What was the last movie you saw?

[Randy M.]

CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN (1950) A very large family has interesting incidents. The father is Frank Bunker Gilbreth Sr. (Clifton Webb? never heard of him before!)

I'm surprised. Webb's main fame comes from the movie Laura, playing an intelligent but extremely vain columnist. Later he did a series of movies as the condescending Mr. Belvedere, a kind of behavioral specialist with children (as my foggy memory recalls). I found them very funny when I was a kid.

Dr. Burton (Edgar Buchanan, have I seen this guy on some TV program? Perhaps Green Acres?)

Maybe on there at some time, but a regularly as Uncle Joe, who's moving kinda slow at the Junction, Petticoat Junction. Not to mention the bazillion or so Westerns he showed up in.

 

[Jeffbert]

Matchless AKA Mission Top Secret (1967)

Italian spy comedy that is more amusing than most. Patrick O'Neal is a reporter inside Red China, being tortured as a spy. He's imprisoned with real spy Henry Silva and an elderly man who gives him a magic ring that can make him invisible for twenty minutes, once every ten hours. He escapes a firing squad by using the ring and gets out of China with the help of a woman who's actually an American spy. In the movie's sharpest bit of satire, the Americans torture him with the same device the Chinese used. Despite this, they enlist him to get his hands on vials of liquid in the possession of our movie's Bond Villain. (Donald Pleasance, who has a mansion full of robot servants and who puts on dark glasses whenever he's upset.) The usual spy stuff follows, with car chases, fights, and beautiful women. Although it's a spoof, the comedy is usually on the witty side than just slapstick. Maybe too long for its own good, but generally entertaining.

I saw this several years ago; & agree it is rather funny.



SEND ME NO FLOWERS (1964) George Kimball (Rock Hudson) is a hypochondriac [<-- spelled it right on the 1st try! ] who overhears his physician talking on the phone & assumes he is the subject of the conversation. The doctor says to the other guy on the phone, that if one of his patients had just weeks to live, he would not tell him so. Now the poor guy is wondering what will become of his wife (Doris Day) after his demise. He decides that he must find just the right 2nd husband for her, in the few days remaining to him.

Not bad, but one time is enough for me.

 

[KGeo777]

I found Rock Hudson to be boring in the action movies he did like Tobruk and that submarine movie. Seconds was ok but he's not doing a normal character--it's like a Frankenstein situation. But he's good on McMillan & Wife. Does some fights and the comedy is well-done.

But the first time I saw him was as Rock Hudstone in the Flintstones.
His stage name is tailor-made for that show.

 

[JunkMonkey]

The Great Silence - Violent Spaghetti Western with a hell of a downbeat ending: The Hero, The Girl and EVERYONE ELSE (apart from the bad guys) gets massacred. Klaus Kinski was the head bad guy and Ennio Morricone provided one of his his usual wonderful scores.

 

[dask]

Ahah! Just like Larson, I knew they were up to something!

The Great Silence - Violent Spaghetti Western with a hell of a downbeat ending: The Hero, The Girl and EVERYONE ELSE (apart from the bad guys) gets massacred. Klaus Kinski was the head bad guy and Ennio Morricone provided one of his his usual wonderful scores.

Library has a copy. Just put a hold on it.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Library has a copy. Just put a hold on it.

Enjoy - apparently there is a 'happy ending' version which I'm glad to say my DVD copy offered as an extra, not in the main feature.

 

[KGeo777]

The Great Silence - Violent Spaghetti Western with a hell of a downbeat ending: The Hero, The Girl and EVERYONE ELSE (apart from the bad guys) gets massacred. Klaus Kinski was the head bad guy and Ennio Morricone provided one of his his usual wonderful scores.

I thought Kinski almost loses his cool-the sheriff stopped him from getting killed. If not for the sheriff intervening, he may have been shot. It looked like he lost his temper and was reaching for the gun--I have to check it out again.
Been a while.
They used shaving cream for some of the snow.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Sol Madrid (1968)

Fresh from The Man From U.N.C.L.E., David McCallum is the oddly named Sol Madrid, undercover narcotics agent. It seems that a guy who worked for the Mafia (Pat Hingle) and a gangster's girlfriend (Stella Stevens) ran off with a bunch of the mob's money. Madrid's bosses want the man as a witness against the crooks. (Interestingly, the two thieves are not lovers, but are just after the cash and then want to split up.) Madrid, a cop who doesn't play by the rules, forces the woman at gunpoint to lead him to the man, who is with a non-Mafia drug lord in Mexico. Madrid pretends to be a crook himself, offering the drug lord a scheme to get heroin across the border by running it through a pipeline. (This requires a demonstration, leading to a lengthy suspense sequence.)

Multiple complications ensue, with the guy who ran off with the loot getting killed, the woman being given multiple injections of heroin by her ex-boyfriend in order to make her a junkie, a good guy turning out to be a bad guy, and so forth. The plot is a little hard to follow at times. McCallum is somewhat miscast; he seems too cool to be the hard-as-nails character he plays. On the other hand, there's a great supporting cast; Michael Ansara as a Mexican cop, Ricardo Montalban as a Mexican undercover agent, Rip Torn as a coldblooded Mafia hood, and, stealing the picture, Telly Savalas as the charming, elegant drug lord. Worth watching for their work, if nothing else.

 

[KGeo777]

Speaking of miscasting, THE GLORY GUYS 1965 suffers from that. Tom Tryon tries his best but he is just too boring to be a lead here and the poor man's James Coburn, Harve Presnell, isn't much better. Senta Berger seems bored, having to choose between them. Only James Caan gives it some life doing an over the top Irish accent and there's some fist fights that bring it brief energy. But the Sam Peckinpah script isn't anything special. There's some nice scenery and the opening titles are cool, that's about it.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

The Weekend Murders (Concerto per pistola solista, "Concerto for solo pistol," 1970)

Italian pastiche/parody of classic English murder mysteries. Starts with the discovery of a corpse in a sand trap on a golf course. We find out this is the third murder, and go into a flashback.

In traditional form, a bunch of relatives show up at the mansion of a recently deceased rich guy for the reading of the will. Among the bunch are the dead man's sister and her disturbed adolescent son; the deceased fellow's estranged daughter and her husband; a ne'er-do-well nephew and his wife (who shocks everybody else because she happens to be a Black woman); and maybe some others not as memorable. Living at the mansion is the dead man's niece, who took care of the fellow and, it is soon revealed, gets all his wealth.

The first two "murders" are quickly shown just to be gruesome pranks by the disturbed adolescent, but real killings soon follow. First is the butler. Since the others think, at first, this is only another practical joke, somebody says "At least we know the butler didn't do it."

The rest of the film is full of clues, red herrings, and others traditions of the genre. There's even a locked room mystery. On the case are a Scotland Yard detective and a rather goofy local police sergeant. At first, it seems that he's just going to be the comic relief, but he very cleverly solves the case. Besides spoofing Agatha Christie style whodunits in an affectionate manner, there are a couple of scenes that poke fun at the giallo genre.

The first fake murder is extremely bloody, in the style of that form, but the real killings are almost bloodless. A couple of scenes have our usual mysterious person with black gloves skulking around, but they both turn out to have nothing to do with the murders. (One of them is the disturbed adolescent making the world's clumsiest pass at the sexy maid who, against all expectations, welcomes his advances. This causes the poor virginal guy to panic, hallucinate his mother laughing hysterically at him, and run away screaming.)

It's quite an enjoyable film, that works both as a witty comedy and a clever mystery.

 

[Randy M.]

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973) dir. Dennis Sanders; starring William Smith, Anitra Ford. Victoria Vetri, Cliff Osmond

I'm surprised a search doesn't find this one already mentioned on this thread.

Smith is a State Department security agent looking into the mysterious death of a scientist by thrombosis the medical examiner says was caused by extreme sexual exertion. More and similar male deaths follow. Cue a fair amount of female nudity including in a very '70s computer room operation merging women with bee DNA that seems to require slathering them with cake batter.

I started watching because of Smith -- a heavy in lots of movies and a good guy in the Western TV show Laredo -- and kept watching because the screenplay was by novelist, screenwriter and director Nicolas Meyers who, I think, was trying for a '70s version of a '50s drive-in monster flick like The Wasp Woman. Circumstantial evidence: Smith's character's last name is Agar, like John Agar, star of The Mole People and Tarantula.

I wonder if there was a disconnect between director and screenwriter, though. The premise is like a parody but the movie's tone is fairly serious. For today's audience, there are scenes that might need trigger warnings, including an attempted rape whose only purpose is opening Vetri's blouse and showing how tough Smith's character is by having him fight off three assailants. I was a bit surprised how mellow the movie was concerning homosexuality, though, given when it was made.

The acting is pretty good for a '70s movie of this type. Smith is low-key and I'm a bit surprised he didn't get to play the good guy more often. Osmond (6' 5") is a familiar face to anyone who watched TV in the '70s and '80s, and one of the few actors Smith (6' 2") had to look up at. Ford looked familiar but I couldn't place her until I checked IMDB; she was one of the presenters on Bob Barker's The Price is Right. Vetri looks familiar too, and I expect I saw her often given her string of '60s & '70s TV and movie appearances.

For what it is and when it was made, on the whole it's not a bad little B(ee)-movie. (Go ahead, roll your eyes like you wouldn't have made that joke.)

 

[KGeo777]

The Weekend Murders (Concerto per pistola solista, "Concerto for solo pistol," 1970)
On the case are a Scotland Yard detective and a rather goofy local police sergeant.

Gastone Moschin, best known as Fanucci in the Godfather Part 2. They did a parody of him on the Simpsons with Homer as the white-suited character.

 

[Jeffbert]

THE GETAWAY (1972) "Doc" McCoy (Steve McQueen) a convict, is again turned down for parole, but, with influence from Jack Beynon (Ben Johnson), he is soon free. But there is a price; Beynon wants him to rob a bank, & insists on providing the other participants. despite McCoy's protests, that he must select the others.

As usual in heist films, things go wrong. After escaping the town with the money, McCoy learns the true price of his release from prison, which causes some strife between himself & his wife (Ali MacGraw). Double crosses, back stabbings, etc., make for a very tense film.

Spoiler

After all that, why does McCoy go to that one particular motel? I must have missed some details, because to me, that made no sense

It never gets old! Some films just don't, & this is one of them. Might this be called an action film? If so, it certainly did not lack for other elements, without which, it would have been as forgettable as the so-called action films of recent years.

 

[Guttersnipe]

Mars Attacks! (1996) I've watched this film many times before, but it still makes me laugh. Apparently, the "Ack! Ack!" language of the Martians was created by ducks' quacking in reverse. Inspired by collectible cards. Strongly recommended if you take your sci-fi with comedy.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Le Dîner de Cons - a rewatch of a small, but perfectly formed, farce.

 

[KGeo777]

Strangler's Web 1965 -- cheapo Edgar Wallace flick has mostly unknown cast but they work rather well. There's much quirky humor and at 50-something minutes it does not wear out its welcome.

They've Changed Faces 1971 - Italian movie about a low level employee at a corporation who is invited to the house of the big boss--who is named Nosferatu. Creepy imagery and weirdness keeps it from being boring--with vampires becoming corporate owners to control the population via technology (media, drugs, consumer products). Prophetic.

 

[Toby Frost]

Mars Attacks! (1996) I've watched this film many times before, but it still makes me laugh. Apparently, the "Ack! Ack!" language of the Martians was created by ducks' quacking in reverse. Inspired by collectible cards. Strongly recommended if you take your sci-fi with comedy.

The moment with the nuclear missile and the paper bag is probably the hardest I've ever laughed at anything in a cinema. Also the theme music is awesome. Likewise the giant robot. Probably one of Tim Burton's best films.

The old cards are weird. We talk about violence in films now but in those 1950s cards the Martians go around torturing and molesting people. They were much stronger than anything we'd let kids have now.

 

[JunkMonkey]

The moment with the nuclear missile and the paper bag is probably the hardest I've ever laughed at anything in a cinema. Also the theme music is awesome. Likewise the giant robot. Probably one of Tim Burton's best films.

Shows how tastes are different. I sat through the whole thing utterly bewildered straining so hard for "funnnyyyyyy"and never making it. (Tim Burton IS Fozzy Bear!) He only made one film I would bother watching again and that's Ed Wood which is very sweet and tender.

 

[Toby Frost]

I dislike most of Burton's stuff, especially when Johnny Depp is involved. Beetlejuice is quite good. I think the lack of goth schmaltz (for want of a better term) in Mars Attacks helps it a lot.

 

[Jeffbert]

NOIR ALLEY showed a French film the other week,

QUAI DES ORFĖVRES (1947)whose English title was JENNY LAMOUR, whose jealous & unattractive husband was central to the plot. Jenny works in the theater & as such many men are attracted to her. When she uses a lech to further her career, her husband's jealousy turns to murderous intent. So, he goes to kill the lech, being sure that people saw him enter the theater, and likewise leaving there after returning from the murder.

Spoiler

Yet, when he arrives at the victim's home, he finds him already murdered! The poor guy leaves, just as a thief is stealing his car!

Now he must exhaust himself, running to return to the theater, before the show ends

A very good, if not great film!

As usual, Muller's wrap-up is as in-depth as his intro. I know very little about French actors, & found this worthwhile.