Friday's Old Fashioned: The Rose Bowl Story (1952)

There’s a line in “The Rose Bowl Story” (1952) about how the only thing that matters in Pasadena, California is keeping the Tournament of Roses committee happy. It suggests the fabled Rose Parade and those who oversee it as akin to a nefarious cabal running the whole southern California city. Alas, nothing so diabolical is allowed to infiltrate this wholesome, humdrum motion picture. Why at one point the Rose Queen, Denny Burke (Vera Miles), lectures the star player of an unnamed Midwestern college team, Steve Davis (Marshall Thompson), that he is not paying proper homage to the so-called Grandaddy of the Bowl Games. Perhaps not, but I also wonder why if the Rose Bowl was so significant, William Beaudine’s movie was made under the umbrella of a low-budget studio like Monogram Pictures rather than, say, MGM, or 20th Century Fox. The camera panning the interior of the mighty stadium nestled in the Arroyo Secco at night that ends with an obvious cut to disguise that its two actors sitting in the bleachers are not really in the Rose Bowl at all made me wonder if Beaudine broke in overnight to steal the shot.

Though the scene-setting narration of “The Rose Bowl Story,” with accompanying aerial images of Pasadena, hint at a movie about the Rose Bowl itself, that’s not really the case. It proves more of a melodrama-romantic comedy hybrid with Coach Hadley’s (Richard Rober) wife in the hospital, and Steve not only falling in love with Denny once his team arrives in California but struggling to learn the right reasons for playing – that is, for love of the game rather than money and future business prospects. It’s a storyline that current shadow college football commissioner Nick Saban and his junior senator from Texas consigliere could love. The plotting, editing, and blocking, however, evince next to no snap, crackle, or pop. Even at a mere hour and thirteen minutes, “The Rose Bowl Story” is one of those movies that moves like it’s stuck in mud. The only time it perks up are the scenes in Denny’s home. Yes, her father Iron Mike Burke (Jim Backus), predating the other Iron Mike, a one-time football player himself, is just a broad, if not occasionally insulting, caricature, but the scene where he re-enacts an old football play with a decorative artifact is more exciting than the climactic Rose Bowl game itself. What’s more, Denny’s phone-hogging younger sister Sally is played by a young Natalie Wood who, bless her heart, brings energy where there generally is none. And though it’s not enough to redeem this stinker, in so much as it has one, Wood is “The Rose Bowl Story’s” MVP.  

Friday's Old Fashioned: Strange Victory (1948)

In watching the recently reviewed “Pressure” about the D-Day invasion, I was reminded of Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower’s in-advance speech to his troops in which he declared that “nothing less than full victory” would be acceptable. But what, exactly, constituted full victory in WWII? That’s the question director Leo Hurwitz puts forth in his aptly named “Strange Victory,” finished all of three years after the second world war, by demonstrating with blunt style that the United States of America could not claim to honor all the ideals it had ostensibly fought and died for in the name of liberal democracy. Stitching together archival footage and dramatic re-enactments to underscore the various points of the archival footage, “Strange Victory” was deemed a documentary but comes across more akin to a visual essay. That sensation is brought home in the voiceover by co-writer Saul Levitt which is not dispassionate but barely concealed rage at what is being conveyed onscreen. An introductory overview of WWII’s conclusion is constructed out of graphic imagery that cuts the heart right out of any nostalgia and evokes a collective trauma that has been repressed rather than dealt with and fuels the anger and fear in the form of antisemitism, anti-communism, and racism coursing the post-war America, as Levitt asks, again and again, “If we won, what did we win?”

If it’s freedom, “Strange Victory” illustrates, we have a funny way of showing it. In Hurwitz’s most daring conceptualization, he blends a brutal rundown of the effects Jim Crow laws with a montage outlining the insidious rise of the Third Reich and in effect, links our own post-war fearmongering with theirs, providing a different spin on that old standby line of scriptural reassurance: if God is for us, who could be against us? He even mixes and matches images of newborn babies, black and white, and their black and white mothers, with images of whites only signs and colored entrances, living the idea that while all men might be created equal, as the declaration says, the society we have constructed once newborns leave the hospital proves just the opposite. In demonstrating oppression of the era, predictably “Strange Victory” was suppressed itself, with a lack of major distribution making it difficult to see. It calls to mind what is currently transpiring with the suppression of history by the current Presidential administration at the Smithsonian, as if embodying “Strange Victory’s” own conclusion, that there is a war still going on at home, waiting to be won. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Violent Saturday (1955)

The central event of “Violent Saturday” is a bank robbery, but Richard Fleischer’s crime thriller feels more like a disaster movie, really, with the heist serving as the catastrophe in place of an earthquake, hurricane, or volcano. We see the meticulous planning of the three thieves, Harper (Stephen McNally), Dill (Lee Marvin), and Chapman (J. Carrol Naish), but we spend just as much time with the residents of the small Arizona town where the bank is located, from colleagues at the local copper mine to a devout Amish family with the taciturn Stadt (Ernest Borgnine) for its patriarch. The manager of the bank under surveillance, Harry (Tommy Noonan), is a George McFly-ish peeping tom, Boyd (Richard Egan) suffers a philandering wife, likely from his own alcoholism, and Boyd’s associate at the local mine, Shelley (Victor Mature), discovers that his son is being bullied because his old man failed to serve and win honor in WWII. These are all issues of a decided masculine variety, and it is telling that the debt-riddled librarian, Elsie (Sylvia Sidney), has the most superfluous subplot of all.

Befitting “Violent Saturday’s” so-called sunshine noir genre, all these problems will be exposed to the harsh light, in a manner of speaking, when the robbery commences, a lengthy sequence of changing locations that Fleischer recounts in an almost documentary-like fashion. There is no accompanying music, nothing more, really, than some chirping birds on the soundtrack once the three thieves make haste from the bank to the Amish farm where they have tied up the family and Shelley, using the latter’s car in lieu of their own stowed getaway vehicle. This vérité sensation makes the gunshots that are fired sound all the more startling, and the deaths stemming from the bullets feel that much more shocking. If Shelley being able to free himself and the Amish clan from the barn loft where they are being held can feel like a bout of some all-too-convenient screenwriting stupidity courtesy of the character keeping watch, it still allows for him to ante up and be the hero he never got to be.

But that’s also the strange thing about “Violent Saturday.” The cold cruelty of the bank robbers would seem to refute the nature of violence just as the Amish patriarch being forced to kill one of the robbers would too. Whether he was coached, decided on his own, or some combination of the two, however, Borgnine plays the Amish patriarch not just with no inner-life but no life at all, reducing him to a cyborg in a straw hat, meaning the moment has no resonance. What’s more, the capping scene in which Shelley is greeted heroically not only by his son but by virtually every boy in his son’s school, like we are suddenly watching an afterschool special, suggests the exact opposite of his character’s half-hearted protestation that it would be better if such things didn’t happen in the first place. I mean, if not, how could you ever prove you were a real man?

Friday's Old Fashioned: McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

Robert Altman’s revisionist western “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” has one of the greatest movie character introductions: a solitary figure virtually hidden beneath an enormous fur coast astride a horse in the Pacific Northwest circa 1902. When the figure finally reaches its destination of a rugged mining town, it dismounts and removes the coat. You expect, say, Tom Hardy as a neanderthal-like mountain man and instead, Warren Beatty emerges. He is John McCabe, wearing a suit, albeit a bit rumpled given the circumstances, and dons a derby hat, tipping it to a passerby, cutting the image of a displaced dapper gentleman. The town is named Presbyterian Church, but its central gathering place is the saloon, not the chapel, where McCabe promptly heads, throws a cloth over the table, as if seeking to class up the joint a little, and fires up a card game to start making some money. The saloon owner, Patrick Sheehand (René Auberjonois), approaches, asking if they go into business together by working out a cut of the proceeds, but McCabe begs off. The scene is infused with Altman’s patented style of overlapping dialogue, myriad conversations happening at once, and has the effect of establishing the town itself existing independently of McCabe while simultaneously imbuing the sense that McCabe exists always at center of his own universe.

His universe is thrown for a loop when he purchases three women and opens a brothel, one that only starts turning a profit, however, when the recently arrived Cockney madam Constance Miller (Julie Christie) convinces him to make her a partner and let her run the place since it’s clear his business acumen lags behind his braggadocio. Indeed, Beatty gives an exemplary performance of a man putting on airs who almost, but not quite, knows he is putting on airs and which pairs perfectly with Christie’s raw candor; there’s this thing she does with her face, occasionally twisting it into a kind of confounded grimace, not able to fathom this blustery half-imbecile before her. When they sit down for breakfast to hash out the details of their partnership, Mrs. Miller orders almost as much as Daniel Day-Lewis in “Phantom Thread,” though it’s not a come-on as it was in that 2017 movie but a throwing down, leaving McCabe to look on like a lost little boy. He might become attracted to her, and she to him, but when they eventually wind up in bed together, Altman’s camera drifts away from them and to Mrs. Miller’s dresser where he has put the cash to pay for her time, as funny and sardonic a shot as you’ll see. 

“McCabe & Mrs. Miller” is all business. Even the rumor that he McCabe a gunfighter of some renown known as Pudgy McCabe, which is eventually called into question, comes to feel mostly like a matter of branding. McCabe might claim to have poetry in him, but we don’t hear any of it. The world that Altman cultivates in the dim interiors and frequently harsh exteriors, a town with mud for streets and lumber stacked high is still in the process of building itself, is one that does not make room for poetry. Merely surviving day to day is the highest priority. That becomes an open question for McCabe when the powerful mining company with a hold on the town dispatches a couple representatives to try and buy out McCabe & Mrs. Miller’s successful operation. And though “The Art of the Deal” might not have been published until seven decades later, McCabe proves its ideas are timeless, spurning the initial entreaties as a negotiating tactic to get a bigger payout, only to peeve the negotiators and wind up with three men sent to kill him in lieu of any further bargaining. Art of the deal, indeed.

In another movie, this might be the moment when McCabe finds something within himself that he did not know he had to become a hero. That very notion is mocked by having McCabe meet with a politically ambitious lawyer (William Devane) who suggests taking the mining company to court, sticking it to large corporations and making McCabe a hero of small business owners everywhere, an idea that McCabe quite likes, even repeating it to Mrs. Miller. She looks at him like his days are numbered. He can’t stop what’s coming, though there will be no quick draw or ten paces, foreshadowed in one of the hired guns, a sadistic kid (Manfred Schulz), killing a goofy innocent (Keith Carradine) just to kill him. There is no gallantry here, just gutless desperation, and the ensuing shootout between McCabe and the three men is as funny as it is tragic with our nominal hero mislaying his shotgun and having it confiscated by a minister, of all people, stopping off for a beer and a bump midway through, scurrying around in the falling snow, and shooting people in the back. As it plays out, the Presbyterian church catches on fire, causing the town folk to rally together to save it, a sly juxtaposition to the gunfight that only emphasizes its meaningless. As the town is saved, McCabe winds up dead in the snow and Mrs. Miller winds up in a drug-induced stupor, just one more failed business venture, the American Dream brutally reconstituted as an opium haze. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Walker (1987)

Alex Cox’s fifth feature film “Walker” was beset by a rash of bad reviews, including two thumbs down from Siskel and Ebert with extreme prejudice. Even among the contemporary notices, though, there were occasional positive ones, like Vincent Canby of The New York Times complimenting Cox’s “nerve.” That’s a good way to put it. If hope is a dangerous thing to have in real life, then nerve is a dangerous thing to have in Hollywood, and after “Walker” was written off, so, too, was Cox, effectively blacklisted in La La Land for the rest of his career. He has intimated that it was a blessing in disguise, and I hope that was true, but boy, watching “Walker” for the first time almost 40 years later could not help but make me wonder what he might have been capable of had financial backing been easier to acquire. In telling the true story of one-time Nicaraguan president William Walker, Cox creates a truly hyper-surreal sort of aesthetic by not merely fudging the truth but often outright ignoring it, honoring the mid-19th century setting and not honoring it at all, commenting indirectly and unequivocally on President Reagan’s own Nicaraguan adventures, creating something that feels of its time, not of its time, and out of time, a Monte Hellman acid western reimagined as a historical biopic. Nerve is a good word but there’s another one: awesome. “Walker” is awesome.

“Walker” begins with its eponymous filibuster (Ed Harris), at least according to the 1850s version of the term, failing in his invasion attempt of Mexico, warning his men that they have no chance at an escape short of an act of God. At that, the wind picks up and a dust storm settles, allowing an avenue for escape, the very act of God Walker is hoping for, so funny as to be farcical even as it simultaneously invests in Walker a misplaced belief that God is on his side. In subsequent Sam Peckinpah-like scenes of gruesome violence, Walker walks through the bullets like someone walking between the raindrops, his imperviousness implying such ostensible divine favor. At the same time, Cox cuts that belief down to size in the most acerbic of manners. When Walker lectures his men on how to conduct themselves, he declares that cursing in public is forbidden, to which one of his men wonders in a deadpan line heard off camera, “Can we curse in private?” That’s how a lot of dialogue goes in “Walker”: so unexpectedly funny you take a beat to confirm in your mind what you just heard and then you laugh. 

Walker might seek to spread his ideology abroad but his financial backer, Cornelius Vanderbilt (Peter Boyle), has other ideas on his mind. He enlists Walker to invade Nicaragua to open a land route between oceans to spur trade and, of course, line his own coffers. Boyle plays Vanderbilt not as a captain of industry, nor even quite as a robber baron, but something else, like, say, a backwater version of Dom DeLuise as Emperor Nero in “History of the World, Part One,” evinced in what is undoubtedly among cinema’s greatest fart jokes. In another way, Boyle’s portrayal feels almost modern, like a 1980s tycoon has slipped the surly bonds of time, an anachronistic sensation that Cox makes more explicit with amusing little touches like the glimpse of a People Magazine where Walker is billed as Nicaragua’s “Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny” or the saxophone that sounds cut from “Jewel of the Nile” occasionally appearing on the soundtrack. History is not repeating itself, Cox seems to be saying, so much as such ideological urges are simply in our blood, brought home in a climactic speech in which Walker may as well be laying out the United States of America’s foreign policy for the next 200 years. 

If Walker has any kind of moral counterweight, it’s his deaf fiancé Ellen Martin (Marlee Matlin), who in keeping with the rest of the movie’s tone is not some patient saint but palpably repulsed by the company her husband to-be keeps. In one hysterical sequence, Walker translates her radical opinions for those who don’t know sign language by softening their tone, nothing less, really, than a literal evocation of the mealy-mouthed kind of centrism. She dies, though, not long after from cholera, leaving Walker with no one to temper his certitude, and as he invades Nicaragua and installs himself as President, it all goes to his head, eventually referring to himself in the third person just as he does in the recurring voiceovers that in Harris’s plainspoken tone juxtaposed against often blackly comic scenes suggest, I swear, Ted Striker’s narration in “Airplane!” Indeed, Ebert might have hated “Walker,” but his old adage about a performer being funniest when they don’t know they are wearing a funny hate proves true here – Harris plays Walker as someone wearing a funny hat who doesn’t realize it. He also plays him with little dimension or nuance, reducing the character to utter zealotry, in himself and his mission so that they are virtually one and the same, a terrifying living embodiment of manifest destiny.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Baron of Arizona (1950)

“The Baron of Arizona” does not technically begin on a dark and stormy night but it essentially begins on a dark and stormy night, a comically sly detail underlined in a magnificent close-up of Vincent Price in the rain emitting the distinct sense of a tall tale. Then again, Sam Fuller’s 1950 movie is based on the true story of James Reavis (Price) who in the late 1800s really did deploy a massive and massively detailed scheme involving fraudulent land claims to try and claim the Arizona Territory as his own. And sort of in the spirit of its main character, and despite a meager budget, “The Baron of Arizona” convinces as it moves the action from the American Southwest to Spain and back again, though its limited sense of action and substantial talky nature can sometimes weigh it down. Price plays this cruel manipulator with great panache, though he is less successful at convincing us of the character’s burgeoning love for the faux-Baroness (Ellen Drew) as the scheme gradually unravels. No, the real affection here is Fuller’s for his unlikely subject. A director famous for intense realism, this independently financed film feels like a sincere melodrama rather than a subversive one. By the end, and by taking liberties with the story, it’s as if the unlikely appreciation evinced by forgery expert Griff (Reed Hadley) toward his target mirrors the iconoclastic Fuller’s. Foreshadowing, or maybe just epitomizing, our national gift for greed and grift, the would-be baron tried to steal a whole freaking territory and for that, in the parlance of our times, you’ve gotta hand it to him. 

Friday's Old Fashioned for 4th of July: From Here to Eternity (1953)

“Robert E. Lee Prewitt,” says Lorene (Donna Reed) as “From Here to Eternity” draws to a close. “Isn’t that a silly old name?” She is referring to the chief character of the 1953 winner for Best Picture, and though the name is, indeed, sort of silly, it is also revealing. Derived from Middle English and Old French, the surname Prewitt means brave, which is how America’s national anthem summarizes its general population, while the character’s given name Robert E. Lee encapsulates this country’s contradictions and complications, truth and lies, the story it tells about itself and how that story is constantly being revised. The making of the movie adaptation of James Jones’s celebrated 1951 novel of military life on Oahu leading up to Pearl Harbor encapsulated those contradictions too as director Fred Zinneman, writer Daniel Taradash, and producer Buddy Adler softened the book’s coarse language and less politically correct details even while painting itself in enough shades of grey to anger the U.S. Military for not being complimentary enough. The immortal essayist Joan Didion loved Jones’s novel and wrote about how in visiting America’s geographical end to Manifest Destiny, the Hawaiian Islands, in 1977 that she was less taken by seeing its beaches than Schofield Barracks, the army base where “From Here to Eternity” is set. In speaking with then-current service members, Didion came away thinking that much had changed and not much had changed at all, and that “the Army was nothing more or less than life itself.”

Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) is the proof. Zinneman’s approach might have been overly polished, and occasionally too literal (the turning of a calendar to December 7, 1941) but in truth, his camera did not really need anything other than Montgomery Clift’s visage to evince “From Here to Eternity’s” myriad dimensions; virtually smoldering in close-ups, Clift wears defiance and vulnerability at once. A hard-headed individualist, Prewitt arrives at Schofield Barracks as the movie opens having taken a buck to private when he is replaced as company bugler in his previous outfit by what he views as an inferior musician. His new company commander, Dana “Dynamite” Holmes (Philip Ober), only wants him for the boxing team, which he refuses to join on account of having previously blinded a man in the ring, given the so-called treatment by his fellow soldiers as brutal, callous incentivization to get in the ring but refusing to waver. “A man loves a thing,” this individualist explains of his devotion to the collectivist Army, “that don’t mean it’s gotta love him back,” which may as well encapsulate a great many Americans and their relationship to this nation. In a sense, Prewitt reflects both his First Seargent Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster), a career soldier who both is and is not content at putting out everyone else’s fires, and his best pal, fellow private Maggio (Frank Sinatra), a hothead who walks off duty when his weekend pass is revoked.

It is through Maggio that Prewitt meets Lorene. In the book, she’s a prostitute, in the movie, she’s a hostess, though that delineation is thinly veiled, and I suspect it is why both then and now that despite winning an Oscar for her performance, Reed is often cited as being miscast. Donna Reed became a certain American housewife archetype while the real Donna Muellenberger, as she was born, was something else altogether, and those dueling notions and the more complex sense of self that Reed nee Muellenberger possessed are why she was, in fact, perfectly cast. Why, Lorene is not even Lorene, she’s Alma Burke, and she works at the New Congress Club to save up enough money to go back to the mainland and lead she what deems a proper life: a proper marriage to the proper man with the proper children with a membership at the country club. The monologue in which she explains this is Reed’s best moment – you can virtually see her putting on a mask in real time, a mask of the person that American society expects her to be. 

Lorene’s hope that Prewitt will be the one to help her fulfill the American Dream is undone, however, when Maggio is killed in the brig by the sadistic stockade Sergeant Fatso Judson (Ernest Borgnine) and Prewitt avenges his friend by killing Fatso, leaving him wounded and on the lam, friendship and honor bleeding into standard-issue American masculine idiocy. Lorene hides him at home, and Warden protects him during roll call, holding out hope he might return, demonstrating his own unexpected complications just as his affair with his commanding officer’s wife (Deborah Kerr) does too. Ah, but the problems of one, two, three, four, five people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world and that proves true when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and “From Here to Eternity” both unironically and ironically brings to life Mr. X’s observation from JFK that the “organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison, is for war.” Even Prewitt is galvanized, in a manner of speaking, inverting the notion of dying for your country by dying for his country in the dumbest way possible by trying to sneak back to the barracks against all logic and getting shot and killed by his own men. That, however, is not how “From Here to Eternity” ends. No, it ends with Lorene telling a make-believe story reframing Prewitt’s idiotic death as an act of genuine valor and reminding us that if you tell a story about who or what something is enough times, you might just start to believe it. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Getting Even (1986)

The 1986 action-thriller “Getting Even” is a moving picture testament to that moment in time when Dallas, Texas captured the imagination of and evoked a swaggering attitude endemic of Me Decade America. It was co-produced by Mike Liddle and Al Hill Jr., the latter the grandson of H.L. Hunt and heir to the Hunt Oil Company, meaning “Getting Even” was infused with oil money and something like an opportunity to transform Big D into a movie town. Indeed, it was filmed not only on location in Dallas but by utilizing Dallas equipment and locations to which the producers had access, as director Dwight H. Little explained in an interview with The Flashback Files. What’s more, Little has said he was hired as director specifically because he was non-union. That’s hilarious, evoking a certain kind of wildcatting spirit and goes a long way toward describing what “Getting Even” is: effectively a B-movie made with an A-movie attitude. And though I can’t speak to how it looked or played in a theater on February 28, 1986, alongside “Pretty in Pink,” of course, just how it came across 40 years later on VHS rip uploaded to YouTube, I gotta say, I was smitten, and which is why I give it my full-throated endorsement. Get even with modern Hollywood by skipping the theater this summer to stay home and watch “Getting Even” on YouTube! 

In keeping with its era-specificity, “Getting Even” opens in Afghanistan where a one-time soldier turned soldier of fortune, Tag Taggar (Edward Albert), is pilfering lethal Russian nerve gas to transport back to Big D for analysis. It does not take long, however, for a wealthy rancher with a grudge against Yankees, King Kenderson (Joe Don Baker), to pilfer the nerve gas for himself, threatening to unleash it unless Tag coughs up an exorbitant ransom. Though the poster makes Tag look like Remo Williams, the characterization and Albert’s performance are anything but, more like a suave Robert Goulet filtered through Timothy Dalton’s James Bond. This is ironic given that Baker played the villain Timothy Dalton’s 1987 Bond movie “The Living Daylights,” though in “Getting Even” he lays his Lone Star heritage on thick, even as that heritage simultaneously makes for another of the movie’s weird ironies. Kenderson’s mission statement might literally be explicated as not messing with Texas, yet by threatening Dallas with the stolen gas, is he not, himself, in fact, messing with Texas?

Meh, who cares. The plot is but a thread on which to hang “Getting Even’s” myriad action scenes and running but a brisk 90 minutes, Little keeps those scenes coming at a good pace while utilizing so many action-thriller sound effects of grunts, screams, and machine gun fire to make for a hog-killin’ time. A car chase concludes on the Texas State Fairgrounds and involves a bad guy climbing the old Comet rollercoaster with the Dallas skyline as a backdrop, a delightful manifestation of Roger Ebert’s Climbing Killer theory, just as Tag deactivating a bomb at the top of Reunion Tower while King blasts away at him from a nearby hovering helicopter makes for a merry embodiment of Roger Ebert’s digital readout on the ticking time bomb cliché while also encapsulating the daredevil nature of 80s action moviemaking. “They were flying that (helicopter) thirty feet away from the tower,” Little told Flashback Files. “You could never shoot something like that today, not in a million years.” Yet, even as it frequently goes big, “Getting Even” is equally good at thinking small, like a sequence in which Tag is roped by some evil rodeo henchmen; I laughed out loud during that scene and I mean that as a compliment. Even better is the moment when Tag’s team runs a simulation of estimated casualties should the nerve gas be released. A helicopter hovering next to Reunion Tower is a whimsical reminder of the era, but so, too, are the dread-inducing graphics on a 1986 desktop computer. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: When Time Ran Out... (1980)

Paul Newman and Jacqueline Bisset react to special effects.

“When Time Ran Out…” is an appropriate title given that it effectively marked the end of producer Irwin Allen’s brief run in the 1970s as Hollywood’s master of disaster with “The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Towering Inferno.” Neither were any great shakes, but they were virtual barnburners next to this low-energy abomination that Leonard Matlin cheekily termed When Ideas Run Out. Maybe, but director James Goldstone’s bomb started as a re-telling of the 1902 Mount Pelée disaster, only for Allen somewhere along the line to call off a dramatization of real events, perhaps deeming them too real. He opted instead for a fictional narrative about a pair of luxury hotel owners, Shelby Gilmore (William Holden) and Bob Spangler (James Franciscus), on a Pacific island who ignore the impending threat of a long-dormant volcano that erupts and threatens to wipe out everything with slow-moving lava that sort of melds the future 1997 volcano movie double shot of “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano” together. 

Shelby also wants to marry his secretary, Kay (Jacqueline Bisset), but Kay is still in love with Hank (Paul Newman), an oil rigger on the same island who in the course of drilling uncovers the volcano’s resuscitation. This is one of many soap opera threads inserted by screenwriters Carl Foreman and Sterling Silliphant that are not only half-baked but barely there, just coming and going, likely owing to the different cuts of the movie, no doubt the studio desperately trying to hack this turkey down. You can occasionally see glimmers of how “When Time Ran Out…” might have worked as a big piece of stinky cheese. The moment when Hank and Kay rekindle their love doubles as the moment when the volcano erupts. What should be waggish melodrama, however, is undermined by the shoddy special effects, stranding Newman and Bisset in laughable effects-less reaction shots. Such bad effects apparently stemmed from the movie’s budget being slashed in the middle of production when costs ran too high, leaving them with matte paintings and models that must have looked ludicrous on the big screen. What’s worse, despite slashing the run time, “When Time Ran Out…” feels endless, owing to a peculiar lack of urgency in the scenes that do remain.

That Newman ended up in “When Time Ran Out…” owed to his deciding to fulfill his contract to Warner Bros. despite earned skepticism over the script. As Matt Zoller Seitz once noted, Jeff Goldblum’s performance in “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” was something like a running commentary on the dumbness of the movie itself. Newman, however, did not have that kind of meta gear, and so he’s left to helplessly look out the side of helicopters and jeeps at the lava to be added later. As such, he innately merges with his character, two men at the mercy of corporate bigwigs, just trying to survive.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Missile (1988)

A sign affixed to the side of a building that we glimpse right near the start of Frederick Wiseman’s 1987 documentary welcomes us to Space & Missile Country. It put me in mind of the sorts of sign you might see in a tourist area, like one in St. Augustine, Florida, say, proclaiming Welcome to Fountain of Youth Country, or something. But this is not St. Augustine: this is Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, responsible not merely for safeguarding our nuclear missile supply but being prepared to launch those missiles in the event of American enemies launching at us. It is serious, not frivolous, and yet the tone of “Missile” is sober in a kind of prosaic way. Wiseman embeds us with the 4315th Training Squadron of the Strategic Air Command and so many scenes of these new recruits sitting and listening to instructors, the commonplaceness of it all, the little Styrofoam cups of coffee, the way there are couple eager beavers who answer and ask questions while most of them just sit there quietly, will take you right back to every first-week orientation of any job you have ever had, like going to work at America’s nuclear missile silo is akin to starting a job at General Mills. It’s humorous, relatable, and a little unsettling. 

“Missile” evokes such contradictory tones throughout its two-hour run time. Trainees are taught the launch angles of ICBMS while also being lectured on the necessity of keeping their workstation clean and not fraternizing with others. They go over the painstaking two-key turn system required to launch missiles and during one of the practice runs, a trainee struggles to insert her key. At one point we even see a trainee being given multiple choice test taking tips, as if examinations on ICBMs are the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. As was Wiseman’s preferred style, scenes like this are not embellished with talking heads, voiceovers, or even music; he lets them lie there for us to make of them what we will. That is not to say, however, that Wiseman (also credited as editor) is not deliberate in how he pieces together his many scenes. Near the beginning we eavesdrop on a classroom discussion about the moral implications of being ordered to launch missiles in which a senior officer stresses to the students not to merely function as unthinking robots. 

If this scene seems selected to impress a certain mental and moral weight on this crash course in nukes, it instead foreshadows a gradual sort of circular logic. Even if you are urged to contemplate what it means to be the last link in the intercontinental ballistic missile chain, you are just the last link in a chain, nevertheless, a riddle that can never truly be solved. Indeed, near the end we see a successful training exercise and when the ersatz ICBMs are launched, a small celebration ensues, like the new recruits have just earned the league title in bowling. True, Wiseman concludes with a speech citing deterrence as the main role of all these missile-minders, but at the end of the day, deterrence is just a solemn word for being prepared to bring about The Day After. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: JFK (1991)

Things in America have only gotten truthier in the decade since I originally posted this drivel on JFK and so, after the events of last weekend, I dusted the review off, revised it, and am reposting it.

In the 2002 review of “JFK” (1991) for his Great Movies series, Roger Ebert recounted that not long after Oliver Stone’s ultra-incendiary three-hour epic was released, he was excoriated by Walter Cronkite for extolling a movie without “a shred of truth in it.” That’s one way to put it. The invaluable Adam Nayman was a bit blunter in his assessment on Letterboxd in 2023: “this film was full of shit.” (Nayman’s review is much more nuanced than that.) I can understand Cronkite’s frustration. After all, “(t)he shadow of suspicion became a way of reading our history,” film critic David Thomson told The Wrap in 2013 regarding the ostensible conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. “Once the mood set in, it became all too easy for any horrible event to just get fed into the hopper.” Huh. You don’t say? Of course, Cronkite admonishing Ebert and his colleagues for giving positives notices to a motion picture about the conspiracy is not the same as admonishing the conspiracy itself.  “I believe films are the wrong medium for fact,” Ebert wrote. “Fact belongs in print. Films are about emotions.” Post-truth was not declared the word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries until 2016, a quarter-century after the release of “JFK,” but few films have embodied the thorny, troubling emotions of our post-truth society quite like “JFK.”

Whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing John F. Kennedy, for the last sixty-odd years, the majority of Americans, by varying percentages, have believed that in some way, shape, or for, he did not. That, as Ebert wrote, has been “our national state of mind since Nov. 22, 1963,” and with “JFK,” Stone reflected that mood by concocting “a thick gumbo of truths, half-truths, unverifiable hypotheses, and pure rant...(ladled) out indiscriminately.” In writing those words for The New Yorker in January 1992, Terrence Rafferty meant to critique but I read them as a compliment, effectively summarizing the figurative stew in which we have been splashing around for the last decade-plus of exhausting American life. Rafferty might have argued that the movie’s “hysterical manner and slipshod handling of the facts actually have the effect of diminishing the credibility of the case for conspiracy,” but that is to suggest Stone is mounting a case in the first place. As Stone said repeatedly at the time and in the years since, he was not crafting a bootleg legal case nor reporting a story; he was presenting a counter myth. 

It is the counter myth that Matt Zoller Seitz and Kevin Lee considered when writing about “JFK” in 2008. “From the opening newsreel Stone presents a myth,” they explain, “one that pervades this stage of his career: government as oppressive patriarch, motivated largely by military and capitalistic interests and operating largely out of view of a public blinkered by patriotic propaganda.” Indeed, Stone seizes on the conspiracy theories peddled by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner in what is either a devious way to launder a real-life tinfoil hatter or to subvert the notion of a cinematic hero, depending on how you, the viewer, feel about it all) to incite propaganda of his own, promoting the idea that a coup d’etat within the utmost reaches of the government sought to bring Kennedy down.

Stone promotes this plot by injecting brief black & white flashback sequences, like Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Howard) telling a room of conspirators that if they get him into the Oval Office then he’ll give them their damn war (as in, Vietnam). These invented flashbacks are often placed around actual archival footage, deliberately intended to muddy the viewing waters. In writing about Stone’s “seamless blend(ing) (of) documentary footage and re-creations” for Reverse Shot, Michael Joshua Rowin pegged it as a “smoke and mirrors act”, and that is true.

It can be argued that this smoke and mirrors act is intended to confuse the audience, to make it difficult to discern what’s real from what isn’t, which leaves everything in question. But while that it is an act of flagrant irresponsibility for some, to others, like me, it is, strictly from a filmmaking standpoint, propagandist or not, a commendation. As Randy Laist, an associate professor of English at Goodwin College, put it for a seriously academic treatise on the film: “More so than any particular theory about who shot JFK, the thesis of Stone’s film is that reality itself has been assassinated, under circumstances that we can only reconstruct out of a montage of images, ambivalently real and/or unreal – the fragments of a hyperreal mediascape.”

Hyperreal is a term credited to French theorist Jean Baudrillard, inevitably name-checked in Laist’s piece, who ascribed the difference between a modern and postmodern society as a “mode of representation in which ideas represent reality and truth.” In a postmodern society, he reckoned, “subjects lose contact with the real and fragment and dissolve.” That’s what happens as you watch “JFK.” If Stone’s previous films, as Laist notes, were born more a narrative realism, in “JFK”, he battered such realism to bits, primarily through ferociously kinetic, Oscar-winning editing by Pietro Scalia and Joe Hutshing, and via John Williams’s relentless harangue of brass and strings, a leitmotif for our national paranoia, an aesthetic so overpowering that it sweeps you up and pulls you into its myriad obfuscations and embellishments in spite of yourself. What’s real and what isn’t ceases to be the point; all you have left is the emotion that Stone deliberately engenders. You feel angry; you feel mistrustful; you feel like you have not been told everything; you feel like the government, that convenient catch-all, wants to keep you in the dark. “On that level,” wrote Ebert, “it is completely factual.”

Friday's Old Fashioned: A Week's Vacation (1980)

Four-time César Award winner Nathalie Baye died on April 17th at the age of 77 from Lewy body dementia. She worked with a who’s-who of French directors, including Godard and Truffaut, and in 1980 she starred in Bertrand Tavernier’s “A Week’s Vacation,” a movie I watched for the first time in April 2025 on The Criterion Channel. As I did, I must have thought to myself at least five times, “Is this my new favorite movie?” I wrote a review but was not entirely happy with it and in her honor, I tried again. RIP. 

Laurence (Nathalie Baye) is being ferried to her job as a secondary school teacher in Lyon, France by her boyfriend Pierre (Gérard Lanvin) when suddenly stricken, unable to face another day, she jumps out of the car and leaves him idling to walk along the river. He hops out of the vehicle and chases her down, just as the handheld camera does too, though both ultimately relent, hanging back and helplessly watching from afar as she walks away into a sudden downpour: offering support is futile. The reasons she eventually gives for this breakdown are specific, though the feeling of wanting to forgo facing another day and renounce shining it on is universal, nevertheless. Her doctor prescribes a week off to rest and spiritually recuperate, which is much less universal, at least to an American, given that over here hard work is peddled as the answer to everything. Not that Laurence’s holiday proves a complete panacea. If the episodic nature of director Bertrand Tavernier’s film seems readymade for a journey of self-discovery, the existential underpinnings quietly suggest something more like a French version of a classic Onion article: Plan To Straighten Out Entire Life During Weeklong Vacation Yields Mixed Results. 

“A Week’s Vacation” begins with Laurence drawing back a curtain on her window to reveal an elderly woman in the apartment across the way and wondering who she is and where she came from. Tavernier turns this image of Laurence spying on her lonely neighbor into a recurring one, giving life to what she says in voiceover, “I’d like to be an animal to watch others without speaking.” It’s not a quite a National Geographic special for people, “A Week’s Vacation,” but Tavernier and his co-writers Marie-Françoise Hans and Colo Tavernier stitch it all together with scenes of Laurence quietly observing the world around her and listening to old friends and new acquaintances, students and parents of her pupils, express their own feelings and recount stories of their own lives. These scenes take on different tenors and tones, but they are all unified by Baye, giving a surprisingly airy performance despite the air of melancholia that otherwise hangs over her character. In Laurence’s solitary moments, Baye evinces a bemused skepticism, as if she is the process of appraising the value of life itself, and in scenes opposite other actors, she radiates genuine joy at listening to their characters’ typically droll stories of woe, smiling and laughing in a way that seems to let us in on the grand cosmic joke of the whole human condition.

If there is a specific reason for Laurence’s emotional exhaustion, it ties back to her career. She believes in the mission of teaching, though its effectiveness is conveyed as debatable, glimpsed in flashbacks with students apathetic to learning and incapable of listening, evoking how despite doctor’s orders, her problems cannot help but intrude on her thoughts. At the same time, her father is wasting away in the French countryside, seen briefly in one scene where she pays him a visit and finds him unable to do much with his hands after a lifetime of working with them, sitting there with a sad smile on his face, happy to see her but having reached the point where living has given way to subsisting. Taken in tandem, these narrative threads suggest the poles of life, as if one’s existence is navigating from youth to the figurative infirmary, leaving the journey in-between as the time afforded to make sense of life’s significance. The pressure to do so feels amplified in Laurence’s case given that she’s 31 and is hesitant not only about continuing her career but about having children, the latter decision complicated on account of Pierre, a genially deft characterization of that most archetypal of dudes: oblivious. 

Laurence is not a static character, by any means, but neither does she experience a Hollywood-like climactic epiphany showing her the light. This is underlined in how she never meets, never talks to, never even learns the name of the elderly neighbor across the way. The woman is there when Laurence’s holiday begins and gone by the time it ends as if life and all that it entails is but a week’s vacation between whatever precedes it and whatever comes after.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Slap Shot (1977)

Part of it is undoubtedly the era in which “Slap Shot” was filmed, but there is a distinct grainy tinge to the cinematography that both embodies the harsh nature of an American northeast winter and captures the mood of the fictional rust belt city of Charlestown, Pennsylvania where both its steel mill and beloved minor league hockey team the Chiefs are on the verge of folding. The fur coat that Paul Newman’s character sports might be a relic of the era, but it also might be necessary given the weather, and in his way, the actor manages to pull the look off while also looking like he might have just grabbed it out of a lost and found for warmth. Improbably, that coat speaks to the impressive dual tones of comedy and commentary in director George Roy Hill’s cult classic. Indeed, through the prism of time, “Slap Shot” has the feel of something like a revisionist sports movie, taking the piss out of so many sentimentalized underdog stories in the way so many later-era westerns critiqued their predecessors. Except, “Slap Shot” came before almost all of them, suggesting the reverse, that after seeing such a bare-knuckle black comedy, so many sports movies were prompted to shine it on. 1989’s “Major League” was not without its own ribald comedy, but if you compare them side-by-side, it is as polished and slick as “Slap Shot” is unvarnished and blunt.

Newman stars as Reggie Dunlop, player and coach of the Chiefs, who given their precarious state, spurs ticket sales by encouraging his players to focus on dropping their gloves and throwing down as much as putting the puck in the goal. If it bleeds, etc. “Slap Shot” does not satirize the sport’s violence so much as lay it wide open for all to see, its rough and tumble aesthetic and raggedy narrative making it feel as if the movie itself is a half-second away from flying off the rails as much as its out-of-control on-ice fights. Its collection of what might discreetly be deemed colorful characters, like The Hanson Brothers triumvirate based on the real-life Carlson Brothers, do not so much separate the men from the boys as they do demonstrate how the line between men and boys is virtually non-existent. Newman has said that Dunlop was his favorite character he ever played, and it feels that way, free, loose, gleeful, giving a performance approximating leaving the toilet seat up or peeing outdoors. 

That freedom, it turns out, correlated to exacting research. Writer Nancy Dowd’s brother, Ned, played minor league hockey, tape recorded conversations of his teammates and then gave those tapes to his sister who wrote the coarse attitudes and severe language right into her screenplay, fashioning nothing less than an x-ray of boys will be boys hockey culture. That came to mind in the wake of the post-USA Men’s Hockey Gold Medal locker room brou-ha-ha. Before the recent Winter Olympics began, I rewatched “Miracle,” Disney’s 2004 retelling of Team USA’s so-called Miracle on Ice upset of the Soviet Union at the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid. 1980 was three years after 1977, of course, which would suggest that its real-life hockey playing characters would have not been too far off from the hockey-playing characters of “Slap Shot,” though instead, every rough edge is smoothed out if not entirely glossed over. I do not mean to besmirch “Miracle,” a movie I quite like and that is good at what it does, but simply to point out how it takes immense care to ensure that everything you see in “Slap Shot” stays, well, in a manner of speaking, in the locker room.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Apollo 13 (1995)

Director Ron Howard and his producing partner Brian Grazer secured the production rights to Jim Lovell’s book about his 1970 Apollo 13 mission, “Lost Moon,” before it had even been published and you can understand their enthusiasm. Triumph can make for good drama, but the twisted truth is that failure frequently makes for even better drama. And the Apollo 13 mission, as a line in Howard’s 1995 movie says, was considered NASA’s most successful failure, one in which the third mission to the moon transformed into a mission to return to earth when an unexpected explosion aboard the service module disabled its electrical and life support systems. That explosion is what accounts for the famous real-life line, “Houston, we have a problem,” one spurring “Apollo 13” the movie’s best moment. Once Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) advises mission control of a serious complication, chaos ensues as the three astronauts and the whole terrestrial NASA gang attempt to ascertain that complication. Eventually, Lovell notices oxygen is leaking aboard the spacecraft, engendering an eerie calm that Howard and his Oscar-nominated editors Mike Hill and Daniel P. Hanley create from almost nothing but faces, close-ups and medium shots as everyone registers the problem, giving way to controlled pandemonium as they then get to work solving it. It evokes the immense craft of “Apollo 13,” direction, editing, music, and writing harmonizing to maximize drama but also to effectively streamline a non-stop flow of information and terminology through whip-smart similes and clever dramatizations.

Given that Lovell and his two other crew members, Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) and Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon), are forced to minimize power aboard their spacecraft and wait on instructions from mission control, it can sometimes feel as if “Apollo 13’s” heart is situated more on earth than it is up in space. Indeed, Howard proves much more adept at conveying straightforward problem-solving than the encroaching isolation in space. Hanks’s preternatural calm as Lovell is convincing, though not necessarily interesting, and Haise and Swigert remain underdeveloped, a brief moment of tension between the two feeling a paint by numbers for such an intense situation. The similar preternatural calm of Ed Harris as flight director Gene Kranzen hits harder as does the angst that Gary Sinise quietly carries in his performance as Ken Mattingly, the crew member forced by Lovell to bow out when he is exposed to measles (which he never contracts).

Much was made of “Apollo 13’s” technical accuracy and it is on full display, often infusing the finished product with the feel of a docudrama, albeit a stirring one. But that emphasis on precise detail over complicated emotion is also what hinders it. Apart from Lovell’s wife and family watching from back home in Houston, “Apollo 13’s” one other subplot involves America’s waning interest in moon landings, evoked in a live broadcast from the spacecraft before things go wrong that the networks drop in the middle to show something else. No one tells the astronauts, which may or may not have been true, but either way, goes to show how the movie itself never wrestles with this flagging interest in any real way. Howard clearly wants to reignite our nation’s passion for space beyond a mere space race, but by never much broadening his viewpoint beyond the mission itself, “Apollo 13” never suggests why America might have become apathetic in the first place, as if afraid of introducing pesky politics. And if the argument is that the thrill of going to space is the end unto itself, Howard’s style is not the kind to illustrate the wonder of spaceflight, more suited to the drama of returning home.

Friday's Old Fashioned: History of the World – Part 1 (1981)

Upon its release in the summer of 1981, Mel Brooks’s “History of the World – Part 1” received mixed, often harsh, reviews. “Rambling, undisciplined, sometimes embarrassing failure,” the esteemed Roger Eber wrote in a two-star review that reads like a one-star, lambasting it for being “unfunny (in its) bad taste.” Yet, what Ebert viewed as its worst quality, is what The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael saw as its best, commending his “audacity – his treating cruelty and pain as a crazy joke.” Having watched “History of the World – Part 1” again for the first time since the last time, whenever that was, rented on VHS, so a long time ago, I side with Kael, even if I acknowledge all the ways in which it comes up short. In fact, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I rewatched this and then rewatched “The Producers” right after, and I was struck by something Kael also alludes to, how in both, Brooks is sort of a Broadway producer disguised as movie director: that is, he essentially stages scenes for the camera rather than staging scenes with the camera.

“History of the World – Part 1” is not so much a history of the world as random bits and bobs pulled from both the Bible and history texts (was the dinosaur eating the caveman a dig at creationism, I honestly have no idea), an overview of the Old Testament and then extended riffs on the Roman Empire, the Inquisition, and finally, the French Revolution. Indeed, if Ebert and Kael agree, it’s on the lack of narrative propulsion. “His ‘history’ framework doesn’t have an approach or point of view,” Ebert writes, while Kael deems the whole thing “a jamboree, a shambles.” And in Brooks’s first-person New York Times accounting of how he conceived of the movie, that’s exactly how it reads, as a jamboree, a shambles, everything just sort of randomly occurring to him in different places, a collage thrown together. It’s not just that “History of the World – Part 1” is uneven, that it hits and misses in its gags, but that it feels longer than its not-that-long hour-and-thirty-two minutes, owing to the kind of dead space that is unacceptable in a rapid-fire comedy. It can occasionally seem as if Brooks is trying to marshal all the elements of his massive sets as much as he is trying to land a joke.

In his New York Times piece, Brooks notes that his overriding theme was the meek will not inherit the earth, a good one, and though it often comes across like he’s just blindly finding his way into that theme as opposed to manifesting it with razor sharp precision, when he gets there, the jokes hit with guillotine-force. As Emperor Nero, Dom DeLuise is giving what I will cite as retroactively one of 1981’s best performances, a debauched infant that cuts to the heart of the matter in a way no staid sword and sandals epic ever could while Brooks’s “It’s good to the king” schtick crudely but effectively portrays the monarchy as “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Nothing is better, though, than Brooks transforming The Inquisition into a big Busby Berkeley-style musical number to comically, sharply evoke a truth that America has been in the process of living all 2026: state-sanctioned violence is just show business. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Outfit (1973)

The 1973 crime-thriller “The Outfit” is based on a novel Richard Stark’s celebrated Parker series, yet in changing the character’s name to Earl Macklin, writer/director John Flynn is essentially remaking the role in the no fuss no muss air of his lead actor Robert Duvall. As the movie opens, Earl is released from prison to find his brother Eddie (Edward Ness) has been killed by a crime syndicate called The Outfit. Turns out, Earl and Eddie robbed a bank that was a front for The Outfit some years back and now that syndicates wants revenge. Rather than go on the run or wait around to get offed himself, Earl enlists his old cohort Cody (Joe Don Baker) to go on the offensive, working their way from Outfit goon to Outfit goon, and eventually all the way up to the man on top, Mailer, appropriately played by the dude of dudes, Robert Ryan, evincing the air of someone who has necessarily strained so much from his life as necessary protection that he has also strained out any sense of joy. He watches professional football games with the air of a man who has no interest in the game itself, just the money he wagered on it.

Like all the women in “The Outfit,” Mailer’s trophy wife Rita (Joanna Cassidy) is only half-acknowledged, but the script at least half-acknowledges that all the women in “The Outfit” are half-acknowledged. That includes Earl’s girlfriend Bett (Karen Black) whose presences mostly ensures that 70s audiences wouldn’t get the wrong idea since the real romance is between Earl and Cody. Indeed, Duvall and Black sculpt a genuine lived-in relationship as two guys getting too old for this kind of life but unable to part ways with it, nonetheless. That way of life involves some traditional action, a few shootouts and the like, but “The Outfit” surprises in just how much drama and tension it mines from moments in-between, like Earl and Cody having a stare down with two men from whom they hope to acquire a getaway car, a scene sculpted from nothing but pure attitude. Time and again Flynn’s script seems to set Earl up for an action hero wisecrack only for the character to decline, as if too serious for such childishness, echoed in Duvall’s turn. “The Outfit” never cuts loose until the last possible second, after Earl and Cody have completed their getaway, falling into a spate of laughter, as if the once the job has been completed, then, and only then, are dudes allowed to rock. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Nowhere to Hide (1987)

“Nowhere to Hide” ends with a car chase in which a helicopter is chasing a car, which is just how you want a mid-80s conspiracy thriller to conclude, but what stuck with me more was when in the middle of an earlier car chase, ex-Marine Barbara Cutter (Amy Madigan) is forced to change a tire when one goes flat. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen that before: a mid-car chase tire change. And whether a spare could hold up under car chase conditions when the pursuit continues, well, I was less concerned with that than how the episode demonstrated Barbara’s cool resourcefulness. It’s one element that did not feel straight off the shelf, as so much of “Nowhere to Hide” does, one part “Commando,” one part “Hard to Kill,” one part “Rambo.” Why there is even a macabre nod to the space shuttle Challenger in so much as this conspiracy thriller turns on a defective military helicopter C-ring. 

The last one is being investigated by Barbara’s husband (Daniel Hugh Kelly), promptly killed when he gets close to the truth, and right in front of his and Barbara’s young son, Johnny (Robin MacEachern). That distinguishes “Nowhere to Hide” as an 80s movie, alright, quite happy to blend gruesome violence with a tender mother/son relationship. Granted, the son is often treated less as a character than a plot device, unwittingly toting around both the C-ring waiting to expose the truth and the homing beacon that ensures he and his mom can never get too far away from the bad guys, but Madigan’s emotional ferocity makes you believe all this is happening, nevertheless. It’s why even if one part of me thinks “Nowhere to Hide” could have used more Michael Ironside as Barbara’s survivalist Vietnam-vet brother, another part of me knows nothing would surpass Madigan embodying Barbara’s maternal hysterical strength, changing a car tire in lieu of lifting a car. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Fight Without Hate (1948)

As I continue winding my way through all the official Olympics documentaries, there has been one emergent trend: they are rarely weird. “White Rock,” chronicling the 1976 Winter Olympics was eccentric in a cheerful prog rock sort of way, and it was a little strange to hear Don LaFontaine narrate the 1992 Winter Olympic documentary to someone like me who grew up with him as the original trailer man, but neither of those weirded me out. Not like the official documentary of the 1948 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz. And that is weird in and of itself because these were the first Olympics since 1936, emerging from the unremitting darkness of WWII, none of which is eschewed in “Fight Without Hate” but openly addressed in a nifty prologue that takes us from the first modern Olympics up through Berlin and footage of you-know-who. Granted, even as it shows this, the narration remarks that sport rises above politics which is not quite true and not just because I say it is not. The documentary notes that Korea is only the Asian representative at the 1948 Winter Olympics, forgoing an explanation of why Japan is not present, but surely, viewer, you can guess. Still, you can understand the inclination to lighten the mood, though “Fight Without Hate” takes lightening the mood to the pre-second wave feminism extreme. 

Despite recounting the truly extraordinary St. Moritz locations, hockey and skating rinks plunked down before awe-inspiring Alpine vistas, and skeleton and bobsleigh chutes of ice that the movie shows us painstakingly being constructed, what stands out most about “Fight Without Hate” is often not the action itself but the commentary. Director André Michel’s foremost artistic choice, it turns out, was to invent a narrator, one called Gaston, who not only adds cheeky fashion commentary and cracks jokes but throughout his narration is also forced to deal with his nagging wife, one who keeps interrupting him to ask questions that he waves off with no small amount of sexism. It’s like you’re watching the Olympics with a Blondie comic strip running concurrently next to it. Indeed, at one point Gaston notes that someday the athletes’ uniforms might “appear naïve and old fashioned,” not realizing he’s referring to himself. It was a different time, as they say, and that is certainly true: it would be 12 years before speed skating was added as a medal event for women, and it would be 66 before ski jumping was added. What would Gaston make of that?

“Fight Without Hate” works better when it puts its cheekiness toward the actual coverage of events, like situating a camera in front of a bobsleigh so that we get a point-of-view shot the whole way down the track. Michel showcases the downhill skiing event with aerial shots and wide views that not only capture the many spills and tumbles but provides thrilling context as to just how massive the vertical descent for this event really is that even modern television coverage can never properly evoke (at least, not until NBC’s drone shots here in 2026). And for a surprisingly long stretch during figure skating competition, “Fight Without Hate” indulges in nothing more than a montage of the skaters’ twists and turns. It might be lyrical overkill for some viewers, it might have been lyrical overkill for me, but it’s also the one sequence where Gaston finally shuts up. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964

Shot using the German film stock Agfacolor, what stands out most about Theo Hormann’s official documentary of the 1964 IX Olympic Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria – given the utilitarian title of IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964 – is the photographic brilliance of its images. The Soviet Union and Czechoslovakian (!) jerseys in their ice hockey tilt pop off the screen like they just came out of the laundry in one of those vintage Tide commercials, bobsleighs come across like vibrant toboggans, and the snow looks the way you imagine a snowy day in your mind. Hormann’s movie must have been striking to contemporary viewers, what with the paucity of color television sets at the time, but it’s equally striking to a modern viewer given the omnipresent gunmetal grey of so much prestige TV. The color renders these Olympics as something like a living parade of nations.

IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964, alas, is not, itself, as striking as its images. Hormann recounts myriad events and athletes but tends to provide little context to put into perspective what all this agony and triumph means, citing results here and there like reading from a two-sentence Associated Press recap. The one time he does, with German Georg Thoma overcoming faulty skis to earn Bronze in the Nordic Combined, suggests what the whole film might have been. (I learned from Motoko Rich and Josephine de La Bruyère’s Athletic article about the residents of current Olympic host city Cortina that Gildo Siorpaes won Bronze for the Italian bobsled team at the 1964 Winter Olympics, but that he was an alpine skier at heart and was forced on to the bobsled team against his will and that all things considered, the medal was not that special to him. I mean, there is a story this movie could have told!) Nor is the visual poetry enough to sustain it. When the narrator mentions the rhythm slalom skiers must use to be successful, we are never made to understand just what that rhythm entails, or how it is accomplished. 

Oddly enough, IX Olympic Winter Games of 1964 works better away from the competition, like a brief interlude with athletes breaking bread by way of feasting on authentic Tyrolean Holzhackerschmarrn. There is also one heartening passage about Innsbruck itself, the narrator noting how “the mountains peek through the window of the house,” reinforcing what he says elsewhere, and that the images of Innsbruck homes, and businesses, and streets set down in the shadow of the Nordkette manifest, “that in this setting, the link between man and alpine sports seems to have come about on its own.” 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Ski Patrol (1940)

As the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics get under way, the International Olympic Committee in conjunction with the United Nations called for a 52-day pause on all wars, a callback to the nominal truce of the Ancient Olympic Games, a futile, mostly symbolic gesture evoking an oversized sense of its own influence. Not to be confused with the 1990 comedy “Ski Patrol” about a wealthy developer seeking to sabotage a ski resort, 1940’s “Ski Patrol” is about the 1939-40 Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union. Yet, even if it is, and even if it is mostly set on the Finnish border where a reserve unit tries to fend off the enemy from tunneling beneath a mountain pass to attack, it is an American film, directed by Lew Landers, produced by Universal, and shot both on the Universal backlot and on location in California. Maybe that explains the various accents, incorrect Finnish uniforms, as IMDb has pointed out, and a screenplay that does not describe the reasons for the conflict in any detail whatsoever. No, this 1940 “Ski Patrol” feels conspicuously like an American war film pre-Pearl Harbor, wrestling between militancy and pacifism, with a gallery of wooden characters that are chiefly vessels for dialogue arguing one or the other. “In war, all friendships are forgotten. We must destroy those on top of the mountain.” 

That’s too bad because the set-up provides a chance at real drama between Finnish skier Viktor Ryder (Philip Dorn) and Russian skier Ivan Dubroski (Reed Hadley) competing in the 1936 Winter Olympics, the former helping the latter up when he falls as Ivan goes on to win gold and Viktor silver. That Olympic set-up, I confess, is why I watched in the first place and is what provides the one charged moment. After the race, when Viktor and Ivan receive their medals in a conference room, an Avery Brundage-like American gives a speech lionizing the glory of sportsmanship, and of sport itself, and how this will help bring an end to needless war…at which point we get a smash cut to a bomb exploding, the start of WWII and not so much a figurative snuffing of the Olympic spirit as an arch obliteration of it. Citius, Altius, Fortius, Extinctus.