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The Nickel Ride (1974)
Jason Miller Deserved Better
In THE NICKEL RIDE, wherein a convoluted set-up is experienced through random wandering conversations with blue collar workers, building managers, street dwellers, and a boxer asked to take a fall, the main actor, an ever-intense Jason Miller, who played the buried lead in THE EXORCIST, is in some big trouble, and there's a feeling of walking into a movie after missing the first twenty minutes...
Throughout this dialogue-driven Neo Neor with a fantastic title in THE NICKEL RIDE, be careful when reading the plot summary... An intriguing tale about a criminal wearing a skeleton key around his neck, controlling what's called "The Block," a literal boulevard of warehouses where mobsters keep their, you know, goods...
One particular new client is hesitant to join-in and Miller's ultra-serious boss, played by a 70's eclectic character-actor (in CHINATOWN the same year) who would gain fame a decade later as Tom Selleck's uppity caretaker, Higgins, on MAGNUM P. I., John Hillerman has, for mysterious reasons, no logical reason not to trust the likable neighborhood chief, Miller's Cooper...
At least not the person we got to know thus far, showing absolutely no flaws whilst completely beloved by the neighborhood... and that's exactly what we seemed to have missed, including the important aspect of how this man's calculating job works in the first place, taking us through a rushed introduction with a continuing score sounding like surreal nightmare carnival music (composer Dave Grusin fared a lot better with the similar-in-plot neo-noir THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE)...
And with a gorgeous, future ROLLING THUNDER ingenue Linda Haynes as Sarah, stubbornly hanging around to our put-upon hero's chagrin; like Charles Bronson in that same year's more entertaining and action-packed MR. MAJESTYK, the two leads venture to a hidden woodsy cabin (albeit for much different reasons), unsuccessfully hiding away from one of the most intentionally annoying hit-men in cinema history...
That being the otherwise superb Bo Hopkins as a talkative yet subtle hillbilly assassin, a cross between MIDNIGHT COWBOY and COLUMBO, whose best scene occurs during a dream, which really works in how Miller wakes up from it -- eerie and edgy in one of director Robert Mulligan's best shot scenes...
And, after escaping from Hopkins following a semi-suspenseful yet overlong exterior melodrama, Hillerman, in the midst of a noisy big-wig city party crashed by his mellow yet extremely perturbed and vengeful employee, explains the situation (as best he can but not enough to clear up the convoluted plot-line) to Cooper: and of course that snarky albatross, Hopkins, still needs to be taken out, for eternity...
So, overall, with such an incredible cast on board (including a potentially good but ultimately wasted Victor French), THE NICKEL RIDE is a real shame since Jason Miller, a swarthy "student" of the James Dean meets Marlon Brando style of brooding Method Actor spontaneity... and who brought a uniquely urban intensity, reaching beyond the horror genre in William Friedkin's THE EXORCIST... is stuck here without a coherent plot to attempt displaying what he has (or could have had) to offer audiences after his previous years' big demonic break.
13 Rue Madeleine (1947)
The FIRST HALF is the best
James Cagney went to war... not literally, like, say, James Stewart, but at forty-years old and already an iconic movie star, once WW2 began, he put away his gangster garb and did only patriotic features...
And that's unfortunate, because the soldiers overseas would probably rather cheer Cagney on in another ROARING TWENTIES-style vehicle to simply get their minds off the war... but perhaps Cagney making war or patriotic pictures for those like him back home to remember the soldiers, risking their lives overseas...
Which continued even after the war, and in the case of his best wartime movie, 13 RUE MADELEINE, he fared much better in what's more a crime thriller in military garb, starting out a kind of propaganda documentary before the story unfolds...
And contrary to popular opinion, the best moments are actually in the first half, involving Richard Conte as a secret traitor/German spy bunked with good American boy Frank Latimore in an officer training headquarters, which is like a post-graduate boot-camp for O. S. S. Agents...
Conte's always good, whether playing good or bad, or in-between, like here... where the audience is unaware of his nefarious status until about twenty-minutes in when he learn along with Cagney, who basically oversees the young soldiers the way Lloyd Nolan and Robert Armstrong did his training to become one of the G-MEN ten-years prior...
Herein, the best scene is also the deadliest, and involves Conte and Latimore about to parachute out of an airplane into France... what happens will leave a chill down your spine as it's not over-scored or melodramatic... but realistic and bone-chilling...
Afterwards, Cagney becomes the star of the picture, traipsing around France, meeting up with resistance members, or the town's mayor (Sam Jaffe)...
Sadly, this is the point when Conte takes backseat, only appearing sporadically after being built-up as a buried lead while the urgency and suspense is cut in half... because it should have been more his picture all the way through...
He'd have made a great villain against Cagney but they hardly share any more screen-time at all.
R.P.M. (1970)
Gary Lockwood's revenge of computers
A year after Gary Lockwood was slightly too old to play a hapless hippie about to go to Vietnam, cruising around L. A. with nothing to do but get stoned in MODEL SHOP, he played an even younger hippie and is completely miscast... especially since he's also balding... but this rebel at least has a cause...
Leader of a student group taking over a university's computer center, Lockwood... along with another thirty-something student Paul Winfield... have demands they give to a liberal professor they once really liked...
That's where star Anthony Quinn, hired as a kind of emergency dean/president, comes in: spending most of the picture either having long discussions with comparably stuffy and conservative university profs or hanging out with young girlfriend Ann-Margret, who, like Lockwood, has little to do here but spout smug counter-culture platitudes in what feels more like a progressive TV-movie than a watered-down big-screen expose on college revolutionaries, hence the R. P. M. Title standing for Revolutions Per Minute...
But there's only one revolution here, and it drags, despite Lockwood having a few good monologues opening up to Quinn... yet the audience can never fully get into his shared plight/agenda since otherwise sympathetic left-wing director and scriptwriter Stanley Kramer and Erich Segal never properly flesh-out the characters to grow past clichés - on either side of the aisle.
Hawaii Five-O: School for Assassins (1980)
Gary Lockwood on Hawaii 5-0
After playing second-fiddle in Stanley Kubrick's highly-successful (and forever legendary) 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, Gary Lockwood never had much of a followup career on the big screen...
He starred in three b-movies: the Spanish-import heist-noir THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS; the Frenchman-directed French New Wave via Los Angeles counter-culture indie MODEL SHOP; and the more mainstream counter-culture melodrama R. P. M. (REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE)...
But he remained busy the next twenty-years doing almost every television show imaginable, and usually as a villain... like in the HAWAII FIVE-O final season's SCHOOL FOR ASSASSINS where, as the episode begins, Lockwood's character Kelsey makes like a cinematic spy, going through a highly-secured building and then, gun drawn, pounces into Lloyd Bochner's office with gun drawn... but instead of pulling the trigger, he's told that he just passed the test...
Lockwood's mission's to kill a visiting oil sheik connected to affable billionaire Monte Markham... with most of the episode dealing with Markham's would-be romance with Pamela Susan Shoop, who could be setting him up...
Lockwood's character turns up now and again while Jack Lord's new sidekick William Smith does some side investigation along with Moe Keeale's native Hawaiian (and fan-favorite) Truck Kealoha...
And, overall, Gary Lockwood... who looked twenty-years instead of ten-years past his prime at this point... was still able to leap onto a rooftop (his career began with stunt-work): but he should have had a much bigger part in SCHOOL FOR ASSASSINS after initially graduating with top honors... until winding-up serving off-screen detention.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Anatomy of an Epic Masterpiece
The greatest cinema epics (from LAWRENCE OF ARABIA before to GOODFELLAS after) have various sequences that feel like their own separate short films that ultimately connect as a whole...
And in that, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is a perfectly multi-tiered vehicle, showcasing both the advanced pioneering of space exploration through orbital technology with the formidable perils of its mere existence...
By the time William Sylvester's top secret NASA scientist leader Dr. Heywood Floyd is having an initially reluctant, abstruse conversation (as the camera gets strategically closer after each time the dialogue's information/importance heightens) with a group of fellow scientists on a moon shuttle, the DAWN OF MAN intro with evolving apes figuring out survival through weaponry had just ended...
And both Sylvester's Floyd and future BARRY LYNDON actor Rossiter have, coincidentally or otherwise, simian-like features within their otherwise modern and progressed, highly-educated countenance...
It's the final chapter filling the entire last half where the most evolved humans are revealed... in the perfect-looking pair of astronauts, Keir Dullea as Dave Bowman and Gary Lockwood as Gary Poole...
It's almost two-years later, and they're headed beyond the moon to Jupiter, on another secret mission: only known to one of the most creatively sinister antagonists ever filmed -- turning 2001 into a bonafide sci-fi thriller...
The computer, HAL 9000, voiced by stage-actor Douglas Rain, a smooth vocal hybrid of yawning monotone, robotic programming and vulnerable, melancholy reflection, ends up taking over the vessel... before which Gary Lockwood's tightly-muscular Poole is the most grounded and human character yet...
While otherwise reserved, patient and methodical, he's also somewhat glib, aloof, even condescending to HAL unlike Dullea's Bowman... who eventually shifts from a metronomic, concentrating professional into a vengefully-driven, intensely determined hero...
Eventually taking the literal last trip through a colorful "Star Gate" that, in 1968, while the most amazing visually is also perhaps the most dated in its obvious nod to then-current counter-culture psychedelia...
Leading to an epilogue that's confused audiences for decades (and will for decades longer) where Bowman seems to hear... before actually observing... his own self within a Gothic alien enclosure, aging until his fantastical transition into...
Well to attempt explaining the inner-meanings of those enigmatic closing twenty-minutes is futile... while the most intriguing sequences had already occurred during the classical music bridge from prehistoric savagery into outer-space special effects that, while later pepped-up in George Lucas's STAR WARS, still has yet to be equaled...
And is where William Sylvester's cool, surreptitious manner equals the inevitably intense realism of those two astronauts, who ultimately take us home -- after having left it far, far behind.
Las Vegas, 500 millones (1968)
Spanish Spaghetti Heist Homage
Spanish auteur Antonio Isasi was definitely a fan of gangster films since almost every single shot of his heist-caper THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS epitomizes the classic crime genre's style and structure, making this a combination of steely homage and groovy/fast-paced 1960's kitsch, jazzy soundtrack and all...
Starring American import Gary Lockwood the same year he'd soar through Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, the biggest flaw is the budget spent on two other name-actors, Lee J. Cobb as the targeted armored car company owner, and Jack Palance as an insurance investigator with eyes on both Cobb and Lockwood...
Their roles are basically innocuous, especially Palance, over-pronouncing each syllable since, like any Spaghetti production, the dialogue's dubbed, sometimes badly: so any leftover money could've gone to then-budding character-actors (like Robert Duvall or Warren Oates) for Lockwood's edgy, double-crossing gang, providing more anticipated suspense and tension in what's an intriguing yet overlong/overly-complicated heist...
Wherein the first half (following a glorious blood-soaked robbery) fleshes-out the central caper with meticulous editing and creative camera angles, while the second takes place around the armored car that Lockwood first robs then buries in the desert, where, once underground, the claustrophobic screen-time stands still (as lawmen search vainly above)...
On the peripheral is a romance between Lockwood and Elke Sommer, connected to mob-backed Cobb: but her initial expository input eventually means little compared to the inevitable action she'll have practically nothing to do with...
Featuring a terrifically-maneuvered desert terrain helicopter, scorching flame throwers and a barrage of Western-style gunfights -- overall making Isasi's VEGAS a really great presentation harboring a pretty good motion picture.
Model Shop (1969)
Looks Great, But Cast Wrong
Leading up to French New Wave director Jacques Demy's car-cruising hangout ode to 1969 Los Angeles, actor Gary Lockwood had a decade of interesting characters, like an idealistic young lieutenant on Gene Roddenberry's THE LIEUTENANT; Captain Kirk's lethal foil on an episode of Roddenberry's STAR TREK; a crude gunslinger in the Western FIRECREEK; and most famously an astronaut in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY...
And here he's dropped any pretense of his usual intensity in MODEL SHOP where he drives a classic jalopy around town, smitten with French starlet Anouk Aimée, who's only first-billed since she'd worked with the director previously... when she was younger, much prettier... and it's not like she's unattractive...
But as a so-called model working in the titular shop where customers take alluring photographs instead of having sex, and as the targeted lady that Lockwood's proudly-broke George Matthews is not only smitten with, but literally follows/stalks around town, a more instantly-alluring actress should have been cast...
Like perhaps Alexandra Hay, who, despite having a whiny, annoying delivery, surely looks the part of a solid knockout... that Lockwood lives with, despite her having another boyfriend in the wings... or blonde beauty Anne Randall, another model at that bizarre brothel-like (and relatively unimportant) title location...
Anouk Aimée also lacks the chemistry to make Lockwood's obsession seem legitimate, or to base an entire 95-minute movie on, deliberately plot-less or otherwise... He says he loves her within their first conversation, which is as hard to believe as the mature actor about to become another reluctant young soldier in Vietnam...
While looking great, he's simply too old and far too intense an actor for such a laidback role in such a laidback picture: one that's aesthetically pleasing, visually representing the late-60's Los Angeles in all its existential, pot-smoking, anti-war, boulevard-roaming glory... but there needed more of an edge for his otherwise dire situation to really matter.
Messiah of Evil (1974)
Some Of Its Parts
Directing couple Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz's arthouse horror MESSIAH OF EVIL has ingenue Marianna Hill's narrated story-line about the search for her artist father at a beach community pieced together in long sequences of gothic dialogue, neatly combined with three of the most suspenseful, deadly moments in the history of exploitation cinema...
Wherein monotone Michael Greer seems to be the title character, a stranger holed-up at her father's pad with two lovely ladies, Anitra Ford and Joy Bang, each making their own separate horror-trope mistake of leaving an otherwise safe location to venture out alone... in this case into the small beach town, inland from a wave-lapping, moon-lit beach...
After getting a lift from a black albino (his mere casting is exploitation itself), who already turned up in an earlier gas station sequence setting the tense, anything-can-happen tone, Ford goes into a Ralphs supermarket, coming across a group of shoppers... until it's revealed they're ghouls eating body parts... turning their tastes onto the doomed beauty, foreshadowing an upcoming sequence involving Joy Bang in an initially vacant movie theater that fills up slowly, methodically... until she's surrounded by the same eye-bleeding antagonists that'd already devoured her shopping friend: only far more subtle and methodically nightmarish...
And while the rest of MESSIAH OF EVIL (mostly involving a foreboding Michael Greer and final girl Hill in the primary location surrounded by spooky artwork) exudes the right amount atmospheric tension, it's regrettable there weren't more pretty young side-starlets to lead the viewer into more creatively-shot living-dead death sequences -- so we wouldn't have to wait so long in-between the great parts.
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967)
Needs To Try Harder
In HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING, Robert Morse as J. Pierpont Finch plays a skyscraper's window washer so quickly that by the time he's climbing the corporate rungs... while reading the titular book that doubles as narration... the NOT REALLY TRYING aspect fails to make the character's plight very interesting...
And after a few semi-memorable songs, one might feel more sympathy for the main boss's whiny nephew, who Finch much too quickly leaves in the dust and, instantly beloved by gorgeous secretary Michele Lee while seduced by overall distracting bombshell Maureen Arthur, our squeaky hero only looks the underdog in a musical that needed more time struggling from the outside to really click within the vibrantly colorful 1960's singing/dancing interior.
The Loved One (1965)
Nurse Strangelike
After American director Stanley Kubrick made DR. STRANGELOVE in England, British director Tony Richardson attempted his own offbeat dark comedy, in Los Angeles, with Jonathan Winters replacing Peter Sellers' multi-tier role as the owner of a plush cemetery catered to the rich, and a pet cemetery for just about anyone...
Where offbeat Robert Morse ends up working after his Hollywood producer uncle (John Geilgud) hangs himself, bringing the audience into Whispering Glades Funeral Parlor that (with Haskell Wexler cinematography) grounds the most intriguing and creatively shot B&W sequences...
But whenever the story ambles outside the box, the overly bizarre, uneven script gets out of hand, featuring Rod Steiger as a flamboyant mother's boy embalmer, vainly attempting a romance with Gothic, death-obsessed yet beautifully simplistic, airhead-ingenue Anjanette Comer...
Who's also pursued by wannabe poet Morse, faking a British accent with his dialogue added post-production, making it literally sound like he's phoning in an already lackluster, lazy performance...
But THE LOVED ONE succeeds in random triumphs from side-characters who come and go: including Liberace, surprisingly effective as Whispering Glades coffin salesman or the team of (both) Winters alongside child prodigy Paul Williams, attempting (with military chief Dana Andrews) to rocket bodies from the ground into space...
An important last-minute plot that should have happened sooner... without so many eclectic distractions in a movie made when avant-garde simply meant anything goes... overall more a parked MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD than the attempted STRANGELOVE-inspired social commentary ensemble.
Mad Men: The Milk and Honey Route (2015)
Penultimate Potboiler
Very strange, as just last night was watching a TV-movie featuring Meagen Fay... looked her up and saw she was in a Coen Brothers movie and is a versatile actress: and then she turns up here as the small town's motel owner... anyhow...
This is a good episode, edgy and strange... The war vets that Don hangs out with all seem like they can do something violent at any moment, which is par for this show's course... Max Gail from Barney Miller is one of them... more fitting, he was a Vietnam vet in DC Cab and here a WW2 vet (both war's were twenty years previously)...
Not only is this a worthy penultimate episode but it's better than the finale: herein mostly involving Don and also Pete on the sidelines, bordering on staying or going with Duck on the sidelines, as usual...
Anyhow, MAD MEN is a great series with a pretty good final season... although the season's first half is better than these Nomad Don episodes, for which this is the weirdest outing but, at this point, like the series itself, I'm repeating myself.
Mad Men: Time & Life (2015)
And, Finally...
A dead man directs this episode, as in Pryce, that is, Jared Harris, a character that, like many on this show, was dropped for no apparent reason while idiots like Glen remains, and never goes away...
Although thankfully he's not in this episode like he haunted the previous one... this one's the best of the winding-down episodes from a show about to end...
Providing the viewer and characters the same kind of hope that's been underlining this series from the get-go: that maybe, just maybe, they can move on as a smaller underdog company instead of being gobbled up by a gigantic one...
Resulting in a nice twist and basically, there's a beginning, middle and end here instead of just a prolonged middle, like we've been used to this (second part of the final) season.
Black Sunday (1977)
Action & Suspense
At the peak of Bruce Dern's 1970's career playing insane, frantic characters, Palestinian terrorist Marthe Keller cautiously asks if he has the deadly contraption, that shoots tiny arrows upon explosion, ready as Dern quickly answers, finishing what he thinks she was really getting to, "Do I feel CRAZY today?"
She's the perfectly patient black widow moll to Dern's off-kilter Vietnam vet, who flies the Goodyear blimp over football games and will soon work the targeted super bowl... while on the heroic side is another contrary team-up in Robert Shaw's brooding yet effectively lethal Israeli commando with edgy, bickering sidekick Steven Keats...
Basically, John Frankenheimer's BLACK SUNDAY cuts back and forth to the terrorist and anti-terrorist duos with an eclectic hybrid of burgeoning suspense equaled with brisk modern day action...
And while about twenty-minutes too long, that time's never wasted, ultimately occurring above, then within and eventually beyond that super bowl while the best sequences had already occurred in more effectively subtle pockets leading up... and without seeming like one of those mainstream movies that builds to a predictable crescendo since are several peaks throughout: for both the characters and the audience.
Mad Men: The Forecast (2015)
The Day The Glen Stood Still
Matthew Weiner gave us so much with MAD MEN... but he had to take some of it away bY forcing his son upon a show that's almost perfect otherwise...
When Glen's on screen, the time just freezes... And acting is more than just speaking words... It's movement on the screen even when it seems like they're not moving... But you can tell a bad actor because they simply do NOT move, and that's Glen... He's a frozen dullard...
Now Glen is supposed to be handsome... I mean, he's better looking than when he was a big goopy glob who was way too old (and large) for lithe little Sally... but now, thinned down and for some reason, pro-Vietnam, he's still a downright bore in two overlong scenes with Betty...
Betty who ultimately gets the shaft on this series: her eventual turnout is pathetic, and what happens to her should have happened to Don... instead of becoming a burgeoning Buddhist, he's the one who should have...
But that's skipping ahead... Here's another filler episode, which is strange since the show's about to end... It all kind of drags along here... and at this point, there should be no more padding...
And Joan's too-perfect she-finally-deserves-this-romance romance with Bruce Greenwood is boring. She's better dealing with creeps strongly than a perfect guy passively. It's in her character, and she's out of character here. Greenwood, an otherwise good actor, is simply an into-the-sunset scenario in human form.
Mad Men: New Business (2015)
No Business
Heading towards the end of the series, the entire thing has pretty much run out of gas. All the stories here seem like part of a failed spinoff, or rather, spinoffs, plural... Don and Megan had ended a long time ago, and as they continue to argue, at least Megan arguing with Don, it seems like overkill of an aftermath, or something...
Meanwhile, the whole story about the commercial director played my Mimi Rogers doesn't even seem like the same show. She's pointless. They wanted Stan to get his own story, but this one's not worthy of him...
And the worst yet it the continuation of Don and Diane, the most bizarre of Don's affairs... she too, seems like something from a different show, like everything else here...
When the only interesting scene has creepy Harry trying to seduce Megan, you know there's a problem.
Silent Running (1972)
Nothing But Trumbell
Science-Fiction Special Effects wizard Douglas Trumbull went from making Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY look both futuristic and prehistoric while his own directorial SILENT RUNNING starts at the same planet the first winds up, Jupiter... while back on Earth, it's learned that life sustains not only without forests, but doesn't seem to need any...
Which goes against Bruce Dern's sole mission, despite literally sharing space with three other astronauts... who eventually get orders to send vessel-carrying forest domes into nuclear annihilation so they can finally return home: until Dern's Freeman Lowell decides to kill off his human cohorts to save one last portion of tangible nature...
Replete with fantastic-looking interior/exterior space-age aesthetic and a big environmental message (including horribly dated Joan Baez songs), the American spacemen aren't professionally collected like 2001 as they engage in spontaneous and playful dark humor between claustrophobic-battling dune buggy rides... yet for Dern, his only real comrades are cute drone robots that'd soon influence George Lucas's STAR WARS...
Splitting SILENT RUNNING into a double-edged sci-fi thriller: the first with Dern physically combating a glib Ron Rifkin, an aloof Jesse Vint and the charming yet disingenuous Cliff Potts... into a race-against-time for an ambiguous anti-hero, split between Bruce Dern's signature frenzied style until calmly dealing with loneliness and solitude -- that engages and haunts both his character, and agenda.
Mad Men: The Phantom (2012)
Seeing Things
The last season 5 episode leading to the worst season of the show, where Don winds up in his most boring affair... and speaking of boring affairs, it's insane that Pete (the wannabe Don) is still in the affair with the woman who made the actor a temporary wife... the wife of his train-riding friend...
It's been an affair that feels part of a soap opera, but not the kind of soap opera that this show can turn into, which is a good not boring one...
Meanwhile the story with Megan also seems part of another show... like, a Megan-acting-in-Manhattan spinoff or something; the entire episode actually feels like if Mad Men went the Walking Dead route and turned into a series of would-be spinoff pilots...
Meanwhile Don is seeing ghosts... It's bad enough we had to finish the last episode with too much Glen, ending with Don and Glen in a Jaguar, but now Don's back to looking back, basically, this time being haunted, and Draper's always best briskly looking foward.
Mad Men: Signal 30 (2012)
Pete's A Real Drip
The greatest aspect of MAD MEN (and there are very many great aspects) are the very, very, very end (yes, there is a character-count)...
This episode has the greatest very, very, very ending of all the episodes, and it won't be spoiled, but it has to do with a certain rhythmic thing that occurs throughout the episode...
A strange one here, having to do with Pete and his too-perfect suburban home, and wife, and then a flirtation with a sexy high school girl at driving school...
Pete has always been a wannabe-Don, on the show, on purpose, but the writers also make him one by putting him into affairs that, frankly, are pretty contrived, like the one he'd get into very soon from this point with a lonely housewife of a guy he talks to on the train...
This, however, was a great near-romance flirtation that really sums up the depth of Pete's endearing shallowness... and, again, what an ending!
Mad Men: The Suitcase (2010)
The Big One
While this is known to be the shining achievement of the series, the previous episode, Waldolf Stories, was also quite great, packing in so many things into a single episode while The Suitcase is very narrowed and basic, bringing the two primary characters together that don't get a whole lotta time with each other without distractions...
That being Don and Peggy... the latter who was our white rabbit taking us into wonderland in the first place... and frankly, after she went from secretary to copywriter, she became pretentious and conceited... as part of the character, but it was often too much...
So this is a great opportunity for Peggy to be brought back to earth, and for Elizabeth Moss to exercise those layers, right back down to size by none other than Don where Jon Hamm really seems more real than ever...
Their alone-time together feels natural and flows amazingly... plus there's great humor involving Duck, that shouldn't be spoiled but... he's a BLAST in this episode...
Overall, a slam-dunk: a kind of contained stage play feel that's still immense and cinematic.
The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)
Class & Exploitation
For American International Pictures, THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES was a hit, and for star Vincent Price, a comeback... despite the fact he never followed it up with anything quite as good and, for a comparably modern body count horror still holding onto the antique Victorian style within then present-day England, the titular Phibes gets severe revenge by killing off an assortment of who we later learn are fellow doctors that had...
Well that's something that shouldn't be spoiled despite every summary doing so, particularly since the movie deliberately plays out with that very twist concealed... while each and every Biblical Plague death carried-out, from a man in a suffocating frog mask to killer bats to bloodletting and being frozen alive in an automobile, is unique and spellbinding... and a lot of bloody fun with the kind of class that Price, only able to speak through a contraption that makes the audience basically adhere to an expository narration, pulls off with ease...
There are three other important central characters in token investigator Peter Jeffrey, shown at Scotland Yard trying to figure out each murder right after each murder, making PHIBES both Gothic horror and police procedural... each sharing a fair amount of British dark humor, so even the extremely serious crimes don't feel extremely serious...
Then there's second-billed American-import Joseph Cotten, the "final girl" of sophisticated males... his only shortcoming being a cheesy effeminate son while Phibes, vainly dreaming of his own dead-preserved wife living once again, has a mute moll in the gorgeous Virginia North as Vulvania, ghostly present at every crime scene and the keeper of Phibes CLOCKWORK ORANGE-style interior manner with a mechanical band (not so ironically deemed CLOCKWORK WIZARDS), injecting science-fiction into the classy classic horror.
Mad Men: The Arrangements (2009)
Ryan Cutrona (Gene Hofstadt) is BRILLIANT
Just have to take a minute to say that, Ryan Cutrona as Gene Hofstadt is a brilliant actor and a brilliant character... he's not only realistic and scary but he's... realistic and scary... he towers over even Don, who never gets towered-over by anyone...
I watch his acting and think, he must have done some great things going back to the 1950's, but, instead he's one of those kind of old actors that started out old... there are a lot of them, and a few are on this show...
The scenes with Gene and Sally are brilliant... She has great chemistry with the old man (it kind of reminds me of Breaking Bad when Skylar has scenes with Saul Goodman... polar opposites clicking in the strangest but most natural of ways)...
On the b-story (well, Gene is also a b-story), the whole rich kid trying to make his weird sport famous is kind of silly, and seems here for comic relief... His father, however, played by iconic actor David Selby, has a good scene though...
However the greatest scene is when Sal breaks out with his true colors in front of his poor innocent (and extremely naive) wife, who needs tending, and winds up like a deer in headlights after his commercial reading... which eventually leads to Sal's... well...
Let's just say that Season 3 is the final season where we get the original characters all together: it's still great but never quite the same after that.
Rich Man, Poor Man - Book II: Chapter IX (1976)
Old Muddy, Professor & Falconetti
The scenes taking place in New Orleans is rather dull, with Rudy seeking out Charles Estep's former secretary who has all the information to drop him... her turnout was too predictable...
Meanwhile Billy's rise to record company owner isn't all it's cracked up to be... But he gets to take Ramona on a date and they go all the way... She keeps cheating on Wesley and it was a more intriguing love triangle as it was setting up... at this point it's a bit redundant...
The best moments take place where Russell Johnson arrests Falconetti... he's locked up and William Smith displays the vulnerable side to the psychotic character, one of the craziest in the history of television... Wish more of the episode centered on this without all the melodrama... William Smith is by far the best thing in Book Two...
Rich Man, Poor Man - Book II: Chapter VIII (1976)
Nighttime Soap... But Still Okay
The last episode introduced a beautiful actress, Laraine Stephens, who plays technically the most important character, the wife of the main villain, the corporate tycoon that Rudy's trying to bust...
And this episode he goes after the "Deep Throat" character who has the information that could bring him down, which is predictable that the woman, once his lover, won't live for very long...
Most of the story is the relationship between Wesley and Ramona going well before... it doesn't go well (which ends this episode with a "bang")...
Meanwhile Billy's being slowly scammed into putting up money for Cassie Yates's singing career, and he asks his step-uncle for help...
Basically it's a building episode since none are filler, but not one of the best as far as building episodes go...
Especially since Falconetti, after having shot at Rudy and Wes from afar in the beginning, lies in wait... till he becomes important again, very soon.
Rich Man, Poor Man - Book II: Chapter VII (1976)
Falconetti Emerges
The good thing about this episode, after Wesley's injured by union goons and the stubborn union man has to admit to the mobsters under his nose at the factory, well...
It's William Smith as Falconetti, finally given a real destination instead of just kind of haunting each episode like a caged tiger... he's lose now, and in the same town where Rudy works and lives and has his target set, great stuff... Falconetti will only become better and better (as in, worse and worse) on this show where he's one of the greatest thugs in the history of TV-movies, or anything ever filmed...
Also showing up is Herbert Jefferson Jr., warning Wesley of Falconetti and, well... what can be said but... Falconetti!!!!
Rich Man, Poor Man - Book II: Chapter VI (1976)
Kimberly Beck, and Nixon
The point of RICH MAN POOR MAN book 2 is that the original rich man is now very rich, and yet he's also poor in that he's an underdog dealing with a corporate antagonist who is truly filthy rich, making him relatable again like when the original was building, and he was climbing...
That's the idea, anyway, and mostly he's romancing his pretty lawyer while we are now introduced to another good female character (after Cassie Yates from the last episode) in Kimberly Beck, his lawyer's wayward daughter who's as loose and carefree as Susan Blakely was, but without a destination or any talent, really, except for getting in trouble...
Meanwhile Falconetti is poised to attack while the Billy, Wesley and Ramona triangle's on pause as the company's strike continues.... Rudy dealing with stubborn working-class union-loving John Anderson...
And what's kind of funny is the talk about Nixon... describing him and his cabinet as if the characters already knew, in 1968, about Watergate... meanwhile he hadn't even become president. But it would be way more bias nowadays... The 1970's were liberal, but were also for everyone.