Edward G. Robinson is the chief member of a likable cast in 1955’s Illegal, a gripping crime drama until it falls apart in its last 15 minutes.  Attorney Victor Scott (Robinson) is not much of a character, really; there is little examination of him, even though the machinations that involve him are pleasurably fresh.  Jayne Mansfield has little to do, but she too is likable and looks even better than Marilyn Monroe in The Asphalt Jungle.

All the major actors here deserve a better movie.

Illegal (1955 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

FYI:  A couple of weeks ago I quoted a line in the 2012 graphic novel, Kick Ass 2 Prelude: Hit Girl, about “Obama’s record f–king deficit.”  Some people may think that, because the federal deficit has been in decline for six years, this line is out-of-date, irrelevant.  It isn’t.  The deficit is rising again.  Hit Girl might need to blame House Republicans as well as Obama, but you’d better believe there’s no irrelevance here—and won’t be any time soon.

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

The crime material in the second season of Jane the Virgin is getting entertaining, more so than the scenes showing efforts to get baby Mateo, offspring of Jane, to stop wailing at night and go to sleep.

I am not yet tired of Jane, but I fear I will be if nothing emotionally meaningful or really dealing with the human situation crops up, as it did when Jane and Rafael worried over a possible health problem in their unborn child.

Also, I like it when the gay stuff in the show is at a minimum, as it usually is.  Last night it was beyond the minimum, though not without a few curious niceties or details.  Still . . .   Incidentally, I wonder if 50 Cent was right that the ratings for Empire plummeted because of that show’s gay stuff.

The first scene has a woman named Gail on the phone with a woman named Linda, apologizing for missing Linda’s recent party and asking how many people attended.  Linda replies that there was none who attended.  The party was a total bust.  This because, in Hal Salwen‘s gentle satire Denise Calls Up (1996), there are no longer in-the-flesh contacts and relationships; people are busy and do everything over the phone.  They even make love over the phone except, well, this is no lovemaking—or sex—at all.  But they don’t know that!  They have settled for the absence of the ordinary human encounters they wish to avoid or simply have no time for.  Or they refuse to make time.  Even the donation of sperm to an anonymous woman who wants to get pregnant is the equivalent of an over-the-wire service.  Predictably, it is over the phone that the donor becomes acquainted with the anonymous woman (she’s the Denise who one day calls up the donor).

Salwen’s film is witty and shrewd as well as competently directed and, by Gary Sharfin, edited.