Easter 2025 briefs

I blogged about the 1959 version of Ben-Hur yesterday. I'm a couple of weeks ahead in doing blog posts, and one of the things I've been doing is to look at the TCM schedules a month-plus in advance to see what's been scheduled that's currently on my DVR so that I can do a post on it. As a result, I didn't notice at the time I wrote that post that the silent version is also tonight's selection for Silent Sunday Nights, at midnight tonight.

The rest of TCM's Easter schedule is nothing especially noteworthy, largely because it feels less than in previous years and in part because there's a small enough number of movies that they seem to get repeated. And, of course, there's the second showing of Noir Alley mixed in. Two things are worth mentioning: one is the showing of Harvey at 10:00 PM, which is of course not an Easter movie at all but a movie with the presence, or lack of presence, of a rabbit playing a major part. The other thing is that TCM Imports is not part of the Easter programming, as it includes two of Yasujiro Ozu's films, Late Spring and Early Summer. I was thinking I might be doing a post on Late Spring in May, but it turns out that the May TCM schedule includes a different Ozu film, Early Spring.

I looked at the FXM schedule a few days before Easter and noticed that they weren't doing anything holiday-related, which is part of why I kept procrastinating about doing another briefs post. I was probably also a week late with ABC's annual airing of The Ten Commandments, since it wasn't on last night, what with the NBA playoffs having begun. I've got that on DVD now and might have done a post on it if it weren't for the fact that I've got such a ridiculous backlog of stuff on my YouTube TV cloud DVR as well as stuff I've put in my "save" lists of various FAST services.

By the same token, there are several obituaries that I failed to mention, with the biggest being Val Kilmer, who died at the beginning of the month. One of the movie channels on Pluto has actually been doing off-and-on marathons of Kilmer's movies over the past few weeks. More recently was the death of Patrick Adiarte, a name I immediately noticed because Adiarte played the kid brother in Flower Drum Song which I had just watched not long before the news of Adiarte's passing was announced. Flower Drum Song shows up on TCM again in May, so the post for it is already scheduled.

Oh, tomorrow is Easter

Tomorrow, April 20, is Easter Sunday, at least for those who follow western strands of Christianity. There's a set of Hollywood films dealing with the biblical tellings of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection that seem to get trotted out every year, one of which is the 1959 sound version of Ben-Hur, which kicks the day off at 6:00 AM.

This version of the story runs something like 3½ hours, depending on how you want to count the overture and intermission. Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) is a reasonably well-off man in Jersualem during the era when Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor and that famous carpenter was roaming around Judea preaching the gospel. He lives with his mom and sister, as well as servant to whose daughter Esther (Haya Harareet) Judah has been betrothed. Judah learns that his childhood friend and Roman citizen Messala (Stephen Boyd) is coming back to Judea. Unfortunately, Messala wants to exploit his friendship with Judah to get Judah to betray rebellious Jews, which Judah refuses to do, knowing fully well this will mean trouble should things go any more sour.

Of course they will, as a good 50 minutes into the movie the Romans are parading past Judah's villa when his sister knocks a roofing tile off, falling just inches from the governor. That's unforgivable, so Messala makes Judah a galley slave and imprisons Mom and sister, who eventually get leprosy, although that story line is at least another 90 minutes away. Judah is put on the ship captained by consul Quintus Arrius (Jack Hawkins), eventually saves Arrius' life, and gets freed and made Arrius' adopted son as a result, enabling him to go back to Judea to look for his family. Esther, rather than telling Judah his mom and sister are lepers, tells him they died, which leads Judah to seek vengeance on Messala.

That desire for vengeance is why Judah finally decides to take part in the famous chariot race, which we know he'll win, and spend the last 50 minutes or so looking for Mom and Sis since Messala tells him the truth. Along the way at several key points, Jesus shows up, filmed only from the back, and has a profound effect on the various characters in the story, including ultimately Judah.

I said at the beginning that this version runs long, and I do mean long. It's a good hour longer than the Ramon Novarro silent, as I mentioned in a brief post in 2013. I stand by the comments I made in that post. The 1959 version of Ben-Hur won a ton of Oscars, and the technical categories it won are probably mostly deserved, since I can't really be bothered to look through the entire list of Oscar nominations to determine whether some other movie had better costume design. The music, art direction, cinematography, and all that stuff are indeed of a very high standard.

But the acting and screenplay? I think they take a back seat to the much tighter Novarro version. A lot of the scenes feel like they go on way too long, notably for me being the time between being sentenced to the galleys to actually winding up rowing a boat. And then there's Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Hugh Griffith playing an Arab sheik and the financial backer of Judah in the chariot race. I'm surprised I didn't come across a bunch of modern reviews arguing he was a bad stereotype.

My criticisms aside, Ben-Hur is considered an epic, and for understandable reasons. Becuase of that, it's one that should definitely be on any film buff's list of "Essentials", even if you only watch it once.

Judex (1963)

I've mentioned several times how I've been recording too many foreign films, with the result that I've got a bunch of films that I have to watch before they expire from my DVR. This time, however, is different in that I've got a movie I recorded only a couple of months ago the last time it was on TCM but is showing up again: Judex, early tomorrow (April 19) at 4:15 AM.

Favraux (Michel Vitold) is a banker living in a French chateau sometime in the years not long before World War I. (The end has a title card mentioning 1914; the cars look like they could be 1910 vintage but could just as easly be 1920s; but the hairdos all scream 1960s.) He lives with his widowed daughter Jacqueline (Edith Scob) who has a young daughter of her own; and Marie (Francine Bergé), the governess hired by the family to help raise Jacqueline's daughter. Eventually, we learn that Favraux has developed the hots for Marie and would like to marry her, although she turns him down.

Meanwhile, Favraux has pressing problems. His daughter is about to announce her engagement, but that party may be disturbed when Favrau gets a letter signed by "Judex", which is a pseudonym comming from the Latin word for "avenger". It seems as though Favraux was fairly ruthless in getting to the top, starting off with finding some illicit information of powerful people and using that more or less to blackmail them. He is also alleged to have sent a man Kerjean to prison for a crime Kerjean didn't commit, while also having swindled a lot of people out of their money. This Judex supposedly knows all this, and says that if Favraux doesn't reimburse the people who harmed, bad things are going to happen to him. Favraux responds to this by running Kerjean over in his car, so we know he really is a bad guy.

Favraux hires a detective to play the part of a guest at the costume ball where he's going to announce his daughter's engagement, although the real intention is to figure out who this Judex is. At the ball, everybody is entertained until midnight, when Favraux is just about to announce that engagement for his daughter. Favraux is handed a glass of champagne... and promptly drops dead!

Except that it turns out Favraux is not really dead, only having been drugged by Judex who promptly robs the grave with help from his underlings since Judex turns out to be one of those Batman types. His plan is to keep Favraux prisoner for the rest of his live. But there are problems with this, as a Diana, who is a gangster, knows the location of those files Favraux had. And she plans to kidnap Jacqueline. Favraux is able to escape long enough to call Jacqueline, further complicating things.

This version of Judex is a remake of a serial from the silent era, and that's a bit of a problem, if you will. The reason why I say this is because the serial ran to a dozen chapters and five hours or so, with obvious points in those five hours to end one chapter. Trying to adapt this to a feature film that runs only about a third of the time is difficult, and at times makes it very difficult to figure out what's going on. Add to that the fact that characters are often wearing disguises, and it's in a language that I only studied for a couple of years in high school, and you can see why it has flaws.

Still, the idea is good, and the movie is entertaining enough if you're willing to stick with it, so give this version of Judex a try.

Two Guys from Milwaukee

In getting through the backlog of movies that I've watched off my DVR but have yet to do a post on, it's time to write about one of those movies that shows up on TCM often enough but that I'd never gotten around to watching before, Two Guys from Milwaukee.

The movie technically starts off at Pennsylvania Station in New York, although the opening scenes are really on a train. The two important passengers on that train are Prince Henry (Dennis Morgan) of one of those central European monarchies that in real life would have been overrun by Soviet-backed Communists a year or two after the movie was made, together with his advisor Count Oswald (S.Z. Sakall). Henry is on a goodwill tour of America, before his country votes on a plebiscite regarding whether to stay a monarchy. Henry thinks that if the vote is going to be rigged, he's going to want to meet real Americans.

Showing up at Penn Station and not realizing that a celebrity is about to get off the train is cab driver Buzz Williams (Jack Carson). He doesn't know anything about royalty, and if anything has mild contempt for them. In a plot twist that's fairly obvious, Henry decides he's going to escape from the train and pass himself off as a regular American, only to wind up taking the cab driven by Buzz. Unfortunately, Henry forgot to get any money when he absconded from the train, which is going to make paying for a cab difficult, as well as paying for dinner or getting a hotel room or anything like that.

Buzz lives with his sister Nan (Rosemary DeCamp), and since Henry has lied about where he was from and just happened to pick Buzz's hometown as where he is from, Buzz takes Henry home with him. Buzz also has a girlfriend Connie (Joan Leslie), and Buzz suggests the idea of a double date as Connie has a girlfriend Polly (Janis Paige).

As you might guess, Henry and Connie begin to develop feelings for each other, which is a problem since she's already got a boyfriend who's done nothing wrong, and because of that upcoming referendum. If monarchy wins, Henry getting married to a foreign commoner might be a problem. Meanwhile, there's still the issue that Henry is technically missing. Because this is a programmer, however, we know that it's going to resolve all its problems with a requisite happy ending.

Two Guys from Milwaukee is, as I just mentioned, little more than a programmer of the sort that Warner Bros. and the other studios churned out in the years before World War II. This one, however, was made just after the war, in 1946, so it does have the feel of being a bit out of place. That's not to say it's a bad movie, of course. Dennis Morgan and Jack Carson work well together, and the movie has a fun little coda at the end. But the sort of monarchy that Henry was a part of would have been destroyed by the recently-ended war, and the consequences of that are totally glossed over. Still, Two Guys from Milwaukee is entertaining enough, and definitely worth one watch at least.

William Shatner, monk

It's easy to forget that William Shatner was a classically trained actor before becoming Captain Kirk on Star Trek more or less turned his acting career into a bit of a parody, albeit a very successful one. So, a role that looking back seems terribly out of place is one of his earliest film roles, in the 1958 adaptation of the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel The Brothers Karamazov.

As you can guess from the title, there are multiple brothers, and that the action is set in Tsarist Russia. Yul Brynner is the star, playing Dmitri Karamazov, an officer in the army who is constantly getting himself into debt because of his high-living ways. Ivan (Richard Basehart) is a writer and a radical, while Alexei (that's William Shatner) is a young monk and in many ways the conscience of the family. Their mother -- well mothers, since they're the product of two marriages in the original book -- has died, but Dad Fyodor (Lee J. Cobb) is still alive, and a towering presence over the rest of the family.

Dad has a reasonable sum of money that could be a nice nest egg inheritance for three sons, and there may be a fourth son as well. Epileptic Smerdyakov (Albert Salmi) is rumored to be Fyodor's son, fathered out of wedlock, and now he's working as a servant to Fyodor and whom Fyodor treats very badly. Although, to be fair, Fyodor treats everybody badly, with the possible exception of his mistress Grushenka (Maria Schell). Dmitri, constantly being in debt, would like to be able to get that inheritance now, although in 1870s Russia I don't think they had those dishonest companies that would buy annuities for pennies on the dollar. Meanwhile, Dmitri has a mistress of his own in Katya (Claire Bloom) but starts to get interested in Grushenka, although that may only be for her money.

There are threats to kill Fyodor, and as you can surmise, Fyodor does ultimately wind up murdered. Alexei the monk clearly wouldn't do such a thing, while Ivan has the airtight alibi of having been in Moscow. Dmitri is the obvious candidate and gets put on trial for it, but we learn that Smerdyakov is smarter than he seems and has been plotting to have a confrontation between Dmitri and Fyodor. With that in mind, Dmitri proclaims his innocence at trial, and has Alexei as a character reference, even though there's a ton of circumstantial evidence that makes Dmitri appear guilty.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's original novel runs to something like 800 pages, depending of course on the size of the page. Suffice it to say that it's a pretty darn long novel. It's also as much a character and philosophical study as it is a narrative novel. Both of these things mean that it's the sort of book that can be tough to adapt to a more visual and narrative-driven medium like film. (Tolstoy is even more difficult in that regard.) Here, the 800 pages are distilled down to a bit shy of two and a half hours, but even this feels long because the characterizations don't allow for quick action.

As for the acting, Yul Brynner and Lee J. Cobb both get the opportunity to give outsized performances. Brynner, despite having been born in Vladivostok and being authentically Russian, feels like a caricature of Tsarist officer stereotypes. Cobb, as always, chews the scenery wildly. William Shatner is a decided supporting role, and he does the best he can with the material. If he hadn't gone on to Captain Kirk, I think his performance would be better regarded.

The Brothers Karamazov definitely has flaws because of the difficulties in translating the source material to the screen. But it's still interesting to see how the studio tried to pull it off.

Beau Brummell (1954)

Stewart Granger was cast in a whole bunch of movies that were period pieces from various eras of British history. When last I posted about Granger, it was for the Victorian-era film Blanche Fury. This time, we go back a couple of decades to the Regency, for the MGM costume drama Beau Brummell. It's airing tomorrow (April 16) at 3:30 PM as part of a morning and afternoon of movies dedicated not to Granger, but to supporting star Peter Ustinov.

You probably know that "Beau Brummell" is, even to this day, a byword for stylish fashion, and the term comes from a real person named George Bryan Brummell, who got the nickname Beau (played here by Stewart Granger). As the movie opens, Brummell is a captain in the British army in the late 1790s, when the real-life Brummell would have been about 20. Brummell's regiment is doing a military parade, and showing up for inspection is the Prince of Wales, the future King George IV (that's Peter Ustinov). Brummell shows himself to be good with a sword on horseback, in exercises involving cutting melons, and putting the sword through rope rings. Brummell gives the rings to another attendee, the socialite Lady Patricia (Elizabeth Taylor). But Brummell gets himself in trouble when he comments to the Prince of Wales that the epaulettes are too big, seemingly designed to make his highness look slimmer and not for ergonomics.

Brummell eventually quits the army, in part because life in the army is expensive since in those days officers had to provision their own uniforms and horses. Brummell runs across a candidate running for Parliament, and makes more comments, partly about fashion, such as the wasteful expense of powdering one's hair and how the flour could be used to feed the poor, as well as some comments about the royals, which again brings Brummell to the attention of the Prince of Wales. This time, however, Brummell is able to ingratiate himself to the prince, in part because of his views on the king, George III (Robert Morley in a small role). If you remember from The Madness of King George, the king's mental capacity had long been a question, along with his testy relationship with the Prince of Wales. The King wants his son to marry a suitable royal from Germany, while the prince is in love with a different woman.

The Prince of Wales, having become friends with Brummell, helps Brummell rise in society, but there are storm clouds on the horizon. One is that Brummell has been spending freely to maintain the appearances of being a member of the aristocracy, and this has led to heavy debts that he's going to be unable to pay off. If he can't pay them off, eventually the debtors are goingto come for him, with the likelihood of debtors' prison looming. The other issue is Lady Patricia. Brummell loves her, and she certainly likes him. But she's long been betrothed to a man who is of her proper social class, Lord Mercer.

Eventually, Brummell and the Prince of Wales have a falling out after he becomes regent and assumes more power. This means he no longer has a protector and is going to have to flee to France post-Napoleon to stay out of debtors' prison. The movie at least gives Brummell the chance at reconciliation with the former Prince of Wales, who by this time has assumed the throne and is George IV.

The problem, if you will, with Beau Brummell, is that it's a fairly fanciful version of history. Lady Patricia is not a real person, but the bigger issue is that in real life, Brummell outlived George IV by a decade. Additionally, from what I've read, he didn't particularly have public political views the way he's presented here. But the total Hollywood lack of historicity aside, Beau Brummell is a good example of how MGM could make a fine color costume drama. Granger is OK, Taylor doesn't have much to do, and Peter Ustinov steals the show. Morley is quite good too, although he only has one or two scenes. If you want to see an example of what MGM could do well, Beau Brummell is definitely a good example.

Lady Be Good

Red Skelton is TCM's Star of the Month for April, and as I mentioned last week, I've got a couple of his movies on my DVR that are showing up as part of the salute to him. First up is a movie that has Skelton in a supporting role: Lady Be Good, early tomorrow (April 15) at 5:00 AM.

Eleanor Powell gets top billing here, although that was a ruse by MGM to get audiences into the theater. In fact, the female lead is Ann Sothern, whom MGM was trying to turn into a musical star. She plays Dixie Donegan, and as the movie opens, she's in divorce court, trying to obtain a divorce from her husband Eddie Crane (Robert Young). This introductory scene is a pretense to go to a flashback, as Donegan tells Judge Murdock (Lionel Barrymore) how the two met and why she wants a divorce. Before the marriage, Crane was a composer, and his girlfriend Dixie sees him and his lyricist have difficulty collaborating. Somehow, Dixie is able to come up with lyrics for Eddie's latest music, and the song they release together becomes a big hit, leading them to get married as well.

Eleanor Powell plays Marilyn Marsh, who is a friend of Dixie's and to a lesser extent Eddie's. She's also a star on Broadway who dances to the sort of music written by people like Eddie. She's happy to see the two married, but distressed by the fact that after they get married, Eddie lets success go to his head, where Dixie just wants to go on writing music for another Broadway show. This is what leads to the Dixie deciding she needs a divorce, even if we all know the two of them are still friends. They just can't work together as husband and wife, at least not until Eddie learns how to combine the two.

After the divorce, Dixie tries to find other composers, while Eddie seems unable to create new music. Eventually he calls Dixie and she thinks he's looking once again for a lyricist. Except that he wants someone to clean up his apartment, as if he thinks this way she'll come back to him. She's already got a new boyfriend, but once again we know this drip isn't right for her. Mutual friends like Marilyn, or Red Willet (that's Red Skelton) who plugs Eddie's and Dixie's songs, try to bring Dixie and Eddie back together. They're even seemingly successful, except that their second marriage hits a snag for the same exact reasons the first marriage did. Still, we know that Dixie and Eddie are going to wind up together in the final reel, so the question is how are they going to resolve their problems.

The on-again, off-again romance story in Lady Be Good is serviceable, and Young and Sothern are able to handle this light drama material well. Red Skelton was on his way up here, and was I think brought in for comic relief which he is unsurprisingly good at providing with his brand of physical comedy. But Lady Be Good is really to be watched for the music and dancing. Arthur Freed, who was of course a lyricist before he become a producer at MGM and made those big post-war Technicolor musicals, provides the song "Your Words and My Music", while some famous composers have old songs of theirs borrowed, with a couple of songs by the Gershwins (including the title number), and "The Last Time I Saw Paris" having been done by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern. Eleanor Powell has a very good dance number she does with a dog, but most critics mention a different Powell number as the highlight of the film, one danced to "Fascinating Rhythm".

Despite the story which feels like a retread, fans of MGM musicals and dancing will, I think, love Lady Be Good.

Pat O'Brien grows a moustache

Ever since moving and getting access to reliable high-speed internet two years ago, I've been able to watch the FAST services. Tubi seems to have access to a whole bunch of stuff that wound up in the public domain. One that I hadn't heard of before seeing it in the "classic" movies section was Slightly Honorable.

The movie starts off with the idea that perhaps there's an island somewhere in the South Pacifc that doesn't have corruption, but we're in America, 8,000 miles away. Cut to a shot of the highway commissioner in some state getting killed in a road accident, which is the height of irony because the commissioner was the one more or less responsible for the shoddy state of the roads, what with all the graft in the highway department. At his funeral are newspaper publisher Vincent Cushing (Edward Arnold), who is in on the graft and getting wealthy from it; and attorney John Webb (Pat O'Brien), who wants to eliminate corruption and graft.

Complicating matters is that one of Webb's clients, Alma Brehmer (Claire Dodd) just happens to be the mistress of one Vincent Cushing. Webb and Cushing are brought together again when Alma invites Webb to a swanky party at a nightclub hosted by Cushing. It's also a place for Webb to meet chorine Ann Seymour (Ruth Terry), who thinks of Webb as someone to look up to as well as woo once he saves her from one of the brutes at Cushing's party trying to slap her around because he's jealous of her dancing briefly with Ann. Ann, however, seems mostly to be comic relief, which is surprising considering that Eve Arden is also in the film playing the part of Webb's secretary.

Up to now the movie has been more comedy than drama, although things are about to take a turn. Alma being one of Webb's clients, she wants him to see her about some jewelry Cushing gave her and that she wants appraised so she can have it added to her insurance policy. Webb goes up to her swanky apartment, and finds that somebody's stabbed her! Needless to say, since he's the one to have found her, he's an obvious suspect. Cushing's wife has good reason to worry that perhaps her husband could be held responsible, what with his having an obvious motive of trying to silence poor Alma. So she tries to keep anything bad about Cushing from being released. Worse for Webb is that Cushing's daughter actively wants to implicate Webb. Helping to save Webb is his legal firm partner Sampson (a young Broderick Crawford).

I mentioned above that the movie starts off on a somewhat humorous tone, and in the years before the US got involved in World War II there was quite a cycle of comic murder mystery-type movies. However, Strictly Honorable takes a slightly different tack of being humorous up to the murder and then tacking a much darker turn. It's an odd strategy, and one that doesn't always work. However, the flaws in the movie are also in part to it being a low-budget independently produced movie.

Not that Strictly Honorable is a bad movie; it's more that it's the sort of thing where it's easy to see why it's fallen through the cracks and become largely forgotten.

The American Film Theatre

Back in the 1970s, producer Ely Landau tried a bold experiment of taking prominent, mostly modern playwrights, and producing more minimalist versions of their plays as movies. Tickets for these movies would then be sold together, like buying a subscription to a stage theater or the ballet or opera. This project, called the American Film Theatre, only lasted two years and produced about a dozen movies in all. Among them is a version of Edward Albee's play A Delicate Balance.

The leads here are Katharine Hepburn and Paul Scofield. They play a married couple, Agnes and Tobias respectively, who have made it in life and are living an upper middle class life in suburban Connecticut of the generation of American prosperity that followed the second World War (the play was first produced in 1966 and the movie was released in late 1973). The sort of older couple who would stay in on a Friday night and enjoy the fruits of their life of hard work. Or, at least it seems they've made it.

Unfortunately, Agnes has a sister Claire (Kate Reid) who drinks too much and has been in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous and has as been rather less of a success at life. As a result, Claire lives with Agnes and Tobias. I imagine it can't be much fun for Tobias, but then they're at an age where life it more about a pleasant enough routine than fun. They can settle down to a nice dinner before enjoying the weekend.

At least, they can until a couple of neighbors and best friends knock on their door. Harry (Joseph Cotten) and Edna (Betsy Blair) are a married couple who seem to have just as good a life as Agnes and Tobias. But somehow, suddenly, they've both decided they're going to have a midlife crisis at exactly the same time. The two have reached the conclusion that they're terrified of... something that they can't quite figure out what it is. Except that whatever it is, they know they can't live in their current house. So they're just going to knock on Agnes and Tobias' door and move right in. And Agnes and Tobias are willing to let them do this because they're such good friends and have enough spare bedrooms to do so. It's a turn of events that makes no sense in any sort of real life, but there you are.

Things go from bad to worse. Agnes and Tobias have an adult daughter, as well as a son who died some time back. The adult daughter, Julia (Lee Remick), has made an even bigger mess of her life than her aunt Claire, and has just announced she's getting a divorce from her fourth husband. So she's coming back to her parents' place since she needs a place to stay. And dammit, Harry and Edna have her room. So there's a lot now for everybody to bicker about and talk in unnatural stage dialogue.

I suppose that the material in A Delicate Balance is the sort of stuff that might work well on the live stage where you've got a live audience to play off of and play to with communal reactions. And I can certainly see why stage actors would read a script like this and jump at the chance to develop characters. But it's material that's decidedly not going to be to everyone's taste, as well as material that doesn't translate to film as well as other plays do. So definitely some people are going to like it. I'm just not one of those people.

Grosse Pointe Blank

It may seem hard to believe, but it's been 28 years to the day since the release of Grosse Point Blank. I have it on my DVR since one of the TCM Guest Programmers some months back selected it. Recently, I finally watched it to do a review on it.

John Cusack stars as Martin Blank, and as the movie opens up he's in Miami, and on the phone with his executive assistant Marcella (Joan Cusack). It's quickly revealed that Martin is in a hotel room on a high floor, working as a sniper to kill some figure. To lighten the mood, Marcella tells Martin that today's mail includes an invitation to his 10-year high school reunion in Grosse Point, MI, a tony suburb of Detroit.

The killing goes wrong and multiple people get killed thanks in part to fellow hired killer Grocer (Dan Aykroyd). Martin also gets a phone call from Grocer, about a plan Grocer has to consolidate the hired assassin business, something Martin doesn't want, even though they're about the only people who can understand each other. Certainly having trouble understanding Martin is Dr. Oatman (Alan Arkin), whom Martin has been seeing in no small part because being a hired killer leaves him with all sorts of mental issues. Well, that and ex-girlfriend Debi, whom Martin jilted on prom night ten years ago.

And then Marcella gives Martin his next assignment, which is to kill a guy who's about to blow the whistle on some sort of corrupt business or other. Obviously there's some bad guy who doesn't want this guy to testify in court, which is why the guy is a target. The thing is, the target is in Detroit. This would be the perfect opportunity for Martin to kill two birds with one stone, so to say. Not only can he do another job, but he can go home and attend his class reunion.

Except that, as Tom Wolfe wrote, you can't go home again. Well, you can go back to the place you used to live, but it will have changed, and not always for the better. Martin finds out that his old childhood home was sold and redeveloped into a convenience store, with his mom being forced into a nursing home with one or another form of dementia. Debi is still in Grosse Pointe, working at the local independent radio station, and not pleased at seeing Martin considering how he jilted her all those years ago.

Worse is the fact that there seem to be quite a few people who want Martin dead. There are two Feds following him around, while another hitman tries to blow up the convenience store while Martin is in it. He's convinced Grocer is responsible for at least some of the people on his tail. And there's still that reunion to attend. Perhaps Martin might be safe there, since you have to be a graduate, or guest of a graduate to be there. There's also that contract killing Martin is supposed to carry out, which has also not been resolved.

Grosse Pointe Blank is a quirky little movie where you never quite know where it's going to go next, and that's decidedly to the film's benefit. I think it also helped me that I was in high school in the late 1980s, so a lot of the nostalgia vibe was definitely in play. The performances are also all enjoyable, with a bit of a surprise turn from Dan Aykroyd since the movie is a dark comedy and not the sort of comedy he'd normally be more associated with. Alan Arkin is good in his small role too.

If you haven't seen Grosse Pointe Blank before, it's definitely worth a watch.