Homework Movie - T-Men

You're probably thinking a movie about currency is going be pretty boring, huh?! Well, aside from the opening statement from the real treasury department, the movie T-men is anything but boring. Anthony Mann's 40's crime noir is peppered with humor that you wouldn't expect, intrigue at every corner, and an intimate cast that's very engaging for it's time or any other decade.

We get to look into the lives of two federal treasury department agents lives as they circle a crime ring that's been smuggling fake bank notes into circulation. Dennis O'Keefe and Alfred Ryder star as the two agents, who when given the assignment, have to start infiltrating the criminal organizations they are "stinging" as entry level hoods looking for work. It takes a little work on their part to fit into the group as they go up the ranks to gain trust, and all the while sending word back to the federal department as to their status for progress.

Once the two agents gain the trust of the criminal organization, they start a plan to bring down the whole operation by finding out who’s in charge. At one point they seem to figure out who is on top by how many orders someone takes over the phone. This part was one of the moments that stood out to me as a very funny point to make. You can really tell who's in charge by how much someone has to take down info and what they are told to do. It was a surprise to me for a movie made in the late forties that they would mention the photographer from the club as a possible kingpin, but she did give a lot of orders to the Schemer until towards the end.

Crime dramas today have taken a bit of a cue from movies such as T-Men, in that they show how the operations of both sides of the law get their information through networks and how much goes into every bit of planning. Similar in it's quest to find corruption in society was Force of Evil where a lawyer tries to go strait and becomes tangled into the local numbers racket because of his brother. It challenges morals and ethics, but ultimately, good triumphs over evil.

Homework Movie - Black Sunday (1960)

When you start off messin' around on your significant other, you just have to know that something wrong is going to come of it. Such is the case in Black Sunday Staring Barbara Steele and directed by one of Horror's best-known directors, Mario Bava. Barbara plays multiple characters that can't seem to keep their hands off the other men in her life when she's supposed to be married as both characters. In both cases it ends very badly for more than one guy. Infidelity doesn't just end with Mrs. Steele's character.

Dr. Gorobec is messing around with the older woman in the beginning, who it turns out to be a younger woman later on in the story that wants the Dr. to take over the estate of the wife/Jenny characters. He then hires a competent doctor that has been looking after Jenny at an asylum before the story takes place and has him move in for a while to study Jenny's behavior to see if she's suitable for the estate or if Dr. Gorobec should watch over and inherit the money/property of Jenny's.

This movie marked the first of many horror genre films for Barbara Steele, including in the 80's the original Piranha for Roger Corman's New World Pictures. Steele has worked on everything from dramas to some comedies, but she's always made time for the horror genre.

Starting off as a cinematographer, Mario Bava didn't rise so quickly into the role of the director until almost 20 years into the business. Sure he'd directed some documentary films and shorts in that time, but his first major film being Black Sunday, this makes watching this film especially fun to see his style start to emerge on the scene. Since the 60's, Bava has rarely strayed from the horror genre, being named one of the godfathers of the modern horror film.

Watching some of his other works in class, Black Sunday is a good start to anything he's done over the years. The whip and the body we watched in class and it was cheesy is some parts and somewhat laughable. Thinking about Black Sunday in the terms of when it was made, it could have scared the pants off of you if you weren't keeping track of where people were in the house.

Homework Movie - On Dangerous Ground (1952)

On Dangerous Ground starts off with a very rough and tumble look at a sharp but very tough police detective on the force named Jim Wilson. He been suspended a few times for being too rough with the captives and his captain is about to kick him off the force when a case comes up that will get Wilson out of the city for a few days on a errant case involving a murder suspect. Robert Ryan plays Wilson, a man who's not afraid to get into it with the bad guys, comes off as a bad guy himself, even to his partners.

Mostly known for his directing of Rebel Without a cause, Nicolas Ray had made over three decades of movies with a darker, underbelly of life, approach. This movie takes our hero from his place of business in the city to the mountainous country of Colorado to find a killer on the lose. When he gets there, Wilson is teamed up with the local father of the deceased to find his daughter's killer. This brings him to the cabin in the snowy mountains of Mary, who's own brother is the prime suspect in the case. It's Mary's strong will and determination that convinces Wilson to hear out Mary's plea to capture her brother, rather than killing him on the spot. Never once did her disability come into the thought of Wilson when it came time to tell Mr. Brent to back off.

The major contrast of the city from the mountains played a part in softening the hardened police detective. He was genuinely concerned for Mary's safety once he learned that she was blind, despite her reassurance that she would be fine. She even went to search for her brother once she realized he was their suspect.

In all of this week’s movies, the bad guys were nicely captured and the story wraps up neat at the end of each movie. It wasn't until later on when crooks would be able to get away and that would be how the movie would end. Justice was served in this case, as in the rest of the weeks movies. Even in the Big Heat where the crime spread into the police force, the straight cop finds a way to figure out just who to trust in the department and smoked out the crooked cops all the way to the top.

Homework Movie - A Bell From Hell (1973)

After seeing several different countries horror genre films as well as other genres from the 70's time period, I came to the conclusion that "A Bell from Hell" was a bit clunkier than it could have been for a horror film. The story involves a young man coming home to his family estate to get revenge for his imprisonment in an Insane Asylum. Some of the subplots don't help move the story along and feel unfulfilled to me.

The young man is played by Renaud Verley, who's a French native working in Spain on this and a few other productions. His character plays a few jokes on people during the course of the movie that don't feel like they belonged with this story. The only reason they're in the movie is to serve their purpose and they don't add anything. He enjoys a few prosthetic gags early on and has a life-sized model of himself sent to the house which later on someone believes is Juan (or John in the English dubbed version) and it's destroyed. It doesn't make any sense when Juan tries to save a young woman in a boat then not much else comes of it other than a bandaged Juan. Maybe it's to give his character an alibi, but it's unclear even after watching the movie a few times to pick up things I may have missed the first time.

Having a bell sent to the local church gives us the title of the movie, and it plays a very small part in the film. For a brief moment the bell doesn't ring when the church alter boys pull the rope. Not much else comes of it and even now, I never really got a clear reason for it not working.

A good deal of the camera work in the movie also doesn't help with the story. There's a lot of unnecessary shake in the camera, to me suggesting that it wasn't on stable ground when they shot. Those things could and should have been adjusted when they shot, not left in for the audience to be taken out of the film with.

About half way through the movie is when the real story begins to unfold. Juan starts to seduce one of his cousins which is disturbing at best, and begins a game of cat and mouse with the rest of the family to begin killing them. His home becomes sort of a petting zoo during dinner one night which is funny, but again it doesn't pay off anywhere else in the story, unless you count the bees used to kill his Aunt, which had no part of dinner.

One redeeming point to the movie is the way the girls get away from Juan in the end. They help each other out as one slips their bonds but doesn't leave the rest. All the while in the background of the place they are all staying at is running clips from the childhood of the five people.

Of all the clips we've watched this week and A Bell from Hell, I couldn't pick a really good movie out of the bunch. Alucarda had a good story with a little bit of blood (okay, a lot of blood) and some possessed people. The Black Pit of Dr. M has some funny moments that were supposed to be scary. Dr. M had a split in personality that seemed comical, not very scary. In all, this generation of import horror didn't terrorize more than it made me laugh. It would be the director, Claudio Guerin's last film, so he couldn't scare us any longer.

Homework Movie - Night of the Hunter

"They abide and they endure" - Mrs. Cooper in The Night of the Hunter

Being born at the turn of the 20th century, Charles Laughton's career was largely as an actor. He has worked in movies as early as the 1930's, with a few short films earlier in 1928. He has been credited for a handful of writers credits as well as producing credits. His directing credits have gone more often than not uncredited. This is the only movie he has worked on as director that has been credited to him in his 30 plus year career. With a writers credit also, Night of the Hunter stands to be an amazing testament to his abilities for story telling through film.

Based on the Davis Grubb novel of the same name written in 1953, this movie portrays a murdering priest that finds his victims while in prison listening to death row criminals about their remaining families. This story and subsequent movie was based on events taken from headlines from Grubb's hometown of Moundsville, West Virginia.

As for the headliner, Robert Mitchum, he was the show's main attraction. As the underhanded Harry Powell, he got to play the worst type of bad guy in my opinion: a crooked preacher that kills women for their dead con husband's stolen money. If there's an example of two wrongs don't make a right, it's certainly this one. The children in the story are fully aware of this from the beginning and Father Powell doesn't want to have anything of it. When anyone is around he and the children he's just as nice as a summer's day, but get him alone with the boy and he's on him to spill the beans as to where the stashed money is with dangerous results. Mitchum has been on both sides of good and evil in other movies, but this character was such a memorable bad guy, with his tattoos on his finger and the story that he told to go with 'em, that I really felt for the kids.

When the kids take off down the river alone, their story seemed hopeless til they came to the old mother hen, played by Lillian Gish. She took in the kids as if they were her own from the moment she saw the two. This wasn't her first time taking in stray kids. She was very skeptical from the moment she heard of Mr. Powell's appearance. It took one word from John to get her to see what a wicked man Powell really was.

This story of good versus evil takes it's twist at the end with a juxtaposed picture of the evil preacher signing sweet songs staring down the house where Mrs. Cooper sits with a shot gun in hand to protect "Her" children from harms way. And just like a mother duck and her chicks, they all fall in line walking home after the trial of Mr. Powell just in time for Christmas.

Of the killers we've seen this week, Mitchum's character didn't favor the gun as did others, including Arthur Frantz's The Sniper. He used the switchblade when he wanted to do his dirty work. But as a whole, there was something very sinister about each of the men hunting down women or children in these films. As a part of film noir, the heavy dark aspects are played til the end of the movies teetering the balance of good versus evil until the very end, where the audience is never quite sure who's going to be the victor. In the case of Night of the Hunter, the children (innocence) wins as they are rewarded with a new family.

Homework Movie - Peeping Tom

When you have been living with the idea that your life is completely normal being terrified by your parents, the thought of harming someone else doesn't seem to enter your mind. That is the first impression I got from the movie Peeping Tom by Michael Powell in 1960. Upon further viewing, this movie is so much more than that, as the main character is attempting to become more main stream talking to Helen.

His torment began when his father would capture him on camera after throwing a lizard at him or catching him watching someone else in a romantic interlude over the fence. We never see Mark's father during the action in the movie, but his work is seen through Mark's actions and reactions to the terror in his victim's faces. The difference between Mark's victims and Helen is that Helen was never scared of Mark, only fascinated in his upbringing.

Mark knows what he's doing is wrong, but it's something that has haunted him since his father's passing. His plan to end his own life on film was creative and very clever for the time when this movie came out and to see it now, it's still remarkable that there hasn't been a movie today that has used his demise.

Of the movies we've watched this week, Peeping Tom seemed the most realistic. Quartemass 2 had an interesting story, but the devices were a bit clunky and ill fated for horror. Especially for today's audiences, the monsters of these early films seem to be more laughable that terrifying. The Crawling Eye gave me a few laughs in class as it lurched towards its victims. With Peeping Tom, the character of Mark could possibly exist, which makes the film more grounded and therefore more horrifying.