RAW WIND IN EDEN

RAW WIND IN EDEN (1958). Director: Richard Wilson.

"This is just a question -- not the bell for the next round." -- Laura

"What are you doing here? You belong on an island with nobody on it." -- ditto

Laura with no last name, the oldest fashion model in the world (Esther Williams was nearing forty when she made this film) is in Rome when she gets a visit from her married lover's lawyer, Wally Drucker (Carlos Thompson). She decides to return home with him in his plane, but they make a crash landing on a small island located near Sardinia. The only inhabitants of the island are Urbano (Eduardo De Filippo) and his daughter, Costanza (Rossana Podesta), who is betrothed to a strange man named Moore (Jeff Chandler), who came to the island seeking peace and isolation and never left. As Laura and Wally try to fix up a yacht to take them off the island, Laura and Moore find themselves attracted, even as strange acts of sabotage occur on the boat, and Costanza's handsome ex-lover, Gavino (Rik Battaglia), shows up now and then in his rowboat gunning for Moore. Laura makes up her mind to find out exactly who "Moore" is and where he comes from. 

Carlos Thompson and Esther Williams

If you think this movie might be interesting, be forewarned that it's not a fraction as entertaining as it sounds. There's a lot of empty posturing with no substance underneath, hollow, under-written characters, and lead actors who are competent but completely miscast. While there's what passes for smoldering passion between Laura and Moore, and Wally seems hot for everyone, the movie has an erotic charge that registers zero. With more than one climax, it seems to take forever to finally end. Thompson seems to have been dubbed by Paul Frees, and the pseudo-romantic music, some of which is nice, is by Hans Salter. Wilson also directed The Big Boodle with Errol Flynn.

Verdict: The only memorable thing about this tedious mess is the title. *1/2.

MAKE HASTE TO LIVE

Stephen McNally and Dorothy Maguire

MAKE HASTE TO LIVE (1954). Director: William A. Seiter. 

At the very beginning of Make Haste to Live, a shadowy stranger arrives at the home of Crys Benson (Dorothy Maguire) -- who has learned that her dangerous husband Steve (Stephen McNally of The Black Castle) has just been released from prison and may be coming to kill her -- and is able to easily open the front door which is not even locked and get inside. This is just one of many problems with the script for Make Haste, but the movie has other issues as well. 

John Howard with a distraught Maguire

Crys (originally named Zena) got away from her husband after she discovered he had shot and killed a cop. He gets away with that murder but winds up going to jail for the murder of Zena in an explosion (it was actually another unknown woman and it may have been an accidental death). Zena has reinvented herself and lives far away from Chicago in New Mexico with her teenage daughter, Randy (Mary Murphy of The Mad Magician). She has a boyfriend named Josh (John Howard of The Mad Doctor) whose proposals she keeps rejecting. The scene when Steve shows up -- something "Crys" has clearly been dreading and is terrified of -- completely lacks tension and impact and is badly muffed. Maguire was certainly a talented actress but in this sequence she acts as if it was only her brother -- whom Steve pretends to be -- showing up instead of the man who spent twenty years in prison for her alleged murder! McNally could also give decent performances but there are a dozen actors who could have made much, much more of this interesting role. For that matter Barbara Stanwyck could also have made a lot more of Crys and her situation. 

Ron Hagerthy and Mary Murphy

The supporting cast, including Howard, Murphy, Ron Hagerthy as her boyfriend, Edgar Buchanan as the sheriff, and Carolyn Jones as Crys' old friend, Mary -- who at Zena's direction tells the authorities she is alive but who is not believed -- are all good, and there is an effective score by Elmer Bernstein [Far From Heaven]. But there are a few too many holes in the plot, and Crys' actions are often senseless. The reactions and attitudes of the two lead characters in an incredibly difficult situation simply do not ring true. There are interesting elements to this that never jell. A bit with a bottomless pit in some Indian diggings being worked by Josh leads to a moderately exciting climax. From Republic studios. 

Verdict: An intriguing situation but you can see why this flick is completely forgotten today. **1/4. 

THE GIRL IN THE RED VELVET SWING

Joan Collins as Evelyn Nesbit

THE GIRL IN THE RED VELVET SWING (1955). Director: Richard Fleischer. 

Young model Evelyn Nesbit (Joan Collins) is so attractive that she comes to the attention of many men, including famous New York architect Stanford White (Ray Milland), who is married, and Pittsburgh millionaire Harry Thaw (Farley Granger), who is not. Evelyn and Stanford fall in love but he refuses to leave his wife, and she has little interest in being a kept woman on the side. Stanford's attempts to turn her into a kind of daughter, sending her to finishing school, don't work out, but Evelyn finally marries the abusive and rather obnoxious Harry. Harry is still obsessed with her past relationship with Stanford, and his murderous actions will lead into the real-life "trial of the century."

Collins with Ray Milland

The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, for which Nesbit herself served as consultant, is a highly entertaining mix of truth, half-truths, fabrications and dramatic license. Although she claimed on the witness stand that she was drugged and raped by Stanford, this film suggests that she was perjuring herself upon the insistence of her mother-in-law. (How old she actually was when she and White had sex is debatable.) Despite situations that would blacken her character back in the day, the film generally treats her in a sympathetic manner; White as well. Collins and Granger give good if imperfect performances, but Milland comes off best. 

Farley Granger with Collins

There are some fine supporting performances in the film. Glenda Farrell, whom I didn't even recognize, as Mrs. Nesbit; Luthor Adler [House of Strangers] as Shaw's lawyer; Gale Robbins [Double Jeopardy] as Gwen Arden, Evelyn's friend and fellow entertainer; Frances Fuller as White's wife, Bessie; Cornelia Otis Skinner as Harry's mother; Richard Travis as Charles Dana Gibson; and others. The film is handsomely produced with a score by Leigh Harline and cinematography by Milton R. Krasner. The movie Ragtime also looks at the Stanford White murder, although in that movie Evelyn Nesbit is not only presented basically as a greedy dingbat but is almost a comic figure. Marilyn Monroe refused to do the film and it would have been interesting to see her take on Evelyn. Richard Fleischer also directed Fantastic Voyage and many others. 

Verdict: If taken with a grain of salt this is a slick, well-acted drama. ***1/4. 

RAGTIME

Howard E. Rollins Jr. as Coalhouse Walker

RAGTIME (1981). Director: Milos Forman. 

A well-to-do couple (James Olson and Mary Steenburgen) live with their young son and her brother (Brad Dourif) after the turn of the century. They take in a homeless black woman, Sarah (Debbie Allen), and her baby, and become friendly with the child's father, Coalhouse Walker (Howard E. Rollins Jr.). Dourif pursues a relationship with Evelyn Nesbit (Elizabeth McGovern), whose husband Henry Thaw (Robert Joy) shoots and kills her former lover, the architect Stanford White (Norman Mailer). Evelyn also encounters Tateh (Mandy Patinkin) and his little daughter, and winds up starring in the silent films he makes when he goes to Hollywood. When Coalhouse is humiliated by a bunch of Irish firefighters, feces dumped in his model T, he tries to get justice. Failing that, he somehow puts together a virtual militia with many weapons and begins bombing firehouses and shooting firemen. Dourif agrees to supply them with explosives. Nothing good will come of this ...  

Elizabeth McGovern as Evelyn Nesbit

For me Ragtime pretty much falls apart about this time as despite Coalhouse's understandable anger at his treatment, his murderous overreaction seems wildly contrived -- it's not as if these firemen killed anyone after all. (Besides, I have never found any kind of terrorism to be justifiable no matter how legitimate the grievances.) Dourif's character and his actions go undeveloped and unexplored, and the whole notion of mingling the Stanford White/Evelyn Nesbit story and its "trial of the century" with the Coalhouse Walker story (novelist E. L. Doctorow based all this on a German novella entitled Michael Kohlhaas, and claimed Ragtime is a homage to it) is perhaps ill-advised to begin with. What might have worked on the printed page doesn't always work in the cinema. 

Mandy Patinkin, Mary Steenburgen, James Olson

There are good performances in the film -- Rollins (who was Oscar-nominated and died of AIDS-related complications at only 46); an excellent Olson; James Cagney (at 81 playing a real-life police commissioner who was actually in his thirties at the time); Moses Gunn as Booker T. Washington trying to convince Coalhouse of the error of his ways --  and a notable score by Randy Newman. But as a whole I found the movie unconvincing and occasionally ridiculous. Other old-time stars in the film are Pat O'Brien and Donald O'Connor. Later this was turned into a Broadway musical. 

Verdict: Has its pleasures, but overall a misfire. **1/4. 

ONCE UPON A MATTRESS (2005)

ONCE UPON A MATTRESS. Wonderful World of Disney. (2005 ABC telefilm.) Director: Kathleen Marshall. Teleplay: Janet Brownell; based on the Broadway musical. 

This is a delightful version of the Broadway musical starring Carol Burnett, who this time relinquishes the role of the princess to an excellent Tracy Ullman and essays the role of Queen Aggravain. Burnett falls back on some of her typical shtick at times, but otherwise is magnificent. The story, of course, is based on The Princess and the Pea. Aggravain is pathologically determined to prevent her son from marrying (it would undermine her power, for one thing) so she dreams up impossible tests for the female candidates to pass – or rather, fail. The latest hopeful is Princess Winnifred the Woebegone (Ullman) who eventually discovers that she is to prove her “sensitivity” as she sleeps by feeling a pea that has been placed beneath twenty mattresses. Complaints that the leads are too old miss the point that this situation has been going on for years and years and the prince is approaching middle-age, which makes the song during which his father the King explains the facts of life to him even funnier! (Besides, the prince is called Dauntless the Drab, not Harry the Hunk! In any case, it's the secondary love story of Lady Larkin and Harry that features a young, more traditionally attractive couple.) 

The cast of Once Upon a Mattress

Ullman may lack that certain endearing “homeliness” of Burnett and Sarah Jessica Parker, but she manages to make a very effective and amusing Winnifred. Denis O'Hare is splendid as the dorky but appealing prince, and Edward Hibbert as funny as ever as the Wizard. Zooey Deschanel and Matthew Morrison make a convincing Larkin and Harry. As the mostly mute King Tommy Smothers has little to say but he gets his character across admirably nevertheless. The songs – lyrics by Marshall Louis Barer and music by Mary Rodgers – are tuneful and pleasant and occasionally memorable. Rodgers' melodies are easy on the ears, and sometimes better, although none have that magical specialness of her famous father, Richard Rodgers', work. That said, "Happily Ever After" is a swell, jazzy number; "Shy" is a lot of fun; "In a Little While" is sweet; and "Sensitivity" is a riot. On the other hand, I could do without "I'm in Love with a Girl Named Fred." All of the songs are well-sung and well-orchestrated, with no attempt to turn them into generic pop tunes as often occurs. TV versions of Gypsy and South Pacific may not have been very good, but Once Upon a Mattress is a very happy surprise. Oddly, the DVD for this program was released only two days after it premiered on television. 

NOTE: Burnett played Winifred in two earlier versions of Mattress in 1964 and 1972. Once Upon a Mattress is now on Broadway (direct from a production at City Center's "Encores") with Sutton Foster in the lead role. I had completely forgotten about this version until I came across my review -- reposted here -- on an old website!

Verdict: If you can't get to Broadway ... ***1/2.