Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

I've been trying for several weeks now to figure out what to say about Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. (I hate titles with colons. Don't you? Makes me feel like I'm back in college, reading academic articles.) Anyway, what can I say about this movie? Well, it was very good. It was very well made, artistic, technically sound. It was suspenseful and exciting and it kept my interest throughout. There were moments of great humor. Robert Downey Jr. was magnificent in the lead, as was Jude Law in the number two slot. In short, it was a very good movie and I'd gladly see it again. In fact, I'm seriously considering purchasing both this movie and its predecessor. I just have one niggling little problem with Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. It's not Sherlock Holmes! Let's be blunt about this. Sherlock Holmes was not - I repeat, NOT - and action figure. He didn't go in for fisticuffs, and he especially didn't engage in modern martial arts style kickboxing. Sherlock Holmes was an intellectual detective. He solved crimes not by racing about, fighting, shooting and that sort of thing. In quite a few of his cases, in fact, he scarcely leaves his smokey rooms. Instead, he holes up and ponders the case, sending his Baker Street Irregulars all over the city looking for clues, firing off telegrams to gain information. For Sherlock Holmes, it was always a game of the mind.

So who was a good Sherlock Holmes? Well, Basil Rathbone did a serviceable job in the fourteen Homes films shot in the 1940s, but Rathbone is such a cold fish that it's hard to be sympathetic with his character the way you can be with Downey's. And Nigel Bruce's Watson was a bumbling idiot who couldn't tell which end of the gun the bullet came out of, not anything like Law's passionate, hard-fighting, pistol-wielding Watson. The best Holmes - at least to my mind that is - was Jeremy Bret, a consummate actor who literally made the character his own. Bret's Holmes was intense, cerebral, yet he possessed a compassion for those who were the victims of crimes. When he would pontificate at length on the quality of a piece of paper or a bit of tobacco, you knew you were seeing a master at work, a man who devoted himself to his craft to the exclusion of everything else. And he scarcely needed to use his fists or a gun, because he could talk most criminals into giving themselves up to him peacefully.

But back to our new Holmes. As I say, Downey gives a superb performance as this new, fast-talking, fast-acting Holmes, and there's nothing wrong with that, I guess. Young people today, having been raised on music videos, action films and video games, want a faster-paced, wittier Sherlock Holmes, and Downey and Ritchie give them just that. And Law's Watson is, I suppose, a character more in keeping with someone who was both a doctor and a soldier. And I will give kudos to the set design. Watching A Game of Shadows, you truly get the feeling you are in Victorian England, with its mix of incredible wealth and extreme poverty, luxury and filth, high society and working classes. There's dirt and mud and horse droppings. Everything seems to be under construction - the buildings, the bridges, the streets, all of the landmarks that we associate with Jolly Olde England. And there is a lot of action and gunfire - including one very big gun - and racing about on horseback and people getting thrown off of trains, and all that sort of thing. As I said - the film kept me riveted. I highly recommend it. But once you've seen A Game of Shadows, go grab a copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's work and find out what the "real" Sherlock Holmes was like. You never know. You may find that you prefer the original.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is rated PG and has a runtime of 129 action-packed minutes.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)

Okay, yeah, so everybody likes to point out that Robinson Crusoe on Mars is scientifically inaccurate, that Mars is nothing like they portray it here, and that no one could possibly survive there like Commander Christopher "Kit" Draper (Paul Mantee) does. But who the hell cares about any of that. This is a cracking good story. Helmer Byron Haskins takes Daniel Defoe's classic adventure story and sets it not on a tropical island but instead on the angry red planet itself. When their mother ship is nearly clobbered by a passing astroid, Draper and his co-pilot Colonel Dan McReady (Adam West) are forced to land on Mars. Well, they crash, really, and McReady is killed. Left with only the ship's mascot - a monkey named Mona - Draper must try to survive as best he can, while his supply-laden mother ship orbits the planet, forever out of reach. In short order, Draper and Mona find shelter and discover water, oxygen and edible plants. With all of his basic needs taken care of, Draper slowly starts to go nutty from the isolation. Fear not, though, for soon to arrive on the scene is his man Friday (Victor Lundin), a very-human looking alien slave who is forced to labor in Martian mines by other aliens who buzz about in ships that closely resemble the Martian spacecraft from the 1950 War of the Worlds. Not surprising, either, since Haskins worked on that film too. Friday is pursued relentlessly by his alien task masters, who are able to home in on him by means of his electronic handcuffs. To escape the bad guys, Draper and Friday go underground, following a deep cavern that runs for thousands of miles beneath the surface. In due time, Draper is able to rid Friday of his wrist monitors, and when the two finally emerge near the Martian North Pole, the bad guys are nowhere to be seen. Our two heroes press on to the pole; although, why they do so is never adequately explained. As they near the pole, another earth ship flies over and Draper is able to contact them assuring his and Friday's rescue.

I first saw Robinson Crusoe on Mars when I was about five years old, making it one of that small group of movies that has had a profound impact on me ever since. As a result, I love this movie. It has adventure, thrills, scary stuff, exploding meteors, great special effects that stand up well even today, and even a ghost. Oh, yeah, and don't forget the monkey. The story is a classic, of course, and you can almost never go wrong when you use a classic as your foundation. The screenplay by John C. Higgins is really first rate, and the entire thing is shot in widescreen technicolor, quite an achievement at a time when most scifi films were shot in black and white. The best thing about Robinson Crusoe on Mars, though, is the incredible performance by Paul Mantee. This is, after all, essentially a one man movie, so Mantee must carry the entire film for most of its 110 minute runtime. To say that he pulls it off is an understatement. This veteran character actor does a phenomenal job, bringing a nuanced performance to a film that could have so easily tripped over the edge and fallen into the morass of camp. But Mantee is restrained, subtle. While the common man in him is scared and lonely, the military officer maintains strict discipline, and the scientist in him rationally catalogues all of Mars' many sights. It's all too easy to believe that this man really is seeing these sights for the first time and trying to hold them in his memory for future reference. That's the sign of a truly great actor.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars is one of the finest examples of mid-century science fiction film making. It's rated G, for GREAT!

To Have and Have Not (1944)

Howard Hawks' To Have and Have Not spawned one of the greatest Hollywood romances of all times as well as one of the greatest lines ever uttered on screen. Adapted from Ernest Hemingway's novel of the same title, the film stars Humphrey Bogart as Harry "Steve" Morgan, a charter fishing boat captain. Based in Martinique, and so under the authority of the Vichy government in occupied France, Steve and his sidekick Eddie (Walter Brennan) try to eek out a living while dealing with crooked customers, avoiding the local authorities and dodging gun battles between resistance fighters and government agents. When his most recent customer dies before paying Steve, he's forced to take work transporting resistant fighters to the island. Into this mix of bullets and intrigue steps Marie "Slim" Browning (Lauren Bacall), a down-on-her-luck cabaret singer who's just trying to earn enough money to get back home to America. This was the first on-screen pairing of Bogart and Bacall and the electricity between them is palpable. Steve is loner and a tough guy, but Slim may be tougher than him. She casts her line and reels him in by simply telling him he can have her. "You don't have to say anything," she says, "and you don't have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and... blow." And hence history was made. But things don't go all that easily for Steve and Slim. The French Resistance fighter that Steve is transporting panics when he should keep his cool and gets himself all shot up. Then Steve has to operate on the guy and remove the lead from him. Meanwhile, the authorities are circling in for the kill. They try to get information out of Eddie by plying him with booze, but Eddie's a lifelong drunk and he can take a lot of booze. Finally, in true Bogart fashion, the evil Vichy agents are defeated and Steve, Slim and Eddie escape on Steve's boat, bound for Florida and happily ever after.


Apparently, Hemingway had bet Hawks that Hawks could never make a film of To Have and Have Not. Hawks rose to the challenge and did so, but only by cutting out most of the novel and substantially rewriting the rest. He focused on a single incident at the book's beginning, expanding and embellishing it to get a full-length movie. The setting was moved from Cuba to Martinique, and the time was moved to after the war had started. In the book, Steve hauls illegal immigrants to Florida, while in the movie he's hauling resistance fighters. He's also a much nicer guy in the movie. This film also has the distinction of being the only movie to have been co-written by two Nobel-prize winning authors: Ernest Hemingway wrote the novel on which it was based, and William Faulkner wrote the screenplay. In spite of this high literary pedigree, it turns out - according to the IMDB - that most of the dialogue was actually improvised by the actors on camera. That's okay, though. It all works out great. As does the presence of the great Hoagy Carmichael as Cricket, the pianist at the local bar. In fact, this film was my introduction to Carmichael at the ripe young age of twelve, and I have been a fan of his music ever since. And all of this is wrapped up in a cracking good yarn with bad guys you can hate and good guys you can sympathize with. You can't do better than that.

To Have and Have Not is rated G and is filmed in glorious black and white. It has a runtime of 100 minutes.

The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

I am a fan of the late Philip K. Dick. No...let me correct that. I am a HUGE fan of the late Philip K. Dick. So it was with eager anticipation that I purchased my tickets and entered the theater to watch The Adjustment Bureau, which was adapted from Dick's short story "The Adjustment Team." I was, I am afraid to admit, underwhelmed. Which is a bad sign. This movie had all of the makings of a great film. It had fantastic source material. It had an outstanding cast. The leads had class and sex appeal and chemistry and a great meet-cute. It had shadowy-men-in-black. What it did not have, unfortunately, was a screen play that could carry it all through a full-length motion picture. Instead, it relied on interminable chase scenes. Yes, our hero and heroine are running away from the eponymous adjustment bureau, but come on! How many scenes do we need of them running down the street? Through a door? Up the stairs? Through another door? Along the corridor? Through yet another door? Around the corner? Through - wait for it - yet another door? Are you starting to get tired of this already? So was I. Oh, and did I mention that they go through doors? Yeah, they do that. Doors. Lots of `em.

Let me throw you the plot so you know where I'm going here. David Norris (Matt Damon) is just about to win a seat in the US Senate. Then he meets Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt) in a men's room. Sparks definitely fly. This is the real thing. They both know it. But, enter the shadowy-men-in-black who do everything in their power to prevent David and Elise from getting together. At least, most of the shadowy-men-in-black do. One of the shadowy-men-in-black (Anthony Mackie) is not so shadowy after all. He kind of runs interference for them. Tells them who they're up against. Shows them the doors. (Oh yeah, you knew they'd be back.) Once everything was established and I was all ready to hunker down with my bucket o' popcorn and gallon o' soda for a bit of good, suspenseful repartee with the shadowy-men-in-black, the film devolved into a rather insipid version of Running Man...with lots of doors. Yeah, cuz the doors let you move around sort of behind the scenes, between the space of reality as it were. Unfortunately, the film doesn't show you any of the space between the space. Instead, we just see our plucky hero and heroine enter a door in one place and - jump cut - exit a door someplace else. Not much to work with there. Then the whole thing ends so abruptly that I almost cracked a tooth on the rim of my soda cup.

In the pantheon of films made from P.K. Dick stories, The Adjustment Bureau ranks pretty near the bottom. Even the 1995 film Screamers had more on the ball that this one does. And as I said before, that's really too bad, because all of the right elements are there. It just needed a better screenplay, one that was a little more fleshed out, maybe a bit more philosophical, maybe one that actually had something worth saying in the end.

The Adjustment Bureau is rated PG-13 and has a runtime of 106 minutes, which is a long time to watch two people running.

The African Queen (1951)

Meet Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart). Charlie's a happy man. He's got it all figured out. Charlie owns a small steam launch called the African Queen. Charlie and the Queen make a living ferrying passengers, freight and mail up and down the Ulanga River in German East Africa. Charlie is living the good life...or so he thinks. Then World War I breaks out and everything changes. Suddenly, all of the non-German residents are enemies. When the Germans raid a mission run by the Reverend Samuel Sayer (Robert Morely) and his sister Rose (Katherine Hepburn), Charlie comes to evacuate them. Unfortunately, he's too late to save the reverend, who dies of fever. When Charlie tries to take Rose back up river to safety, she comes up with a counter plan. She wants to sail downstream to Lake Tanganyika and destroy the Louisa, a German gunboat that plies the waters of the lake. Charlie tries to point out the impossibility of the trip: there's a German fort to get past; there are rapids; there's a dense swamp. Rose is adamant, though. They must do this for England. Reluctantly, Charlie agrees, and they argue their way down river. When Charlie gets drunk soon after they start out, Rose dumps all of his alcohol overboard. By the time they've made it past the fort and shot the rapids, both Charlie and Rose have changed. They begin to see each other in a new light. Yes, they fall in love. And the harder their journey becomes, the deeper in love they fall. By the time they finally - and miraculously - reach the lake, they are a committed pair. Charlie fashions crude torpedoes out of dynamite and oxygen cylinders, and they head out onto Lake Tanganyika to sink the Louisa. Unfortunately, a storm sinks the African Queen instead. Picked up by the Louisa, Charlie and Rose beg the ships captain to marry them before they are executed as spies. As the doomed couple say "I do," the Louisa strikes the half submerged hulk of the African Queen, detonating the torpedoes. The Louisa sinks, and Charlie and Rose swim off to safety.

Well, that - in a nut shell - is the story. It doesn't sound like much when you read it that way. You have to experience it. The African Queen is simply one of the finest movies ever made. Based on the novel by E. M. Forester, and directed by John Huston, it is the only movie for which Humphrey Bogart won an academy award during his long career. It is also a movie that nearly killed everyone involved in the making of it. The movie was shot largely on location in Africa, and dysentery, malaria, contaminated water and wild animals were a constant danger. The only members of the cast and crew who didn't get sick were Bogart and Huston who lived on a diet of baked beans, canned asparagus and Scotch whiskey. Bogart famously said, "Whenever a fly bit Huston or me, it dropped dead." Katherine Hepburn was so sick with dysentery during the filming that a bucket had to be kept just off camera for her to throw up in between takes. Now that's dedication. And that dedication brought forth a movie worth watching again and again. Bogart's portrayal of the lazy, drunken Allnut is one of the finest of his career, and his Oscar was well deserved. Hepburn is fantastic as the straight-laced Rose Sayer, who can't help but fall in love with her surly, pickled companion. It's fun to watch the relationship between the two characters grow and blossom into a deep abiding love. And the scenery and cinematography are amazing as well. It's just hard to imagine what Huston and his crew had to do in order to film this movie. They had to build a raft in order to float all of the camera equipment to get shots inside of the Queen when it was out on the water.

All in all, The African Queen is just a great visual feast, as well as being a whole lot of fun to watch. The movie is rated G, and it's filmed in Technicolor (it was, in fact, Katherine Hepburn's first color movie). Runtime is 105 minutes, and it's worth every second.

Red Dirt (1932)

Victor Flemming's Red Dirt is a saucy little pre-code romp about a no-nonsense plantation owner and a prostitute on the run. Although it is laughably tame by today's standards of "show it all and let the public sort it out," this was pretty risqué stuff for it 1932. For those of you who don't know, the Production Code was a lengthy set of guidelines and restrictions that governed what you could and couldn't show in a motion picture. It included such things as how long a kiss could last, how much of a woman's body could be uncovered and even moral issues such as the fact that all murderers had to receive their just deserts by the movie's end. The code was in effect from 1930 to 1968; although, the strictest version of it was in force from 1934 to 1955. Red Dirt is one of the films that helped create the stricter version of the code. It also helped make the careers of Clark Gable and Gene Harlow. This movie is all about sex. That's the only way to put it. Every scene drips with innuendo, as Harlow, Astor and Gable do a sexual dance so carefully choreographed that not one inch too much skin is shown, not a single scene of actual intercourse. But we're left with no doubt whatsoever about what's going on off camera.

Set in French Indo-China (Viet Nam), the Red Dirt centers on Dennis Carson (Clark Gable), the owner of a rubber plantation. Denny is struggling through a dusty, dry monsoon season, and not feeling any too happy about his prospects for the coming year. When the monthly supply boat arrives from Saigon, it brings with it Vantine (Gene Harlow), a prostitute who got in trouble with the law and decided to head up river until things cooled off. When Vantine first arrives at the plantation, Denny is angry at her for barging in and wants nothing to do with her. But there's no denying the electricity between these two. The air around them is practically crackling with it. Soon, with the help of the primitive bathing facilities at the plantation, Denny succumbs to Vantine's rather obvious charms, and they engage in a romance that's so hot it threatens to burn the jungle down. The fun is short lived though. The next supply boat brings a wet blanket to throw all over the party. Gary Willis (Gene Raymond), Carson's new surveyor, arrives with his sleek, sophisticated wife Barbara (Mary Astor) in tow. Well, Gary wastes no time in coming down with malaria, and Denny wastes no time trying to get Barbara to come to his room and check out his etchings, much to Vantine's dismay. By the time Gary has recovered, Denny has stolen Barbara from him. His only problem now is how to get rid of the useless husband. The answer presents itself in a tiger hunt. Denny will take Gary with him to hunt a tiger that's been terrorizing the locals. At the crucial moment, Denny will delay firing for just a second or two, while el tigre does his dirty work for him. Problem is that Denny's really a descent guy at heart, and he can't bring himself to let Gary take one for the team. In the end, Gary and Barbara head for home, and Denny and Vantine settle back into their scorching affair once more.

I love this film. I know I say that a lot, but that's only because I mean it. I love any film with Gable in it. And Red Dirt is one of his best. It lifted him above the pack of "actors" and made him a "movie star." Didn't hurt Harlow's career any either. Both of them are fun to watch as they trade insults and innuendos, barbs and embraces. Mary Astor is both aloof and alluring as the high-society gal who decides to go slumming withe her husband as visits the wilderness and leaves her lover with a bullet to remember her by. Nothing says "I Love You" like a well-placed slug! And Gene Raymond is appropriately sexless and ineffective as the cuckolded Gary, who's simply no match for Gable's virile manliness. After all, who's gonna want a surveyor who drops like a rock whenever anyone sneezes, when they can have the muscly guy who chopped a plantation out of the jungle single handed? Well, maybe he did have a little help. Like several hundred Viet Namese peasants. But still, you get the idea. Which brings me to another interesting thing about this film - it shows an image of Viet Nam from the Western perspective, when it was a French colony to be exploited for its resources. Always interesting to see what folks here in sunny SoCal thought was really going on in places like that back in the day. You can see where a lot of the world's current problems began. Interestingly, Red Dirt was remade in 1953 as Mogambo, with Gable reprising his earlier role, and Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly playing the parts of the prostitute and the society dame. I'll leave it to you to guess which of the two is the better film.

Red Dirt is unrated and is presented in its original black and white format. Running time is 83 minutes.

Captains Courageous (1937)

Harvey Cheyne (Freddie Bartholomew) is a monster. Ten years old. Rich. Spoiled. Used to getting exactly what he demands. Lording his wealth over the rest of the kids in his class. A real pain in the keester. No one likes this kid (Didn't we all know a creep like this?). On an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic with his father, Harvey falls overboard. Of course, no one on the liner even misses the little brat. Fortunately for Harvey, he's fished out of the sea by Manuel (Spencer Tracy). Manuel - who is fishing from a small dory - works on a Gloucester schooner that's heading out to the fishing grounds for the season. When Manuel gets Harvey back to the schooner, Harvey tries to bribe Captain Disco Troop (Lionel Barrymore) to turn around and take him back to shore. But the captain refuses. His greater obligation is to his crew who's livelihood depends on the fish they catch this season. So, like it or not, Harvey is stuck on the schooner for the next six months. And since there are no passengers on a working fishing boat, Harvey has to work. For the first time in his life. He's not a happy camper. Harvey soon discovers that all of the shenanigans that he got away with back home and at school don't work work out here in the world of hard, no-nonsense working men. It's a tough lesson. It's a tough school. One wrong move out here, and you won't be going home. But Harvey's a tough kid, and Manuel is a patient teacher. In time, Harvey learns how to work with people rather than using them all the time. He sweats with the rest of the crew, bleeds with them, grieves with them. By the time the schooner gets back to Gloucester and Harvey's waiting father, he's a different person. He's one of the crew.

Filmed in 1937, Victor Flemming's Captains Courageous is another of those literary adaptations that utterly destroys the original story, but in this case it's all right. Since only about one in 10,000 Americans has ever read the original novel, it really doesn't matter. And it's such a good movie, that it stands solidly on its own feet. The cast is incredible: Spencer Tracy with curly hair, Lionel Barrymore in the last role before arthritis knocked him off his feet, Freddie Bartholomew in the only role in which he was ever allowed to play someone of less than impeccable character, Mickey Rooney as Captain Troop's good natured son, John Carradine as the surly Long Jack, and Melvyn Douglas as Freddie's tycoon father. This was the cream of Hollywood in its day. And this is a man's film all the way through. As someone else once said, it's the story of "wooden ships and the iron men that sailed them." All of the action centers around men and the boys who are becoming men with a suddenness that would shock us today, and they're all doing "manly" work under extremely harsh conditions. There's no mollycoddling of children in this story, nobody's worried that the boys are playing with sharp knives and big hooks, no one seems to care that these boys' lives are in danger almost every minute of the day. There's work to be done, and all hands to it.

You may read this and think to yourself that it sounds barbaric, disgusting and gross. But this isn't about our time. It's a movie about an earlier time. A harder time. A time when men struggled against the elements to wrest a living out of nature, a time when women worked the house and waited for the men to come home from the sea, and a time when children stopped being children when they were still only children. Captains Courageous pays tribute to all of the Gloucester fisherman who didn't come home from the sea, while telling a wonderful story about one boy's reformation in the harsh world of hard work and harder men. It's worth watching just because it's a really great story. It's worth watching because it has a really great message.

Captains Courageous is rated G and is available in glorious black and white.

Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings tells the story of the men and women who flew mail over the Andes Mountains back in the 1930s. This was at a time when airplanes where largely wood framed craft covered with cloth and powered by temperamental engines that could barely get planes over the high Andes passes. Many craft were lost, along with the pilots who flew them. The French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote about the experience in his novel Night Flight which was given the Hollywood treatment in 1933. I've never seen that film, but I seriously doubt that it could be better than Hawks' film. Hawks was, after all, a master at creating atmosphere and winding up the tension.

Only Angels Have Wings follows the adventures of an air cargo service run by Geoff Carter (Cary Grant) and Dutchy (Sig Raumann). Geoff and his crew - The Kidd (Thomas Mitchell), Les (Allyn Joslyn), Sparks (Victor Killian), and Joe (Noah Berry, Jr.) - fly mail and freight to villages and mining camps on the other side of the mountains. It's hard dangerous work in planes that are barely able to make the flights. Some of the planes have been patched back together so many times that they are little more the chewing gum and bailing wire. The pilots who fly the route are men who have exhausted all of their other career opportunities - they do this job because it's the only flying job they can get. They're fearless, even reckless, but they get the mail through. Into this cocky group of men comes Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur), a nightclub singer touring South America. She falls for Geoff, but he was burned in the past and is not having any part of her. She decides to stay on for a bit to see if she can't get him to change his mind. Meanwhile, Bat MacPherson (Richard Barthelmess) arrives with his wife, Judy (Rita Hayworth). Bat has come to sign on as a new pilot, but he's responsible for the death of the Kid's brother years earlier and Judy is the woman who broke Geoff's heart. As if this weren't enough, Geoff and Dutchy have to make a certain number of flights in order to win a lucrative contract, but the weather is getting worse and they're running out of lanes and fit pilots.

With all of the pieces in place, Hawks slowly ratchets up the tension as the flights become more dangerous and plane after plane crashes. The tension also grows between Judy, Geoff and Bonnie, as Geoff tries to forget about the former and open himself up to the latter. And all of this takes place against the backdrop of a rustic bar and a tiny airport somewhere on the coast of South America during the Great Depression. These are people with nothing to go home to and nothing to lose, fighting a desperate battle - pitting canvas, wood, and steel against nature itself - to create a business and a life they can call their own. But with all of the death and injury portrayed, Only Angels Have Wings is ultimately a story of hope, a story of how it is possible to prevail against the all the odds if you believe in your dream hard enough.

Only Angels Have Wings is rated G and is available in glorious black and white.