Tag: movie review

The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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Okay this one is an oddball.  What we have here is a sort of morality play mixed into a fantasy.  In the first half of the nineteenth century in the southwest corner of New Hampshire there lived a farmer named Jabez Stone.  He has a wife and a widowed mother and not much else.  Bad luck follows him and prevents him from ever catching up on his debts.  One day when disaster strikes, again, he cries out that he’d sell his soul for some good luck.  And the Devil (played amusingly by Walter Huston) shows up and talks him into the deal.  He provides him with a pot of “Hessian” gold and seven years of guaranteed good luck for the price of his soul.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

And indeed, Jabez gets all the good luck for which he could ask.  When his neighbors’ crops are destroyed by hail, his are spared.  He loans money to his neighbors and when they can’t pay him back, he makes them sharecroppers working his fields.  He builds a huge mansion on the hill and alienates his wife and mother and all his old friends.

Jabez’s wife Mary is a good friend of the famous American statesman, Daniel Webster (played by Edward Arnold) and she finally calls Webster in when she decides that something terrible has happened to her husband.  Jabez has changed from an honest friendly religious man into a greedy, hateful sinner.  He’s driven away all of their friends and taken up with a Jezebel named “Belle” whom the Devil has sent to keep Jabez from repenting.

On the seventh anniversary of his contract Old Scratch (as the Devil is called in that neighborhood of New England) comes to claim Jabez Stone’s soul.  By this point Jabez realizes the wrong he’s committed and is repentant but he knows his contract is binding.  But at this point Daniel Webster confronts the Devil and demands a jury trial.  Webster will represent the defense and the Devil gets to pick the judge, and jury.  The jury is made up of notorious criminals of the early American era including Gen. Benedict Arnold the infamous traitor of the Revolutionary War.  But the Devil stipulates that if Jabez is found guilty Daniel Webster’s soul will also be collected.

Webster uses all his gifts as an orator and appeals to the jury’s remorse for not fulfilling their birthrights as free Americans and lovers of life.  He reminds them of the simple joys of living a virtuous life and how each of them regrets the road he has taken.

Finally, the jury asks the Devil to see the contract and when he hands it over Benedict Arnold tears it up and throws it away.  The judge and jury disappear into smoke and Daniel Webster gives the Devil the bum’s rush out of Jabez’s barn.  The two victors return to the farmhouse in time to enjoy a homecooked breakfast with Jabez’s wife and mother and young son.

His neighbors arrive to alert Jabez to the fact that his mansion on the hill is in flames.  He smiles at them and tells them he’s glad and that all their debts to him are cancelled and to prove it he tears up his promissory notes and invites them to breakfast.  The movie ends on a comical note with Old Scratch sitting on a country fence, finishing up a pie he stole from Ma Stone and looking into his little book of prospects and then peering out into the audience and smiling and pointing at you!

As I said this is an oddball film.  The bulk of the film is a melodrama about a good man going bad through greed and pride.  I suppose the supernatural story is meant to be a metaphor for how circumstances can make even good people lose perspective on the what’s really valuable in life and let the pursuit of money destroy the good things they have.  I don’t know if I can recommend this movie unless I compare it to something like the movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”  That movie also shares a supernatural framing of the dangers of losing perspective on what makes life worth living.  If you didn’t like that better movie then you probably won’t like this lesser tale.  That won’t guarantee you’ll like this one but it gives you an idea of what kind of movie this is.

Marty (1955) – A Movie Review

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Ernest Borgnine stars as Marty Piletti an Italian American living in the Bronx.  He’s a 34-year-old who works as a butcher in a small shop and supports his widowed mother in the house where he grew up with his brothers and sisters.  But all of them, even the younger ones have gotten married and only Marty is left hanging out with his friends who talk about women all night long but mostly can’t get a date.  None of them are matinee idols and Marty is probably the homeliest of the bunch.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

When his mother, who worries that Marty will never marry, harangues him to go out to the Stardust Ballroom to find a girl, he laments that he’s been rejected countless times and is tired of it.  But he agrees to go and initially things go as usual.  Girls he asks to dance brush him off.  But a man comes by and asks a favor.  The other man is on a blind date and is unhappy about his date’s looks.  He wants to tell the girl that he has to leave but then have Marty take her home so she won’t feel abandoned at the dance.  Marty objects to the idea so the man finds someone else willing to escort the girl home for a five-dollar fee.

Marty follows the two men and witnesses the girl being callously rejected.  She refuses the offer to be brought home and the two men leave.  The girl is visibly devastated and leaves the dance floor and heads for an outdoor space to be alone.  Marty follows her and sees that she is crying.  Trying to cheer her up he approaches her and asks if she’d like to dance.  Overwhelmed by emotion she sinks her face in his shoulder and cries while Marty nervously pats her shoulder to comfort her.

In the next scene the couple are dancing and we meet Clara Snyder.  She is a twenty-nine-year-old school teacher.  Her relatively plain face has meant that like Marty she has never been in love.  The two hit it off tremendously.  Normally shy and tongue-tied Marty talks garrulously and exuberantly to this stranger.  And Clara is charmed that a man is so genuinely enthusiastic to be in her company.  They spend several hours talking while eating pie in a local diner.  At the end of the night Marty asks Clara to go to the movies the next night and they agree that he will call her next afternoon to decide on the details.  They both end the night deliriously happy to be in love.

But next morning his mother has had a change of heart and fears that if Marty gets married, she will be cast aside.  She tells Marty that she dislikes Clara even though she barely met her.  She tells Marty that Clara is old, unattractive and probably of loose morals because of her college education.  Also, Marty’s friends that saw Clara tell him that she’s a dog and not worth his time.  Now Marty allows himself to be persuaded by the people around him and fails to call Clara in the afternoon.  We see Clara at home that evening watching television with her parents and quietly crying.

But spending the night with his loser friends snaps Marty out of their spell.  He mocks their endless vacillation about what to do and their loveless lives.  He declares that he had a good time with Clara and if he has enough good nights with her, he’ll get down on his knee and beg her to marry him.  He then leaves them and heads to a phone booth to call Clara and change his life.

Marty is a straight forward story of two lonely people and the marvelous accident that brings them together and changes their lives for the better.  The movie has heart and even with the changes in social behavior between 1955 and today the humanity of the two main characters shines through and provides a timeless message, that there is beauty within.  Highly recommended as a date movie for couples.

The Westerner (1940) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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In this western story Gary Cooper is Cole Harden a drifter passing through Vinegarroon, Texas on his way to California.  But Vinegarroon is the home of “Judge” Roy Bean, the only law west of the Pecos River.  Bean (played by Walter Brennan) is a hanging judge who hands out rough justice based on being an advocate for the cattlemen.  If the cattlemen stampede a herd of cattle through a corn field and the farmer shoots one of the steers he’ll be hanged by Bean for the offense.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

When Harden appears in the movie, he’s being led to Bean’s court house (saloon) because one of the locals recognized Harden’s horse as one that was stolen from a local.  Naturally the jury will declare him guilty but Harden manages to convince Bean that he is a friend of the famous actress Lily Langtry whom Bean greatly admires.  Claiming that he has a lock of her hair Harden gets Bean to “suspend” his sentence while evidence of his innocence can be found.  While Harden and Bean cement their friendship over bogus tales of Langtry and Bean’s rotgut whiskey the real horse thief walks into the saloon and Harden punches him out and retrieves the purchase price of the horse from his pockets.  When the thief attempts to shoot Harden, Bean beats him to the draw and thus reinforces the bond between the drifter and the hangin’ judge.

After this the movie drifts off into other directions.  Harden leaves town and while travelling through the area ends up working as a field hand for the Mathew family on their farm.  A romance blossoms between and Harden and the daughter Jane.  But we find out that Judge Bean has been persecuting the farmers and intends to drive them off their land through harassment and judicial malfeasance.  The farmers organize and decide to go en masse and shoot Bean to end their problem.  When Harden hears this, he gallops to Bean’s saloon and warns Bean.  Harden and Bean stop the plot and send the farmers away.  But Harden convinces Bean to remove all the cattle from the valley where the farmers live in exchange for Lily Langtry’s lock of hair that Harden claims to have.  Harden manages to get a lock of Jane Mathew’s hair for the purpose and when Bean fulfills his promise to move the cattle, he ceremoniously hands over the hair.

Now the farmers are triumphant and have a celebratory feast.  But while it is going on the cattlemen set fire to the fields and homesteads of the farmers and destroy the whole valley.  Jane’s father is murdered by the cattlemen and she blames Harden for the deeds she attributes to his friend Bean.

Harden forces Bean to admit that he was responsible for the fire and Harden leaves town to get a warrant for the arrest of Bean for murder and arson.  Coincidentally Lily Langtry is in the area for a concert and Judge Bean buys up all the tickets so that he can enjoy a private audience with Miss Langtry.  And the performance becomes the site of a shootout between Harden and Bean.  Eventually Harden fatally wounds Bean but before Bean dies Harden carries him backstage so Bean can see Langtry before he dies.

In the final scene Harden and Jane are a married couple on a rebuilt farm celebrating the return of the other settlers that had been driven out by Bean.

By the description, you can tell this is a very strange western.  The way I can describe it is a comedy for the first half of the movie that switches over into a more conventional melodrama.  From my point of view the comedic portions of the movie are the better parts.  Cooper and Brennan have a weird funny chemistry that makes the movie interesting and enjoyable.  The later romance and drama are okay but clash with the comedic elements.  I’ll recommend the movie based on the scenes with Cooper and Brennan even though as whole the movie is sort of a mess.

Battle of the Bulge (1965) – A Movie Review

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This movie purports to be a dramatic portrayal of the pivotal WW II battle of the same name.  But the liberties that have been taken with respect to plot and characters make it almost unrecognizable when compared with the historical event.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

The beginning of the movie interweaves scenes from the American perspective and the German view.  We start out meeting Lt. Col. Daniel Kiley, played by Henry Fonda.  He is an American Army intelligence officer stationed on the supposedly quiet section of the front line near the Ardennes Forest.  But he suspects that the Germans are planning an offensive in the area.  He makes a surveillance flight in a small aircraft over the forest and manages to get photos of hidden German tanks and also a high-ranking German officer arriving at the German headquarters in the area.  He passes this intelligence to his superiors, Gen. Grey, played by Robert Ryan and Col. Pritchard, played by Dana Andrews at their headquarters in the town of Ambleve.  Pritchard rejects Kiley’s suspicions about a German offensive while General Grey demands more proof.

Next, we meet the German officer that Kiley photographed.  It is Col. Martin Hessler, played by Robert Shaw with an outrageously over the top German accent, who is being given command of a large force of Tiger II tanks with the goal of breaking through the American lines and capturing Antwerp thus crippling the Allied offensive in Europe.  The Germans are sending out a party of their soldiers who have lived in the United States dressed as American GI’s. They will sabotage communication lines and road signs and try to hold the bridge over the Our river to allow the Tiger Tanks to advance.

Kiley manages to get some intelligence on the tank attack back to HQ just as the attack begins.  We see the Tiger tanks destroy the American tanks while sustaining almost no damage from direct hits.  And we are shown the Germans machine gunning large numbers of American prisoners.  But one other thing that Kiley learns during his surveillance of the German advance is that they are gravely short of fuel for their tanks.  They have only enough fuel to reach a large American fuel depot that is along the route to Antwerp.  Even taking a few extra hours to destroy the town of Ambleve where the American HQ is located is sorely argued against by Hessler’s commanding officer General Kohler.

When General Grey receives this intelligence about the fuel, he decides on a plan to attack the tank force with his tanks before the Germans can reach the fuel depot.  He wants to use the attack to delay the tanks long enough for them to run out of fuel.  When Hessler realizes the delay tactic he heads for the depot with a force of his tanks to obtain the fuel.  But the Americans at the depot spill thousands of gallons of fuel and set fire to it just as Hessler’s tanks arrive.  Hessler’s tanks are engulfed in flames and he dies when his tank explodes.  Without fuel the rest of Hessler’s force have to abandon their tanks and the last scene shows a long line of men walking back to Germany.

I’ve left out a lot of details.  This movie is three hours long!  Charles Bronson plays an American major who fights a rearguard action against the Germans until he is captured at Ambleve.  Telly Savalas is an American sergeant tank crewman who also runs a black-market store in booze, stockings and chicken eggs out of his girl friend’s apartment.  Savalas ends up finally saving the day when he machine-guns the disguised Germans who have taken control of the fuel depot at the end of the movie.

My thoughts on this movie are mixed.  Some of the action is interesting to watch.  Shaw as Hessler gives a compelling performance.  I enjoy his style.  Other than Shaw a lot of the acting is competent but not memorable.  The tank footage looks pretty good.  But the thing that I hold against this movie is that it misrepresents the events of a very important battle for which the details are very well known.  There was no race to get to a fuel depot in the actual battle.  The movie doesn’t show the fact that the battle took place during an horrendous frigid snow storm where the weather was as awful as the fighting.  The real battle was fought hand to hand in towns, forests and trenches.  If you are interested in what it really was like watch the episodes in “Band of Brothers” that chronicles the Battle of Bastogne.  So, my recommendation is unless you really like war movies and don’t care about accuracy don’t watch this movie.

Midway (2019) – A Movie Review

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This 2019 film attempts to provide an accurate modern version of the story of the pivotal WW II naval battle at Midway.   The only actors whose names I recognized were Woody Harrelson as Admiral Nimitz, Dennis Quaid as Admiral Halsey and Mandy Moore as Ann Best, the wife of the hero of the movie Dick Best. Since this is an historical drama, I won’t add a spoiler warning but if you actually don’t know what happened at Midway then go to the last paragraph for my recommendation.

The movie begins with a scene in pre-war Japan where Edwin Layton is an American naval attaché and intelligence officer.  His Japanese counterpart Isoroku Yamamoto warns him that Japan will eventually attack America as part of its plan to dominate East Asia.

In December 1941 we meet Lieutenant Dick Best a naval aviator on the aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise.  He is a hotshot dive bomber and he is being sent on leave to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.  But when his plane nears Pearl Harbor, he comes under attack from the Japanese aircraft that have just destroyed the US naval fleet.  Best’s plane is shot down but he escapes alive.

This devastating attack leaves Japan with an enormous advantage over the American fleet.  Specifically, the Japanese have six aircraft carriers to America’s two.  The War Department assigns Admiral Nimitz to do whatever is necessary to prosecute the war against the Japanese until replacement aircraft carriers can be built.  The plan they fix on is to surprise the Japanese at Midway and destroy as many of their aircraft carriers as possible.

Layton is put in charge of the effort to decode Japanese messages and use them to locate the Japanese fleet and lay the trap.  On the day of the battle the Enterprise sends out its planes along with bombers from Midway but they have trouble locating the fleet.  And they lose a number of planes to the Japanese aircraft.  But eventually they find the fleet and attack.  Most of the American flyers are shot down but the Japanese fleet is only damaged but not destroyed.  Best and his squadron return to the Enterprise and head out again for a last desperate attempt to finish off the carriers.  And they succeed.  Best sinks two of the carriers himself.  By the end of the day all four of the Japanese carriers have been sunk and Admiral Yamamoto orders the rest of his fleet to retreat.  The defeat gives the Americans the time they need to rebuild their fleet.

The makers of this movie made an effort to make it historically accurate.  The names of the protagonists are real.  Obviously, some license was taken for dramatic purposes but the story has not been made politically correct or overly propagandistic.  I enjoyed watching it.  The acting was decent, the special effects are very good and it maintains a pro-American viewpoint throughout.  One touch I especially liked was the quote by Admiral Yamamoto after hearing Roosevelt’s speech after Pearl Harbor, “”I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”  I recommend this movie to patriotic Americans.  Everybody else can fend for himself.

Bullitt (1968) – A Movie Review

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Bullitt is a 1968 crime drama starring Steve McQueen as San Francisco Police Lt. Frank Bullitt.  He is assigned to a case where he will be responsible for keeping a Chicago mobster, Johnny Ross, safe while he awaits testimony in front of a US Senate panel on organized crime.   The politician who has set up Ross’s testimony is Walter Chalmers, played by Robert Vaughn.  He is an unpleasant manipulative political operative who rubs Bullitt the wrong way.  When Ross is critically wounded during a late-night mob hit, Chalmers blames Bullitt even though the attack occurs while Bullitt is off-duty.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

The remainder of the movie is the aftermath of this attack.  Ross dies shortly after the hit and Bullitt keeps his death a secret in order to lure the killers back in order to catch them.  The two hit men escape Bullitt at the hospital but he finally finds them while they are staking him out.  What follows is one of the most famous and still one of the best car chase scenes in American film history.  Bullitt chases the killers through the streets of San Francisco and onto an expressway.  The finale is a fiery crash and explosion when the gangsters plow into a gas station.  The fire burns both of their bodies beyond recognition.

When Ross’s girl friend is found strangled Chalmers demands that Bullitt be held responsible for the ongoing disaster and be punished by his superiors.  But Bullitt has found very strange evidence in Ross’s girlfriend’s luggage that proves that the man they thought was Ross was a plant named Albert Renick who was working for Ross but whose death was the work of Ross to fake his own death to escape from mob retribution.  And now it is believed that Ross will be leaving San Francisco by jet to Europe using Renick’s name.  Eventually Ross is found to be on a plane taxiing down the runway.  The airliner is recalled and Bullitt and his partner are waiting as the passengers disembark.  But Ross forces his way out of the rear door of the plane and jumps to the tarmac and runs off into the night with Bullitt in hot pursuit.  Ross takes several shots at Bullitt with a pistol but eventually after a long chase Bullitt corners Ross as he attempts to escape the airport by shooting an airport security guard.  Bullitt finishes off Ross with a couple of bullets to the chest and Ross crashes through a glass door and dies.  Chalmers sees his plans in ruins and departs in disappointment.  Bullitt returns home to find his girlfriend Cathy, played by Jacqueline Bisset, sleeping in his bed, apparently having forgiven him for the sin of being a policeman.  The final image is Bullitt staring in a mirror at his own reflection as if to say, “What kind of life is this?”

I left some stuff out of the summary because it wasn’t that important.  Bullitt’s girlfriend Cathy is upset with him because she barges into a crime scene and sees a woman who has been brutally murdered.  She feels that if Bullitt can deal with this type of violence, he can’t be the cool laid-back character who listens to jazz music with her that she thinks he is.  This seems moronic to me so I always ignore it when I watch this movie.  I hope you will too.

I recommend this movie on the strength of the car chase scene.  Sure, the police drama is pretty good and the conflict with Chalmers is okay, I guess, but the car chase is worth the cost of watching the rest of the movie and then some.  It’s two late sixties American muscle cars running amok on crowded roads at high speed.  If you’re an American male you’ll enjoy it.

 

12 Angry Men (1957) – A Movie Review

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12 Angry Men is a courtroom drama, or more accurately a jury room drama.  It almost entirely takes place in the jury deliberation room in a downtown Manhattan court building.  The star of the movie is Henry Fonda as Juror 8.  The setup (and it is a setup) has Fonda as the only juror unwilling to vote not guilty in a murder trial.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last two paragraphs to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

The eleven other jurors to a greater or lesser extent are convinced that the trial has proven the guilt of the young man accused of stabbing his father to death with a switch blade knife.  There was an eye witness to the killing and another witness heard the defendant threaten to kill his father and saw him running away from the murder scene just after the killing.  Another witness saw the defendant in possession of a switch blade knife the day of the murder.  The defendant’s alibi was that he was at a movie theater at the time of the killing but no one remembers him there and he could not remember the name of the movies playing or even the actors in the movie.  When questioned about the whereabouts of the switch blade he had been seen with, he claimed it had fallen out of his pocket without his knowing it and wasn’t the one found plunged into his father’s chest.

When the deliberations begin the foreman (played by Martin Balsam) asks them to start with a preliminary vote to see how many want to vote not guilty.  Fonda says he has doubts.  He is verbally challenged by Juror 3 (Lee J. Cobb) who is portrayed as a belligerent, irascible man who is determined that the verdict be guilty.  His behavior is so extreme that you can see he is being set up as the bad guy.  And what we are shown is that the other jurors are so annoyed by Juror 3’s behavior that regardless of the logic of the case they find themselves more sympathetic to Juror 8’s arguments.

Step by step Juror 8 attacks the details of the case against the defendant.  With regard to the witness who heard the fight and saw the defendant running from the building, Juror 8 uses the fact that a nearby elevated train was passing at the time of the murder to cast doubt on what the witness could have heard.  And then based on the disabled status of this old man he contradicts the idea that he could have reached the staircase in time to see the defendant running out of the building.  Next he shows that the switchblade knife that killed the defendant’s father was of a common design easily available by producing one he bought the day before in the neighborhood where the murder took place.  With the help of Juror 9 he makes a plausible case that the eye witness to the murder might have been unable to see the murder clearly due to poor vision.  To the question of the defendant not remembering the movies he’d seen that night Juror 9 questions Juror 4 about his memory of two movies he had gone to a week before.  And although he remembered the movies’ titles, he was incorrect on one of the actresses in the second feature.

As each of these questions was raised by Juror 8 one by one the other jurors changed their votes until finally it’s only Juror 3 who claims to have no reasonable doubts and still wants to declare the defendant guilty.  At this point we witness Juror 3 rant about the character of the young defendant and we realize from his speech that he has a grudge against his own son who has turned against his father because of his brutal strictness.  And finally relenting Juror 3 declares not guilty and the jury leaves the room to announce their decision, not guilty, in the court room.

This film is a leftist propaganda film.  The intent is to try and prove that no matter how much evidence there is against a defendant in a case there can always be enough doubt generated by clever obfuscation to justify a not guilty verdict.  The characters are defined so that the audience will obviously admire Juror 8 and despise Juror 3.  The first is presented as an educated, white collar, intelligent, polished speaker and the latter is a working class, obnoxious bully who can’t help but alienate all around him.  The defendant is portrayed as non-white, poor and coming from a criminal family background.  All these things are used as points against him by Juror 3 and by others of the jury.  This ethnic and class bias is highlighted as another factor in the unfairness of the opinions of the jurors.

Obviously I’m not a fan of the message that the film is meant to make.  However, I think the film is well made.  The cast is for the most part, very good.  I’ll list the below for your perusal but I’ll say that they are all pretty with Martin Balsam and E.G. Marshall providing particularly strong supporting roles.  Fonda and Cobb have the lion’s share of the camera and even though Cobb provides the strawman for Fonda’s attack I thought they both were pretty good.

As I’ve said this is propaganda and propaganda for the Left.  But the topic of the importance of the jury in our society is something that should be thought about and dramatized.  I served on a jury that tried to ignore its duty and decide against a defendant without any actual evidence.  I was forced to hang the jury.  Seeing how Americans were willing to abandon their duty and instead declare a verdict based on personal animus was shocking and enraging for me at the time.  I think a movie about the jury process is a worthy thing to make.  I would prefer a better one but I will admit I think watching this movie is worthwhile.  Intelligent people will know they’re being patronized and judge accordingly.  But it will still be an interesting experience.  I guardedly recommend this movie on those terms.

Martin Balsam                                 …            Juror 1

John Fiedler                                        …            Juror 2

Lee J. Cobb                                         …            Juror 3

E.G. Marshall                                      …            Juror 4

Jack Klugman                                     …            Juror 5

Edward Binns                                     …            Juror 6

Jack Warden                                      …            Juror 7

Henry Fonda                                      …            Juror 8

Joseph Sweeney                              …            Juror 9

Ed Begley                                            …            Juror 10

George Voskovec                             …            Juror 11

Robert Webber                                 …            Juror 12

Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert are the newlywed couple Gil and Lana Martin.  They have migrated from the settled and comfortable area near Albany, New York to settle in the frontier farming community of Deerfield in the Mohawk Valley.  But this is during the American revolutionary war and the Mohawk Valley is the scene of conflicts between Americans and their Indian allies versus British troops, loyalist settlers and their Indian allies.  The movie starts off with Lana learning to accept the rigors of frontier life after her more affluent existence with her well-to-do family.  But once the young couple begin to prosper the attacks begin.  The Indians burn down their homestead and they are reduced to living as servants in the house of a rich old woman Sarah McKlennar (played by the irascible Edna May Oliver).  Gil is enlisted in the local militia and they participate in the Battle of Oriskany where they are victorious but at a cost of nearly half their men.

Meanwhile Lana gives birth to their daughter and the Martins find a happy life working for McKlennar.  But eventually war returns to Deerfield.  An overpowering war party of Indians is approaching.  The settlers abandon their farms for the relative safety of Fort Schuyler.  The settlers resist the attack for as long as their ammunition holds out but eventually Gil is sent out on a desperate mission to get reinforcements from Fort Dayton.  Three Indian braves chase him for hours through forests and grasslands until finally he reaches the fort and brings help.  Just as the Indians have occupied the stockade and a desperate hand to hand battle is under way, the militia from Fort Dayton arrive to save the settlers.  They quickly defeat the enemy and restore order.  The commanding officer informs the settlers that the war is now over and the English have surrendered to General Washington.  Lana and her child have survived the battle but Mrs. McKlennar was mortally wounded and as she dies, she leaves her farm and money to the Martins.

The movie is a semi-historical account and the action of the story is dramatic enough and the characters interesting enough to keep the viewers’ interest.  I found Edna May Oliver’s portrayal of the cantankerous Mrs. McKlennar as probably the dramatic highlight of the movie.  Fonda and Colbert do an admirable job as the young couple trying to survive the war and various character actors such as Ward Bond and John Carradine add substantially to the effort.  I would rate this movie as a diverting historical adventure story.  Perfect for a winter evening when you don’t want to go to sleep too early.

The Verdict (1982) – A Movie Review

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The Verdict is a courtroom drama about a Boston lawyer, Frank Galvin (played by Paul Newman) who brings suit against the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, one of its hospitals and a world-renowned doctor who botched the anesthesia on a woman who was there to give birth.  The woman went into cardiac arrest, the baby died and she ended up in a permanent coma.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Galvin is currently an ambulance chaser who spends most of his time drinking.  Years earlier he had a brilliant career and was married to the daughter of a senior partner at a prestigious law firm.  But when he threatened to expose witness tampering by one of his colleagues, he was indicted on trumped up charges and his career and marriage disappeared.  Now years later his former mentor Mickey Morrissey (played by Jack Ward) throws him one last chance to pull his life out of the gutter.  He gives him the above-mentioned malpractice suit knowing that the Archdiocese will pay handsomely to hush up the criminal negligence.  And he hopes this financial success will give Galvin a chance to revive his law practice.

But when Galvin goes to the nursing home to take photographs of the comatose patient, he has a moment of conscience and decides that instead of settling the case out of court he will prosecute the doctor for negligence to get justice for the destruction of this woman’s life.  The woman’s sister and brother-in-law are enraged thinking Galvin is only interested in the larger settlement that a court case might yield and Morrissey is shocked at what he sees as the foolishness of throwing away a guaranteed $70,000 fee for accepting the settlement.  But Morrissey agrees to help Galvin with his court case.  Likewise, the judge in the case and the defense attorney Ed Concannon (played by James Mason) are astonished that Galvin is determined to go to court.  But Concannon has enormous resources as the head of a powerful and unscrupulous law firm.  He sets to work to destroy Galvin’s case.  He coerces the expert witness on anesthesia not to testify for Galvin and even plants a spy in Galvin’s life by paying a woman, Laura Fischer, who wanted to work for Concannon, to insinuate herself into Galvin’s life and even sleep with him in order to provide the defense team with the details of Galvin’s case.

And Concannon’s tactics work brilliantly.  Galvin’s case is hopelessly inconclusive and it seems inevitable that the jury will come up with a verdict of not-guilty.  The only possible hope is an OR nurse who refuses to testify for Concannon.  But she also refuses to help Galvin.  Her angry defensiveness leads Galvin to suspect she is protecting someone else and upon reviewing the employment records he guesses that Kaitlin Costello, the admitting nurse on that day, is the one being shielded.  Costello resigned shortly after the incident.  By some underhanded tricks Galvin finds Costello and convinces her to testify.  What we learn from her testimony is that the patient had eaten an hour before coming to the hospital and should not have been given anesthesia.  The doctor had worked on five difficult surgeries in a row and had made the mistake due to fatigue.  After the catastrophic injury to the patient the doctor threatened Costello to change the note concerning her pre-op meal from 1 hour to 9 hours by doctoring the admission record.  Costello refused and made a photocopy of the form just in case someone else doctored it.  And that was exactly what happened.

After this riveting testimony, Concannon raises an objection to the photocopied document which is sustained by the judge and then raises an objection to the testimony based on its lack of credibility without the photocopy.  The judge sustains this also and advises the jury not to credit any of the testimony.  But obviously the jury cannot unhear such damning evidence and they find for the plaintiff.

The plot of this movie doesn’t sound very extraordinary when narrated as a synopsis as I have just done above.  But the acting by the principal cast is extremely well done.  I especially enjoyed James Mason’s work as Concannon.  The way he portrays the Boston Brahmin lawyer and his staff rings true.  But the whole cast is strong.  David Mamet wrote a very lively script.  I would say this is easily among Paul Newman’s best films, right up there with The Sting.  I highly recommend this film.

Enemy of the State (1998) – A Movie Review

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Back when this movie came out in 1998, before the 9-11 attack and the Patriot Act, the idea of the surveillance state having the wherewithal to use information from telephones, e-mail, surveillance cameras and satellites to choreograph a manhunt in real time seemed like a paranoid’s conspiracy theory nightmare.  Well, other than for the ineptitude of our intelligence agency doofuses it’s now a living breathing reality.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Jon Voight plays Thomas Reynolds, a mid-level NSA official who is trying to ensure the passage of a bill very close to the Patriot Act that will legalize the kind of surveillance of American citizens that back then was thought unthinkable.  In furtherance of this aim he corners the chairman of the congressional committee responsible for approving the bill at a lake where the congressman is walking his dog.  He tries persuasion then threats.  But when the congressman refuses to approve the bill and walks away from him Reynolds has an assassin assault him and inject him in the neck with a drug that will simulate a heart attack.  Then the congressman is thrown back in his car which is then sent rolling to the bottom of the lake.

Unfortunately for Reynolds, there was a surveillance camera in a wildlife blind that was being used for Canadian Geese wildlife research.  This motion activated camera captures the murder and the identity of the murderers.  A member of the cabal spots the researcher, Daniel Zavitz, replacing the memory on the camera and alerts Reynolds who has the NSA trace the researcher.  Zavitz discovers what he has and hides the video in a video game just in time to escape the NSA hit squad sent out by Reynolds.  What ensues is the squad being fed street location information on the fleeing researcher via satellite images.  Finally, Zavitz runs into a lingerie store and sees a man he knows named Robert Dean and hides the video in Dean’s shopping bag before running out of the store.  He is chased by the team into heavy city traffic where he is run over and killed by a speeding fire truck that happens by at that moment.

Will Smith plays Robert Dean, a labor lawyer that is using his friend, Rachel Banks’ connections to get damaging surveillance evidence against a mafia mob boss to help his client fight back against union breaking intimidation tactics.  Rachel has an ex-CIA agent named “Brill” who can get surveillance on anyone.  Dean brings the video to the mob boss and tells him to lay off or risk being exposed to prosecution for the evidence on the video.  The mob boss threatens Dean that if he does not reveal the identity of Brill, he will kill Dean.  Undeterred, Dean goes shopping for a Christmas present for his wife Carla in a lingerie store when Daniel Zavitz shows up.  Recognizing Zavitz he hands him his business card before his old acquaintance rushes out of the store.

Meanwhile the NSA team searches Zavitz’ body and fails to find the video but they find Dean’s business card.  Reynolds orders them to destroy Dean’s life to facilitate finding the video and also to discredit him in case he tries to expose the video to the public.

And very systematically that is exactly what they do.  They break into his home in order to place microphones and tracking devices into his home and his clothing.  They send evidence to the police, newspapers and to his courtroom adversaries that makes it appear that he is guilty of fraud, theft and malfeasance.  They send photos to his wife that make it appear he is having an affair with Rachel Banks.  He’s fired from his job, his credit cards are cancelled and his wife throws him out of the house.  Finally in desperation he goes to Rachel Banks’ house.  She had at one time been his mistress so he needed her help in clearing his name with his wife.  But when he gets there, he finds her murdered and his clothes and belongings staged in the house to make him the suspect.

Now with nowhere else to turn he uses Rachel’s secret signal to contact Brill.  Brill, played by Gene Hackman, tells Dean the bad news that the NSA is destroying his life for some information he must have received without knowing it.  He also warns him that his clothes must be bugged then he leaves Dean to his fate.  Finally, after a manhunt that chases Dean through streets and tunnels and down the side of a hi-rise hotel he sets fire to a building to summon police and rescue personnel to scare off the killers.  After he is inside an ambulance, he steals an officer’s gun and escapes.  He returns home and finds the video and then meets up with Brill.

We learn that Brill was an NSA agent who was disowned by the agency out of convenience when a mission went sour.  His partner was killed in the mission and the partner’s daughter was Rachel Banks.  Brill brings Dean to his secret hide out.  They decipher the video and discover what the fuss is about.  But unfortunately, right before reaching Brill’s base, Dean made a phone call to his wife and the NSA was able to find his location and using satellite data they followed them back to Brill’s base.  As the agents break in, Brill and Dean escape just as the building is pulverized by an enormous fireball of an explosion.  In the ensuing chase the video is destroyed and so Brill and Dean decide to entrap Reynolds into a confession.  But the plan backfires and Brill and Dean are captured by Reynolds and the team.  Reynolds threatens to kill Brill and Dean if they do not give up the video.  Brill refuses and Reynolds shoots him in the hand.  Dean agrees to get him the video and tells them to drive to the restaurant owned by the Mafia mob boss.

Dean goes into the restaurant with Reynolds and some of the agents and using confusion between the video that Dean had shown the mob boss previously and the video that Reynolds wants, he gets the two groups into an argument that turns into a full-on fire fight.  Reynolds, the mob boss and most of the gunmen on both sides are killed in the shootout.  But Dean had hit the floor and survived.  Brill escaped in the confusion and the FBI which had been monitoring the crime family shows up in time to collect the survivors and sort out the crimes involved.  Dean is cleared of all the crimes he had been accused of and reinstated in his job and restored to his family.  Brill escapes to an island paradise to leave behind the world of espionage.

This movie is one long frenetic chase.  But for the most part it’s entertaining.  Sure, there are some over the top sequences and some of the characters are a little thin on acting skill but the action sweeps you along and the predicament that Will Smith’s character endures keeps your attention through all the running, jumping, hiding and seeking.  And after what we’ve learned in the last five years about the capabilities and lack of ethics at our intelligence agencies it doesn’t seem far-fetched at all.  Will Smith and Gene Hackman provide just enough old guy-young guy chemistry to provide some interest in their espionage mission.  I’ll recommend this movie as a full tub of popcorn’s worth of thrills.