TH Reviews drives by night and by day!

An easy misunderstanding about They Drive by Night is that Humphrey Bogart is the star of the film...but alas, Bogart was still mired in his indentured servitude to Warner Brothers as a contract player. Bogart was unhappy during his period from The Petrified Forest to The Maltese Falcon (1936 to 1941) generally playing second banana (or even third!) to more established stars as James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and of course, as in TDBN, to George Raft. Bogart usually was the bullet fodder who got gunned down in the third reel by the star...but good things still lay in the future for the future super star.

Actually Raft could sympathize with Bogart to a certain extent....both were type cast as wiseguys in several Warner gangster films. Warner's was a bit notorious in recycling gangster stories, but had hit the gold mine with their on the cheap crime films that were drawing well from Depression era audiences.

So They Drive By Night was a departure for both...the story of two brothers trying to make it as independent truckers in an often corrupt and dangerous industry. After a crash that destroys their truck and takes off Bogie's right arm...the brothers have to work for a trucking company run by The Skipper's dad...Alan Hale Sr. In the wings waits smoky Ida Lupino, the wife of Hale with an eye for Raft and Hale's bucks. All in all, a nice and boiling pot of a noir film that does not involve detectives but does involve murder.

Raoul Walsh, veteran director of silent films and some of the best action adventure films around...not to mention a few of Warner's gangster films, does good work here. But Bogart, even in his limited screen time, shows why no one remembers George Raft but adores Bogie. Bogart does so much with little...a gesture or tick to his face...a particularly fine scene involves Bogart breaking down about his lost arm and disability at the dinner table. Raft was a minimalist kind of actor like Bogart, but as the hero, seems a little wooden even when faced with the guilt of his brother's injury or romancing yummy Ann Sheridan.

Which leaves the mystery of Ida Lupino. She does well at first as the femme fatale wife of Hale...but her descent into murderous mania seems a bit cheesy to the 21st century eye...especially her fortuitous breakdown in the courtroom scene. Lupino was well regarded at this time, but she seems to be munching the scenery a bit in this turn. Better things were ahead for her as well.

Lupino, Walsh, and Bogart would get to team up on the film that would finally catapult Bogart to his early forties classics The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. It would be High Sierra and it would be the last true Warner's gangster film for Bogie...but finally he would be in a starring role which he would make the most of, becoming arguably, the greatest star of the Classic Hollywood era!

As for They Drive, it is a nice, little dark confection....a nice break from the usual Warner's fare, but fairly predictable...the bad guy(girl) gets theirs, Raft gets his girl, and Bogart gets the shaft, but not for much longer....3.8 stars out of five!

TH Reviews laughs at Andy Hardy!

Entertaining enough for a few smiles and a laugh or two, Love Laughs at Andy Hardy is not the strongest addition to the franchise. These films have never been profound film making but represent a quaint snapshot of late thirties to mid forties Americana.

Perhaps most disappointing is the real lack of a romantic lead for Andy...at least no one at the level of a Judy Garland anyway. There was of course super attractive, but super tall Coffee, an interesting and fun character, but certainly not for the vertically challenged Andy.

All the other hallmarks are here, such as the all knowing, wise father, Judge Hardy, who helps Andy think through a busted love affair at college. It does feel at this point in the franchise, that all the successful wrinkles were worn out. Not a waste of time, though, to experience what Hollywood thought college life around 1946 was like!

TH Reviews rating: slightly dim 3.5 stars!

Review of a Wimpy Kid!!

I always have mixed feelings when a film like Diary of a Wimpy Kid comes out....I initially feel elation and immediately call over my tween daughter to exult over the fact that Hollywood has finally made a film version of a tremendously beloved book that we have shared... But then I feel anxiety that the film will not adequately capture the essence and feel of the book, or perhaps not bother at all, merely slapping the brand name on their crappy flick to sell it to a lot of know nothing goobs who love to flush their money down the....(Whoops, sorry I kind of lost it there!) At the end of viewing Diary, I came to the conclusion that my feelings about this film were....well, mixed.

In case you don't read much young adult or tween literature, Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a journal (not a diary!) kept by a boy named Greg Heffley about his experiences of being a new six grader at his local junior high. Sprinkled among the hilarious text are cartoons of himself, his family, friends and enemies. The whole mix is really a quite hilarious meditation on standing out and fitting in, reminding me of Matt Groenig's Life in Hell or The Simpsons. It took me back to my own experience of Junior High...struggling to find a personal identity or noticing girls for the first time or exploring the depths of school popularity.

Animation and art were taken from the books to adorn the beginning and end credits along with being sprinkled liberally through the film at certain points and this was quite entertaining...but it underscored a problem I have with the film and that is the casting of at least of the hero character Greg Heffley and his family...they all seem too blow dried and good looking to fully inhabit the characters we see portrayed in the hilarious books. I understand that in the books, Greg and his family are rendered in the style that he sees them...goofy and sometimes silly or gross. Unfortunately the actors cast seem almost too attractive to live up to the book's characterizations. The film does a better job in the casting of Greg's friends and classmates, particularly Rowley, played by Robert Capron. Capron really steals the show and gets some of the film's best lines and most comic moments.

But to be fair, most of the time, Diary gets it right, picking up on the hilarious and yet heartbreaking moments of discovering yourself and how that self fits into the whole scheme of things.....Greg tries out for athletics, the school newspaper, crossing guards in an effort to realize popularity. This will cause him to question his most important relationships with his best friend Rowley and his family. Being a family film meant to draw in kids and amuse their parents who have been drug along, Diary does fall into some time honored (and sleep inducing) cliches...like being true to yourself and your friends and various instances of farting, belching, and other poopy humor techniques. But in the final estimation, I felt entertained, a little wiser, and not ready to run screaming from the room as I do from most live action Disney comedies! Diary of a Wimpy Kid is worth the effort of your family to view even with the PG rating for older children.

Rating of Diary of a Wimpy Kid: A reserved 3.5 stars!!

Return to "Away We Go"!

Seeing this again with my wife recently was a real treat...it was and is a lovely and sweet Independent Romantic Comedy-Drama...amazing that I wrote this almost exactly a year ago...a day before my anniversary with my own "Verona", the lovely and talented Shelly...it kind of echoes our own gypsy journey of the past twenty years, not to mention our nearly five year adventure as parents of our sweet Breianna! So enjoy and don't forget...lots of great Indy stuff out there:

Sweet and engaging, Away We Go is the kind of Indy comedy that entices me back again and again to Independent film. Goofy and kooky with lots of opportunity for its very good cast to stretch their chops, Away We Go is the off beat story of Burt and Verona who are having a baby and are searching for a place of emotional security and deepness to have that child, in short looking for community with either friends or family. This search makes the film essentially a road picture made up of separate but lightly connected episodes. Burt and Verona have the opportunity to sample the family communities of their various family and friends and come to a momentous but not necessarily surprising conclusion. The enduring grace and light of this film is the relationship of Burt and Verona who love each other deeply but wonder if they are truly doing a "good job" preparing their lives for another. Worthy of note are Jeff Daniels and Catherine O'Hara as Burt's rather laid back parents. As with most independents, this film has a pace and plot that develops within a more gradual sense of time...so most main stream rom-com lovers may feel frustrated with this.

Really a 4.5 star film, Away We Go quietly earns it's A- grade. 10/05/09

Review of Underworld: Evolution....the cotton candy experience!

Ever gone to the county fair and ate a whole bunch of stuff that's not so good for you? Of course you have! One of those things was cotton candy, wasn't it? You know cotton candy....that whipped up sugar confection that looks so big before you eat it, but then you bite off a piece, and it immediately shrinks down to a tasty, but sort of gravely residue in your mouth. This is akin to the experience of watching Underworld: Evolution!

It starts out as its predecessor, Underworld begins...a tasty whipped up confection that nearly explodes your eyeballs with its incredible CGI and of course the most lovely Kate Beckinsale wearing her latex outfit like it was so much painted on her. But where the first film is a pretty lean and mean action flick/monster machine, Evolution feels torpid and top heavy, treating its light weight material as something of much more epic import than it deserved...as if Peter Jackson was doing the S&M version of The Lord of the Rings. Even the somewhat interesting race/class struggle of the lowly, blue collar lycans (werewolves) against the aristocratic, velvet collar vampires that enlivened the first film becomes a sort of vague afterthought here.

It does expand on the lycan-vampire struggle that was kind of thrown into the first film to explain why all these good looking and muscular folks in spandax, leather, and latex (Oh my!) were going after each other tooth and nail. This has been going on for generations upon generations since the first lycan and vampire (brothers of course!) decided to take a dislike to each other. Throw in Derek Jacobi as their immortal but brooding papa and you have something that threatens to back up on you, once you take a bite out of it. And really....Sir Derek must have poor relatives he's putting through night-school somewhere, because why would he need to be in this movie when just about any older male actor with a posh English accent could fill the bill with this kind of stuff.

And yet...Kate B. sails through this film like a leather jacketed dove through a hailstorm of blood and bullets, only touching lightly down to spout the predictable one liner as she mows down lycan and vampire alike. With all the massive explosions, gore, and weapons of unearthly qualities....enough to shame The Matrix, Evolution is like most guilty pleasures...at times fun and actually entertaining. I just wouldn't want to turn in my Film Appreciation Club card by admitting that I found parts of this cotton candy confection mildly interesting....and then there is that gravely residue left in your mouth!

TH Reviews rating: 2.5 mildly interesting stars out of 5!!!

Jaws and the meeting of men...a review!

Seeing the classic horror (more on this later!) film Jaws as an older man, I discovered a new truth...that sometimes in real life you encounter stuff that might be scarier than a soulless behemoth come from the depths to make soup and salad of you! I found it in the very quietly awesome and pivotal scene in which Quint(Robert Shaw) and Hooper(Richard Dreyfuss) compare the scars of their lives on and in and off the water while a bemused Chief Brody(Roy Scheider) looks on. Then Hooper points out a scar on Quint which Quint says had once been a tattoo identifying him as a survivor of the USS Indianapolis from World War II. Coming back from it's secret mission to deliver the H Bomb that would be dropped on Japan, the Indianapolis would be torpedoed with over eight hundred men left in the water. Eventually the men were rescued, but only 312 would survive. Several of the deaths were attributed to shark attacks.

There are indeed man-eating sharks of many kinds which this scene pays a solemn tribute to ...not just the organic ones...for the secretive mission of the USS Indy contributed to the great length of time it took to rescue the sailors not to mention the failure of the US Navy at different stages of the rescue. Another shark threatening the good folk of Amity are the town select men who resist Brody's attempts to close the beaches to the tourist trade which is Amity's lifeblood. Economic pressures brought to bear on the little town force this decision which results in the deaths of at least three people within the film. A wonderful, but chilling scene has the grieving mother of a shark slain child strike Brody on the face for allowing the beaches to remain open when they knew a shark was threatening.

How strong is the good in human beings when faced with difficult, dangerous choices...when you seem doomed no matter what you decide. Brody and the rest of the Amity folks are faced with impossible choices with consequences fated to destroy their idyllic lives. Peter Benchley's multi-faceted novel has more about this and I suggest that viewers check it out, but Steven Spielberg does a visual interpretation worthy of Benchley's vision of dread and doom. Which is about as much as anyone can claim of a film which at it's heart, is most assuredly a horror film. Aside from the usual suspects...lots of gore, horrendous monster, and lots of Hitchcockian foreboding...Jaws is also a magnificent and horrifying look at how sometimes sharks actually walk around on two legs in the inhumanity practiced against humanity.

TH Reviews rating of Jaws: 5 out of 5 glorious stars....Highly Recommended!!!

Stalag 17 Review!

While there are many comic moments in Stalag 17 (the spiritual father of TV's Hogan's Heroes), it does have, I am happy to say...a darker side to all of the street savvy antics of it's very American cast of Joes from different parts of the country...namely Brooklyn. William Holden is the soul heart of this film and reveals it's gritty underbelly heroically...while many of the POWs look rather well fed to be long term prisoners, there is a very authentic air about the film with the guys in patched up long johns and mud surrounding the barracks. Holden is the actor that keeps Billy Wilder's awesome POW film from falling into another mushy "Gee aren't they all a bunch of great guys" kind of American War film.

There are the usual suspects of stereotypical American archetypes: the tough guy with a heart of gold from Brooklyn, the Midwestern blue-collar guy from Cleveland, the blue-blood with a silver spoon from Boston, and of course the simple backwoods guy from the South...they are all here. But this story of POWs trying to serve their country by attempting escapes to keep the Nazis busy has the wonderfully dark character of Sgt. Sefton to keep everybody honest. Holden, the former Golden Boy of Hollywood was truly entering his "golden" period as Sefton, and of course would continue with very meaty roles afterward. Sefton stands apart from all the other Joes, an outcast and antihero, stating frankly that he merely wants to make himself comfortable, riding out the rest of the war. No cabbage on the chest for Sefton.

But Sefton is pulled into the hero business when he becomes accused of being a stool pigeon, alerting the Camp Guards of any escape attempts or banned items that might be in the possession of the prisoners. He must use his inherent sneakiness to root out the true spy. Sefton makes the very ironic remark that might have chilled many souls in the 1950's red scare era when he wonders aloud nastily why anyone should be suspected of spying for aren't they all "Americans"? It would be interesting to find out if Wilder was saying something of weight in those days when Americans were nervously watching the Russians and each other for Commies out to subvert the government. Later there is indeed a very chilling scene where Sefton's fellow inmates attack him in what clearly amounts to a lynching.

Billy Wilder is definitely on his game here, along with Holden's academy award winning performance, making Stalag 17 classic Hollywood material, not to mention a step ahead of some of it's War film brethren. A solid cast is in place including a young Peter Graves. Stalag 17, along with The Great Escape, remains among my most cherished favorites of this genre.

TH Review's rating of Stalag 17: 4.5 stars out of five! Highly recommended!