The Glass Key (1935)

Director: Frank Tuttle

Writers: Dashiell Hammett, Kathryn Scola, Kubec Galsmon

Composers: John Leipold, Heinz Roemheld, Tom Satterfield

Starring: George Raft, Edward Arnold, Claire Dodd, Rosalind Keith, Charles Richman, Robert Gleckler, Guinn 'Big Boy' Williams, Ray Milland, Tammany Young, Harry Tyler, Charles C. Wilson, Emma Dunn, Matt McHugh, Pat Moriarity, Mack Gray, Ann Sheridan, George Reed

More info: IMDb

Plot: Ed Beaumont is the personal friend, advisor and bodyguard to Paul Madvig, the political boss of a large city. When a mysterious murder is committed---the son of a Madvig political opponent---Madvig's enemies try to pin the crime on him because he is waging a clean-up campaign they oppose. Ed risks his life and his reputation to find the killer and clear his friend.

My rating: 7.5/10

Will I watch it again?  Probably not.

This one took me off guard and boy am I glad it did.  I thought for sure I knew who killed Taylor.  Thinking that opened up all kinds of nasty consequences for a couple of the players but I'm pleased it was something different.  I like surprises.  Raft is great as the man who tries to put the pieces together.  His motives seem to change and you're not quite sure where he stands and that's all part of the fun.  He does a fine job but his shoulders look unusually stiff.  Is that his style or was he not all that good of an actor to use his entire body?  Beats me.  He comes across best when he's cheerful.  He's not smiling much in this one, though.  The stunt work is very good, too.  A German shepherd jumps on Raft's back and it's fast and badass.  Later Raft is escaping out of window two or three floors up and falls and it's harrowing.  The last twenty or so minutes are great all the way up to discovering the truth and the final gag which leaves all of the actors smiling and laughing.   Look for future star Ann Sheridan in a small role as a no-nonsense, smart-talkin' nurse.  

Man Without a Star (1955)

Director: King Vidor

Writers: Borden Chase, D.D. Beauchamp, Dee Linford

Composers: Hans J. Salter, Herman Stein

Starring: Kirk Douglas, Jeanne Craine, Claire Trevor, William Campbell, Richard Boone, Jay C. Flippen, Myrna Hansen, Mara Corday, Eddy Waller, Sheb Wooley, George Wallace, Frank Chase, Paul Birch, Roy Barcroft, William 'Bill' Phillips, Jack Elam

Tagline: His home was his saddle...and his only friend...a six-gun!

Plot: A drifter working as foreman for an iron-fist female rancher must chose sides between his attractive employer and the other neighboring settlers who are mistreated by her.

My rating: 6.5/10

Will I watch it again?  Nah.

Geez, I'd sure like to have seen this in widescreen but them's tha breaks sometimes.  I like Kirk Douglas but here he plays it a little more enthusiastically and over the top than necessary.  He's at his best when he pulls back a little, at least in this picture.  William Campbell, Kirk's new found young friend, over does it as well.  Outside of that the acting is solid.  Some of the dialogue is forced and goofy like when Dempsey (Douglas) freaks out whenever someone talks about barbed wire.  It's another example where he goes to far in the performance.  There are little things like this that bugged me a little.  Boone makes a fine baddie but he's not given much to do.  I guess it's enough if you consider this isn't some character study and it's all about a starring vehicle for Douglas where he gets to fight, shoot his pistol, love on some dames and crack wise...all in glorious Technicolor.  He covers the gamut in this picture.  He did everything but cry.  I did like how Dempsey and Reed's (Crain) relationship took a turn in the last act.  I didn't see that coming.  It's funny how much is made about having an indoor toilet yet they never show it, only Kirk's wild eye reactions to seeing one for the first time.  I guess it would be a while before that was allowed.  Unbelievable.  If you don't like Douglas then stay far away from this one but if you do then you'll be lightly entertained for an hour and a half.

Bitch Slap (2009)

Director: Rick Jacobson

Writers: Rick Jacobson, Eric Gruendemann

Composer: John R. Graham

Starring: Julia Voth, Erin Cummings, America Olivo, Michael Hurst, Ron Melendez, William Gregory Lee, Miniae Noji, Kevin Sorbo, Lucy Lawless, Renee O'Connor, Dennis Keiffer, Scott Hanley, Mark Lutz, Debbie Lee Carrington, Zoe Bell

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Prepare to get slapped ...

Plot: Three bad girls travel to a remote desert hideaway to steal $200 million in diamonds from a ruthless underworld kingpin.

My rating: 4/10

Will I watch it again?  Nope.

Ugh.  This looked like silly fun but it's nearly two hours of "get on with it already".  I was bored and it's another one of those movies where you think it's FINALLY wrapping up only to hit the display button and see that you've got 40 minutes left.  It's painful.  The opening credits are fucking fantastic.  It's a quick succession of clips from old movies with women slapping and punching and bits from exploitation flicks from the 60s.  I recognized a lot of them and that made me feel special.  Hey, I don't get many of those moments so I revel in them when I do.  Then the movie starts proper and there a definite vibe of FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! (1965).  There's a trailer in the middle of the desert and these three gals show up in a sweet classic muscle car.  I'm on board so far but it doesn't take long before boredom sets in and I'm fading.  Some things that annoyed me...There are flashbacks galore and they all start with something like "4 hours ago" and "3.17 months ago".  There are at least a dozen of these and it gets old and fast.  There are a lot of fights and they go on for too long.  OMFG why am I spending so much time writing this?  And one thing that might be a deal breaker for you is there isn't any nudity.  I take that back, there's one scene at a party where some random girl is topless.  OK, so there's your two seconds of skin.  You would think that the clearly grindhouse loving film makers would throw some bare boobs in there somewhere.  Sometimes it's completely necessary like in a movie that overstays its welcome by about a half hour.  I'm just sayin' a few nips wouldn't hurt this picture in the least.  If you're thinking about watching this for the first time I would encourage you to consider other options.  For what it's worth, the acting's OK if not surprisingly better than you'd expect.  So there's that, but who's going to watch a movie called BITCH SLAP with three hot chicks leading the cast for the acting?  Exactly.  Now where's the nudity?

Nightmare Honeymoon (1974)

Director: Elliot Silverstein

Writers: Lawrence Block, S. Lee Pogostin

Composer: Elmer Bernstein

Starring: Dack Rambo, Rebecca Dianna Smith, John Beck, Pat Hingle, Roy Jenson, David Huddleston, Jay Robinson, Dennis Patrick, Jim Boles, Dennis Burkley, Patrick Cranshaw, Angela Clarke, Jack Perkins, Bob Steele, Richard O' Brien, Walter Koenig

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Thank Heavens, It's Only A Movie!

Plot:  A newlywed couple witness a murder.  The two men responsible rape the bride and the groom vows revenge. 

My rating: 6/10

Will I watch it again?  No.

The first half hour is fantastic.  They set the picture up beautifully.  The Louisiana locales are beautiful and rich, and we know everything we need to know and get a damn good idea of what's to come.  Then the middle third shows up and drags it all down.  Before the slowdown period, Jill (Smith) is raped while her new husband David (Rambo) is unconscious.  By this point we already know that David spent two years in Vietnam in combat and he's only been back for three days when he marries Jill.  That says to me that once it's revealed she was raped (which she initially lies to David (and the viewer) that the killer just let them go while he was knocked out) then all killing machine hell is going to break loose when David sets his sights on revenge.  But that doesn't happen.  Instead it's a natural (I presume as I'm not familiar with the process rape victims go through) progression for this couple dealing with the aftermath of the crime.  He's pissed and wants revenge and she wants to move on and not tell anyone, including her father or the police.  The second half hour deals with this mostly with the couple discussing their feelings. 

There's a little bit of sleuthing on David's part to find out who these two killer rapists are.  Jill isn't able to tame her husband's desire so she's pretty much along for the ride eventually.  The last act has the main bad guy kidnapping Jill and using her to get to David so he can rape her again but in front of her husband.  I'm sure he's got plans to kill them both when the humiliation is over.  There's a big confrontation and fight and then it's over.  What starts as a textbook example of how to make a revenge exploitation picture ends up being a drama in disguise but then it remembers what it promised early on and tries to make up for it by going back to the exploitation roots and finishing with an action finale.  The middle third drags.  It's fine if the film wants to be a drama but it clearly doesn't from how the first and last half hours play out.  What's missing is that Vietnam experience David has and how he puts that killing skill to use by hunting these pricks down in the swamp or something.  THAT would've been awesome.  Everything else in the film (acting, directing, etc) is very good.  It's just the story's midsection is tonally not what the picture needed or at least what I wanted.  Little did they know that they were making a picture for some bozo to watch on a rainy Saturday night forty something years later.  Goobers.

Gunfighters of Casa Grande (1964)

Director: Roy Rowland

Writers: Bordon Chase, Patricia Chase, Clarke Reynolds

Composer: Johnny Douglas

Starring: Alex Nicol, Jorge Mistral, Dick Bentley, Steve Rowland, Phil Posner, Mercedes Alonso, Diana Lorys, Maria Granada, Roberto Rey, Aldo Sambrell, Toni Fuentes, Angel Solano, Pepe Martin

More info: IMDb

Plot: When a gambler wins a Mexican cattle ranch at a game of poker, he plans to drive the herd across the Rio Grande to Texas, sell the cattle and leave the ranch behind. He hires on local hands, but during the drive, the discover that he plans to cheat them.

My rating: 6/10

Will I watch it again? No.

SPOILERS ON THE RANGE...YARRRRRR!!!

Man, if you read the reviews from boneheads on IMDb you get the idea that this is the worst Western (or movie depending on at least one member) ever made.  I'm sorry to disappoint anyone but it's not even close.  I'd say it's better than average and reasonably entertaining.  The biggest plus is the beautiful Mexican scenery.  Most of this picture is filmed outdoors and that's A-OK by me.  There's enough action to satisfy some of those folks and there's plenty of in-fighting among the group of gunfighters.  That's the good and now the disappointments.  Rojo is the Mexican outlaw with 400 fighting men at his disposal and he's built up to be the looming menace in the background.  His name is dropped many, many times before we finally get to see him in the last act.  It's that long before he shows up.  This character is almost empty as they do nothing to show you he's a bad man except that we're to understand he is.  He looks the part but that's it.  Then our "heroes" dispatch him and his men in less than three minutes near the end of the film.  It's more like two and a half minutes.  So much for Rojo's reputation. 

Some other things that could've been better left this movie lacking.  The score sounds a few years out of date.  That might sound silly for someone to say but this film came out right around the beginning of the Spaghetti Western explosion and those films (Sergio Leone's Dollar Trilogy specifically) became a major influence on the Hollywood Western.  While Hollywood had been making smart, mature Westerns for years, it was the Spaghetti that made them grittier, dangerous and a lot more exciting.  The music that accompanied these films did the same.  I don't think it's fair to blame anyone for the lush Big Valley vibe of this score because it was made in this transitional period but taking the romanticism out of the music and having something more stark would've served this picture better.  There's one more thing that nagged me just a little.  At the beginning of the movie, Joe Daylight (some of the character names in this flick are awful) crosses into Mexico after having robbed a bank or something.  He's being chased by a posse led by a sheriff who stops at the border and says they'll be ready for when he eventually comes back.  That's the last we hear from these guys.  The rest of the movie is about dealing with Rojo and getting their thousands of head of cattle into the US to sell.  I figured they'd meet up with the Sheriff and that would be the end battle.  Had the picture continued after Rojo's defeat, that would've been great but it didn't.  89 minutes was their limit.  It would've been a better movie if they'd kept going.  It's still a decent movie.  Like all movies, watch this one on as big of a screen as you have.  It makes a difference.  Watch it now on YouTube while you can above.  It's a great widescreen print.

I Was Monty's Double (1958)

AKA: Hell, Heaven or Hobken

Director: John Guillermin

Writers: Bryan Forbes, M.E. Clifton James

Composer: John Addison

Starring: M.E. Clifton James, John Mills, Cecil Parker, Patrick Allen, Patrick Holt, Leslie Phillips, Michael Hordern, Marius Goring, Barbara Hicks, Sidney James, Bryan Forbes, John Le Mesurier, Walter Gotell

More info: IMDb

Tagline: The Gigantic Hoax of World War II

Plot: During WW2, a British actor impersonates Field Marshal Montgomery in order to confuse German intelligence.

My rating: 7.5/10

Will I watch it again?  Maybe.

What a marvelous picture!  I loved James playing himself doing what he did in life.  It's a neat true story and there's a lot of good stuff here.  It's great storytelling all around.  The film follows a pattern that's not uncommon to modern audiences.  The sequence of events seem very natural and logical.  But what makes it work is not just the remarkable story and script itself but the acting and the direction.  I'm not spoiling anything here but when you see James struggle to get the confidence to play the decoy role of Montgomery, I felt that hope was on the ropes even though I knew he had to have been successful or this movie wouldn't have been made (you know, based on the true account of what the man did during the war).  The payoff is when he finally gets it.  I actually teared up a little I was so happy for him.  I know, right?  He's challenged in other parts of the film where the tension is thick.  The scene where he's giving a speech to the American soldiers and he forgets the lines.  Man, I was literally on the edge of my seat.  And again, when he recovers and sells the shit out of it, I found myself emotionally thrilled as if I were there.  This is top notch filmmaking.  The climax of the picture didn't happen in real life (according to James) but it's still a tense and exciting way to end the film with a bang.  I'll probably watch this again someday when I find a proper widescreen print.  It played just fine in fullscreen, though.

The Gambler (1974)

Director: Karel Reisz

Writer: James Toback

Composer: Jerry Fielding

Starring: James Caan, Paul Sorvino, Lauren Hutton, Morris Carnovsky, Jacqueline Brookes, Burt Young, Carmine Caridi, Vic Tayback, Steven Keats, London Lee, M. Emmet Walsh, James Woods, Carl W. Crudup, Allan Rich, Stuart Margolin, Antonio Fargas

More info: IMDb

Tagline: For $10,000 they break your arms. For $20,000 they break your legs. Axel Freed owes $44,000.

Plot: James Caan portrays a compulsive gambler who can't quit or win. He falls into debt to the mob for $44,000 but seems to relish the thrill of gambling against the long shot. As a professor of literature at a New York University, he is in over his head, until his mother gives him some money which he quickly tries to increase in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, the odd s never allow him to win or fully recover, so his future is in the mob's hands.

My rating: 8/10

Will I watch it again?  Maybe.

This one's been on my radar for a very long time but it also looked like it was a depressing picture.  It is a depressing picture but it's beautifully made.  The cast is superb.  Every actor, regardless of the size of the role, brings it.  Paul Sorvino is amazing how his smile can light up a joint and then that disappears when he's dons a scowl that will shake you with fear.  Caan is magnificent.  He sells driven hopelessness.   There are a few moments of harsh tension.  You don't know how it's going to go for Axel (Caan).  Will he win or lose big.  The Vegas sequence had me on edge as did the basketball game near the end.  That was tense.  Jerry Fielding's sparse score is hypnotic and it shares heavily in bringing us down with Axel.  Great stuff.  The supporting cast is a who's who of great character actors and the surprises keep coming all the way till the end of the picture.  This is one hell of a rollercoaster ride with high peaks and subterranean valleys.  This is one picture worth taking a chance on.  I'm only sorry I waited 20 years to do it.