Rodger Codger from Forlorn River sez:
Just got done watching Plunder of the Sun (1953), a surprisingly enjoyable movie. It was on Turner Classic Movies, which is a staple like bread and milk for me, of course. Black and white, it would have been gorgeous in Technicolor, on location in Mexico. The leads were Glenn Ford and Patricia Medina, and I do commend Joseph Cotten on his excellent taste in marrying that dazzlingly beautiful woman. She was a knockout!
I enjoyed the two buffoons who played the villains, namely Francis L. Sullivan, a Londoner, and Sean McClory, a Dubliner. They made the movie camp, whether it was supposed to be or not. Sullivan is the portly and in this case slovenly one (I was reminded of Sir Peter Ustinov in some roles), a quite familiar character actor, and McClory is the one with a college flattop cut for his platinum blond hair and wearing glasses with heavy black rims popular in the fifties. McClory is supposed to be a villain and he and Ford duke it out several times but I found the Irishman to be amusing and likable. (More than Ford!) And with his fifties-college do and specs, quite silly. In some scenes where he is running around in his summer ice cream suit he looks like some kind of kewpie doll, or a figure to be knocked down in a pinball machine or something. He's a very bad boy but you can't hate him! I hope to see him in other movies in which he plays the good guy because he's the kind of dude I would enjoy hoisting a few with. (Let him join my dream drinking buddies in heaven where all alcoholism is cured and drink only gladdeneth, never stingeth, along with Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, Tony Hopkins, Dave Letterman, Chevy Chase, John Larroquette, John Berryman, and a host of literati and gifted people and perhaps some of my own relatives who have been cursed by drink in this life: certainly Bud, above all Bud, of Jong Mea and the Hillside and Joe and Betty's. But I digress.)
Diana Lynn is in this too, the same girl who played Cornelia Otis Skinner in Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, a lighthearted memoir of that writer. She is a "tramp" in this movie but an unattractive one, which is the point, because good-guy Glenn confronts her about her loser status as a hooker and she takes his come-to-Jesus talk to heart and appears in the next scene, reformed, as the sweet girl-next-door she always played well because it was real-life wholesome Diana.
Patricia Medina is just drop-dead-gorgeous. Knowing what I do about Duke Wayne's (the ghost producer of this movie) predilection for raven-haired, sloe-eyed Latinas (he married three), I wonder if he hung around the set and pined for her.
The music is by Antonio Díaz Conde, and it is delightful. Besides Senor Conde's dramatic action scoring, which is exciting and the kind of stuff I could listen to all day, the action is in and out of cantinas with sultry guitar and castinets and marimbas and things and a mariachi band, supposedly an intrusion in one scene but they are perfect musicians and the music gladdens your heart: who cares what Ford and Patricia are plotting?
Conde has no biography available that I can find, not even dates of birth or death, but IMDB shows that he scored 258 movies, almost all of them Mexican. He was nominated for awards for about ten of them and won the Ariel award for best score in 1950. He scored movies from 1942-1974.
So much for the "review."
The sky to the south is beautiful. We've gone from cloudless to overcast, and we're now under a severe thunderstorm watch.
"Big wind a-comin'! I hear it hummin'!
"Sky turnin' yeller! Head for the cellar!"
I remember hearing that bluegrass sort of song one morning on WCSI in Columbus when the twins were little during the spring storm season. I believe the year was 1974. Which reminds me, today is April 3rd.
We did get a warning but it only rained and blew and I think we dodged the bullet. The daytime will go from 80 today to about 50 tomorrow, I think. We may get snow flurries one morning on the weekend, Tom said. We're still getting rumbles of thunder and those make Rudy nervous. Me too, just a little.
3 comments:
Was April 3, 1974 the big madison hilltop tornado?
That's the one, son. We were in Columbus, you and I and Nat and Mom. Next day I went to Madison to check up on MaMa and Aunt EJ -- they were OK, praise Allah -- and wrote a story on the Madison tornado for the Columbus newspaper. Rosie and her kids and hubby were smack dab in the middle of it and lost a roof but not their lives. She's anxious now when we have a watch or warning but no more than I am. Calvin H. was at the power plant, which was hit, and he watched the barometer needle on his controls there arc down like a tachometer to 26 PSI in seconds. Fortunately the thing hit the switching yard there and after turning it to spaghetti, made a left turn and went up over the hill, sparing 800 employees at that plant.
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