John's Green Blog

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Category: movies

  • The Accountant (2016)

    When I tire of hearing about the latest Trump outrage on my TV, I scroll down my list of channels to see what cool old movie is being shown on the TCM channel!

    It’s become my favorite “escape” from the truly depressing reality of life in America in 2026.

    The next chanel below TCM in my listing is good ole TNT. Tonight it is showing The Accountant, and I got hooked on it!!

    I have a real soft spot for that movie. I think I actually saw it in my local theater!

    That was the good old days when I lived in Reno and the Century Riverside 12 movie theaters were still operating about 3/4 mile from my condo!

    Short aside:
    Reno, Nev. (News 4 & Fox 11) — The Cinemark Century Riverside 12 movie theater in downtown Reno will show its last film Thursday at 9:25 p.m

    Shorter follow up:
    It’s now a church! 🙂

    Cast

    So back to my story …
    I watched a bit of the first part where our hero is an autistic child, and boom! I was hooked! …
    so watching the rest was what I did for the next couple of housr!

    The actual movie!

    The movie opens with some disconnected scenes from a bloody shootout, that make no sense at all until well into the movie.

    Then we get a flashback which tells the story on why the Accountant is the weirdo he is:
    He, his brother and his mom and dad are at a child psychologist’s office, where they get the news that little Christian is autistic. I probably need a psychologist of my own to tell me why, but I find this scene deeply moving. This scene is basically what re-hooked on the movie last night. It sure wasn’t for the gunfights and bloodshed!

    We move forward to the “present day”, which opens on a strip mall parking lot in rural Illinois. Our hero is in his office helping a nice farm couple figure out their taxes. He has no interpersonal skills, but he still manages to suggest a sweet little home business set-up that will maybe let them save their farm!

    • We meet the Treasury agents who want to find who massacred the 9 hoodlums in the first scene.
    • We get flashbacks from when Chris was in prison.
      We meet Jeffery Tambor, who is always fun to see in a movie.
      • He was a Mafia accountant.
      • In prison he spends his time teaching our hero the fine points of accounting!
    • Later in the movie it all gets tied up in bow:
      • Mafia really wanted Tambor dead, so they pulled strings to get him released from prison, and within hours had tortured and killed him..
      • The Accountant really didn’t like that.
        • That is why he massacred the 9 hoodlums in the first scene!
      • IThey even tie in the dented thermos!
        • After he found Tambor was murdered, he had to get out of prison to revenge him, so he bonked a guard with his thermos and somehow got out!
    • Accountant gets hired by a biotech company (Living Robotics) to find the leak in their finances.
      • He finds it and pisses everybody off!
    • Anna Kendrick is the in-house accountant at the biotech company.
      • I re-kindled the fascination (that I forgot I had) with her!
      • TNT is running the movie again tonight, because showing a popular movie 8-10 times in a week is how they roll.
        • I have it on with the sound off while I work on this post …
        • except when Anna Kendrick comes on,
        • then I turn on the sound and savor every second of her calming, lovely presence. It’s mood therapy for me just to watch her! 🙂
        • Can’t get enough of her in this movie!
    • Bad guys try to kill Chris at the home of the nice farm couple.
      They FAIL, but tell him they are after Anna also!
    • He rushes to her apartment where they are in the process of trying to kill her also. They FAIL again 🙂
    • Now Chris and Dana (Anna in the movie) are on the run together.
      • There is a delightful interlude where she gets to see the inside of his Airstream and his original Pollock and Renior paintings.
    • We go back to the Treasury agents for a while.
    • Now we’re back with the Chris and Dana!
      • They get a (really nice!) hotel room.
      • She’s SO darned cute!!!
      • Dana asks him about stuff, which gives us more back story!
      • He’s autistic.
      • His family moved 34 times in 17 years.
        We learn more about what a weirdo his dad was.
      • Dana’s turn to share.
        • She tells how she lucked into the money to buy a black strapless dress for prom.
        • Dumb story, but imagining her in a sheer, black sleeveless gown made my night a little better, so my needs were met! 🙂
      • She almost kisses him, but he kills the moment.
    • More flashbacks with Chris’ creepy dad.
      • I think we’re supposee respect him for his stern but fair ways, but I’m not into it. I think he’s cruel to his children and his wife, and a jerk.
      • A really dislikeable fellow in my view.
    • Chris sneaks out on Anna at the nice hotel, never to see her again … sigh…
    • Treasury agents search his Illinois house. It’s pretty entertaining.
    • The expensive security team has Living Robotics in lockdown.
      • The head security guy is a very entertaining fellow
    • Ray, the head Treasury guy reminisces to his second, so that we get all the back story on the Federal law side of all this.
      It really fills in a lot of blanks:
      • The Gambinos tried to kill Tambor, so he turned states evidence!
      • Ray messed up and didn’t protect him enough, which is how he got dead.
      • That’s why Ray’s crew was surveillling the Gambino’s. Ray had a lot of guilt about it all.
      • Then the Accountant shows up and kills everybody. For some reason he lets Ray live.
        This is an extended replay of the first scene of the movie, except now we know Chris was the killer.
    • Oh yes, there is a dis-embodied, really sexy female voice that makes all the Accountant’s phone calls.
    • Ray is still reminiscing to his agent. “Who is the Accountant?”
      • He was in military prison, but got detailed to Leavenworth for his accounting brilliance.
      • He roomed with Tambor, they were inseparable.
      • One day a guard told him Tambor was murdered.
      • He snapped and fractured the guard’s skull with a thermos.
      • Escaped from a third floor window.
      • My thought: It’s that easy to get out of Leavenworth??
      • Now we learn how his dad died.
        • Visiting his mom’s funeral un-invited and being the belligerent asshole he was, he got into it with a security and caught a bullet.

    Almost to the end of the saga, only two more spoiler alerts! 🙂

    Security guys are still guarding John Lithgow at Living Robotics.
    Accountant attacks, because he never got to “finish the job”.

    • It’s a big bloody mess. Chris even gets shot in the leg.
    • He shoots John Lithgow, who surely deserved it!
    • The head bad guy is watching on video monitors, where he figures out that the Accountant is his brother Chris!!!!
    • … which would make him Braxton!

    All through all the flashback scenes of young Christian Wolff, his younger brother was always sitting on the sofa just watching it all and taking it all in.

    A perceptive watcher may have wondered why that brother sitting there didn’t fit into the plot at all! But not we know it was all to set up this surprise at the end!

    Now all is revealed!

    • Chris was a successful accountant/assassin.
    • Braxton was running a large-scale security company.

    So their dad managed to raise two high-functioning sociopaths, not just one!

    Only one is autistic, but they both have hearts of gold and good value systems so we’re supposed to think they are OK. meh…

    They have a lovely reunion. Lithgow is still around for the start of it, and makes the fatal mistake of barging in on them to bitch out Chris for messing up is extremely important (and lucrative) stock debut. Lithgow foolishly admits off-handedly that he still might kill Dana/Anna so Chris offhandedly plugs him in the forehead, and that is that!

    The brothers go their separate ways.

    Two more little surprises at the very, very end!

    1. Back at the Institute wher it all started, we find that the autistoc girl who befriended Chris at the first of the book is his sexy voice!
    2. We DO see Anna Kendrick one more time.
      1. She gets a package which turns out to be the original Pollack.
      2. I was very moved by this!

    The music at the as Chris is driving his Airstream across a lake to parts unknown was very moving!

    is

  • Bullitt (1968)

    Bullitt (1968)

    This was the Saturday night Feature movie for Steve McQueen Week on TCM.

    I’m really diggin it!

    It came out in 1968, when I was a sophomore in college. So I either saw it in the theater in Cambridge, or in Louisville in the summer.

    But I am quite sure I did see it when it came out! I had to see that car chase, with McQueen in his souped-up Mustang airborne in the hilly streets of San Francisco!

    I loved the 60’s vibe. Bullitt’s girlfriend is Jaqueline Bisset, who is a quintessential 60’s hottie!

    Everybody takes cabs. Robert deNiro is a cab driver that appears early in the move.

    Everybody, even the police, are dependent on regular wall phones to stay in touch. It was normal to ask the cabbie to pull over at a bank of pay phones so you can make a call. Or when you go into a bar, tell the bartender you’re expecting a call …

    The City looks ravishing all through the movie.

    Bullitt has the quintessential City flat. On the side of a steep street with steep parking. Up one flight of stairs just to get to the front door, then you get in the door, another flight of stairs to get to the actual flat. In a very cool San Francisco touch, there was a handle at the top of the second stairs to open the front door without walking down the stairs!

    A priceless scene. there Bullitt anxeht other cops are gathered around the telecopier. They have dialed up the Chicago PD, the device is making modem noises, then the printing drum starts whirling and three minutes later we have grainy black and white image of the guy they thought they were protecting (who is noT the dead guy!).!!

    The Story

    Bullitt and a couple of other cops are assigned to babysit a witness over the weekend.

    The federal prosecutor in charge is Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) a consistently nasty human being throighout the movie.

    the Wiki page had this delightful tidbit:

    Decades later, when Vaughn considered entering politics, he discovered that people could not take him seriously, or found him untrustworthy, as they remembered his performance in this film.

    The flat where the’ve stashed the witness isn’t nearly as nice as Bullitt’s. The view out the window is of the elevated freeway. Ugh.

    They get visitors while they’re guarding the witness. He actually un-chained the door, to let them in, but then they shot him! So he thought something else was happening!

    They shot the cop in the leg, which was nice of them. Blasted the witness with a shotgun point-blank but doesn’t kill him immediately.

    Bullitt is wandering around the hospital just staring at patients in their beds. They don’t let you do that any more!

    Witness dies in the operation room, but Bullit tries to hide it so he can keep investigation.

    The car chase was still epic, but it no longer feels super-cool like it did back in the 60’s.
    In fact it was kinda dumb to my 2026 eyes!

    After the car chase

    The bad guys crashed into an oil tank and got dead. Bullitt was able to pull into a controlled spin and walk away, but his hot Mustang is out of comisssion for the rest of the movie.

    So the next day to to go work, he gets a ride in Jaqueline Bisset’s very stylish Porsche. Which is just what a 60’s hottie like her should have!

    This is a really dumb set-up.. It happened as follows:

    • Back when dead guy was riding in the cab with Robert deNiro, he called a number in San Mateo.
    • It was the number of a young woman it turns out.
    • Bullitt’s boss is giving him all day Sunday follow leads and play out his hand before he turns it all over to Vaughn on Monday
    • So Sunday afternoon he needs to go to San Mateo to talk to this woman.
    • The SFPD is fresh out of cars for him to check out.
      • Really? The SFPD motor pool is fresh out of vehicles??
      • So he gets his girlfriend to drive him.
    • This is how we get spend a few minutes with Jaqueline Bisset and her sweet little Porsche.
    • When they get to the hotel, the woman he wanted to see has been murdered in her room.
    • Bissett sees it, and boy does it turn her world upside down.
    • Her and Stever McQueen have perhaps the dumbest conversation in the history of movies along the lines of:
      • “I thought I know you, but I have no idea who you are now”
    • Spoiler alert, at the end of the movie Bullitt gets home and she asleep is in his bed, so I guess she shook it off. 🙂

    Nailing the real gangster

    Long story short, the dead lady and the dead guy from the start were an innocent husband and wife just trying to make a buck by him impersonating the actual gangster.

    They had flights booked to Rome after all this was over. With the guy dead, the real ganster tried to use that ticket to escape the country.

    It doesn’t quite work out. When Bullit finally runs him down, he shoots a security guard and Bullit shoots him, and that’s pretty much the end of the movie.

    The OTHER super-dumb thing: The bad guy had gone through airport security and was sitting in his seat to fly to London, yet after Bullet made him force the escape hatch and take off running he had his gun with him.

    I know rules were different back in the 60’s, but STILL …, I don’t think you could hop on an international flight from SFO to London with your loaded revolver in your holster!

  • The Big Heat (1953)

    The Big Heat (1953)

    This was a fun movie that popped up on TCM this evening on Glenn Ford Night.

    Watching the news has been particularly depressing lately, so I decided to spend this evening watching a Glenn Ford movie instead of being bummed out by another evening of Trumpian noise. I couldn’t be happier with how that decision worked out.

    This is a Fritz Lang movie. The stars are:

    Glenn Ford is a city police homicide detective whose is married to Jocelyn Brando.

    I had NOT heard of Jocelyn Brando before. She’s Marlon Brando’s sister, and she was very cute and appealing in this movie … until she got blown up.
    I barely got to know her, then BOOM!, she’s gone!

    The movie opens with another police officer killing himself. He had written a long letter. His wife does something with the letter. Then she calls the police but doesn’t mention the letter.

    Glenn Ford investigates, and things get very complicated quickly.

    Glenn Ford is having a lovely night at home with his lovely wife and their cute daughter. He and his wife drink a lot! He gets the call about the suicide. He’s gotta leave his cute wife to investigate.

    The wife of the dead guy has a mysterious call with the head gangster. She wants him to know about that letter, which we come to discover is her insurance policy to stay alive, and to get paid by the bad guys.

    She tells makes up some nonsense to tell Glenn Ford her husband was depressed about health problems.

    Later Ford runs down the dead guy’s girfriend at the bar. She says he did not have health issues, and that he was planning to divorce his wife!

    Turns out the town is corrupt through and through, even the Police Chief tells Ford to lay off. Ford won’t lay off, and he eventually pisses off the crime boss bad enough that he has his stooge wire Ford’s car with a bomb.

    At the last minute, his wife hopped in the car to get the babysitter, so she got blown up instead of him. No more Jocelyn Brando!

    Now Ford’s REALLY mad! He follows a lead to the bar where all the gangsters hang out, and makes Gloria Grahame kinda like him a little bit. This pisses off Lee Marvin, who scars her for life by thowing steaming hot coffee in her face.

    Now Gloria Grahame is really mad too, and she decided to eff up as many bad guys as she can on her way out!

    She goes to the house of the widow of the corrupt cop from the intro and shoots her dead! Recall that she had set it up so that dead husband’s incrimination letter would be released if she dies!

    Grahame then goes to her old boyfreind Lee Marvin’s apartment and throws steaming hot coffee in HIS face and shoots him. She doesn’t quite kill him. Which means we get to enjoy him writhing in pain about steaming hot coffee in HIS face! We don’t get to enjoy that beautiful retribution for long before Glenn Ford comes and shoots him really dead.

    Gloria Grahame dies of her gun shot wounds, tidies everything up. We all had come to quit like her, but it wouldn’t have been in the style of these movies to have her hanging around as a cripple, so she had to die.

    And that’s pretty much the movie!

  • Mansfield Park (1999)

    Mansfield Park (1999)

    Love me some Jane Austen!

    This is just a movie review. I am not reading and reviewing the Jane Austen Mansfield Park the book simultaenously!

    The internet says that the gorgeous building in the Featured Image was known to Jane Austen and was the inspiration for the book!

    I saw this movie at the Sequoia Theater in downtown Mill Valley in 1999 or 2000 when it came out. I’m seeing it quite a differently now than I did then.

    Seeing a movie about the manners of well-to-do white folks in the early 1800’s was very fitting when I was living in the 21st century version of that life in downtown Mill Valley. 🙂

    The Cast

    The movie

    Fanny Price is just a delightful character!
    Frances O’Connor plays her perfectly, seems to me.

    I really liked the way the movie starts, with little 10 year-old Fanny being sent off to live with her rich relatives.

    It wasn’t clear to me what the family connection was that enabled this, so I looked up the family tree here. It says that these three women are sisters:

    • Fanny’s mom Mrs Price – she’s the sister that married for love (therefore the poor one).
    • Lady Bertram – she’s the sister that married for (big!) money.
      She takes care of the others.
    • Mrs Norris – the sister that married for security I guess.
      • She is Lady Bertram‘s housekeeper.
      • She married a clergyman who dies off-sreen early in the book.
      • She is a perpetually unhappy, bitter person.
        • She is particularly vile towards Fanny, the only person in the house she can be mean to without penalty.
        • Living at the beck an call of your rich sister might to that to you!

    I guess that’s how they did it back in the day. The Bertram’s had all the money, so one sister became their live-in housekeeper. The other got married to just a regular guy and lived with him. When her child was of a certain age, her family bundled her off to to learn manners and grow up with a better class of people.

    None of the characters is actually evil, but they all (except for Edmund 🙂 are “flawed”. That is they are nice when it suits them, but peevish and selfish much of the time.

    Mrs Norris was a bitch from the first time we were introduced to her. To be fair, there are occasional moments later in the movie where she does NOT treat her niece like shit. But they are rare and short-lived.

    Sir Thomas is lovely when we first meet him, coming downstairs to greet 10-year old Fanny. He was very thoughtful and kind then.

    But he’s never quite that nice again in the whole rest of the movie!
    What with the slaves getting restless in Antigua he’s got a lot on his mind!

    Lady Bertram spends the whole movie in her chair drinking some clear British liquor. She doesn’t contribute much to the plot except comic relief for being half in the bag all the time. There’s never a hint in their daily interactions that she and Mrs Norris are sisters. She just treats her like a housekeeper.

    It’s a very rough introduction for Fanny.

    Sir Thomas thought Fanny would be living with Mrs Norris, but Mrs Norris ain’t having that! They argue about it right in front of her, which was not cool.

    Fanny is eventually allowed to clean out the attic in the main house and live there.

    While she’s sobbing to herself in her new room (the attic), Edmund comes upstairs to meet her. Edmund Bertram (Jonny Lee Miller), is the best person in the book (except for Fanny of course)

    Somehow, we know that he’s the one, even though she’s 10 and he’s 15-ish.

    And sure enough, after we go through an hour and a half of flirtations and romances and 15-20 years of aging on the part of both of them, by the time we get to the closing credits they are married!
    I for one couldn’t be happier about it! 🙂

    They start with the usual movie trick of showing her growing up every few years until she is the lovely and accomplished 18 year-old that the story revolves around.

    I’m not going to o a play-by-play on this one. I wore myself out doing Smiley’s People.

    The Crawfords come to town

    Things start happening. The Crawfords: .Mary Crawford and Henry Crawford come to live with the clergyman and are “introduced to society”.

    Mary does some heavy flirting with Edmund, which upsets Fanny, but in the end it all works out. Mary was not impressed that Edmund is entering the clergy.

    Edmund has two sisters: Maria and Julia. Maria is the older and is thought to be quite the catch even though I think Julia is prettier. As the oldest sister though, Maria is closer to the money. She has a great body we find out much later. 🙂

    I did not pick up on this when I saw the movie 20 years ago, but Mary Crawford seems to have the hots for Fanny Price at a couple of different junctures. It’s probably the bad influence of too much internet, but I got a low key lesbian vibe from her those two times!

    They are practicing for a play and she’s pawing all over Fanny.
    Arguably this was just to get Edmond worked up, but then this happened….

    Fanny is picking apples and gets caught in a rainstorm and ends up inside with Mary Crawford, who seems a little too excited to help her get her wet clothes off. This was pretty exciting for me 🙂

    Slavery

    There is a thing that is highlighted in this movie more that Austen did in the book, and it is that this whole English upper-class world is build on slave labor.

    Director Patricia Rozema makes sure we know that firehose of money that maintains Mansfield Park and that all the book’s characters live off of comes from slave labor on a sugar plantation in Antigua.

    This choice gets a lot criticism on the Wiki page, but I think it’s interesting!

    In general … where does all the money for the big estates all over England come from? It sure the heck didn’t come from farming the local crops. It the “fruits of empire”.

    England ran most of the developing world at that time. Heck, they were running the American colonies 15 years before the time of this book! So all that wealth from all over the world was flowing back to England to keep a bunch of upper class twits like the Bertrans and the Crawfords in fine clothes and snuff.

    Sir Thomas Returns!

    Thomas Jr doesn’t play a big part in the first part of the movie except to upset his dad and get blind drunk, but he’s Edmund’s older brother. He will inherit EVERYTHING and Edmund will get crumbs. That’s the way they did it.

    Sir Thomas heads off to tend to his affairs on Antigua, and takes Thomas Jr to try to straight him out and learn the family business. Surprise, he comes home early, roaing drunk.

    Most of the romance and craziness happened while Sir Thomas was gone.

    He’s a little strange when he returns, I think having slave women at will was bad for his personality. He’s clearly thinking sexy thoughts about Fanny, and not shy about thinking it out loud!

    I learned a little something about English law at the time. Maybe I knew, but I’d forgotten. He was thinking out loud about bringing a slave woman back to work around the house, and Fanny points out that

    if he brings a slave back to England he’ll have to emancipate her and she’ll be a free Briton!

    He’s much more cool to Fanny after she says that!

    Mr Crawford asks for the hand of Miss Price

    Maria Bertram consents to marry the really boorish rich guy, Mr Rushworth. She wanted to do it in the next two weeks for some reason that eluded me. This is the occasion for this hall of fame quote from Fanny:

    Maria was … “prepared for matrimony by a hatred of home, by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry.”

    Anyway, with Maria out of the picture Henry Crawford’s restless eye lights on Fanny.

    Starting about 50 minutes in Henry suddenly discovers tnat Fanny is the most fascininating woman in sight (which of course she is!). And he asks Sir Thomas for her hand in marriage.

    Boy did this shake things up!

    I’m actually having a hard time making myself watch the movie at this point, because everybody is so uncomfortable!

    Henry is making Fanny uncomfortable. He is being very sympathetic and appealing and getting totally crushed by Fanny anyway.

    Sir Thomas kicks her out for not accepting this great proposal, so Fanny has to return to her very poor family.

    Henry follows to woo her some more, which makes everything worse … it’s a mess.

    It all gets sorted in the last 20 mnutes

    As I said above, I almost bailed out on the movie, but I’m glad I didn’t.

    Crawford proposes to Fanny at her dirt-poor family’s house, and she said she’s rather stay with her dirt-poor family. It was really intense and made me uncomfortable (I would talk to my therapist about if I had one.:)

    Once we made it through that, everything calmed down and things slowly resolved themselves.

    • Older brother Tom made himself useful to the plot by partying way too long and hard and being brought home in the back of a wagon near death.
    • Good old Edmund shows up at the Price family hovel to ask Fanny to come bacck to tend to Tom.
    • This works great. All the Bertrams are glad to have her back.
      • Mary Crawford, not so much, she knows how Edmund feels…
    • Henry Crawford returns to form as the shameless rake he is.
      • Fanny accidentally busts in on him and Maria Rushworth (Bertram) fucking like bunnies in the pantry!!
      • I don’t remember THAT scene from the theater back in the day!!
      • The dress style of that time seemed to be scoop tops that show a lot of cleavage. (a positive feature of the movie IMO. 🙂
        • Maria had always looked pretty great in her dresses, and she looks really great in no top at all!
      • The upshot however is that she is disgraced. She has to leave her husband and go live in a little cottage because Henry declines to marry her. … harsh!
    • Tom starts to improve.
    • There is a family gathering one day where it all comes to a head.
      • Mary Crawford makes a crack about Edmond inheriting the estate of Tom dies.
      • Edmond is appalled, the conversation goes down hill from there.
      • After Edmund officially breaks with Mary, he feels free to declare his feelings for Fanny.

    About effing time thinks everybody who ever watched or read this story!

    … and they live happily ever after!

  • The Drowning Pool (1975)

    Paul Newman is Harper again!

    According to Wiki, movie wanted to capitalize on the popularity of the Harper movie 9 years ago. One could ask why it took 9 years!(xxxx)

    As a side note, Paul Newman appears to have NOT aged even a tiny bit in those 9 years 🙂
    [born 1925 -> 41 for Harper -> 50 for this one]

    Harper is still an LA detective , but he’s in Louisiana to help out his old flame Iris Devereaux (Joanne Woodward, his real life wife for 50 years!)!

    The book on which this movie is based takes place in Los Angeles like other MacDonaled books, but the movie is relocated to the swamps and bayous of Louisiana. This made the whole thing feel a little off. Harper, especially as played by Paul Newman is such a So Cal guy, and here he is wandering through white trash trailer parks in Louisiana.

    Watching the two movies back to back right now I’m noticing a LOT of structural similarities between the movies and also I imagine, the books too.

    • Harper’s job is to rescue a damsel in distress.
      The damsels are both extremely wealthy white ladies in big white houses
      • with suspect servants lurking suspiciously everywhere. 🙂
    • In the first book, that lady (Lauren Bacall) is the iron ruler of the family.
      • In this book that same position is taken by Olivia Devereaux, Iris domineering mother.
    • Their husbands are absent, in different ways.
      • In the first book hubby was kidnapped (and eventually killed).
      • In the second he’s a closeted gay in an alcoholic stupor for the most movie.
    • In both cases there is a very young, very nubile daughter that throws herself at Harper in the first minutes of the movie.
      • Both are central to the cruel events that are the central tragedies of the movies.

    The main characters:

    The movie opens…

    As the movie opens, Harper is getting into his 1970’s rent-a-car at the New Orleans.
    [Already I miss the 60’s cars in the other Harper movie, which were so much cooler than 70’s cars]

    He is driving to the Devereaux mansion, because Iris Devereaux has reached out to him all the way across the country for help.

    Iris is getting blackmailed letters. She thinks from her former chaffeur, Pat Reavis, but in any event she wants Harper to get it sorted out.

    Harper does his usual detecting thing, searching rooms, poking his nose there it’s not wanted, pissing everybody off, and getting information in the process.

    He get abducted by thugs from Oil magnate J. Hugh Kilbourne who wants to get his greedy paws on a huge tract of swampland full of oil that is owned by the Devereaux’s.

    Olivia Deveroux, the mean old lady who rules the family, is killed.

    Everyone thinks Pat Reavis did it. Harper runs him down, then while he is bringing him in, they are waylaid and Reavis is killed.

    Aside on culture

    By now I (think I) can see why the producers move the movie to Louisiana, it’s just so colorful.

    The first Harper movie featured many bleak So Cal industrial wasteland scenes.

    • They found the old guy’s body in a decaying oil tanker.
    • The bad policeman died by falling off a high catwalk into a assembly line of ship propellers in another abandoned factory. ugh.

    All very appropriate to MacDonald’s bleak opinion of the dark underside of modern American culture. (boy would he have loved Trump!).

    But if you are looking for seamy signs of human decay and organic decay, and the decline of civilization in general, Louisiana is the place for you!

    Harper tracks down Reavis’ apartment. He gets knocked out while rifling through it.

    Ht tracks town Reavis at his ex wife’s aartment. It tries to take himm in, but gets run off the road. Reavis gets killed in the gunfight.

    Eventually Kilbourne abducts Harper again and his wife Mavis, and in a memorable scene locks them in a deserted sanitarium.

    [Kilbourne’s mother has commited him there years ago, he didn’t like it, so he bought it and shut it down. :)]

    They must have some kind of water therapy, because it’s a watertight room lined with white tile. Harper gets a weird idea to escape by filling the place with water till they can reach the ceiling where they will get out the skylight.

    A really dumb idea.

    Surprise, the skylights won’t open after being unused for 20 years, and they’re too thick to break. They woulda died if Kilbourne and his stooge didn’t come back in the morning to torture the, some more.

    Things wind up pretty quick after that.

    • Mavis kills Kilbourne
      • “He was right, he would’ve gotten away with it.”
    • Harper goes back to the Deveraux mansion / house of horrors.
      • His beloved Iris has killed herelf.
      • Chief Broussard is there and is distraught.
        • He dated Iris 17 years ago, and regrets naver “taking her away from all this”
        • The make sure you do the math so see that he’s probably Schuyler’s dad.
      • Harper finds her at the pool of course.
      • Harper lays it all out
        • She was banging Reavis
        • She wrote the nasty notes to Iris what brought Harper out here in the first place
        • She killed Olivia,
        • She didnt’ outright kill Iris, but egged her on to do it herself.
      • Broussard is listening. He has a lot of emotions.

    I just compared the Wiki pages for the book and this movie, and they are quite different!

    Along with happening in different parts of the country, the book has a visiting English Professor who is a major player in the book plot but completely absent from the movie.

  • Harper (1966)

    This is the first of two Ross MacDonald books that were made into movies. TCM in their infinite wisdom elected to show them back to back this week, and I ate it up!

    Both movies feature Paul Newman as detective Lew Archer. Well, that’s what his name is in the books, but for some reason the movie people changed it to Lew Harper for the movies.

    This movie is based on the book The Moving Target.

    Interesting to me is that this movie came out the year I graduated from high school! 🙂 I think I saw it at the time, based on Newman’s star power.
    But I didn’t get turned on to the MacDonald books until the 70’s, when a friend of a friend turned me on to them … I read them all!

    Featured in this movie:

    Paul Newman (Harper) is hired by super wealthy Lauren Bacall on the advice of her lawyer, Albert Graves (Arthur Hill) to find her alcoholic and increasingly erratic husband. He gave away an entire mountain to a religious crank, and so now they’re worried. To be clear, they are way more about the money than him.

    Their daughter, the very hot but very young Miranda (Pamela Tiffin), is out by the pool flirting with Allan Taggart (Robert Wagner), the all-purpose errand boy for the rich folks.

    Harper goes to the old guy’s haunts looking for him. He unearths old flame Shelly Winters, and they spend a hilarious 10 minutes getting drunk together.

    She passes out, Harper gets caught rifling her bedroom.

    He goes to an even seedier bar looking for more connections. He pisses people off, as he tends to do, and gets beat up. Back to Shelly’s place where a truck comes thru.

    Miranda takes Harper up the mountain now owned by the religious nut in his sweet little rusted out Porsche coupe. It’s a long, curvy, dusty dirt road that we end up going go up and down a number of times during the movie.

    Quick summary

    Sorry to say, I didn’t really enjoy the movie so much this time around, it wasn’t as fun as I remembered. In fact, except for that charming interlude getting drunk with Shelley Winters it wasn’t really fun at all. They were all pretty rotten people.

    One little cool thing: Since it’s in the 60’s … they are actually doing the frug on the dance floor!!

    Everybody double crossed everybody before it was over.

    Taggart saved Harper early in the movie, but then later, turns out he was in on it. He and Betty the jazz singer actually were in love.

    They did NOT match as people even a little bit, but that’s what the plot said.

    They kidnapped the old guy to get money to run away.

    There was a whole other sub plot where that crew was smuggling in Mexican laborers in the mysterious truck and stashing them at the mountaintop retreat.

    • Taggart double-crosses Harper, then is shot by Albert as he tries to shoot Harper.
    • At their beach house hideaway, Betty is being tortured to tell where the money is hidden by the religious crank and his smuggling buddies (and Shelly Winters for some reason!)
    • Harper shoots a smuggler and makes Betty take him to where an abandoned oil tanker where the rich guy is stashed.
    • Harper gets klonked on the head again.
      • When he comes to, the rich guy is dead and Albert is just arriving.
    • Betty has taken off in his little Porsche.
    • He and Albert retrieve the money.
    • They catch up with Betty on the remote but well-travelled road to the mountain retreat.
      • She wipes out on a curve, so now she’s dead too.
      • The Porsche is not looking so good either.
    • While they are driving the money back to the (not) grieving widow Lauren Bacall, Harper lets on that he knows that Albert double-crossed him!
      • It was Albert that slugged him on the ship and shot the old guy.
      • Everyone agrees the old guy was an awful person.

    This leads up to the end of the movie, which is an utterly memorable bit where Harper gets out of the car with the bag of money.

    • He’s told Albert that he has to turn him in.
    • He gets out of the car with the bag of money and starts up the walkway to return it to Lauren Bacall.
    • Albert makes as if to shoot him, sittin in the car, taking careful aim with his pistol.

    Harper walks a few steps, it’s very dramatic, then he drops the bag.

    Albert lower the gun, and they both say “oh hell” at the same time …

    THE END!

    GOOD stuff == things I liked:

    • The 60’s vibe:
      • his cool little Roadster
      • all the other Mercurys and Fords that were like land yachts
      • Frugging!
      • How underdeveloped the beach side communities were.
      • Even the abandoned oil tanker was cool in it’s way. Prime waterfront real estate being wasted!
    • The seersucker shirt!
      • Harper borrows a shirt from Allan (long story) right before he gets killed.
      • It is a short sleeved “casual dress” type shirt that he wears for the rest of the movie.
      • He drapes his arm over the car seat and you see that the shirt was striped, and ribbed as if it were seersucker!
      • You sure don’t hear about seersucker any more!
        • That took me back to the 60’s!
    • That last scene is so charming!
      • Albert is maybe the only genuinely likable, honest and reliable person in the whole damn movie, expelt for that little detail that he murdered his boss.
      • After the scene with his ex, Harper was certainly none of those things.

    BAD stuff == things I didn’t like so much:

    • Harper’s annoying habit of taking out his chewing gum and just tossing to the side no matter where he is!
    • The really shameful way Harper used his soon-to-be former wife (Janet Leigh) after he got beat up one night. It really mad me angry at him.
      • Janet Leigh sure is a babe though….

  • Marlowe (1969)

    Marlowe (1969)

    A so-so movie called Marlowe was on TV not too long ago so in honor of Raymond Chandler I started a review:

    The movie had:

    • great subject – a book by Raymond Chandler
    • great name – Philip Marlowe got me going!
    • James Garner – beloved of 124 episodes of Maverick
    • Rita Moreno – what a multi-talented babe!
    • Garner – Moreno later paired in the Rockford Files!
    • the late 60’s So Cal vibe – 60’s cool style

    what’s not to like?

    Over the years I’ve read and re-read all the Chandler books. This movie is based on one of the well-known ones: Little Sister (1949) … which is as of now on my list of books to reread!

    Loving the 60’s style!

    The star is James Garner (Marlowe). Along with all the Perry Masons, I watched all 124 episodes of the Maverick series, many for multiple times. I guess he would be my favorite 60’s male hunk.

    A co-star is Rita Moreno. She really was multi-talented and thus all over the TV back then. As likely to appear on performer on the Ed Sullivan Show as on be in a dramatic role Mannix or The Mod Squad. I had kind of a thing for her back in junior high 🙂

    This movie was made when I was in college, so the hot young women are styled out just how I would have thought sexiest at that impressionable time in my young life! Beehives and other bouffant hairdos, little sleeveless tops tight enough to make boobs in hard-shell bras extra perky!

    The Movie

    First scene is a dude snapping pics from the bushes of a movie star-looking couple in a hot tub.

    Second scene is our hero, a cheap private eye going to his office and being harrassed by a weird but kinda cute blonde asking has he found her brother yet?!

    The cheap private eye is Philip Marlowe! The girl is named Orfamay.

    We are intended to put 2 and 2 together and conclude the brother she’s worried about is the photographer in the bushes in the first scene. That doesn’t come together in the movie until about 3/4 the way through, but we viewers kind of know it all the way through.

    First place Marlowe goes looking for the kid is a beatnik hangout by the beach. The first body is quick to follow. Turns out the norm here is an icepick perfect placed in a nexk nerve.

    The second body is seen in the Featured Image. I love the tilted head thing as Carrol O’Connor and the other guy discover he had a toupee. :))

    The real Bruce Lee makes an appearance as a thug for the bad guy. He deserved better than this role.

    • First he karate-kicks Marlowe’s office to kindling just to slow he’s tough.
    • In a later scenic, Marlowe’s meeting the main bad guy in his high-rise restaurant.
    • Bruce is supposed to fatally beat him up, but in an extremely cheesy move, Marlowe implies he’s gay, which I guess hit different in 1969 … then is quick enough to dodge enrages him somaich he flying-kicks Marlow and misses and sails off the roof.

    Maybe that got some laughs in 1970, but it was just plain sad here on 2026.

    Another 60’s touch was that the evil doctor takes Marlowe out with a doctored cigarette.

    The plot gets kinda convoluted and incestous.

    The girl pestering Marlowe is the sister of the guy taking the dirty photos (Orrin). Much later we find that the movie star (Mavis) is their third sibling!
    Convoluted and incestuous, right?

    It gets even more convoluted, until the end when Rita Moreno is killed by the doctor (what doctor?).

    I’m not having fun reporting on all the double crosses, so I quit! 🙂

    It wasn’t that much fun at the end anyway. 🙂

  • The Blue Dahlia (1946)

    The Blue Dahlia (1946)

    What a great name for a noir movie!
    Alan Ladd and the above-pictured Veronica Lake are a great line-up!

    [I just realized I’ve been conflating Alan Ladd and Audie Murphy.
    The are both compact, heroic-type guys who actually were war heroes(true?).
    In any event, I like both of them in old movies.]

    This movie was tonight’s Noir Alley entree so we get all the Eddie Muller movie trivia before and after.
    He tells us that this was a Raymond Chandler screenplay.

    He says that Chandler did NOT like Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake in these roles!
    Me and Eddie disagree. We think they’re great!

    The story

    Alan Ladd (Johnny), William Bendix (Buzz) and another guy (George) are fresh out of the Army and get off a bus in downtown LA.

    They go direct to a bar (of course), and we immediately know that Buzz has severe post traumatic stress syndrome. The juke box is “jungle music” to him, and jungle music freaks him out. I remember from before, he will do this the whole movie!

    The other two are bachelors, but Johnny was married when the Army took him, so he goes straight home to his wife (Helen).

    Her place (their place I guess) is a super-cool little hotel of single-unit bungalows. Every unit has their own entrance and their own front porch, but you have to past the front desk to gain entrance!
    (unless you have a key to the side door!)

    The house detective comes around. He is is slithering creep of a human being. I remember him very well from before.

    Ladd’s wife Helen is having a party with about 15 people including the man who is obviously her lover (Eddie). Alan Ladd slugs him, as we would expect a WW2 hero to do!

    Something I did NOT remember was that she had told Ladd that their young child that died of diphtheria.
    We find that the child actually died in a car crash because she was drunk and drove off the road.

    [In my own life, I’ve been researching my real-life older brother that died in the late 40’s, so this resonated with me more profoundly than before maybe…]

    Things in the movie get complicated quickly:

    • Johnny hasn’t unpacked his bag yet he picks it up and leaves.
      • The part about killing their son is even worse than the infidelity.
      • He pulls his gun but doesn’t shoot her, but for some reason throws it on the chair before leaving. 21:30
      • He also for some reason leaves the notepad with George and Buzz’s # in plain view.
    • She calls their number, and bad luck for us all, gets Buzz without George around.
      • We can tell Buzz is stressed because the jungle music sounds start up in his head.
    • Buzz goes to her hotel and ends up at the hotel bar with her.
    • It’s pouring down rain in LA.
    • Eddie Harwood is a big-time guy!
      • He owns a bar called the Blue Dahlia!
        • Even though he’s the bad guy, he has standards.
          • He does NOT like how Helen is treating her husband, so he tries to break up with her.
            • He thinks Ladd is a nice guy!
              Eddie is kind of likeable for a 2 minute stretch here.
        • Helen has something on him and threatens him with it. We don’t know what it is, but he’s not happy.

    32 minutes in:

    • Veronica Lake is driving (still raining!). Her name in the movie is Joyce. That’s a boring name, so we’re gonna call her VL.
    • She picks up a very wet Johnny (Alan Ladd), which is how they meet.
      • Off they go down the highway having snappy noir dialog.
    • 34:30 Flash back to Eddie, who is letting himself into Helen’s bungalow
      • the creepy house dick is watching from a wet corner
    • Buzz makes it home.
    • Eddie leaves Helen’s place.

    Johnny skips out on Veronica. They have a pretty deep conversation for a couple of folks that just met. 38:30

    How’s this for some dialog:

    AL: Good bye. And it’s tough to say googbye.

    VL: Why is it? You’ve never seen me before.

    AL: Every guy has seen you before, the trick is to find you.

    Finally a body

    Meanwhile back at Helen’s bungalow…

    • The house cleaner in her maid’s uniform gave me flashbacks to my Mom!
    • The look:
      • Forty-something years old,
      • startched uniform,
      • natty little startched hat
      • silvery coiffed hair….

    But I digress…

    The maid discovers Helen is not simply dead-drunk like usual, but is in fact actually dead!

    House dick and manager mess around for a while, finally call the cops.

    Meanwhile, back at the beach outside Malibu was, Johnny has spent the night in a hotel. He’s is having breakfast, and up pop’s Veronica!!

    She at the hotel last night also! (Because of Johnny? Who knows!)

    They have more deep conversation, then decide to take a walk.

    In the lobby, Johnny hears the radio …

    His wife’s murder is there and a detailed description of his suitcase etc.
    The radio is pretty loud, VL can hears it also from the top of the lobby stairs. She sees Johnny take off!

    • George and Buzz go to the station … Buzz is belligerent as always.
    • Eddie shows up. Calls the house dick “dad” (?)
      • I thought we had a plot twist going, but no, it’s NOT actually his dad, merely post-war slang! 🙂
      • Everybody knows everybody in this little corner of LA.
    • Eddie plays cat and mouse with the police detective who seems pretty sharp!
    • Johnny is at the bus station and has the interest of a guy played by Frank Faylen, [who will forever be remembered by me for being Dobie Gillis’s dad!]
      • He helps Johnny get a room, then gets arrested before he can shake down Johnny.
    • Now we’re back at Eddie’s suite 59:00
      • “Dad” (actual name Morelly) tries to blackmail Eddie.
      • Then VL show up they go round and round. I rather like Eddie, big slease though he apparently is.
    • Somehow Johnny is back riding along with Veronica in her sweet little convertible!
    • Morelly visits Buzz and G, and rifles Johnny’s room.
      • He is SUCH a sleazy guy. I want a shower just watching him.
    • Johnny finds out about Eddie.
      • He visits him and we find that VL is his wife!!
      • The one he’s not with anymore. Oops.
    • 1.18 Back with Buzz and George
      • Johnny gets angry at them for hinting that they think he killed Helen.
      • 40’s heroes can overdo the heroic-ness sometimes.
    • Johnny gets “pinched” by fake cops
      (sent by Eddie Harwood, who I guess isn’t really a nice guy 🙂
      • Johnny gives ’em a good fight.
      • They break a lot of cheap furniture, but on the third try, the sap puts him down. 🙁
      • Helen had Johnny given a scrap of paper with Eddie’s dirty secret about a murder he commited in his wasted youth.
        • One thug kills the other over it and keeps it.
      • Harwood shows up.
      • Despite being a street-wise guy, he stands right over two men fighting over a gun, and catches a stray bullet. Cheezy screenwriting, IMO.
        • That’s the end of Eddie Harwood.
    • So everyone’s favorite bad guy is out of the picture.
    • Now we’re back with everybody that’s left.
      • The police, Bud, George and Veronica.
      • The police have Buzz fitted out for Helen’s murder.
      • But Johnny arrives and they figure it all out.

    Eddie Muller Postscript

    The was a great Eddie Muller bit on the True Story of the ending.

    • Raymond Chandler hated the movie.
    • He originally had Buzz be the mordered, but the Navy would not permit it to make a service man the bad guy.
    • Alan Ladd didn’t like VL since she’s taller than him 🙂

  • The Big Combo (1955)

    The Big Combo (1955)

    This a really stylish gangster movie noir!

    Shadowy figures in fedoras and trenchcoats looming out of the fog … because it’s foggy every night in these movies!

    Here is a really interesting backgrounder from TCM.

    The actual movie listing on IDMB:

    In case you’re not ready enough, there’s this:

    There is a sense of fatalism and perverse sexuality found in The Big Combo that exists in few noir films – Carl Macek in Film Noir

    The movie

    • Big time boxing match in the city:
    • Susan tries to run away.
      • Susan is a hot blond.
        • She doesn’t do a lot for me, but you can tell that for the purposes of this movie she is the drop-dead gorgeous woman that drives every man she sees MAD with desire. 🙂
          • (Gotta have one of these in this kind of movie!)
        • [That said, she does look awfully good in the image I just uploaded.]
      • She is stopped from leaving the fight by the bodyguards.
        • Both bodyguards (who apparently work for a Mr Brown) are actors who became pretty famous:
          – Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman
        • When they release her she slugs Earl Holliman, which set a nice tone for the movie!
      • She’s being tailed by someone else.
    • Shift to the police station. We find that Police Lieutenant Diamond has a thing for Susan. Everybody knows it….
    • Shift back to Susan. She makes the bodyguards take her to dinner.
      • She passes out for some reason.
    • Now we meet Mr. Brown in the back room at the boxing match.
      • He turns out to be a titanic asshole. All about hate and domination.
    • Susan’s in the Emergeny Room. She’s tried to kill herself.
      • We find out that the other person tailing her was a cop.
        • He picked up her purse back at the restaurant.
    • So both of the characters we’ve come to are about are obsessed with Susan:
      • Lieutenant Diamond (Cornell Wilde) and
      • Mr Brown (Richard Conte)
    • They face off at the hospital. Not much happens.
    • The Lieutenant sure is intense about this girl.

    Next we meet a funny, charming showgirl named Rita.

    I guess I’m out of touch on 50’s mores, because Lieutenant Diamond, the big hero, treats her like a pile of crap, and I don’t see any reason for it except she’s not white, and I don’t like it!

    He shows up at her stage door. We find that he had a pretty intense thing with her 7 months aqo, and now he shows up out of the blue wanting to be with her just to make himself feel better about Susan.

    50’s men pretty dependably act like jerks and assholes in these movies when it comes to women.

    • The episode turned out kind of sweet!
      • First of all I really like Rita, unlike Susan who seems pretty boring to me.
      • She is actress Helene Stanton. Check her out online … she’s smokin fine!
      • She reads Cornell Wilde like an open book. She is not into his lovesick routine, so she just goes home. Good for her!!
      • Cornell Wilde shoulda totally stuck with Rita.

    Oh bummer! In the last third of the movie Rita gets killed! (in my exegisis, she was TOO GOOD TO LIVE 🙂

    Diamond and Mr Brown are still playing mind games about Susan, and Diamond pisses off Mr Brown enough that he orders him killed.

    But as luck would have it, Rita had gone to Diamond’s to wait, so she got the burst of submachine fine, not him. The only really sympathetic person in the whole movie and she gets killed!

    After that things start going downhill for Mr Brown. There are double crosses on top of double crosses. Finally Brown’s ex-wife (long story) rats him out as to where he plans to catch a plane to blow the country with Susan, and the cops sweep in and actually arrest him after he runs out of bullets.

    Susan and Liertenant Diamond walk off into the fog together.

    • Not holding hands, since they’re not yet a thing, but you can see it coming.
    • I guess this is why Rita had to get killed, so Diamond can lust after Susan with a pure heart … although those 50’s dude’s didn’t seem to worry about that stuff too much.

    That’s the movie!

  • No Name on the Bullet (1959)

    Audie Murphy is the only name that I recognized in this movie, but that’s the fault ONLY my terrible old movie knowledge.

    Many of the actors were instantly recognizable soon as I saw them from countless other movies. I just didn’t know their names.

    • Audie Murphy – John Gant – the main guy and the “anti-hero”, everything revolves around him
    • Charles Drake – the town doctor – the other main guy and the hero by 1950’s movie standards.
    • Joan Evans – Good-looking woman betrothed to the doctor.
      She takes care of her invalid dad, a retired judge.
      I think she is the sexy young woman in a bunch of westerns because she sure looked familiar.
    • R G Armstrong – the doc’s dad and the town blacksmith.
      He is VERY familiar.
      He always plays the big, burly trusty sidekick (except for the times he plays the big, burly bad guy :).
      • The movie signals early that Audie Murphy is actually a good guy being presented in a bad guy role by having this Armstrong fella stare him down suspiciously, then decide to shake his hand.

    This movie came out when I was 12 years old. It would have been a prime candidate for me to watch in the movie theater after school waiting for mom to be done with work. I wish I could say I remembered it.

    The movie has (to me) a strong 50’s vibe to it. The 50’s was all about secrets (Atomic bomb secrets!) and being suspicious of the person next to you (Are you the Russian spy?)

    Audie Murphy rides into town …

    … and takes a room at the hotel. As soon as he says his name “John Gant”, half the town freaks out because “everybody knows” that John Gant only goes comes to a town to kill someone.

    Everybody also knows about the particularly 1950’s psy-ops method of killing which is his trademark, which is:
    to goad his prey into a “fair” fight right in front of the town so the killing is self-defense!

    Again, this is a 50’s movie, so everyone has secrets!
    All the upstanding pillars of the community have a guilty conscience about something, so they are all SURE he’s there to kill them. … Hilarity ensues …. very grim hilarity, some folks jump to conclusions that are fatal to their neighbors..

    One townsperson gets gunned down at work and another kills himself in his office just because Gant is in their town taking a room in the hotel and drinking coffee in the hotel lobby.

    A cycle of guilty action -> guilty re-action burbles around the community for most of the middle of the movie, until towards the end we settle on the unlikeliest candidate – the most upright community pillar of them all, the wheelchair-ridden judge whose sexy daughter is to marry the spotlessly perfect doctor. Here’s how it unfolds:

    • The judge reads a letter. He shows visible distress then locks it way in a box.
    • His daughter notices and wonders what THAT was about??
      • So when the judge goes to town, she sneaks in, unlocks the box and reads the letter.
    • She has strong emotions.
    • Turns out her dad, the Judge did something shady many years ago.
      • He pissed off powerful people back east, and they have finally caught up to him.
        • She is sure he’s Gant’s target.
          • Unlike everyone else who has thought that, she turns out to be correct!
    • She rides into town, and goes to Gant’s room with a gun to try to dissuade him …
      • … and if that fails, to shoot him!
    • She fails to either, because Gant easily disarms her.
    • They dialog about it for a while.
      • Gant ends the conversation by guaranteeing the judge will be pissed off enough to fight him by ripping half of her blouse off!
    • We get to see she’s wearing sexy black bra that she presumably has been hiding under those pure white blouses all this time!
      • Hot stuff in the 50’s!
    • Things are happening quickly now.
    • Gant meets the judge outside his house.
    • The Judge is indeed pissed off enough to try to kill him but he as he takes a shot at Gant, the shot goes skyward because he is collapsing of heart failure from all the excitement.
    • The Doc and his dad the blacksmith arrive.
      • Doc heard a shot, and sees the body, so he naturally thinks Gant shot the judge.
      • He starts to throw the blacksmith’s hammer he happened to be carrying.
      • But Gant shoots him in his throwing arm before he can throw.
    • Doc still has the hammer, and is such a manly man that he scores a perfect strike throwing it with his off arm, and shatters (it’s implied) Gant’s shootin’ arm.
    • Somewhere in here, Doc’s dad the blacksmith hollers out that Grandpa, the Judge, died of a heart attack NOT a gun shot!
      • A little late to save Gant’s shootin arm, but maybe it’s time for a new career anway!
    • Doc and Gant exchange pithy words of well-earned mutual respect as Gant rides off and the movie ends!

    Pretty good movie.

    When Gant ripped the lady’s shirt off I thought things were going to get tacky, but the movie saved itself.

    It’s implied that Gant’s career is over, that his shoulder is shattered, but really he could just have a broken his arm and be back in business in six weeks.

    I developed quite a liking for Gant over the course of the movie.
    I think he’ll be OK either way.

    Also, a little bit to my surprise I developed quite an attachment to this dumb movie! 🙂