Lust for Gold

As Gordon Gekko profoundly said, 'Greed is good.' One of the all-time great films dealing with one of the seven deadly sins was released in 1948, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a frightening look at what gold can do to one's minds. It's one of the all-time classics, making 1949's Lust for Gold an odd choice. Was it an effort to build off its success? Whatever the reason, it doesn't work despite some potential.

It's 1948 in Arizona, a treasure-hunter of sorts, Barry Storm (William Prince), is walking through the Superstition Mountains looking for a supposedly long-lost mine, the Lost Dutchman. He's actually following a famous treasure hunter who states he's got the mystery figured out, but Storm is stunned when he hears a gunshot and soon after finds the treasure hunter dead. He walks to the nearest town, still several days away, to report the murder, quickly realizing this isn't some innocent old treasure hunt. Storm is quickly cleared of suspicion, but his interest makes some curious as he claims to be the grandson of the original owner of the Dutchman mine. As the police waits for a break in the case, Storm sits back and listens to the legendary story of how the mine came to be, including how his grandfather, Jacob Walz (Glenn Ford), came to be involved.

This was an interesting movie, not always for the good. From director S. Sylvan Simon (and an uncredited George Marshall), 'Lust' does have its positives and negatives. It plays at times like a pseudo-documentary, a film noir meets a rough and tumble western. Unfortunately, it never really gels as one coherent film. I liked the framing device in the story, a 90-minute story split about 55 (the Glenn Ford part) and 35 (the 1948 part) divvying things up appropriately. It comes with a message from the state of Arizona -- almost like a Welcome Guide, "Come and see Arizona!" -- stating that the mine is still out there somewhere. It is based off a book by the real Barry Storm, called Thunder Gods Gold, and it plays like a pandering effort to sell some copies of the book. Prince's Storm's narration is a little much too, almost an attempt to sound like a James Cagney-esque gangster. "The gold's out there, I tells ya! Don't believe me, eh?!?"

Oddly enough though, I enjoyed the 1948 portion of the story far more than the 1885 portion. Prince is okay as the intrepidly curious Storm, jobless and interested in finding the lost mine that's supposedly filled with literally tons of gold. The film noir in the desert plays well, dead bodies and potshots piling up over the years as treasure hunters supposedly near the location of the lost mine. In addition to Prince, look for Paul Ford as the local sheriff with Will Geer and an uncredited Jay Silverheels (later Tonto on The Lone Ranger) as his two deputies. The mystery builds nicely and when things wrap up back in 1885, we get some solid resolution. The ending was pretty exciting, wrapping things up that the first 20-25 minutes set up.

Surprising for me was how dull the actual 1880 Arizona western was. It starts off well, greed, murder and betrayal introduced early to the point I thought I had stumbled onto a hidden gem from a genre I love. Well, I didn't. The story detours quickly and is never able to recover. Glenn Ford gets a rare turn as a bad guy -- an out and out bad guy -- but it's wasted because after he finds the gold mine by some rather duplicitous means (read = Murder) the story hamstrings the character as it devolves into a forced love triangle with Ida Lupino's Julia and her husband who she fights with constantly and would like to divorce, played to smarmy annoyingness by Gig Young. Wait, she loves her husband, but she doesn't because she loves Jacob but she doesn't love him either. Gag me, the story goes nowhere, turning a potentially really good story about what greed can do to people into a lame, glacially-moving love triangle. A love triangle of sorts. You've gotta be kidding me.

In the flashback portion, also look for Edgar Buchanan as a grizzled old trail hand working with Ford's Jacob and uncredited parts for Arthur Hunnicutt and Antonio Moreno as two rivals who may hold the key to the location of the lost gold mine. Even western veteran John Doucette turns up for a quick appearance in a barber shop talking about how much gold may be out there.

There are parts that worked surprisingly well. The explanation of how the gold came to be in the mine is a gem, an Apache war party descending on a heavily-guarded escort in a surprisingly graphic action scene. The same for the intro to the 1880s flashback, Glenn Ford's Jacob straight up murdering folks. How many movies can you say that about? Glenn Ford is a good guy for goodness sake! The ending in the flashback has some potential too, but by then I was so bored with the Ford-Lupino-Young part of the story I just didn't care. A movie that has its moments, but not enough of them unfortunately.

Lust for Gold (1949): **/****

The Three Musketeers (1948)

First appearing as a serial in 1844 from French author Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers have become some of literature's most popular, most famous and most well-liked characters in the history of the written word. That popularity has transitioned to film in countless efforts (ok, you can count them, but there's a lot, HERE), including 1948's The Three Musketeers.

Leaving his home and family behind, a young Frenchman named D'Artagnan (Gene Kelly) heads for Paris with hopes and dreams of joining the Musketeers of the Guard, the men who protect the King. He almost immediately meets three musketeers, Athos (Van Heflin), Porthos (Gig Young), and Aramis (Robert Coote), getting on their bad side and agreeing to duel to the death with each. Their problems are thrown by the wayside though as they see they must work together to save France from the treacherous prime minister, Richelieu (Vincent Price), who wants to start a war with rival England. With spies and traitors all around, the Musketeers -- plus D'Artagnan -- must fight for each other, for France, and for love.

Above all else, the cast here is truly impressive, a long list of recognizable names. That doesn't mean they're necessarily great performances, but well, the names are there! Not a great start, but Kelly is miscast as young D'Artagnan. He's just not believable other than his physical ability. Heflin is the only one of the three Musketeers to make any lasting impression, Young and Coote wasting away in the background. Price sneers and connives as Richelieu as only he can, but the best villain is the stunningly beautiful Lana Turner as Lady de Winter, Richelieu's most trusted agent. There's also parts for Angela Lansbury as the French queen, Anne, June Allyson as Constance, the Queen's maid and D'Artagnan's true love, Keenan Wynn as Planchet, D'Artagnan's servant, John Sutton as the Duke of Buckingham and Frank Morgan as King Louis.

What plagues this movie is something that affected so many movies in the 1940s and 1950s. It is interested in the spectacle of what's going on on the screen, and the truly impressive scale. It is intended to 'WOW!' the audience, and it does. The Technicolor technique has the action jumping off the screen, and visually it is an amazing movie to watch. The sets, the costumes, the detail. It's all there, but it's a shallow movie. Even knowing who the Musketeers were and the outline of the story, I was bored to tears. It took multiple viewings and a week-long break to even finish this one. There's no heart, no real interest in the characters. Rather than developing those bonds and the characters, we get countless fight scenes, lots of Musketeer carousing that goes nowhere.

Like anything, something good is best in small doses. The fight scenes here are a prime example. An early introduction has D'Artagnan fighting at first against and then with his new Musketeer buddies. The sword-fighting is a sight to behold, and then it keeps going....and going....and going. Kelly was a dancer first and foremost, and a talent with an incredible physical ability, but enough is enough. He jumps, he twirls, he flips, oh, and then he kills some guys. We get it, Mr. Kelly, you're extremely talented. Almost to a fault, the action -- whether it be hand-to-hand or with swords and pistols -- starts off well but doesn't know when to stop. It gets tedious, and with impressive sequences like this, that's never a good thing. Director George Sidney had to know when to pull the plug. Instead, he tries to wow the audience and ends up overdoing it. 

Now even with the thinly drawn characters and tedious action, this movie certainly has its pluses. When the story does get serious toward the end, dropping all the comedic carousing and shenanigans, wouldn't you know? The story significantly improves. As Lady de Winter, Turner especially shines, a snake waiting in the shadows to strike. There is a darkness to it as characters are killed, betrayals are unleashed, and allegiances tested. With a movie that runs at over two hours at 125 minutes, it just takes too long to get there. A darker, more straightforward Musketeers movie with this cast could have been a classic, but this 1948 version struggles to find a consistent tone. The last half hour is that good, but the build-up unfortunately is not. Still, there is too much positive going on here to not give it an at least partially positive review. Just know it's a mixed bag.

The Three Musketeers <---TCM trailer/clips (1948): ** 1/2 /****

Five Miles to Midnight

This intro isn't exactly dead-on as it pertains to the movie, but it was one of the first things I thought of while watching 1962's Five Miles to Midnight. When I watched Airport for the first time a few years ago, I was genuinely surprised to learn that passengers could buy insurance in airports before their flights. For one like in Airport, it seemed an easy way for some suicidal nut to make some quick cash.  On the other hand, it hit me wrong, and I'm pretty cynical when it comes to things like that. In 'Five Miles,' life insurance at the airport ends up being the motivating force for one character.

After having a fight with her husband, Robert (Anthony Perkins), that turns physical, Lisa Macklin (Sophia Loren) decides she's had enough and tells him that she wants a divorce. He fights it at first, but finally agrees, telling her they'll figure it all out once he returns to Paris after a quick business trip. Lisa is stunned the next day when the newspaper says that Robert's plane crashed somewhere in France with no survivors. She's even more surprised then when he turns up on her doorstep, claiming he survived when he was thrown from the wreckage in the crash. Lisa wants nothing to do with him, but he makes a deal with her. He took out an insurance policy before takeoff, and he'll leave her behind for good if she receives the $120,000 claim and gives it to him. Can she go through with it though just to rid herself of him?

Two days after watching this movie, I'm not really sure what to write about.  Like any movie, there's positives and negatives to take away, but what were they? It's that rare movie I can't come up with something to write about. So here goes, probably a review that rambles more than it should. 'Five Miles' has some odd casting choices and not necessarily for the better, knows where it wants to get but not how to get there, has some excellent on-location work in Paris (hard to mess that up), and has an ending that while not particularly surprising still provides a bit of a shock factor.  Okay, that's a good start I guess.

Four years earlier in Desire Under the Elms, Loren and Perkins worked together so while I haven't seen that movie, I feel safe saying they must have had better chemistry than they did here.  Sophia Loren is maybe the most beautiful actress to ever grace the screen, and while I don't intend this as a dig against Perkins, they just don't look good together.  Is it fair to judge a movie on whether its cast members look good together?  For me, I needed some reason to believe that at some point Loren's Lisa met Perkins' Robert and fell for him.  Instead, we get nothing.  It also seems a stretch that Loren would be scared of a skinny guy like Anthony Perkins.  A great comment at the IMDB said that one punch/slap from the Italian actress, and he'd be down for the duration.

If it makes sense, the two actors don't have a great chemistry together, but their performances on their own are interesting.  Two years removed from the success of Psycho, it's easy to see Perkins already being typecast in Norman Bates-mode.  He makes Robert this neurotic ball of energy, at one second charming and personable while the next second he's overbearing, jealous and abusive.  As is the case with Lisa, his smile has a disarming effect on people, able to diffuse the situations he so often gets himself into.  Loren too delivers a solid performance as a young wife simply pushed too far past her limits.  She's had enough with her husband but has no way to get out of the situation any quicker than it's going.  Her descent into some sort of madness is creepy to watch, making the ending that much better.

The problem with that ending is that director Anatole Litvak takes his sweet time getting there. After the plane crash, Robert does his best Lazarus impression and is back in the story by about the 20-minute mark.  Then, as Lisa goes through the process of getting the insurance check, we get another 90 minutes building to the ending, and it is slow going.  Not much happens in between, and that's where the movie struggles.  Perkins interacts with a boy (Tommy Norden) curious why he never leaves the apartment. Lisa moves on, starting to see newspaper writer Gig Young who's naturally curious about what's going on. Building tension is one thing, but it's clear Lisa is nearing her limit, and the story just keeps piling on and on.

What saves 'Five Miles' from being a really bad, pointless even boring movie is the last 20 minutes.  You see the twist coming two-fold if you're paying attention at all, but that doesn't mean it can't be enjoyable to watch it unfold.  Better than the twist is the finale then, the final nails in the coffin for one character.  I was definitely surprised with that aspect of the story, especially the movie ending on such a sour note.  The other positive is the look of the movie whether it be the vast Macklin apartment that still manages to be claustrophobic or the Parisian locations.  It's got to be impossible to make that city look bad, and 'Five Miles' doesn't go for lots of known locations either.  Still, the movie is a mixed bag, and one I struggled to get through.

Five Miles to Midnight <---trailer (1962): **/****    

Air Force

As part of a themed day a few weeks ago, Turner Classic Movies aired a handful of World War II movies honoring the heroes of December 7, 1941 when the Japanese led a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Almost 70 years since one of the biggest, most violent on attacks ever on American soil, it's still hard to wrap your head around the immensity of the attack and how it drastically changed the course of human history.  Some movies like From Here to Eternity focus exclusively on the attack, but others use December 7th as a jumping off point, like 1943's Air Force.

Watching a movie released in 1943 in the U.S., you have to know what you're getting into.  Made with the backing of the U.S. Air Force (and most likely the U.S. government), this is a war story dripping with propaganda.  It was made to encourage the home front, make sure Americans knew what our armed forces were fighting for.  Overall, the movie doesn't overdo it with its message until an unnecessary gruesome finale, but the first 90 minutes is a perfect example of how good a movie can be even with an incredibly one-sided story.  Flag-waving in just about every scene and a can't beat the U.S. mentality end up working toward the positive here.

Taking off from a runway in San Francisco, a B-17 bomber named 'Mary Ann' piloted by 'Irish' Quincannon (John Ridgely) and Bill Williams (Gig Young) heads out over the Pacific bound for Hickam Field in Hawaii. With several new members of the nine-man crew, they have little experience working together but quickly find themselves needing to get on the same page.  They fly into Hawaii on the afternoon of Dec. 7, 1941 just hours after the sneak attack by the Japanese Navy that almost cripples the U.S. Pacific fleet.  They land and are are quickly given orders to continue flying to the west.  Reports of Japanese attacks throughout the Pacific have the High Command on a major alert, and every man, pilot, and plane is needed to hold back the advance if the U.S. has any chance of staying in the conflict.

Director Howard Hawks did a wise thing setting this story in and around the opening days of the U.S. involvement in World War II. Looking at the story as simplistically as possible, we get a tour of the Pacific in the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor.  We see Battleship Row still in flames, we see the heroic defenders of Wake Island as they await a Japanese attack, we see military bases in Manila falling back under waves of Japanese attackers.  It serves two purposes, one being a jumping off point for everything that's going on, and two, it shows these heroic efforts put forth by American soldiers, Marines, sailors, civilians and pilots throughout the Pacific against impossible odds.  And make no mistake, many of the people on Wake and throughout the Philippines were either killed or captured by the Japanese.

The propaganda is held in check for the most part with two major exceptions.  A machine gunner on the back of a small fighter plane is forced to bail and attempts to parachute to dry land.  Floating back to the ground, he is machine-gunned by a Japanese pilot.  Then as he lies dying on the ground, the pilot flies over again and finishes him off in brutal fashion.  First, there's documented cases of Japanese pilots doing this throughout the war.  Subtle it is not, but in terms of portraying the Japanese in as brutal a depiction as possible, this gets the job done.  Second exception, 2001's Pearl Harbor syndrome. Instead of just telling the story of Pearl Harbor, the 2001 movie adds on the telling of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo because us Americans, we need our happy endings. Here in Air Force, Hawks depicts a fictional, very one-sided depiction of the American Air Force destroying a Japanese invasion fleet on its way to Australia.  It's overdone and just tries too hard, reveling in the defeat of the Japanese.  I understand this might have been a necessary ending in 1943, but now in 2010 it just doesn't work.

Those complaints aside, I loved the movie starting with one of Hawks' biggest strengths as a director.  He had a knack for working perfectly with predominantly male, ensemble casts, and Air Force has a good one.  Ridgely and Young play the pilots of B-17 Mary Ann with the crew including Harry Carey as veteran crew chief Robbie White, John Garfield as new machine gunner Joe Winocki, Arthur Kennedy as bombardier Tommy McMartin, Charles Drake as navigator Monk Hauser, George Tobias as mechanic Weinberg, Ward Wood as radioman Peters, Ray Montgomery as newbie Chester, and James Brown as tag-along fighter pilot Tex Raider. With such a big ensemble, we only get tidbits of info about each man, but they cover a melting pot of the Americans fighting in WWII.  They bond through their common goal and will to survive, doing whatever they can to take the war back at the Japanese.

When propaganda works, it is typically because it hits a nerve.  I've long been a fan of war movies across the board, and you can't help but root in patriotic fashion for this B-17 crew.  For a start, they're very easy to like, all of them.  When one of the crew dies following a Japanese attack, you see the others throw caution to the wind in hopes of reassembling the plane so they can rejoin the war effort.  Carey and Garfield cradling machine guns in their arms fighting off Japanese Zeroes hits you in the gut.  It's over the top and hammy, but it's perfectly portrayed. Obviously now in 2010, we know the Allies won WWII.  But in 1943 the war was still up for grabs, and Americans could always use a positive jolt.  This certainly qualifies.

Air Force <---trailer (1943): *** 1/2 /****  

Slaughter Trail

If there's anything one thinks of in a western it's the cowboys vs. Indians, the gunfighters, the cattle drives, the outlaws. One thing I clearly don't associate westerns with is singing, whether it be musicals like Oklahoma! or even singing cowboys like Gene Autry. They just seem out of place. 'Hey, I just saved the pretty school teacher from bandits, let me get my guitar out and sing about it a little!' So you might ask, how do you make it worse? Combine the two with a ballad soundtrack that runs throughout and not singing cowboys, but singing cavalrymen. That evil combination comes to fruition with 1951's Slaughter Trail.

With a brisk running time of 78 minutes, director Irving Allen apparently did not have enough in the way of a story for a feature length movie. By my guess, there's about 30 minutes of actual story and 48 minutes of ballad soundtrack and various asides with characters bursting into song. There's not enough here to make a worthwhile Gunsmoke or Bonanza episode much less a theater-released movie. Other westerns have used a ballad-like sountrack, High Noon comes to mind, but never this much. Four and five minutes pass as a cavalry troop rides across the desert, not a word spoken, with the 'Slaughter Trail' ballad booming.

There's also six different musical numbers thrown in with the story when the ballad isn't blaring. Some fit better than others, like a dance at a fort in Arizona, but most seem thrown together to make the movie a little longer. At one point, Andy Devine's Sergeant Macintosh actually hands another soldier a guitar and asks him to play so he serenades the troopers. How sweet. All this happy singing is just out of place in a story that a typical B-western could have handled nicely, or at least better than this clunker.

Working together to knock off stagecoaches and the money/gold/jewels they're carrying, outlaw Ike Vaughn (Gig Young) and Lorabelle Larkin (Virginia Grey) hit the jackpot when they discover a purse full of diamonds onboard a stagecoach. Ike passes them off to Lorabelle for safe-keeping so he and his gang can get away. But as they run, the gang steals three horses from a small group of Navajo Indians, killing two of three. The one survivor returns to the tribe where the chief calls for war because the white men broke the treaty. At the nearest outpost, Fort Marcy, the commander, Captain Dempster (Brian Donlevy) has to figure out what to do in hopes of stopping what could be a bloody rampage.

This B-western story is nothing new or inventive, but it is a good story if nothing else. There's never enough time spent on that story though for it to be any good. There are some limitations with the budget as seen in the finale. The Fort Marcy set is a great, expansive outdoor location that was used in a long list of movies in the 40s and 50s. It's situated in a small valley ringed by hills. But when the Navajos attack, they're attacking on wide, dusty plain in the middle of nowhere. We never actually see the warriors in the same shot with the soldiers firing at them. There's also the angle that Donlevy's Dempster takes about the three outlaws. He won't turn them over to the Navajos, instead posting them outside the walls to apparently be brutally killed. Ends justify the means I guess.

Known as much for playing the evil villain as much as anything, Donlevy gets a crack at playing the heroic good guy and does pretty well as he looks out for his daughter and the fort and even tries to work some magic with Grey's Lorabelle, a forced movie relationship if there ever was one. He even compliments her, 'That was quick thinking,' when she picks off an Indian about to kill someone. Smooth talker that Capt. Dempster. Young as Ike Vaughn is all right, the outlaw with the maniacal laugh. Devine is his typically annoying, braying self as the apparently veteran cavalry sergeant.

On to one more thing that bugged me that I can thank all the John Wayne movies I've watched for helping me spot. Chuck Hayward was a long-time stunt man who always got bit parts in westerns and war movies, a face you'd probably recognize, if you've seen enough of these movies. In Slaughter Trail, he plays two bit parts, one as the Indian survivor in the beginning and two as the Indian scout working for the cavalry. At one point, his two characters are actually in the same scene together. Talk about a small budget, but that is just impressive. A stinker all around, I fortunately could not find a trailer for this gem. Steer way clear of this one.

Slaughter Trail (1951): */****