That Certain Summer (1972)

Director: Lamont Johnson
Writers: Richard Levinson and William Link
Stars: Hal Holbrook, Martin Sheen, Joe Don Baker, Marlyn Mason, Scott Jacoby and Hope Lange

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Hal Holbrook turned the lead role in this TV movie down when it was offered to him, as he felt that nothing much happened in it. He isn’t wrong, at least from one perspective, but it’s a groundbreaking gamechanger from another.

He’s Doug Salter, who’s divorced with a son, lives in San Francisco and runs a contracting business. That son, Nick, who’s fourteen years old, lives down the coast in Los Angeles with his mother Janet, but is about to fly out to spend a summer with his dad, who he misses.

They drive around and see the sights, talk to each other in classic movie voices and host a party for friends and neighbours to celebrate Nick being there. Nick gets to see dad at work and he meets one of dad’s friends, Gary, who’s a sound engineer.

Late in the film, Nick takes off and spends a day riding the trams; he isn’t running away so much as he’s going walkabout to think about things, but it worries his parents, of course. He does come back, I should add, and flies home with his mum at the end of the movie.

The Swan (1925)

Director: Dmitriy Bukhovetskiy
Writer: Dmitriy Bukhovetskiy, based on the play by Ferenc Molnár
Stars: Adolphe Menjou, Ricardo Cortez and Frances Howard

If The Rag Man was an emotional but highly predictable film for the whole family, then The Swan is all of those things but for women. This is a textbook weepie, the sort of stereotypical picture that men hated and women wept over.

It’s based on a Hungarian play, A hattyú, or The Swan, by Ferenc Molnár, a comedy whose comedy seems to have been lost in translation. On the other hand, it had tragic undercurrents which are emphasised in this version. Some of the scenes almost seem brutal in their tragedy and it’s hard to imagine comedy ever having been associated. And I say that as a devotee of the blackest English humour. I see Kind Hearts and Coronets as an absolute masterpiece. I have no issue with comedy and tragedy co-existing.

The story also seems to be so threadbare as to be archetypal. Was it successful because it’s the originator of a trope? I don’t know. Given that I liked the 1956 remake for its dialogue, a notion helped by actors of the calibre of Grace Kelly, Estelle Winwood and Agnes Moorehead, not to forget Alec Guinness, there to deliver it, I wonder if this struggles because it inherently doesn’t have much dialogue, as a silent movie.

The Rag Man (1925)

Director: Edward F. Cline
Writers: Willard Mack and Robert E. Hopkins
Star: Jackie Coogan

The first entirely MGM outing for child star Jackie Coogan arrived four years after his huge appearance in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid and it borrows from it considerably.

For a start, he’s an orphan again, though he has a place in an orphanage this time out. The catch is that the orphanage is on fire when the film begins and so, rather cleverly, is the title card that tells us that.

He does climb out, using bedsheeets that are tied together but they’re also on fire and they drop him on the ground and wrap around him, so the firemen putting out the flames inadvertently bounce him out to the street, where a cop chases him away because he’s only dressed in a nightshirt.

And so he’s on the loose in New York City, a couple of years younger than Macaulay Culkin was when he made Home Alone II and without a packed wallet that will get him into the Plaza Hotel. Instead he sleeps his first night in the back of a rag man’s horsedrawn cart, in which he also finds a sweater, a pair of trousers and a familiar looking hat. He has to cut the trousers down to size by placing them on tram tracks, but that’s only the first of his bright ideas that works a treat.

Missing (1982)

Director: Costa-Gavras
Writers: Costa-Gavras and Donald E. Stewart, based on the book The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice by Thomas Hauser
Stars: Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek, Melanie Mayron and John Shea

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Jack Lemmon was nominated for an Oscar on eight films. The first was for Mister Roberts in 1955, for which he won as Best Supporting Actor, and I coincidentally watched that this week as prep for its sequel in Jack Nicholson’s First Thirty. Now I’m watching Missing for his centennial, as it was the last of the eight nods, this time as Best Actor. He lost to Ben Kingsley for the year’s biggest picture, Gandhi.

It’s also a rather timely film, given the news of late, as it’s the true story of a coup, in Chile in 1973, when the U.S. aided the removal of the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, in favour of a brutal military regime run by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

More specifically, given that most of those names, like Allende, Pinochet and even Chile, are carefully never mentioned in the film, it’s a look at the effect of such a coup on a family. The missing man is Charlie Horman, a writer from New York state, and much of the movie is dedicated to the search for him by his wife Beth and his father Ed, the latter of whom has flown out specially after not getting answers he likes from the powers that be back home.

The Lost World (1925)

Director: Harry O. Hoyt
Writer: Marion Fairfax, based on the novel by Arthur Conan Doyle
Stars: Bessie Love, Lewis Stone, Wallace Beery and Lloyd Hughes

Oh, I’ve been looking forward to this one! I have seen it before, probably more than once, but not for a couple of decades and I’m unsure as to the completeness of those versions. Now, I’m watching as complete a version as exists, a 92 minute composite of eight prints.

It’s the Arthur Conan Doyle story, of course, a pivotal 1912 novel that didn’t invent a genre but did give it a name. It stands up very well as a smooth read free of the excesses of Victorian literature and as an archetypal adventure.

Of course, Hollywood ached to adapt it but a crucial detail needed to be squared away. How were they going to depict the dinosaurs? Well, enter Willis O’Brien, who had been animating them in stop motion since The Dinosaur and the Missing Link in 1915 and the far more advanced The Ghost of Slumber Mountain in 1918. He’s best known today as the animator of King Kong but his work here was just as pioneering.

The Crazy Ray (1925)

Director: René Clair
Writer: René Clair
Stars: Henri Rollan, Albert Préjean, Madeleine Rodrigue, Louis Pré Fils, Antoine Stacquet, Marcel Vallée, Charles Martinelli and Myla Seller

Less than a week after Josef von Sternberg’s debut with The Salvation Hunters, another film legend of the future, René Clair, debuted with this short and unusual science fiction feature, although I believe his second picture, Entr’acte, was released first, in 1924.

It’s usually titled The Crazy Ray in English, a much edited version released as At 3:25, but its original French title translates to Paris Asleep, which carries a lot more depth. As French film tends to do, it asks many questions, but it isn’t particularly interested in answering any. It’s a happy and very cinematic curiosity.

Initially it’s a curiosity because of its dream of a location. Albert wakes up one morning to look out over Paris from a singular point: he’s at the very top of the Eiffel Tower, where he’s presumably working as a night watchman. The views of 1924 Paris from this height are magic andshots of the tower are even better still. The one of him walking down the spiral staircase at its heart while the camera slowly descends alongside him is a thing of beauty indeed.

A Raisin in the Sun (1961)

Director: Daniel Petrie
Writer: Lorraine Hansberry, from her play
Stars: Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil and Ruby Dee

Index: 2025 Centennials.

It’s Black History Month, whether Trump’s administration is willing to acknowledge it or not. It therefore seems appropriate to review this film now, even though I’m actually doing so for a white actor, in fact the one and only white actor in the entire movie. He’s literally the token white guy.

He’s John Fiedler, who would have been one hundred years old today. While he only has a supporting role, it’s a notable one. The entire closing monologue, a tearjerking showcase of a monologue, is delivered to him and he walks out utterly silenced. Well, for now, at least.

A Raisin in the Sun is a powerful film indeed and part of its success is that it was based on a powerful play, the first Broadway production by a black woman, Lorraine Hansberry, as well as the first by a black director, Lloyd Richards. It didn’t win a Tony from its four nominations but it was the New York Drama Critics’ Circle’s best play of 1959. It ran for 530 performances.

Crucially, almost the entire cast transferred over to this feature version, as did the writer, so they were all well and truly invested in the roles they played and the relationships their characters had with each other.

Back Door to Hell (1964)

Director: Monte Hellman
Writers: Richard A. Guttman and John Hackett, based on a story by Richard A. Guttman
Stars: Jimmie Rodgers, Jack Nicholson, John Hackett, Annabelle Huggins and Conrad Maga

Index: The First Thirty.

This is the second of four pictures in a row that Nicholson made with Monte Hellman and there’s some powerful irony in play this time.

Flight to Fury was his tenth picture and none of the ones before it had established him as an actor, so he began to diversify his roles off the screen. He wrote that one, he co-produced this one and he did both for the next one, Ride in the Whirlwind. He got the opportunity because producer Robert Lippert had been impressed by his writing for Thunder Island a year earlier.

After all, if he wasn’t going to make it as an actor, then maybe he’d make it as a writer or a producer. Those jobs paid well. Given all that, it’s acutely ironic that this be his first film in which he is without a doubt the best actor.

The Salvation Hunters (1925)

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Writer: Josef von Sternberg
Stars: George K. Arthur, Georgia Hale and Bruce Guerin

After precisely no notable new feature films in January 1925, February started off with one from a complete unknown of a director, Josef von Sternberg.

He was Austro-Hungarian, born in Vienna in 1894 and he would become a major filmmaker, often credited for inventing the gangster film, with 1927’s Underworld, and lauded for a string of important films starring Marlene Dietrich, not least The Blue Angel, Morocco and Shanghai Express, the latter two landing him Oscar nods. Talking of Oscar, he’d also direct Emil Jannings in what would become the very first Academy Award-winning performance for Best Actor, in 1928’s The Last Command.

Needless to say, this picture isn’t up to those standards, but it’s an interesting one, notably artistic and feeling much more European than American, though it was made in Hollywood.

It’s a depressing picture but it’s meant to be. The Great Depression didn’t happen until 1929 but times were tough in the twenties and this film makes them seem even tougher. Tellingly, everything is kept vague, none of the locations or characters given names, and stripping their identities helps us to realise not only that they could be anyone anywhere but also that they simply don’t matter to the world at large.

Flight to Fury (1964)

Director: Monte Hellman
Writer: Jack Nicholson, based on a story by Fred Roos and Monte Hellman
Stars: Dewey Mann, Fay Spain and Jack Nicholson

Index: The First Thirty.

This is not a good movie. Let me get that out there right away. However, it’s an interesting movie, the first of four that Jack Nicholson did for director Monte Hellman and the first of a pair shot back to back in the Philippines. It’s also a thoroughly enjoyable movie with an odd charm to it. It’s much more enjoyable than it really has any right to be.

That’s because it’s a cheap pulp flick with an over-complex story built on no background at all and which is reliant on its characters to do a whole lot of things that aren’t believable. It ought to suck royally. However, it grabbed me early and it kept me all the way, even while I acknowledged a host of problems as it went.

For a start, I have no idea where we are and I’m not sure anyone ever tells us. All we know is that it’s a city and a bunch of people in a car watch another man arrive at the docks by taxi, surreptitiously take something from a man on a boat and then leave in another taxi.

They’re interesting characters, at least. The three in the car include a young driver, exotic muscle and a beautiful woman. I recognise the muscle as Vic Diaz, a memorable villain in a lot of memorable Filipino movies. He channels his best Peter Lorre for this one.

Ensign Pulver (1964)

Director: Joshua Logan
Writers: Joshua Logan and Peter S. Feibleman, based on the novel Mister Roberts by Thomas Heggen
Stars: Robert Walker, Burl Ives, Walter Matthau, Tommy Sands, Millie Perkins and Kay Medford

Index: The First Thirty.

Ensign Pulver is a sequel to an adaptation of a play that was an adaptation of a novel, and it’s something of a scar on that franchise.

It began as Mister Roberts, a novel by Thomas Heggen, published in 1946 and based on what he went through in the Pacific theatre during World War II. It was soon adapted to the stage by Heggen and Joshua Logan, the play opening on Broadway in 1948 and winning five Tonys. It took seven years to bring it to the big screen but Henry Fonda came with it and delivered a seriously good performance, even if it was Jack Lemmon who won the Oscar.

Fast forward nine more years and the play’s director helmed this sequel, with precisely no returning actors and no Mister Roberts, hence the new name and focus. The former turns out to be a small problem but the latter a big one.

Slap Shot (1977)

Director: George Roy Hill
Writer: Nancy Dowd
Stars: Paul Newman, Strother Martin and Michael Ontkean

Index: 2025 Centennials.

I’ve seen a lot of Paul Newman movies, from early films like Somebody Up There Likes Me to late ones like Road to Perdition. Somehow I not only hadn’t seen Slap Shot but hadn’t realised it was a comedy.

I knew that it was an ice hockey movie from the seventies and that it was violent, famously so, but I was under the impression that it was a more realistic equivalent to Rollerball. Well, it isn’t. It’s violent, for sure, but I found it to be a drama, first and foremost, that often took time to be funny. I liked it more than I expected to.

The humour is almost cartoonish, so much so that it’s not very realistic, but the funniest thing of all is that almost everything that feels unrealistic actually happened in real life. This is no documentary, but it seems to be true to the spirit of what was happening in the minor hockey leagues during the early seventies and, in many instances, the detail as well.

The Terror (1963)

Director: Roger Corman
Writers: Leo Gordon and Jack Hill
Stars: Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson and Sandra Knight

Index: The First Thirty.

The Terror is one of those movies that’s a lot more interesting than it is good. Then again, it really had no business being any level of good, given that it was shot on the sets of The Raven during the two days Roger Corman had before they would be torn down, the same two days he had the continued use of Boris Karloff.

He didn’t have a script, just a vague idea, so had Karloff and a few other actors do generic things like walking down hallways or through doors and, of course, talking to each other, as people do, so a writer could conjure up a story around it later. The idea was coherent enough, at least, to have Karloff spend a few hours in a tank of cold water for the finalé.

That writer was Leo Gordon, a co-writer of The Cry Baby Killer. Once his script was written, Corman brought in another director to shoot everything else, because he was union and he didn’t have the budget to shoot extra footage according to union rules.

More footage was needed but that director had taken another job, so a friend of his shot some scenes. Then a fourth director took care of some exterior shots, a fifth supposedly took care of the rest but a sixth shot the last day. A two day shoot therefore ended up taking nine months and the results are about as coherent as you can imagine, with creative input from all of those different people.

The Raven (1963)

Director: Roger Corman
Writer: Richard Matheson, based on the poem by Edgar Allan Poe
Stars: Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff

Index: The First Thirty.

I’ve always been in two minds about Roger Corman’s fifth Edgar Allan Poe adaptation and a fresh viewing doesn’t change that.

On one hand, it’s a flimsy movie indeed, the source material—Poe’s famous poem—adapted so loosely that it would be unrecognisable but for Vincent Price’s memorable voice reading a part of it at the very beginning. There are very few characters and, twists aside, they’re all of little substance. What’s more, unlike its four predecessors, it’s played primarily for laughs and with inconsistent effect.

On the other hand, it’s a ridiculous amount of fun. Price camps it up unashamedly. Peter Lorre steals every scene he can from him with ruthless intent. And Boris Karloff adds some weight to proceedings by playing it straight, a stellar decision regardless of how outrageous his character actually is. Hazel Court and Jack Nicholson are really just icing on the cake. We could focus only on the sorcery duel with 1963 special effects and this would be worthy.

As a result, the critic in my head continued to find fault, but the fan next to him ignored it all and revelled in its insanity. How it will play to you in 2025 will depend on which voice you want to listen to.

The Broken Land (1962)

Director: John Bushelman
Writer: Edward Lakso
Stars: Kent Taylor, Diana Darrin, Jody McCrea, Robert Sampson and Jack Nicholson

Index: The First Thirty.

Jack Nicholson checked off many genres in his early years. He started in teen exploitation pictures but they shifted from crime through melodrama to hot rod racing. Then it was dark comedy and historical drama—if we could call the 1920s historical in 1960. Here, he acted in a western before finding his way into horror.

The Broken Land apparently ran for seventy minutes but the only versions I can find are a mere sixty minutes long. Clearly something’s gone but I couldn’t tell you what it was. There are too many scenes of padding as it is, with a succession of characters riding here or there or somewhere when the editor could have just taken us there in a snap.

It’s the late 1870s and the frontiers are gone for the most part as law and civilisation take root. The deepest this movie gets, which isn’t particularly deep, is to ask us what law means. The telling speech there is given by a marshal of a tiny town that doesn’t seem large enough to warrant one, so he can explain his mind to his much younger fiancée.

He’s Marshal Jim Cogan, who’s played by the ever-reliable Kent Taylor, and he believes that the law is some sort of gospel truth delivered from on high. “You see, no man really knows right from wrong,” he says. “That’s why laws are invented. I’ve lived by them all my life. It’s the only way I can be sure of myself.”

Studs Lonigan (1960)

Director: Irving Lerner
Writer: Philip Yordan, based on the novels by James T. Farrell
Stars: Frank Gorshin, Venetia Stevenson, Carolyn Craig, Jack Nicholson, Robert Casper, Dick Foran, Katherine Squire and Christopher Knight

Index: The First Thirty.

Nowadays, the trend seems to be to adapt a single book into a trilogy. Hello, The Hobbit! In 1960, Studs Lonigan took the opposite approach by adapting three novels by James T. Farrell into a single hour and a half movie. Needless to say, it skips forward in time a lot and misses a heck of a lot out. Does it matter? Maybe not.

The point is that William Lonigan is a young man living in the Roman Catholic south side of Chicago in the twenties and he proves unable to escape any part of that, however much he tries to (or doesn’t). Farrell knew the time and place (this trilogy was published from 1932 to 1935) and suggests that the “spiritual poverty” carved into its every aspect was inescapable.

If it wasn’t immediately apparent that this was a naturalistic drama, very American in the setting but very European in the telling, Studs Lonigan is played by Christopher Knight, who landed an “introducing” credit. He’s certainly game enough and he gives it a fair shot, but he does reach Reefer Madness levels of histrionics, only made one more film and is best known today for a near marriage to philanthropist John D. Rockefeller’s granddaughter Neva.

The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

Director: Roger Corman
Writer: Charles B. Griffith
Stars: Jonathan Haze, Jackie Joseph and Mel Welles

Index: The First Thirty.

Oh, it’s been a long while since I’ve seen this little gem, though I revisited A Bucket of Blood a lot more recently, a thematic predecessor on whose sets it was shot. It was the first of four films Jack Nicholson made with Roger Corman in the director’s chair; Corman had produced his debut, The Cry Baby Killer. He isn’t the lead, but he does have a highly memorable role.

For a throwaway B-movie feature made on a budget of under $30,000 and shot in only two days (because that’s how long those sets were going to be up), The Little Shop of Horrors has found some major legs. It built a cult audience quickly, continued to build it on television (it’s in the public domain) and eventually exploded in popularity after it was given the Broadway musical treatment which was filmed in 1986 by Frank Oz. It even became an animated show on Fox Kids, horror removed.

I much prefer the original, not only because it isn’t a musical but because it does so much with so little. Corman didn’t give much effort to making the sets look grand, so Mushnick’s Florists has a sign reading “Lots Plants Cheap” and almost everything we see takes place in it, almost like a play. However, the screenplay, by regular Corman writer Charles B. Griffith, is darkly witty, full of New York Jewish dialect, black humour and malapropisms, and the big cast of character actors nail the delivery. “It’s a finger of speech!”

The Big Gundown (1967)

Director: Sergio Sollima
Writers: Franco Solinas and Fernando Morandi, based on a story by Sergio Donati and Franco Solinas
Stars: Lee Van Cleef, Tomas Milian and Walter Barnes

I remember learning from Alex Cox that all the great spaghetti westerns are directed by a man named Sergio. There’s Leone, of course, but Corbucci and Sollima as well. This is one of the latter’s greatest films and it stands up well to my memory of it from two decades ago.

I’m watching it because 9th January would be Lee Van Cleef’s hundredth birthday and so chose the English dub rather than the original Italian language version. It’s an odd dub that shifts now and then back to Italian, with Van Cleef’s voice dubbed, but it mostly features his memorably deep voice.

He’s the hero of the film, Jonathan Corbett, but one of the best things about it is that he’s not a clear hero. He has honour and integrity and he’s cleaned up his part of the west, with the sheriff’s wall now free of wanted posters. His friends are keen for him to run for senator. However, he gets suckered into going after a Mexican who supposedly raped and murdered a twelve year old girl, without seeking proof first, becoming a rather flawed arm of justice. We may not be in on the real story yet, but we can see that it’s clearly a setup from the start.

The Wild Ride (1960)

Director: Harvey Berman
Writers: Marion Rothman and Ann Potter, based on a story by Burt Topper
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Georgianna Carter and Robert Bean

Index: The First Thirty.

Oh boy! Everything I expected from obscure teen exploitation films like The Cry Baby Killer and Too Soon for Love manifested here instead. I stand by both of those being better than we’re conditioned to expect. I can’t say that here.

This is a pretty dismal and rather unlikeable teen exploitation flick, only an hour long and that at least half an hour too much. Most of it boils down to a dick measuring contest for no particular title except that of far out stud in a small town juvenile delinquent clique.

Top stud when we begin is Jack Nicholson as Johnny Varron, who’s done precisely nothing at this point except force a motorcycle cop off the road. “Chicken!” he says, as the cop hits a tree, and then he goes about his day. We learn a little later that it’s Officer Neely who’s now fighting for his life in hospital.

Too Soon to Love (1960)

Director: Richard Rush
Writers: Laszlo Gorog and Richard Rush
Stars: Jennifer West and Richard Evans

Index: The First Thirty.

Jack Nicholson doesn’t have much of a part to play in Too Soon to Love, here and gone again in a few short scenes at a drive-in theatre. The rest of the cast are nobodies, as indeed he was at the time, though a couple of the supporting adult characters went on to parts of note.

The director is the other big name, though he was debuting here. Richard Rush went on to direct The Stunt Man, Freebie and the Bean and a couple of other Nicholson pictures, Psych-Out and Hell’s Angels on Wheels. He co-wrote it with László Görög, who had penned The Mole People and Earth vs. The Spider, hardly nuanced fare.

It would be easy to automatically write this off, but that would be unfair, because it turns out to be a surprisingly effective drama that persists in going further than I expected it to. I don’t know how many times I said “Damn!” during the second half but it had to be a lot.

The Cry Baby Killer (1958)

Director: Justus Addiss
Writer: Leo Gordon and Melvin Lavy
Stars: Harry Lauter, Jack Nicholson and Carolyn Mitchell

Index: The First Thirty.

Yes, Jack Nicholson, star of so many eighties and nineties movies, started out way back in the fifties, when he was shockingly young but still recognisable. His name surely eclipses all the others above today but he was very much a new kid in 1958 working on his first picture.

The biggest name other than Nicholson’s to our eyes today is that of the producer, Roger Corman, for whom Nicholson worked in many of his early films, not only as an actor but as whatever a film needed at any particular time. If you know Corman’s name, then it shouldn’t surprise you to find that this is an exploitation film, but it doesn’t do a bad job at mimicking the effects of Ace in the Hole on a tiny budget.

Other than the opening scene, which is set in a dark alley, the whole picture unfolds in or around Pete Gambelli’s café. There are a lot of characters, meaning that a lot of actors get to have moments in the spotlight. Nicholson gets surprisingly little to do, but he’s arguably the lead character, even with second billing after Harry Lauter, and his character is absolutely the driving force of the entire picture.