High Sierra (1941) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

High Sierra was Humphrey Bogart’s first starring role.  He plays Roy Earle, a veteran gangster sent to prison in Chicago for life.  But after ten years one of his old bosses, Big Mac, manages to get him a pardon and arranges for a car and some money to allow Roy to come to California to head up a jewelry heist in a wealthy desert resort where the ultra-wealthy winter.  Mac has recruited a couple of young small-time thieves Babe and Red to assist Earle.  The other part of the ring is the hotel night manager Louis Mendoza who will provide the inside information.

But Roy gets a surprise when he arrives at the meeting place, a mountain cabin park.  Babe has picked up a girl named Marie from a dance hall and brought her along. Roy angrily tells his crew and the girl that she has to go.  Marie, played by Ida Lupino, goes to talk to Roy and convinces him that she is the most trustworthy member of the crew.  She admits that she knows the plan of the heist because Mendoza talks too much.  After a few more incidents between Marie and Babe and Red, Roy decides to have her stay in his cabin and lays down the law with the two young men.

After this a romantic relationship begins between Roy and Marie, although he warns her that love is not a possibility for her with him.  Roy’s heart has been caught by a young farm girl that he has met while travelling to California.  Velma is travelling with her grandfather and grandmother from Ohio to live with her recently remarried mother in Los Angeles.  Roy has had the chance to help the family out as they struggle to pay for the trip cross country.  Their country roots remind him of his own family from rural Indiana and Velma’s unspoiled beauty and unaffected manner charms him.  The girl has a clubbed foot and Roy enlists a mob doctor he knows to arrange for a surgeon to operate on the girl’s foot to repair the problem.  But after the surgery Velma declines his offer to marry him.  She has a boyfriend back in Ohio that she is still interested in.  Roy takes the refusal hard but promises to come back when she has healed from her surgery to see her walk and say goodbye to the family.

Finally, conditions at the hotel are right for the heist.  Marie and Roy take one car and Babe and Red in another.  While Babe and Red are breaking open the safety deposit boxes Roy guards the lobby and Marie is in one of the cars watching for trouble.  She warns them of the approach of a late-night couple arriving at the hotel and Roy holds them on one of the lobby couches along with the bell boy.  But finally, an armed security guard enters.  Roy gets the drop on him but when the scream of the woman on the couch distracts Roy the guard pulls his gun and they exchange shots.  The guard is fatally wounded and Roy is struck on the side.

Rattled by the shooting Mendoza refuses to remain behind to claim his innocence as the plan required and instead goes in the car with Babe and Red.  The two cars take off but the car with the three men takes the wrong road and crashes along a hairpin turn.  Babe and Red are killed and Mendoza injured.  Mendoza is picked up by the police and Roy and Marie return to the cabin without incident.  Roy goes to visit his friend the mob doctor who tends to his wounds.  Then he goes to Mac but finds he’s died of a heart attack.  Following instructions Mac had given him earlier he passes the gems onto a mob contact who gives Roy a little money in advance and the promise that the deal with the big boss would be transacted soon and Roy would get his cut.  While waiting for this Roy goes to see Velma and meets her fiancé whom he immediately takes a strong dislike to.  Velma berates Roy for his jealousy and he leaves.  Now Roy sees Marie’s loyalty and love for him in a new light and promises that as soon as they get their money, they’ll start a new life together.

But all his plans fall apart as the newspapers are full of the story of the heist.  Mendoza has confessed and named Roy as the mastermind of the plot and the murderer of the guard.  Roy puts Marie on a bus to escape the dragnet and promises to catch up with her later when he gets clear.  But Roy is soon identified and the police pursuit corners him in a blocked pass in the Sierra Nevada.  Roy climbs up into the hills and holds the police off with a machine gun.  Marie hears report of the stand-off and heads back to be near him.  A reporter recognizes her from her description and the police try to persuade her to call to Roy to give himself up.  But she refuses.

The police manage to get a sharp shooter with a high-powered rifle on the cliff that overlooks Roy’s position.  And when Roy’s dog Pard escapes from Marie and runs toward Roy’s voice as he banters with the police the dog’s barking reveals to Roy that Marie must be nearby.  He runs out onto the exposed rocks calling her name and is killed by the sniper.

This movie is a sort of combination gangster movie and melodrama.  Even though Ida Lupino got the top billing because of her established reputation at the time really the movie belongs to Bogart.  He plays the part as naturally as any of his later roles.  The plot moves along pretty well and even the Velma plot line isn’t too distracting.  At times I think Lupino is given a little too much melodrama to successfully portray but I think the movie holds up pretty well.  And there are a few character actors in supporting roles; Henry Hull as Doc Banton, Henry Travers as Velma’s grandfather and Donald MacBride as Big Mac that add human interest to the story.  One sort of interesting bit of trivia, the dog Pard was played by Zero, Bogart’s own pet dog.

I think Bogart has half a dozen movies in his resume that are better than High Sierra.  That being said this is a good movie.  I can recommend it.

01DEC2020 – Quote of the Day

The same Being that fashioned the insect, whose existence is only discerned by a microscope, and gave that invisible speck a system of ducts and other organs to perform its vital functions, created the enormous mass of the planet thirteen hundred times larger than our earth, and launched it in its course round the sun, and the comet, wheeling with a velocity that would carry it round our globe in less than two minutes of time, and yet revolving through so prodigious a space that it takes near six centuries to encircle the sun!

Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux

What Does Joe Biden Say About the Democrat Party?

The Democrats have invested everything they could into getting Joe Biden into the White House.  They were willing to commit open fraud on an industrial scale and thereby throw away any remaining credibility they may have had with half the population.  They can no longer pose as the loyal opposition.  They are a crime syndicate.  And they did this in order to install this doddering, sleazy, dim-witted stooge in the Oval Office.  Why did they do it?

The only answer that I could come up with is because they were sure they could.  The Democrats are no longer concerned about appearing to be part of a legitimate political party that operates along the lines of the laws of the United States of America.  They are exactly the kind of corrupt machine politicians that run places like Chicago and Philadelphia.  In these places, citizens don’t vote.  Votes are manufactured in the back room and the results are given to the media to proclaim.  If the other side objects you just pick a judge from your stable of bought and paid for robe-wearers to declare that all is in order, nothing to see here and move along.

They think that they’ve got the whole thing so nailed down that it won’t be necessary to select leaders that pass the smell test that even Democrats want.  They must be sure that Biden will be given a pass by the CIA and FBI on his graft and influence peddling.  Even after it was put on display through the good offices of everyone’s favorite crackhead Hunter Biden.  Even Joe’s constant gaffes and brain freezes aren’t a problem.  Apparently, they’re confident that a dementia patient running the most powerful nation on Earth is not even a consideration.  That must mean that actual decision making will occur elsewhere.

So here we are.  They don’t care what we think.  They don’t even care what we know.  They’ve got a program to run and as far as they’re concerned, we’re not going to make any difference at all.  Maybe they’re wrong.  Maybe there are enough people in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to take back their states from the crooks.  And maybe there aren’t.  But either way the days of making believe are over.  In the months and years to come we’ll be looking for leaders who aren’t making believe either.  No more nonsense about cooperation and bipartisanship.

And going along with not making believe anymore, let’s not bother to make believe we think Biden and Harris are legitimate leaders that deserve respect.  If they were respectable, they’d be ashamed to allow this obvious fraud to be perpetrated on their behalf.  And so, should the state legislatures in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin.  And so, should the Supreme Court justices.  So, if any of these officials refuses to correct the crimes that have been perpetrated against the American people then equally these are people that have no legitimacy any longer.

If President Trump is unable to get the states and the Supreme Court to reverse this outrageous crime then he should refuse to participate in the sham of the Inauguration.  Having to sit there and listen to Joe Biden and John Roberts mouth blasphemies over a Bible should be more than any honest man should have to stand.

Well, I’ll end this thing here.  What Joe Biden tells us about our enemies is that they think so little of us and what we can do to them that they’ve selected a witless worm to deconstruct our country.  And in return we should treat them with the contempt that they deserve.  Creepy Uncle Joe and Willie Brown’s Ho are the least disrespectful names they’ll get from me.  And if the worst occurs and these two pathogens end up in charge, then it is the duty of any Republican who wants our votes to do anything and everything to frustrate their every effort.

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

The true story of the Bounty is an amazing tale. There are sea voyages on wooden sailing ships that took multiple years and girdled the Earth on routes that threaded the Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope to get to such amazing places as Tahiti must have been in the eighteenth century.  Then the human drama of a crew finally rebelling against a merciless tyrant and then escaping the whole British navy to start a new life on a remote island from which they could never return.  Bligh’s unbelievable 3,500-mile sea voyage after being set adrift in a life boat.  And finally, the trial of the men who were captured on Tahiti after the mutiny.

Hollywood found the perfect Captain Bligh in Charles Laughton.  His strutting, bellowing Bligh is an inhuman monster of legendary proportions.  When a seaman whose knees are raw sores asks for water to wash the sand of the deck out of his wounds Bligh orders him to be keel-hauled.  That means he was dragged the whole length of the ship bottom against a barnacle encrusted hull.  Naturally he doesn’t survive.

And Clark Gable is an excellent Christian Fletcher.  His defiance of Bligh before the mutiny is measured and prudent but when the outrages become insurmountable, he finally snaps and leads a mutiny that takes the ship and sends Bligh and his loyal followers out onto the open sea.  The movie presents us with Fletcher sailing the ship to Tahiti and allowing his men to take Tahitian wives.  When the British come looking for them Fletcher leads all of them to Pitcairn Island on the Bounty where they start a new life.

Franchot Tone portrays Midshipman Byam a friend of Fletcher’s who refuses to join the mutiny but is forced to remain with the mutineers.  When the Bounty flees Tahiti Byam remains to return with the British but he is accused of mutiny by Bligh and ends up on trial for his life.  According to the movie the trial is the cause célèbre that eventually caused the British Navy to reform their treatment of enlisted men.

Along with these leads there are a dozen other supporting characters that are each engaging and entertaining.  The seamen, the officers, the Tahitians, the Admiralty Court Martial.  Each is given screen time to tell a story.  One of the standouts for me is Dr. Bacchus, the one-legged, constantly inebriated ship’s surgeon who provides medical help and moral support to the victims of Bligh.  His other amusing characteristic is the constantly changing story of how he lost his leg.  One time it was in a sea battle against John Paul Jones.  Next, it’s a French frigate and after that a Spanish galleon.

As I said at the start, the true story of the Mutiny on the Bounty is an amazing tale.  The 1935 movie is based on a fictionalized account.  There are many inaccuracies that have been added to the story.  For instance, Bligh was not the captain of the ship that brought back the mutineers from Tahiti and chased the Bounty.  There is no record that a sailor was keel-hauled and died by Bligh’s order.  And Bligh did not attend the court martial.  But it is a remarkable movie nevertheless and it is still very entertaining eighty-five years after it was made.  I highly recommend it for all fans of adventure stories.

29NOV2020 – Quote of the Day

In my mind, he was guilty of no error, he was chargeable with no exaggeration, he was betrayed by his fancy into no metaphor, who once said, that all we see about us, Kings, Lords, and Commons, the whole machinery of the State, all the apparatus of the system, and its varied workings, end in simply bringing twelve good men into a box.

Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux

Not So Black Friday

I was going to write a post on thriving in the Woke World but I went back and saw that I’ve written that post at least once before.  Instead I decided to look and see what was going on around me.

I woke up this morning and felt like I always do on the day after Thanksgiving.  I felt like I ate way too much rich food.  So, I had a cup of coffee and a bagel and looked over the news.  I saw all the stuff I saw yesterday.  Election legal challenges and noise about Biden’s picks for a cabinet, COVID studies and vaccine speculation, big tech censoring and conservatives complaining.  All the same old stuff we’ve been seeing forever.  Nothing I felt like talking about there.

Later on, as I felt a little less like a stuffed museum exhibit, I asked Camera Girl if she wanted to go for a walk in the local state park.  It’s about a mile or two down the road and has a paved road that penetrates into the forest to allow fisherman to access the lakes inside the park.  There are streams and forested hills and scenic stuff as far as the eye can see.  There is also a half dozen picnic grounds and parking areas.  We like going there because even when there is ice on the wooded paths the blacktop thaws quickly and gives us a good walking path until winter is completely in control of the weather.

So anyway, she agreed and we parked and started walking.  With my usual confidence I announced to her that it was so quiet because nobody was up and around after Thanksgiving.  Two minutes later we passed the first parking lot and there were at least fifteen cars and I could see someone cooking on a charcoal grill.  Ah, my psychic powers.

As we walked along, we could see that the place was pretty crowded.  Eventually we started passing people walking in the other direction.  Couples, people walking with dogs, families with kids, families with three generations, you name it.  And as we got within talking distance we’d smile, wave, say hi.  After about a dozen such interactions we looked at each other and read each other’s minds.  What struck both of us was that people without masks were friendly and greeted us with a smile and the people wearing masks were surly and unfriendly.  For clarification neither of us were wearing masks but we never got within the COVID magic six-foot circle of death of the other walkers.

And when we looked at the people who were barbecuing none of them were wearing masks and they seemed to be having a good time.  After that I made sure that whenever I passed the masked marauders, I was especially cheerful and demonstrative.  I’m sure it annoyed them terribly.

By the time we got back to our car I felt a whole lot better about the day.  There are plenty of people around who are just tolerating this COVID nonsense without drinking the Kool-Aid.  And they are attempting to enjoy their lives despite it.  And the true-believers looked pretty damn miserable from where I was standing.  Maybe this whole COVID cult is its own punishment.  But maybe it’s just an act and they are really just signaling their virtue in case someone from the security apparatus is filming them for the quarterly report.  Either way I can see that it will be pretty easy in this Brave New World to find the good people.  They’ll be the ones who look like they’re actually happy to be alive.  By this you will know them.