Four men should have come up with a more agreeable plot than that which exists in the Bob Hope comedy, Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number (1966), directed well enough by George Marshall.  In silly ways a movie star, Didi, is used to move the plot along, but the screenwriters finally acquit themselves with Hope’s one-liners and much of the fun slapstick.

Hope plays a real estate agent who foolishly helps Didi, the sexy actress who runs away from the movie industry, all the while necessarily trying to conceal this from his wife.  With Wrong Number, Hollywood produced a family film that tries for mid-60s sophistication through one person only:  Elke Sommer (Didi).  Though offering no surprises, she is quite good in her role, and her bare legs are good in theirs.  But there is no smut; there is commercial appeal, rickety as the whole thing is.  And there is funny Hope figuring that Phyllis Diller must tend to her looks with an egg beater.

Four men should have come up with a more agreeable plot than that which exists in the Bob Hope comedy, Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number (1966), directed well enough by George Marshall.  In silly ways a movie star, Didi, is used to move the plot along, but the screenwriters finally acquit themselves with Hope’s one-liners and much of the fun slapstick.

Hope plays a real estate agent who foolishly helps Didi, the sexy actress who runs away from the movie industry, all the while necessarily trying to conceal this from his wife.  With Wrong Number, Hollywood produced a family film that tries for mid-60s sophistication through one person only:  Elke Sommer (Didi).  Though offering no surprises, she is quite good in her role, and her bare legs are good in theirs.  But there is no smut; there is commercial appeal, rickety as the whole thing is.  And there is funny Hope figuring that Phyllis Diller must tend to her looks with an egg beater.

The 2018 film Chappaquiddick treats Senator Ted Kennedy as though he were a very unscrupulous tragic hero save he doesn’t die at the end, which is significant.  Kennedy goes on living, after dopily getting together with Mary Jo Kopechne and driving her to her doom:  oxygen deprivation in a car underwater.  “Kopechne died because Kennedy dithered” (Daniel Oliver), and after this, a true tragic hero would have died, perhaps by suicide.

This is not to say that John Curran‘s film isn’t a good one; it is.  Sympathy goes to Kopechne—how could it not?—but even more of it goes to Kennedy, and one may be in high dudgeon over this.  Yet it should be remembered that by consorting with Kennedy poor Mary Jo was going off with a married man.  It was a grave mistake.

Jason Clarke, though, portrays Kennedy not only as a tragic hero but also as a fool, in a nicely subdued performance.  I suspect that director Curran did not work that thoroughly with his actors—they don’t always own their roles—but there’s no problem with Clancy Brown, who shows intelligent fire as Robert MacNamara, or a palatable Ed Helms.  It’s about time someone made a movie about the Liberal Lion of the Senate’s failure to be charitable to a doomed girl.

Dennis Hopper‘s The Hot Spot is a lurid sex ‘n’ violence medley from 1990.

Its pulp story is second-rate with its mad, insatiable Virginia Madsen character and excessively defeated blackmailer (William Sadler).  Hopper wants us to have a good time, however, primarily through scenes of nudity, so it’s a pretty low enterprise.  It would be, anyway, even if the utterly enticing yet innocent looks of Jennifer Connelly call for a favorable comment.  Even so, she and Madsen are certifiably limited here as actors, and Don Johnson is miscast as a smart, greedy drifter-thief.  Hopper may have been a bit corrupted by playing in Blue Velvet.

The serial murderer in the spooky The Spiral Staircase (1946) is the worst kind of man there could be—one who targets women who are especially vulnerable, women with “afflictions.”  Not always a sympathetic character, old, ailing Mrs. Warren (Ethel Barrymore) is nevertheless right to urge her hired helper Helen (Dorothy McGuire), who is mute, to leave the vicinity.  The handsome Dr. Parry (Kent Smith), beginning to love Helen, agrees.  However, death (at the hand of the killer) has been in the town; now death is in the house!

Robert Siodmak‘s film is cleverly shot to look now fey, now horror-noirish.  It is very consistent with its melancholia, and its cast seems like old friends (ours).  Credit must go to Mel Dinelli, too, for script-adapting what is probably a fine entertainment novel by Ethel Lina White.