Oh Captain, My Captain

Maybe it’s just me, but I think the Marvel comic movies are just getting better and better. I loved the latest one we watched, Captain Marvel (2019).

It starts on the Kree home world, with Brie Larson waking up from a nightmare on a battlefield. She heads to Jude Law’s place to work off some steam training. We find out that she has amnesia, and also can shoot some kind of blasts from her hands.

The Kree are a martial race in conflict with the shapeshifting Skrull. The Kree-Skrull wars were one of my favorite bits of Marvel lore, but mostly because I never really knew anything about them. The Skrull were introduced in Fantastic Four, but I never read the Captain Marvel series, so I missed all the history. Instead, it was a bit of cosmic backstory, sometimes referred to but never explained - and I liked it that way. In this movie, we get some of the story, but some is sort of skipped over. For one thing, Kree are famously blue-skinned, but there’s a comment about picking someone who you respect and looking like them - so Kree are shapeshifters too? Anyway, Larson is not blue, for whatever reason.

But a shapeshifting Skrull, Ben Mendelsohn, kidnaps Larson and there’s a big space battle, and Larson winds up on Earth in the 90s. In fact, she crashes into a Blockbuster video (and blasts Arnold’s head off of a True Lies standee). Agents Coulson and Fury are dispatched to pick her up - both Clark Gregson and Samuel L. Jackson digitally de-aged, and Fury with both eyes. In time, we find that Larson was a Air Force pilot, Carol Danvers, believed dead. And the two lives, her Kree and human sides, come together.

There’s a lot more, of course - especially a marmalade cat called Goose who isn’t really a cat. It seems that Fury is kind of a cat person. The Skrulls turn out to be a lot less evil then we all thought, except Mendelsohn’s accent (I read it as Jewish cockney, but whatever) was to cute for him to be a villain. Then there’s the Tesseract and the fate of the galaxy. Lots of action, adventure, some comedy, girl power, and a tie-in to the Avengers: Endgame.

Like I said, maybe it’s just me. I do tend to like most movies I see - after all, a lot of time, money and talent went into making them. And there’s no big reason for me to love this. Guardians added humor to the MCU, Logan had pathos. This seemed like just a solid, firing on all cylinders Marvel movie. Whatever will they do next.

More Like Siesta

Just when I thought I’d seen all the great classic Hollywood musicals, Fiesta (1947) comes along and proves me right.

It stars Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban. A famed bullfighter in Mexico has a baby, and to his consternation, it is a daughter (Williams). But to his joy, she had a twin, Montalban. Of course, the bullfighter wants Montalban to succeed him, but he is really more interested in music. It’s Williams who wants to fight the bulls, and trainer Akim Tamiroff helps her out on the sly.

I regret to say that Mary Astor (the twins’ mother) and Cyd Charisse (Montalban’s love interest) make no impression, nor did Alan Napier. John Carroll as Williams boyfriend does a little better. The bullfighting scenes were interesting, but not too authentic looking. The music wasn’t bad - Montalban’s supposed composition was Aaron Copeland’s El Salon Mexico.

My favorite number was a very folklorico version of La Bamba. The Mexican Hat Dance - less favorite.

Just Drew That Way

I saw a bit of online chatter about Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase (2019), and thought I’d give it a try. It definitely wasn’t for me, but I liked it a lot.

It starts with Sophia Lillis as Nancy finding out that one of her friends (Mackenzie Graham) is being cyber-bullied in a crude video, and sets out to get revenge with another friend (Zoe Renee). They replace a shower head in the boys locker room so that it sprays photo-sensitive blue dye all over the culprit, a jock BMOC. I mention this mainly because Heinlein used this gag in Podkayne of Mars. But I wonder if he stole it from Carole Keene?

The jock’s girlfriend, Andrea Anders, is pretty hostile, the typical mean girl, but she also wants Nancy’s help to find out who is haunting her aunt’s house. Of course, the haunting is fake ala Scooby Doo, and the mean girl will drop her jerk boyfriend and become pals with Nancy’s crew. There’s a train coming to town that Nancy’s widower father supports (he’s a lawyer for the railroad, or something) and her aunt opposes. It’s all wrapped up neatly in under an hour and a half.

The main thing I liked about this was Lillis. She’s a great looking kid with a short shaggy red dye job, who rides a skateboard and solves crimes. I expect to see her in a lot more movies soon. The rest of the cast was doing a great job too. But although this movie is about high-school (I guess?) kids, it is clearly aimed at 10-12 year olds. There is no sex and barely any romance - it is pre-pubescent in outlook. So much so that I even felt a little weird watching it as an adult.

But weird or not, I’m glad I watched.

Promise Made, Promise Kept

When I was growing up, I saw a lot of Jayne Mansfield on TV, possibly Dick Cavett’s show. I considered her to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and I kind of still feel that way. I knew of Promises, Promises (1963) as the movie where she went nude. I was assuming it was all a con.

It starts with Jayne in a bubble bath. So she’s nude, but there are strategically placed bubbles. Just like I expected. Then she comes out to talk to her husband, Tommy Noonan, with a towel wrapped around her waist. And there she is. Who would have guessed, in 1963?

Noonan is one of those 50s ad men, with black-rimmed glasses and some neuroses. He wants to get Mansfield pregnant, but hasn’t had much luck, so they go on a cruise. He confides Hilo’s problem to ships doctor Fritz Feld (usually a snooty maitre d’ or hotel clerk), who prescribes a pill to be taken with alcohol. It is an aspirin - he is doing an experiment in suggestibility. So Noonan gets drunk and has a romantic evening with his wife, who is convinced she is pregnant the next day.

But when the test comes back negative, Noonan doesn’t dare tell her the truth. He does tell the doctor that he had the mumps as an adult, and is probably sterile.

In the next cabin are Noonan’s best friend Mickey Hargitay, the perfect male body, and his wife, a somewhat brittle suburban sophisticate played by Marie McDonald. McDonald was once billed as “The Body”, but here is clearly the counterpart to Noonan, just like Hargitay and Mansfield are clearly meant for each other (they of course were married in real life).

Naturally, Noonan and McDonald and Mansfield and Hargitay manage to spend a drunken night with their counterparts. In one version of a standard sex comedy, it will be clear that nothing happened between them, even though they are panicked that something did. It seems like that is what happens here, but McDonald turns out to be pregnant - and Hargitay can’t have kids. Also, Mansfield really is pregnant.

If you like this kind of sex comedy, you’ll probably like this - it isn’t quite Billy Wilder, but it is at least Doris Day. If you like a glimpse of a classic topless pinup, you’ll either like this, or you can find the clips online. My favorite part was Babette, the hair-dresser, played by T.C. Jones, a man presenting as a butch woman. He’s charming and silly. And of course, the great Fritz Feld, whose medical malpractice started the whole thing.

B Average or Better

Here’s a couple of films noir with a vague similarity of structure: Deadline at Dawn/Backfire (1950).

Deadline starts with a drunken floozy, Lola Lane, being visited by her blind (?) ex-boyfriend Marvin Miller. He wants the money he’d stashed with her. But it isn’t in her handbag - that sailor she’d picked up must have stolen it. Cut to a sailor, Bill Williams, coming to in a newsstand, being fed coffee by a newsie. He can’t remember much, but finds a wad of cash in his pocket. He takes it to a dance hall, and buys a dance with a foot-weary Susan Hayward. Since he’s more hungry than dancey, they go to her place for a snack.

He tells her about the money and convinces her to come with him while he returned it. See, he only came home with Lane to fix her radio, and when she plied him with drinks, he got “non-compos mentis”. Of course, when he gets to her room, she is dead. Now, he has to find out who did it and get on the 6:00 AM bus to his station in Norfolk. Later, a philosophical cabbie, Paul Lukas, starts helping them make the rounds. They meet any number of underworld characters, including Joseph Calleia.

This was written by Clifford Odets from a Cornell Woolrich story, and directed by Harold Clurman of the Group Theatre, so there is lots of New York literary background. So even though it’s pretty much a B picture, it’s got a bit of class.

Backfire starts with Edmond O’Brien visiting his Army pal Gordon MacRae in the hospital. They talk about how they are going to buy a ranch together when MacRae recovers from his back surgery. Nurse Virginia Mayo, clearly in love with MacRae, doubts he’ll ever be well enough.

One night, after MacRae is sedated for pain, a beautiful woman, Viveca Lindfors, comes in to tell him that O’Brien has been in an accident, is in terrible pain and wants her to help him die. MacRae is groggy as hell, but tells her to keep O’Brien alive, and he’ll come and help. But when he wakes up, no one has heard of this woman, and they all think he dreamt it.

When he does recover, he can’t find O’Brien. But the police want to talk to him about the killing of a bookie that they think O’Brien was involved in. So he starts trying to track him down, finding people who knew him and getting them to do flashbacks. He meets an old Army buddy, Dane Clark, now running a mortuary. There is also a gambling ring/escort service, which is where Lindfors came in.

So, we have two B movies, with either a strong team behind the camera, or bigger stars in front. We have a set up in both that is kind of separate from the main film. And both have a key plot point obscured by drugs or alcohol. Not great, but with a little something.