An Aging Broad with a Scrapbook: Elisha Cook Jr.

Saturday, June 10, 2023

Messiah of Evil (1974)

I decided to watch something from 50 years ago by selecting a title from my 1973 movies and landed on Messiah of Evil. It wasn't until I went to write this post that I realized the incorrect date was listed on the Film Detective DVD, and it had actually been released in 1974. If not for that error, I may have been writing about Jesus Christ Superstar today instead. It seems to be an era for messianic movies.

"A hundred years ago, the moon started turning red up in the sky and things began to happen. It was like the redder the moon got up there, the closer the people were being jerked toward hell. Well, the people started bleeding out of control. They found children eating raw meat. It was like the town was festering with an open sore, until the night that they...until the night they came down out of the canyon and..."

Thursday, June 8, 2023

Don't Bother to Knock (1952)

This month, the Criterion Channel is featuring a collection of films by Marilyn Monroe. I've seen quite a few of her films, so was pleasantly surprised to discover a film I'd not seen before, Don't Bother to Knock, which also has Anne Bancroft providing some lovely lounge music and Richard Widmark looking for love in all the wrong places.

"The way you treat people. The way you think about them. All you can focus on is the cold outside of things, the simple facts. Not any causes of why's or wherefores. Oh, you're sweet. And you're fun. And you're hard. And you lack something that I ask for in a man."

Wednesday, February 2, 2022

365 Days: #33 The Long Night (1947)

I first watched this movie in 2017 and would have been interested in watching it for the cast alone, even if I hadn't already seen the film that inspired it.

#33 The Long Night

Joe Adams, a former soldier, has shot a man, and then refuses to open the door to the police, instead shooting at them through the door. They run away to seek reinforcements, allowing Joe time to reflect on the circumstances that led up to him becoming a murderer. We learn he is a working stiff with a sandblasting job that's damaging his health, who falls in love with a cute, young girl, who's been taken in by charming creep, Maximillian. After Joe catches her sneaking around to see Maximillian perform, he takes up with Maximillian's former assistant for a no strings relationship. Joe and JoAnn finally decide they love each other enough to commit to one another, but Maximillian isn't having it, and he confronts Joe in a way that isn't very smart. JoAnn mounts a last ditch attempt to save Joe.

"A murderer. A killer. Thought I was all through with killing. Had no use for it. Hated it. Maybe even more than you. Well, here I am. You ever see a killer before? I've seen plenty. And plenty killed. Lots of murderers around. All kinds of them. And lots of ways of getting killed. Everybody kills a little bit, quiet like. With nobody knowing it."

This movie is definitely worth watching, but of the two films, I think it's fair to say that Le jour se lève is a superior movie. Henry Fonda has a lot more dialogue to explain what's going on inside his head, taking away some of the imagination required, and Barbara Bel Geddes, in her first screen role, narrates an extended sequence explaining thoroughly her relationship with Maximillian. Vincent Price is as entertaining as ever, hamming it up in the role of charlatan, and Ann Dvorak is comparable to Arletty, though she maintained a safe distance from Henry Fonda in the bedroom scene, lest we think there was a possibility that they were doing more than drinking beer and snacking on pretzels. The Hollywood ending is less powerful than the punch-in-the-gut ending of the French version. The sets in this film have the same visual style as the French version, which makes it interesting to compare the two.