Fitzwilly (1967)

Director: Delbert Mann
Writer: Isobel Lennart, based on the novel A Garden of Cucumbers by Poyntz Tyler
Stars: Dick Van Dyke, Barbara Feldon, John McGiver, Harry Townes, John Fiedler, Norman Fell and Edith Evans

Index: 2025 Centennials.

While I review a lot of movies on hundredth birthdays, it’s rare that I get to do it while the centenarian is alive and celebrating, but today actually is Dick Van Dyke’s centenary and he’s still going strong. Why not tackle a film that I haven’t seen before that he made when he was forty-two, the ultimate answer?

I enjoyed this immensely but I left it with a string of questions, starting with, “Why wasn’t this British and black and white?” It feels like a classic Ealing comedy remade in Hollywood, keeping Dame Edith Evans because who could replace her, but recasting most other roles.

She’s Miss Victoria Woodworth, delightfully haughty as an old and rich force of nature who requires a vast staff to run her huge New York mansion and signs endless cheques to endless charities. The only catch is that she hasn’t any money and hasn’t had since her father left her a measly hundred and eighty bucks.

A Man Called Adam (1966)

Director: Leo Penn
Writers: Les Pine and Tina Rome
Stars: Sammy Davis Jr., Louis Armstrong, Ossie Davis, Cicely Tyson, Frank Sinatra Jr., Mel Tormé and Peter Lawford

Index: 2025 Centennials.

The poster appropriately points out that “in Adam’s world... the music never stops!” That’s pretty true because music is everywhere here. Even when Adam Johnson isn’t performing on stage, there’s music in the background: on the radio, on the jukebox, even on his reel-to-reel tape deck. Manny, his powerful agent, points out his problem: “Take that horn away, buddy, and what have you got? Nothing.”

It’s also our problem, because, while Sammy Davis Jr. is blisteringly good as Adam, he’s the sort of disaster of a human being that we can’t find much sympathy for, even if he truly went off the rails a decade ago in the aftermath of a tragic accident that took his wife and baby.

Instead, we’re asked to sympathise with the people who are closest to him. Nelson, his best friend from childhood, played by Ossie Davis, cites “that excitement, that quality of personal danger” as why Adam’s a genius and also why he can’t stop being there for him, regardless of what he’s done in the past.

The Plastic Age (1925)

Director: Wesley Ruggles
Writers: Eve Unsell and Frederica Sagor, based on the novel by Percy Marks
Stars: Donald Keith and Clara Bow

Index: That's a Wrap!

As I write, Paramount are involved in a new merger, trying to buy Warner Brothers against opposition from Netflix. This film was made by Preferred Pictures, who had been founded by a former Paramount publicist in 1918, who then merged his company with Paramount because they wanted its leading lady, Clara Bow.

I’m watching with her in mind, even though the film is far more about the character played by Donald Keith. There are reasons why Clara Bow’s name is still remembered while Keith’s is not and they’re obvious after she’s been on screen for about ten seconds.

I did have other names in mind too, because I know that Clark Gable and Carole Lombard are both in here somewhere, as they would be again later in the month in Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, but I couldn’t find either of them. It was early for both of them, as neither made a major name for themselves until the thirties. They were both huge stars when Donald Keith was retiring, in 1936, though not yet married to each other. That happened in 1939.

In 1925, twenty-two year old Keith is the all-American boy ready to go to Prescott College, with the fastest 440 yard dash ever made by a prep student. We’re also told that the thrill of going to college is the thrill for the plastic age of youth, which is the only mention of the title anywhere in the film.

Lights of Old Broadway (1925)

Director: Monta Bell
Writer: Carey Wilson, from the play Merry Wives of Gotham by Laurence Eyre, with titles by Joseph W. Farnham
Stars: Marion Davies and Conrad Nagel

Index: That's a Wrap!

“Some of us are born to be lucky...”, says the opening intertitle, “and others are lucky to be born.” That’s Joseph Farnham earning his pay for titles already. Marion Davies plays both, as a pair of sisters orphaned on board a ship on its way to New York and fostered by different parents at opposite ends of the social scale.

We quickly leap past childhood so Anne De Rhonde can be “petite and perfectly bred” at a choice address in Washington Square but Fely O’Tandy, the sister she doesn’t know she has, only “rough, roguish and Irish” down in the ethnic slums.

There’s more opportunity for Davies in Fely so naturally we concentrate on her, beginning with her climbing to the top of a ridiculously large stack of tables in the street, then tipping them over, miraculously sustaining only a few bruises in the process.

Go West (1925)

Director: Buster Keaton
Writers: Buster Keaton and Lex Neal, from a scenario by Raymond Cannon
Star: Buster Keaton

Index: That's a Wrap!

The second of Buster Keaton’s two features for 1925, Go West is a far more subtle film than Seven Chances, or indeed any of his earlier full length films. I’m used to suggesting words like “frantic”, “acrobatic” and “impressive”. None of those spring to mind here. I’d offer “slow”, “calm” and “gentle”, at least until the finalé.

That finalé involves Buster dressed in red as a devil to lead a herd of cows through the city of Los Angeles to the stockyards. It reminds a great deal of the finalé to Seven Chances, where his pursuers were would-be brides—a different meat market, I guess—but it’s initially slower, gaining pace only when he finds the costume.

Until then, it’s gentle comedy performed at a gentle pace, the best scene the first one, still in the east. Buster plays Friendless, the credits tell us, and it’s a fair name. The shopkeeper he meets as we start certainly isn’t his friend and neither is anyone else at any point in the film. Well, except Brown Eyes, who plays herself.

The Mafu Cage (1978)

Director: Karen Arthur
Writer: Don Chastain, based on the play Toi et Tes nuages by Éric Wesphal, translated into English by Richard Cottrell
Stars: Lee Grant and Carol Kane

Index: 2025 Centennials.

The Mafu Cage is an American film that was widely seen in Europe but little seen at home. I can see why, because it’s a very European film, indeed one based on a French play. I can also see why Jerry Gross, a distributor who kept on trying the U.S. market under an array of titles, went bankrupt. I’m European. I adored it.

I’m watching a version called Deviation that includes a brief voiceover at the beginning, as my copy of The Mafu Cage is an extremely dark open matte version. However, that omits the voiceover. Hopefully the rest was unchanged.

We’re in Los Angeles but it doesn’t seem like it because we hardly see it. We spend most of the film at the home of Dr. Ellen Carpenter, an astronomer who specialises in solar activity. If we leave the house, it’s to visit her at work so that we can see the life that she tries to have, a life with a purpose and the potential for more, as a co-worker, David Eastman, tells her he’s in love with her. However, she’s unable to fully embrace life so keeps him at arm’s length.

Demons of the Mind (1972)

Director: Peter Sykes
Writer: Christopher Wicking, from a story by Christopher Wicking and Frank Godwin
Stars: Paul Jones, Patrick Magee, Gillian Hills, Robert Hardy, Michael Hordern and Yvonne Mitchell

Index: 2025 Centennials.

I wanted to see 1973’s Yellow Dog for Robert Hardy’s centennial but it’s stubbornly elusive and I couldn’t find a copy. Instead, I went with this kinda sorta Hammer horror from the year before. I hadn’t seen it before and he’s the lead character, however the order of credits reads, so it seemed like a good choice. However, now I understand why it’s not better known.

It worked best for me as a mood piece, a sort of impressionistic painting, because the film is as unhinged as its subject matter. We’re never quite sure of much that happens or why and, if I ever imagined that the ending would clear it all up, then I was horribly wrong. Half of me is eager to watch it again to discover what I had missed that would make sense of it all, but the other half is convinced that it wouldn’t help.

Initially, it’s all about Elizabeth. She’s in the back of a horse drawn carriage heading home to her family’s castle down a woodland path. It could easily be a Disney princess story but she clearly doesn’t want to be there and her older companion drugs her. Then she calms and we drift into either a memory or a dream. I’m not sure which, given that she spends it blissfully with a woodcutter but neither of them speaks.

The Light of Asia (1925)

Directors: Franz Osten and Himanshu Rai
Writer: Niranjan Pal, “with specially selected titles from Sir Edwin Arnold’s masterpiece”
Stars: The Indian Players Company

Index: That's a Wrap!

It’s well known that 80% of American silent films are lost. That’s a painful statistic to think about but, in India, the equivalent percentage is a staggering 98%. Of the 1,338 known silent films made in India, only twenty-nine survive today and not all of them completely.

That makes The Light of Asia or Prem Sanyas a historic film, though it wasn’t entirely Indian. It was shot on location in the British Raj, most of it around Lahore, the city ironically now in Pakistan. Its cast was drawn from the Indian Players Company, so it looks authentic.

Another reason it looks authentic is because the Maharajah of Jaipur lent huge assistance. The story really isn’t deep so it takes time with extras: rituals, costumes and pageantry. That help allowed a vast amount of architecture to be on display and legions of local extras.

Himanshu Rai, the film’s lead actor, is even credited as its co-director. Nine years later, he would create the Bombay Talkies studio, a key element in the rise of Hindi cinema in a nation where each tongue has its own film industry.

Little Annie Rooney (1925)

Director: William Beaudine
Writers: Hope Loring and Louis Lighton, based on a story by Catherine Hennessey
Star: Mary Pickford

Index: That's a Wrap!

Based on my rating alone, I clearly enjoyed Little Annie Rooney back in 2005, but that was a little before I started reviewing movies, so I’m unable to tap into my thoughts at the time. In 2025, I can’t ignore the obvious fact that Mary Pickford was far too old to play this role.

The thing is that she knew it too. She was a big star in the teens, very possibly the biggest, and she built her career on playing children, a natural gravitation for someone four foot ten who looked great in curls. That was believable in 1917 when she played The Poor Little Rich Girl and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm at twenty-five, but she’d become the most powerful woman in Hollywood, a co-founder of United Artists with complete control over her films. So she moved on to adult roles, as you might expect.

Unfortunately, the public didn’t follow her. They still wanted “the girl with the curls” and they told her so after she asked them during an interview for Photoplay. So she made this, a feature that opens with a protracted battle in the back streets of a bowery between Annie’s gang and the Kid Kellys. Every participant is a kid and looks it, except for Pickford. It seems anomalous to start with and gets progressively more awkward as she and fifteen year old Joe Butterworth start leaping onto each other.

Please Murder Me! (1956)

Director: Peter Godfrey
Writers: Al C. Ward and Donald Hyde, based on an original story by E. A. Dupont and David Chantler
Stars: Angela Lansbury, Raymond Burr, Dick Foran, John Dehmer and Lamont Johnson

Index: 2025 Centennials.

This didn’t turn out to be the greatest movie that Angela Lansbury ever made, but I’ll leave it to others to look at Gaslight, The Manchurian Candidate and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, to cite just three. It didn’t turn out to contain a great role for her either, though I always like her as a villain, even if she didn’t. What it did turn out to be was an interesting failure and a pristine opportunity for Raymond Burr, billed second.

He’s Craig Carlson, attorney at law, and this starts out with him walking through dark film noir streets, checking pawnshop windows and buying a gun. He comes back to his office and dictates a fantastic message to Ray Willis: “In exactly 55 minutes, I will be dead. Murdered.”

If you want to hook an audience, this is how. Nowadays, it’s tailor made for a trailer, but it works as the prologue too. Of course, it’s a film noir so we leap into flashback and learn how the story progressed to that point.