I am a great film fan as regular readers will know, particularly classic films. I do occasionally watch a film at the cinema but generally I reckon I am really your regular couch potato type of guy who tends to watch films in the comfort of home with a large cup of tea and perhaps a corned beef sandwich nearby.
Most people will have the experience of settling down to watch something good on the TV only to find that the film you have waited for is in fact, a load of old cobblers. What can you do but flip through the channels and try and find something else to watch. The big problem there is if you are watching during the evening, most films start at 9pm so if you have to flip over twenty minutes into a dud film, you’ll have missed the first twenty minutes of the good film that started over on some other channel.
Yes, it can be a hard life for us dedicated couch potatoes, that’s why I like to have a good DVD on standby to rescue the evening if things go sadly wrong.
According to Wikipedia: globally, film production varies significantly by country and year, but in 2023, China produced nearly 780 feature films, while the UK saw 207 films go into production, and the US and Canada saw 569 movies released.
To be honest, looking at those figures it’s hard to understand why a bad film actually gets made. Look at the process a bad film has to go through. Someone has an idea for a film, then they either write a screenplay or pay someone to write one. The screenplay comes to the attention of a producer and he says something like “I bet Brad Pitt would be good in the lead, and, what about Jennifer Anniston for the female lead”.
Scripts are sent out, a budget is raised, directors, cameramen, sound people, set designers and all manner of people come on board. The film is made and released. The critics go to see it and think, wow, this film stinks. Nobody comes to see it and a few weeks later it’s suddenly on Sky cinema with someone hired to write a whole lot of (lying) complimentary stuff about it to make you watch it.
People do watch it, realise it’s bad and twenty minutes later they change channel and are now watching a re-run of Star Trek that was made in 1968. Why didn’t someone way back down the line say ‘hang on, this is rubbish, let’s scrap it and film something else?’
Of course, one man’s Oscar winner is another man’s straight to DVD seriously bad film.
Here’s the crazy thing though, sometimes those bad films are so bad that you actually like them. Anyway, for this week’s blogging entertainment, I thought I’d list a few examples of rubbish films that I kind of enjoy.
Uncle Buck.
Uncle Buck is a complete load of old tosh but I just seem to be drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Never seen it? Really? OK it’s a sort of variant on the film Home Alone and in fact one of the characters is played by that kid from the Home Alone films, Macauley Culkin.
In this film a couple have to leave home because the wife’s father has had a heart attack. Who can they get to babysit the three kids? No one is available so the no-good bum of a brother-in-law is roped in, you guessed it, Uncle Buck.
Uncle Buck is played by the late John Candy and he has to contend with kids he doesn’t even know including, as well as young Mr Culkin, two screen sisters, one of them a teenage girl with a big attitude problem. She is completely embarrassed by her uncouth uncle and his smoke screen producing old banger automobile and even though the film is just a notch above rubbish, it’s actually quite fun in parts.
Buck sorts out ‘Bug’, the teenage girl’s cheating boyfriend and in doing so finally makes friends with his teenage niece. Uncle Buck is a great film to watch when you’re tired and not really paying attention and I always get the feeling it was written by a sort of committee of writers. (Probably the same committee that wrote Home Alone and Three Men and a Baby and so on.)
The thing about Uncle Buck is that the star, John Candy is actually pretty funny (in parts) and there are some actual funny elements to the film. Believe it not, even though I once hated this film, I’m beginning to warm to it.
Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves
There have been numerous film versions of the Robin Hood legend and for me the stand out one is the Errol Flynn version with Errol as Robin, Olivia De Havilland as Maid Marian and Basil Rathbone playing the villain. In this rather dire version made in 1991, Kevin Costner plays the legendary English hero with an accent that would not be out of place on the streets of New York.
Costner, as the noble Robin of Loxley, returns from the crusades to find that his father (not a bad performance by British favourite Brian Blessed) has been hung and his home laid to ruin by the Sheriff of Nottingham, played in a villainous but slightly camp way by Alan Rickman, whose performance was universally praised. Robin was accompanied by Azeem, a Muslim who feels he has to repay Robin for saving his life.
The film featured the hit single Everything I Do, I Do it For You sung by Bryan Adams and also had a small cameo from Sean Connery playing King John. The exteriors were shot in the UK and one particular location was at Sycamore Gap, just by Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. The tree used in the sequence became known as the Robin Hood tree which featured in the news in 2023 when it was cut down by vandals.
The film does start out fairly seriously with Robin escaping from capture in the holy lands and then making his way back to England. Alan Rickman’s performance later in the film gives the story a lighter sort of tone and although I’ve always preferred other versions of the Robin Hood legend, over the years I’ve actually begun to like this one.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
So what have we here? A young American lad (Matthew Broderick) decides to have a day off school by pretending to be sick. He calls over his hypochondriac friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) and gets him to call their school with the fake news that his girlfriend’s grandmother has died so she (Mia Sara) can also get a day off and the three decide to have a little fun by going out in Cameron’s father’s beloved Ferrari.
The headmaster of the school (the Principal as the Americans call them) knows something is up and is determined to catch Ferris in the act of truancy.
The whole thing is a load of old rubbish but like the other two films mentioned above, it has somehow wormed its way into my affections.
The Vikings
I thought I might finish with that classic rubbish film, The Vikings. The Vikings is a 1958 epic produced by Kirk Douglas who also starred in the film. Douglas and Tony Curtis star as Viking half brothers and if my memory serves me right, they don’t actually know they are brothers. They do a lot of raiding and pillaging over in England and it turns out Tony Curtis might be the heir to a Kingdom in England and Kirk Douglas might be the heir to the Viking leadership. To be honest I’ve never been really sure what the score is even after looking up the film on Wikipedia but the finale ends with Kirk Douglas about to bump off Tony Curtis but hesitates for a moment having been told Tony Curtis is actually his half brother and then during that second of hesitation Curtis manages to bump off Kirk, or was it the other way round?
Anyway, the whole film is a mildly entertaining load of old tosh and my brother and I used to watch it as children and try to imitate the rather catching musical theme.
Once again, despite this being a completely dire film, I always tend to watch it for reasons completely unknown to anyone, especially myself.
What bad films do you enjoy?
Back in the 1970s my Saturday ritual involved getting the bus into town and scouring book and record shops for, yes, you’ve guessed it, books and records. One day back then I was flipping through the posters in one particular shop. The posters were the music stars of the 70s; Elton John, Mick Jagger, Suzi Quatro, David Bowie and so on but one was a picture of a really good looking guy with a fifties combed back hair style. In some pictures he was dressed like a cowboy and in others in a red jacket and denim jeans. The guy behind the counter must have seen me wondering who the guy was and he told me he was a film star called James Dean. He handed me a paperback book about the actor and I took it home and read it and very soon I was trying to find out everything I could about him.
The paperback book I bought that day in the record shop in the 1970’s was probably James Dean: A Short Life by Venable Herndon. It wasn’t a great book but an interesting introduction to Dean and who he was. It detailed his struggle for acting roles, TV work in New York, his apartment at 19 West Sixty-Eighth Street, his three films, his doomed affair with Pier Angeli and of course his death.
Another book I picked up only recently was another picture album James Dean: Portrait of Cool edited by Leith Adams and Keith Burns. It’s an album of photographs found in the Warner Bros archive and some have not been published before. Included are all sorts of documents such as casting sheets, production notes and messages. Dean’s address is listed as 3908 West Olive Avenue which I think might have been a place he shared with Dick Davalos who played his brother in East of Eden. During Rebel Without a Cause, Dean was listed as living at 1541 Sunset Plaza Drive.
I’m not sure which came first for me, the book or the film but I actually think it was the book. The Godfather was written by Mario Puzo and is the story of Don Vito Corleone, the head of one of the five mafia families of New York. The book opens with the wedding of Don Corleone’s daughter and Puzo sets the scene and introduces the various characters.
Francis Ford Coppola was the director of the film version and was also the co-writer of the screenplay along with Mario Puzo. Coppola wanted Marlon Brando to play the part of Don Corleone even though Brando at the time was rather unpopular with the producers. He was expensive, his last few films had not done well and his time wasting attitude had added huge expenses to his pictures. After the director had made the producers understand how important Brando was, they set various conditions for his employment. He would have to work for a reduced salary and put up a bond to ensure he would not delay the production. Another was that he had to have a screen test. Coppola has told the story in various interviews how he and his film crew had entered Brando’s house like ninjas and quietly set up their equipment. Brando slicked down his hair with shoe polish and stuffed cotton balls into his mouth to make the transformation into the aging mafia boss.
Coppola decided that instead of finding the horse at the end of his bed like in the book, it would be better if Woltz awoke, was disturbed by something wet, pulls the bedclothes away to see blood and then uncovers the horse’s head. The head was the actual head of a horse, procured from a dog meat factory and Coppola mentions on the commentary to my DVD version that lots of animal lovers sent him hate mail about the horse, even though the horse had been condemned to its fate anyway.
As previously mentioned, the book does have some storylines which were not used in the film but one chapter was a look at the beginnings of Vito Corleone. Born Vito Andolini in the Sicilian village of Corleone, Vito’s father was murdered by a local mafia boss and the young Vito was smuggled away to America. In America he took the name of Corleone and seemed to slip quietly into the role of mafia Don by murdering Fanucci, a New York Sicilian Godfather who preyed on his fellow Italians. Although this element of the story wasn’t used, Coppola kept the storyline for use in The Godfather Part II. The follow up film was a film classic in its own way.
Ida Lupino, like Roddy MacDowell, was born in England, in fact both lived in the Herne Hill area of London. She wanted to be a writer rather than an actress but went into acting as she was part of a theatrical family and it seems that becoming an actor was expected of her. She appeared in many British films before moving to the USA in 1933.
Myrna studied dance in Los Angeles. She had small parts in many silent pictures but some stills of her appeared in Motion Picture magazine and led to a contract with Warner Bros.
What attracted me to the persona of Marilyn Monroe? Well, apart from her obvious charms as a very attractive lady it’s her death that has always interested me. I’m a sucker for a modern mystery whether it’s the assassination of JFK, the disappearance of Amelia Aerhart or Marilyn’s own strange death. The obvious solution is that Marilyn committed suicide. She had tried suicide quite a few times before and various people along the years have saved her from death, including her acting coach Natasha Lytess and her third husband playwright Arthur Miller. Suicide is the obvious answer to her death but personally, I’m not so sure.
Norman Mailer’s book about Monroe finished with a photo of Joe DiMaggio, grief stricken on the day of her funeral and he reckons we can perhaps surmise Marilyn’s true worth just by the look on Joe’s face that day. I cannot disagree.
I thought I’d start with Gone with the Wind and see where it takes me. Gone with the Wind was a major film adaptation of the book by Margaret Mitchell. The book was a huge hit and producer David O Selznick bought the film rights. Production was delayed for a long while as Selznick was determined to get Clark Gable for the part of the roguish Rhett Butler. Another delay was a distribution deal with MGM which couldn’t be finalised until Selznick’s then current deal with United Artists had expired. Selznick used the delay to begin a huge search for an actress to play the part of Scarlett O’Hara, the spoilt daughter of a plantation owner in the deep south of America. Scarlet has a crush on Ashley Wilkes played by British actor Leslie Howard in possibly his most famous role. The film was one of the major hits of 1939 and was the highest earning film up to that time.
In 1938 Leslie Howard played the part of Professor Higgins in the film production of Pygmalion based on the play by George Bernard Shaw. A musical version was a big hit on the stage in the 1960s. Julie Andrews played the part of Eliza Doolittle to great acclaim on the stage but when the time came to make a film version in 1964, the producers wanted a major star and so the part went to Audrey Hepburn.
I had a few ideas for the title of this post. I had A Piece of My Life on the brain for a long time and then substituted A Pizza My Life (A piece of my life, geddit?) I even had a graphic sorted showing a slice of pizza. The thing with that I thought is that even though it ranges from funny to faintly humorous, I reckoned I would be giving people the wrong idea and that readers might have been expecting a post about, well pizza. Just lately I’m trying to optimise my titles for SEO (search engine optimisation) and at the same time also trying to give the impression that I know something about it. Some time ago I did a few posts titled 
Back in the 1960’s I was a big fan of the Apollo moon missions and on UK TV one of the presenters was James Burke. Burke also did a TV show called Connections. It was a really fascinating series which connected various historical events to make a sort of chain which led up to something which was pretty unexpected. The episode that stands out in my memory was one about the atom bomb, various unconnected events and discoveries that together, led to the splitting of the atom. In today’s post, I’ve tried to do something similar but all relating to the world of film, so here are five fascinating connections.
The first thing to remember about films is this, they are not a public service, they are made to make money. They start life as a business proposition. Producers start by asking would the public want to see this? Would they pay to see this? Suppose we got famous film star Mr X to star opposite film actress Miss X? One sure fire way of making the public want to see something is by making the film again. How can they make it again? By making the sequel! Sequels can be good, they can be bad but sometimes they can be downright ugly . .
Every now and then, the film industry will make a film about itself, yes, a movie about the movie industry. There a quite a few I could include in a post like this but here are three of my favourites.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 