Mostly baseball and podcasts this month.
The list.
(“Where’s the February log, Radish?” Uh. Um. Uh. Yeah.)
The Last Man on Earth (1964)
Amazon Prime, original English
Vincent Price Italian zombie-apocalypse film. It’s set in America, but it’s very obviously filmed in Italy.
I got kind of bored halfway through. No notes.
Ein Walzertraum (The Waltz Dream) (1925)
arte Mediathek, original Deutsch
A comedic silent film based on an 1907 Oscar Straus operetta; the newly-composed soundtrack of the 2025 restoration also had waltzes from various members of the (unrelated) Strauss family.
Princess Alix, from a tiny town in Bavaria with many “old-fashioned” customs, is in Vienna so her father can marry her off to a royal, who isn’t interested and pawns her off on his womanizing adjutant (Willy Fritsch, Frau im Mond) for an evening. After several good minutes of sight-seeing footage, he takes the princess to a Heurigen, a working-class wine venue somewhat analogous to a Biergarten, treats her like he has treated all the other girls he has taken there, and accidentally gets himself engaged to marry her.
After a ceremony that makes it very clear that local law states he is only to approach his wife on her royal orders, he runs out on the wedding night, ends up in a Biergarten, and falls in love with the leader of an Austrian all-girl band. Poor Alix despairs, but confides her troubles in a new friend–oh, it’s the band leader, unaware that her new beau is a married man–who helps her win her husband over by teaching her to play Vienna waltzes and dress like a modern Viennese woman.
Great fun, this one. Good music, good costumes/scenery, good physical comedy. The ending was a little sad, but it was a satisfactory end to the story being told.
The Vikings (1958)
arte Mediathek, original English
A rewatch, mostly to see if I could find the scenes filmed in Freising.
Might be here:
Or here:
Lol. I enjoyed it, of course. Swordfights and costumes.
The Godfather Part III/Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (1990/2020)
Netflix, original English/Italian
The shortened re-edit of the original third segment of the trilogy; I know fans say you have to see the whole thing but it wasn’t available and frankly I think this one was long enough. I figured out the twist ending about twenty minutes in, and after about an hour I caught myself looking for a second screen (the segments in Italian made that impossible, of course) or something to do with my hands.
I also had a very hard time figuring out what year the story took place; Mary’s dress at the party in the beginning looked like 1989. Later a newspaper told me it was 1980. At least that gave me something else to think about.
What About Bob? (1991)
tubi, original English
Saw this one in the theaters at release with a group of friends, and we baby-stepped around for a few weeks, until Prince of Thieves and The Smell of Fear conquered the quotation centers of our brains. I was thinking about it for no apparent reason one day, and there it was.
It’s definitely a time-capsule (pay phones, answering services, mental illness portrayed as something to treat instead of encourage and celebrate) but the dialog and physical comedy are still funny. Check it out.
The War Wagon (1967)
arte Mediathek, original English
“That was fun,” said Mr Radish, after the conclusion of this Kirk Douglas/John Wayne Western gold-heist popcorn flick. And it was. Nice scenery, lots of fight scenes and shooting, and some witty banter between the two leads, frenemies paired up for a big score. A nice evening on the couch.
Some Came Running (1958)
Cable (Warner Film), original English
Shot on location in Madison, Indiana, where I have never been, but it looks like a lot of towns where I have been. Frank Sinatra plays a transient blocked writer and WWII vet who returns to the small town where his much-older brother (played by Arthur Kennedy, and they look the same age) is a businessman and pillar of the community. He’s accompanied by a crass young club hostess carrying a purse made from a stuffed dog (Shirley McClain, in her first Oscar nomination). Her boyfriend follows them from Chicago and tries to fight for her hand.
His brother tries to get him in with the country-club crowd, where he meets a beautiful blonde school teacher who offers to read his unfinished manuscript and give him some pointers. He offers to bang her in the car, which she doesn’t want. Meanwhile, he moves in with a gambler (Dean Martin) who has befriended him and the younger lady.
A lot of people yell at each other, reminiscent of a Tennessee Williams screenplay, but more violent. Marriages are proposed, rejected, betrayed, and finally undertaken in a sad farce. There is gambling with money, reputation, and life itself. At the risk of spoilers, the last scene takes place in a carnival atmosphere as the good small Midwestern town celebrates its centennial and reminded me of Strangers on a Train.
I did not completely understand this one, or why the characters chose to act how they did. The novel the screenplay was based on was 1200 pages, so I will not be consulting the source material…
Neither Frank nor Deano sing, but Sinatra does say, “ain’t that a kick in the head.”
Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) (1945)
arte Mediathek, Deutsch
While re-reading some of my previous quality content (lol), I thought maybe I should watch more antique foreign films. This film tells the story of the SS hunt for an Italian engineer who is a key figure in the local resistance, from the viewpoints of different people involved–neighbors, friends, the whore who rats him out, and the local priest who is arrested along with him. Mostly civilians, and children.
When Roberto Rossellini started filming this one with scavenged film stock, Rome was in rubble. The 21st-century film students who write reviews for the IMDB don’t seem to understand that this was not a sound stage (or even the “WWII rubble” street at Babelsberg) and the Italian actors had recently lived through the German occupation of their city. There’s a lot of “this was boring and cliché” but it wasn’t cliché in 1945. The characters were interesting, and even though the cinematography was rough and not up to Hollywood standards of the day 1) why should it have been? They told and interesting story and 2) the selections of props, interiors, exteriors, and the lighting all contributed to the telling of that story. Good enough for me, and its place in the “timeless classics of film heritage” series is deserved.
The ending reminded me of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, another Italian film about the era.
