Fitzwilly (1967)

For the rest of the month, I intend to review Christmas films, and while Fitzwilly isn't a traditional feel-good holiday movie, it does take place entirely at Christmastime, so I figured I'd put it in, especially since Turner Classic Movies was featuring it on their lineup of Christmas movies. This film is so rare, moreover, that it deserves to be reviewed while it's still fresh in my mind.

This charmer stars Dick Van Dyke as the butler Fitzwilliam, affectionately known to his employer Miss Vicki as Fitzwilly. The son of a butler, Fitzwilly was taken  in by Miss Vicki when his parents died suddenly and was given an Ivy League education to complement his considerable mental faculties. Out of filial devotion to Miss Vicki, he looks after her as both her butler and the steward of her estate.

Unbeknown to Miss Vicki, she has gone broke giving away her money to charities, so in order to support her in the manner to which she is accustomed, Fitzwilly starts pulling elaborate heists and scams, all of which Miss Vicki remains in ignorance. Ironically, almost all the money Fitzwilly makes gets given by Miss Vicki to charities, so he can never amass enough capital to give up the life of crime. In addition we get the feeling that Fiztwilly enjoys the thrill of heist, so it's not much of a sacrifice on his part.

The whole arrangement comes into jeopardy, however, when  Miss Vicki hires a secretary named Juliet--played by Get Smart's Barbara Feldon--to edit the book she's writing. At first she loathes Fitzwilly's controlling ways, but sensing a deeper story hidden underneath his unorthodox way of running the houshold, she soon finds herself falling in love with the cunning butler. Her investigations, however, nearly prove fatal to the gang's thieving operations. When she learns the truth of the source of Miss Vicki's income, Juliet makes Fitzwilly promise to give up his life of crime before they get married, so he plans one last grand heist to ensure that Miss Vicki will never have to worry about money again.

Being a simple face, this film doesn't need a believable premise to be enjoyable, and it succeeds in providing us with plenty of amusing situations and some really ingenious heists. It's a not laugh-out-loud funny movie, but it certainly holds our interest for an hour and a half. Barbara Feldon and Dick Van Dyke prove themselves to be just as entertaining on the big screen as they were on the small, and I especially appreciate that there's no estrangement between their characters when she finds out the truth about his job because that's such a cliche. In addition the character actors never fail to delight, especially Edith Evans as Miss Vicki and John McGiver as the butler Albert.

I give this film a 6.7 out of 10. It's not brilliant, but it's smart enough to be one of Blackadder's cunning plans.

Film Review: Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964)

Frank, Dean, and Sammy share the stage with Bing Crosby,
who steals the show in my favorite Rat Pack picture.

If you're a fan of the Rat Pack, it's impossible to dislike this movie. Frank, Dean, and Sammy sing, and the supporting cast includes Bing Crosby--who nearly steals the show--and Peter Falk (of Columbo fame). Not only that, but the theme of this movie is unique and twistedly appropriate for the stars: a re-telling of Robin Hood set in 1920s Chicago. I hope that piqued your interest, because it's all up from there.

The movie opens with Chicago's current crime boss, Big Jim, being taken out by Guy Guisborne's hit-men. Afterwards we learn that Guisborne (Peter Falk) has cut a deal with the sheriff to get his protection for all the illegal activities in the city, but Guisborne is going to make all the other gangs in the city pay through the nose for this protection. The only one brave enough to stand up to Guisborne is Robbo (Frank Sinatra), the owner of a speakeasy and casino. With the help of his friends Will Scarlet (Sammy Davis, Jr.) and Little John (Dean Martin), Robbo hopes to break up Guisborne's cartel by being the only place in town who can bypass his "protection."

Unfortunately there's an X-factor in this equation in the form of Big Jim's daughter Marian (Barbara Rush), who is not only looking to avenge her father's death but also to take over his empire. When she pays Robbo blood money for a hit he didn't make, he offhandedly tells his men to give it to charity, unaware that this act could have any consequences for him. An itinerant clerk at the charity, however, seizes this opportunity to declare Robbo a modern Robin Hood for giving his ill-gotten gains to the poor. This turns out to be a huge gain for Robbo because as long as he's a public benefactor, Guisborne's mob can't touch him. The trick, therefore, becomes finding a way to blacken Robbo's name.

Apart from having an entertaining plot, this movie succeeds because it has some fabulous musical numbers. Sinatra gets one of his signature songs, "My Kind of Town," Dean Martin croons about loving his mother while playing a mind-bogglingly skilled game of pool, Sammy Davis, Jr. sings and dances with  a couple of machine guns, and Bing Crosby gets one of the most memorable numbers in the show with "Mr. Booze." Atop of all those great performances, though, is "Style" in which Frank and Dean succeed in modernizing Bing's wardrobe, and then the three of them sing together in their tuxes and boaters. I can't say that the number is musically perfect, but just seeing three giants of the recording industry singing a fun tune together is enough to get me any time.

Although this was made to be a Rat Pack vehicle, Bing Crosby is self-deprecatingly hilarious as the dorky Allen A. Dale. Classic Bing cliches pop up such as his inability to dance and the fact that he always gets the girl in the end, and he is also wonderful at being endearingly awkward.

Despite all these pluses, the movie seems to drag at times, especially when Guisborne and Marian are plotting. It's not necessarily that these scenes are bad in themselves, but they're not entertaining enough to merit the time that they take to watch on the screen. Also the opening "All for One" number along with a few others scattered about the show are underwhelming, especially given the high talent level of the performers.



Still in all this movie is a lot of fun, and I would rate it a 7.5 out of 10 for Rat Pack fans at least.

Film Review: Charade (1963)

Even strolling by the Seine with Cary Grant,
Audrey Hepburn cannot shake her fears of murder in Charade

The first time I saw this film, I was shocked to learn that it wasn't a Hitchcock; that's how good it is. Of course it was an easy mistake to make. When watching a slick, witty suspense film starring Cary Grant, of course one would think Hitchcock since Hitch used Grant in four of his masterful films: Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946),  To Catch a Thief (1955), and North by Northwest (1959). This 1963 gem, however, was directed by long-time MGM musical and comedy director Stanley Donen, who made such classic films as Royal Wedding (1950), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), and Singin' in the Rain (1952), which he co-directed with Gene Kelly. So although Donen was highly credentialed, taking on a project like Charade which is charged with action and suspense was highly unusual and risky to say the least. The result, however, was a thoroughly entertaining film.

Without giving away too much of the plot, since half the fun of this movie is the curve balls it throws you, the action starts when American ex-patriot Regina Lampert (Audrey Hepburn) returns home to her Paris flat to find that her husband has been murdered while attempting to flee the country with $250,000. Regina is at a loss to explain her husband's actions until a visit to the American embassy informs her that her husband was actually a former CIA agent who absconded with that money during the war. Now her husband's co-conspirators are threatening her life unless she can somehow figure out where her husband hid the cash, and the CIA wants it back too. Helping her along the way is a dashing fellow American (Cary Grant) whom she met in the Swiss Alps, but his evasive answers and outright lies make Regina reluctant to trust him despite her obvious attraction to him.Walter Matthau and James Coburn co-star as a CIA chief and one of the conspirators out for blood or money, respectively.

What keeps this movie from being too much as the bodies pile up, each murder more gruesome than the last, is the wonderful comedic talents of Cary Grant. A combination of witty dialog and Grant's stellar physical comedy abilities break up the tension and give both the audience and Audrey Hepburn's character new reasons to fall in love with the most attractive actor ever to grace the silver screen (Grant was 59 when he made this film, but still surprisingly handsome.) My favorite part has to be when he decides to take a shower with his clothes on.

This is also my favorite screen role for Audrey Hepburn, and certainly one of her most versatile. The way she alternately chases Cary Grant shamelessly and then repulses him always makes me laugh, and she runs the gamut of emotions perfectly from despondent to frightened to childishly glib. I honestly was never a Hepburn fan until I saw this film because I objected to her anorexic physique on the grounds that I've felt the repercussions of the media's obsession for thinness in women all too personally. I liked a lot of her other films, but I never thought her performance exceptional or memorable until this one (I don't count My Fair Lady because as good as she was in that film, I can't get over the fact that she didn't do her own singing, especially when Julie Andrews originated the role in the West End and Broadway. Epic fail, Hollywood. Epic fail.).

Despite my outright adoration for this film there are two things in it that I don't like. First I can't stand the scene at the nightclub in which participants must pass an orange to each other without the use of their hands. It was another scene designed to utilize Cary Grant's physical comedy skills, but it's awkward to watch and just too drawn-out. It eats up a good five minutes of an already long movie without adding anything to the plot. The second problem I have with it is that the deaths are too gory. Hitchcock understood that with suspense films less can be more, that not showing a murder can imprint it all the more deeply into an audience's consciousness, but Stanley Donen obviously didn't get this concept, showing us a graphic drowning victim, a slit throat victim, and a person who had been smothered. I'll admit to being a little bit of a wimp when it comes to violence, but it's especially jarring in such an old movie.

One last thing to note: Audrey Hepburn's last line of the film is one of my favorites ever.

I give this movie an 8.5 out of 10, one that can be watched almost ad infinum with pleasure.

Buy on DVD:

 Charade, Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief, North by Northwest, Royal Wedding, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Singin' in the Rain