It is a campaign-enriching axiom that Eisenhower “got us out of Korea and kept us out of Vietnam.”  This is what a movie like Pork Chop Hill (1959), starring Gregory Peck, very much wanted.

Peace talks in the Korean War have gotten underway, but Pork Chop Hill needs to be taken from the Chinese—and everything goes wrong until the end.  The film laments the upending of military strategy, the myopia, that turns soldiers into sitting ducks.  Is it antiwar?  Practically so, but not quite.  As John Simon has explained, a movie is not really antiwar unless it shows that both battling sides, not just one, have more or less lost the conflict, and this is not the case with Pork Chop Hill.

Cover of Pork Chop Hill

Written by JP Miller, Days of Wine and Roses (1958) was a Playhouse 90 TV movie before it was remade as a theatrical film.  Though technically crude, it is a memorably strong drama about the ruination of sought-after social mobility—and of people’s lives—by alcoholism.  Joe and Kirsten are the broken hard drinkers.  Without getting drunk, Kirsten can only see the world as a “dirty” place, and is the more vulnerable and myopic of the two.

JP Miller (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The picture was well directed by John Frankenheimer.  Cliff Robertson is a natural for the part of Joe.  His acting is nigh effortless, whereas with Piper Laurie (Kirsten) we do see the effort.  Laurie is inconsistently convincing, but—interestingly—she does manage to be deep.  A psyche is there. . .

I’m glad I finally saw Days (on DVD) after all these years, and, yep, I’m sticking with the original.

Predictably, the hit movie Spy Kids spawned a sequel, Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams (2002), both directed by Robert Rodriguez.  It’s another techno-fantasy for the entire family, featuring Carmen (Alexa Vega) and Juni (Daryl Sabara), spy kids employed by the OSS, which, as you know, eventually became the CIA.

Er, wait a minute—the OSS in Spy Kids 2 is fictional; it isn’t the CIA.  Okay, but there is still a mission here, now that a highly destructive device has been stolen and is located on a now oddball island.  A scientist there (Steve Buscemi) is given to both miniaturizing animals and creating hybrid animals which, however droll, grow to deluxe size.  (Not good.)  For good measure, Carmen and Juni confront rivals in fellow spy kids Gary and Gerti Giggles, capable of outdoing our child heroes but also facing a disadvantage.  They get their faces soiled with camel manure and their father (Mike Judge) turns out to be an appalling traitor and would-be murderer.  When he protests over how things are going, his daughter Gerti, disgusted with him, says, “Don’t even start, Dad!”

I’m glad Rodriguez started the Spy Kids trilogy.  In addition to having an entertaining cast, SK2 is comically rich and visually endearing.  And, thankfully, it has nothing to say.

In the John Wayne Western from 1944, Tall in the Saddle, land seizures are interrupted when a man threatens to tell the authorities about the sell of marked playing cards.  The man, never shown, is killed.  John Wayne plays the newly hired worker and good shot who, naturally, discovers the truth.

Wayne plainly attracts the haters here, including an insufferable biddy.  A saucy cowgirl (Ella Raines) believes Wayne has made a fool of her, and she intends to fire him from his ranch job, but—aw—she becomes infatuated with him.  There is a pleasing little moment in Saddle when a fellow female looker, Raines’s competition, praises the cowgirl’s prettiness and Raines gives a verbal indication that she knows about her looks and intends to use them to her advantage.

Tall in the Saddle (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Director Edwin L. Marin‘s movie is a fun romp in which Wayne’s character is refreshingly less contemptuous of certain people than some other Wayne characters.  The cast is not wholly effective but it comes close, especially with the admirable fire of Ward Bond and Miss Raines.

I saw the Howard Hawks film, Ceiling Zero (1936)—or let me say I saw a particular print of it—on YouTube.  It was the best I could do since the pic was never released on DVD.

Director Hawks did even better with airline workers in Zero than he did, years later, with cowboys in Red River.  He organizes his scenes of active crews admirably, although this is in truth scriptwriter Frank Wead‘s show, for he adapted his own play.

Aviation technology of the Thirties is (to me) fascinating, and here we get that as well as a surprising amount of aircraft destruction.  And death.  There is no happy ending.  Still, I was happy to be seeing the forgotten Ceiling Zero.