Gratuitous House Arrest Flash Movie Observations – UPDATED

Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

What with baseball season put on indefinite hold due to Coronapalooza, Ol’ Robbo has had to lean more heavily on old movies for entertainment these last weeks.  A sampling:

“Only The Valiant” (1951) – A new-to-me film I stumbled across on an obscure cable channel.  Gregory Peck is a hard-horse Cavalry officer who has to hold a narrow defile against the Apaches with a handful of disgruntled troopers until re-enforcements arrive.  It was okay.  Ol’ Robbo has never really understood the Peck allure.  To me he always seemed simply wooden.  If there was some kind of brooding, smoldering, passionate substratum under that tightly-contained facade, damme if I could ever see it.  When I put this to the Mothe, who was a yuge Peck fan, she would simply reply, “You haven’t the genes, dear boy.  You haven’t the genes.”

“Big Night” (1996) – Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci as two Italian brothers who have one last chance to save their 1950’s Jersey restaurant before the bank takes it.  With Minnie Driver when she was sort of a thing and Isabella Rossellini, who at one time Ol’ Robbo thought the Most Beautiful Woman in the World (but not here).  It’s actually a very small film but it has its moments.  I saw it once years and years ago and my impression was simply, “Eh, fine”.  Nothing this time really changed that.  I will say this:  Ian Holm, who is one of my very favorite actors, could do many, many things.  But here he could not pull off a convincing Italian patrono.

“The Lavender Hill Mob” (1951) – Mild-mannered bank nobody Alec Guinness quietly concocts a plan to steal his employer’s gold and get it out of England disguised as Eiffel Tower souvenir paperweights.  In Ol’ Robbo’s humble opinion, this is the second best of the classic Guinness/Ealing Studios comedies, the best being – far and away – “The Ladykillers“.  Fight me.

Coming Up:

“Adventures of Don Juan” (1948) – I’ve not seen this one before but I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that it’s Errol Flynn doing pretty much what he does in every picture – fling himself about the stage with a sword and a debonair smile.  And once again, Alan Hale will be trailing him, no doubt chuckling heartily.  (Alas, no Basil Rathbone in this one.)

“Sahara” (1943) – After Tobruk, Humphry Bogart is an American tank commander who has to get back to Allied lines.  On the way, he picks up a ragtag of passengers including a Brit medical team, a Frenchie, a Sudanese soldier and his Italian prisoner, and a downed Luftwaffe pilot.  I’ve seen this pic a number of times and it is a really good cat-and-mouse tactical thriller involving the search for water and an on-coming German strike force.  I’m very much looking forward to seeing it again.

So there you have it.

UPDATE:  I received word today that “Joe Kidd” (1972) is on the way.  I honestly can’t recall if I’ve seen this before.  I’m much less familiar with Clint’s Westerns (apart from the Leone spaghettis) than I am with the Duke’s because by the time Eastwood got into making such movies the genre was dying out.  (Happily, his “Unforgiven” (1992), of course, gave it new life.  Fun fact: Rob Campbell, who played one of the cowboy bad guys in that film, was a classmate of mine in college.)