demand. Here's 1954's The Raid.

It's fall of 1864 and the tide of the Civil War has fully turned in favor of the Union forces on all fronts. At a prison camp in the northeast, a group of Confederate prisoners led by Major Neal Benton (Van Heflin) plots their escape and manage to break out, hoping to head north into Canada. From there? Hopefully lead raids into Union territory to help ease the pressure on Southern forces. Their first target is a small town in Vermont, St. Albans, that offers several banks just waiting to be knocked off with the funds meant to help the Confederate cause. With his fellow escapees and several other Rebel soldiers hiding out in Canada, Benton puts the plan into play. He starts off posing as a landowner and businessman just visiting St. Albans, but all the while he's putting the pieces together to pull off the successful raid and robbery. There's so many pieces though and success depends on everything going off without a hitch. Can Benton and his Confederates succeed and get out alive in the process?

The American Civil War lasted four years, three weeks and six days between 1861 and 1865 with hundreds of thousands of soldiers killed, wounded and crippled. It is probably the darkest time in American history -- or certainly one of them -- and in general, is a historical era underutilized in film. There just aren't many Civil War movies out there for viewing pleasure. The unfortunate part? A movie like this is a prime example, a true story of a real-life incident. Read through the history books and there are literally hundreds and thousands of stories like this just waiting to be told. Sure, there are the major battles like Gettysburg, Shiloh and Antietam, but what about stories like these? Read about the real-life raid HERE if you're curious.

I was very glad to finally track this one down. From director Hugo Fregonese, 'Raid' clocks in at a crisp 83 minutes and has that distinct B-movie feel but is never held down by its relatively small scale and budget. It's dark and dirty and nasty with the raid being unleashed partially as a counter to Sherman's march through Georgia. In other words, it's about the war, but it's more too. It's about revenge. Title cards introduce the days as the raid draws closer, Benton's plan being put into action with minute details. Much of the story takes place in the St. Albans set with some brief detours into the prison camp and also across the U.S./Canada border. 'Raid' is content to not be an epic but to tell a little known story that's become a footnote in most Civil War and history books. Nothing flashy, but well done and always interesting.

Now what originally caught my eye with this 1954 Civil War drama was the cast. There's some established stars and some rising stars who would go onto bigger and better things in the late 1950s and into the 1960s and beyond. Heflin is just solid as always, the relative anti-hero and leader of the raid. We learn his family was murdered and his home burned down, the desire for revenge coursing through his body. His men include Lee Marvin as a fiery, unpredictable and possibly unhinged Confederate fanatic, Peter Graves as Benton's loyal, capable second-in-command, James Best, an uncredited Claude Akins and later, John Dierkes. Some cool names working together, giving some variety to the Rebel group.

A big plus to the story is that nothing is black and white. It isn't Confederates good and Union bad or vice versa. It's both. This was war, and there was nothing particularly pleasant about it. We get to meet some of the St. Alban residents, starting with Anne Bancroft (just 23 years old) as a widowed boarding house owner (with young Tommy Rettig playing her son), Richard Boone as a Union officer trying to overcome a mistake he made in combat, and assorted other townspeople from farmers to business owners to preachers. It adds a cool element to the story as we see this raid won't be as easy as planned once Benton gets to meet people around town.

If there is a relative disappointment, it comes in the finale, the actual raid. The quick-moving story builds and builds, and the raid is well done as Fregonese sticks pretty close to the facts of the 1864 raid. Unfortunately, the ending just kinda...well, ends. It's fairly accurate to the truth, but this is one case where maybe stretching the truth even a little would have livened things up a touch. As is, the ending scene is rather abrupt as 'THE END' pops up on the screen. It is still a worthwhile movie but the ending could have been far stronger. Still, it tells a little known slice of Civil War history that simply isn't very well known. Worth tracking down a copy for sure.

The Raid (1954): ** 1/2 /****

Silent Movie

Certain names rise above the genre they're associated with. And when you talk about the comedy genre in Hollywood, few names hold such power, respect and name recognition as Mel Brooks. A director, writer, actor and producer extraordinaire, Brooks did it all with too many classics to even mention to his name. And what do you get with power and an ability to make some serious amounts of cash? A movie like the 1976 comedy Silent Movie.

A very successful movie director, Mel Funn (Brooks) has fallen on some very rough times as he has retreated into a bottle.  After years away from movies, Funn has a script that will hopefully turn his career around. With his friends and sidekicks at his side, Marty Eggs (Marty Feldman) and Dom Bell (Dom DeLuise), Funn heads into Hollywood with his script and convinces a Big Studio executive (Sid Caesar) to back his movie....if he can get some big stars attached to the production. With their work cut out for them, Funn and Co. set out to find enough big movie stars to work with but it's going to be easier said than done. A film studio, Engulf and Devour, has been scooping up struggling movie studios left and right, and they'd like nothing more than to buy up Big Studio too. Can Funn put his drinking problem aside to get his dream movie made? What is that dream movie? Well, Funn intends to make a silent movie. Dun-dun-duh!!!

Ready for a twist? Writing, starring and directing 'Silent,' Brooks is at the helm of an actual....silent movie!!! You know, because there's always so much demand for that throwback feel of a silent movie! It plays as a tribute to the slapstick stars of the silent era like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, even evoking moments of The Three Stooges, The Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, and Laurel and Hardy. Famously, only one word is audibly spoken in this comedy, dialogue cards popping up as our stars discuss and talk on-screen silently. We're introduced to sight gags, musical cues, sound effects throughout the 87-minute running time, a series of jokes on top of each other. Brooks has a ton of fun with those little moments, the soundtrack setting up a joke and then pulling out the rug from under us.

That's all well and good, the tribute working well. But still, I don't think the movie is as funny as the movie thinks it is. The script is interesting, the stars very talented, and a handful of cameos providing some memorable moments. 'Silent' is going for the laughs, but they're not necessarily there in the end. I chuckled a couple times, smiled a bunch, laughed out loud once or twice but at no point did I think I was watching a hilarious, laugh-riddled comedy. None of this is to say it's not good. It is good, but 'Silent' isn't even close to as funny as it think it truly is. Moments work, a sight gag here and there, but as a whole, there's no unifying link that holds it all together unfortunately.

So, yes, the laughs aren't there in abundance as I might have liked. There are moments though that work because quite honestly, there's too much talent assembled here for it to not be somewhat entertaining. So Brooks, Feldman and DeLuise? Yeah, they have their moments. It's the little things, not the big moments. It's how they walk in step inches apart from each other. It's how they hug like they've won the lotto when the movie gets approved, prompting the beginning of a running gag with on-lookers muttering a perfectly placed slur. They each get their bits, Brooks the leader who falls for a sexy seductress (Bernadette Peters) sent by Engulf and Devour to destroy Funn. Feldman's Eggs is always trying to hook up with beautiful women, usually going down in flames, while DeLuise's Bell is perpetually drinking Coke and always needing to go to the bathroom. Great comedic minds at work.

Also look for Harold Gould as Engulf and Ron Carey as Devour, the studio heads so desperately trying to stop Funn from making a successful movie. Huge, over the top parts with so obviously evil villains.

All things considered, the best thing for me from 'Silent' was the cameos, some big-time stars poking fun at themselves with some quick appearances. That group includes Burt Reynolds, James Caan, Liza Minnelli, Anne Bancroft, Marcel Marceau and Paul Newman. Reynolds especially stands out, playing up his good looks into a star obsessed with his own looks. The scene where Funn, Eggs and Bell end up in the shower with him is pretty perfect, one of the moments I genuinely laughed out loud. Caan too is very good, playing the kinda slow movie star who invites Funn and Co. into his off-balance trailer as they serve some lunch. It is a solid example of how subtle physical humor can work in an almost effortless fashion.

Still, I struggled to get through this one. No cohesive link, some solid moments lost in a wave of lesser moments that don't work so well. Not a positive rating, but it's still one I can mildly, mildly, recommend because when it works, it works real well.

Silent Movie (1976): **/****

7 Women

When I think of John Ford, I typically think of westerns, and male-dominated westerns at that.  If his movies had female characters, they were almost always in the background or as a source of conflict between two men.  Some directors worked well with actresses, but from what I've read about Ford he was much more comfortable directing men.  Certain actresses continually popped up in his movies, but almost always playing basically the same character over and over again.  It's funny then that in a career that included almost 150 movies, his last movie is a female-dominated cast in 1966's 7 Women.

Ford making some interesting decisions late in his career was nothing new.  With Cheyenne Autumn, the director admitted he owed an apology to how Native Americans had been treated in many of his movies, telling their story in this big budget if average western.  In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford explored the idea of legend versus fact and the idea of romanticism in the old west.  With '7 Women,' he has a story that could have easily been set in the wild west like so many of his movies were.  But he picks an incredibly unique setting to tell a story that is completely different from any other movie in the Ford lexicon.

In 1935 in northern China along the Mongolian border, Agatha Andrews (Margaret Leighton) is in charge of a Catholic mission that helps any Chinese refugees on the isolated frontier.  She has help from a handful of women who have sacrificed much to be there in this dangerous situation where everything from bandits to diseases threaten everyone inside.  A new doctor, Dr. Cartwright (Anne Bancroft), arrives and quickly finds out how rigid, how very strict Andrews' mission is.  Cartwright is more of a free spirit and doesn't fit in so well, but that's the least of everyone's problems. A warlord/bandit chief, Tunga Khan (Mike Mazurki), is on a rampage across the frontier with the mission right in his path. 

Along with Leighton and Cartwright, the 7 women of the title include Sue Lyon as Emma, a young innocent girl somewhat naive to what's going on, Flora Robson and Anna Lee as two survivors from a nearby mission, Mildred Dunnock as Jane, Agatha's assistant, and Betty Field as Florrie, a middle-aged woman going through her first pregnancy and one of the most shrill, annoying characters I've ever seen in a movie.  It easily could have been '8 Women' but Ford chose to leave out Jane Chang's character for some reason.  Cough RACISM Cough.  Just kidding. These women of all shapes, sizes and creeds certainly cover the gamut, giving a nice diversity as they are forced to cope in these horrific situations where no one is there to protect them other than themselves.

With so many characters, it would have been easy for all the performances to get lost among themselves, but I don't think Anne Bancroft was going to allow it.  This is hands down the reason to see this movie for her performance, rising above a script that really doesn't have much going for it early on.  Dr. Cartwright is as tough as they come, a woman who put herself through school in the 1920s when female doctors weren't exactly commonplace.  Bancroft gives her a hard edge that has enabled her to survive on her own these years, but it's in the last 30 minutes where her character's true colors come to light.  She's spent most of the movie arguing with Leighton's Agatha character, but Bancroft's Cartwright makes a noble decision, leading to a very effective and more than a little surprising ending.

Of the rest of the women, Robson stands out as a fellow missionary who respects Cartwright for all her differences when no one else does.  She is underused unfortunately, but what's there is certainly a positive addition to the movie.  Lyon too represents herself well as the young Emma, torn between her duty and what she sees in the new doctor who is unlike so many other women she's met in her life.  As Agatha, Leighton is the self-righteous, condescending she-devil who thinks she is above criticism but feels incredibly comfortable dishing it out.  Also joining the cast is Eddie Albert as Florrie's Bible-spouting husband, Charles.  Like his wife, this character comes across as easily unlikable early on but he too comes around, realizing how ridiculous his stance is.

Now it is a John Ford movie, and there has to be some element of racism or politically incorrect moments, doesn't there?  I don't mean that as negatively as it sounds, and I am a huge Ford fan, but something almost always pops up in his movies.  Here it is Mazurki and Woody Strode as Mongolian bandits. Mazuriki is laughable as bandit chief Tunga Khan, and Strode looks ridiculous with eye makeup that attempts to make him look like a Mongolian.  Close but no cigar.

It's certainly a change of pace for Ford, and being his last movie, it is an intriguing watch.  It is different from any other Ford movie I've come across and is worth a watch for that reason alone, all flaws aside.  You can watch it at Youtube starting with Part 1 of 9.  Listen to the early parts of the credit, and guess who the composer is.  It took me about two notes, and if you said Elmer Bernstein, you win a cookie.

7 Women <---trailer (1966): ** 1/2 /****