Cash on Demand (1961)

Director: Quentin Lawrence
Writers: David T. Chantler and Lewis Greifer, based on the teleplay The Gold Inside by Jacques Gillies
Stars: Peter Cushing, André Morell, Richard Vernon and Norman Bird

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Richard Vernon may well be one of the least famous names whose centennials I’m covering this year but his is a familiar face to me from British film and television and I’m very happy I pulled this feature out to celebrate his life and career because it’s a hidden gem that I’ve never seen before.

It’s a Hammer but not a horror, as a strange sort of polite but nonetheless brutal heist film that ends up doing the same job as A Christmas Carol, a surprise I was not prepared for.

It’s a fourth opportunity for the leads, Peter Cushing and André Morell, to work together in film and in a fourth genre but with the power dynamic neatly reversed from The Hound of the Baskervilles two years earlier.

And it’s a remake that was made by many of the same hands. It was originally a teleplay for Theatre 70, a drama series produced by ATV, a year earlier, the episode called The Gold Inside. Morell and Vernon reprise their roles and the director, Quentin Lawrence, does likewise. The Cushing role was played by Richard Warner.

Lady of the Night (1925)

Director: Monta Bell
Writer: Adela Rogers St. Johns and Alice D. G. Miller
Stars: Norma Shearer, Malcolm Mac Gregor and George K. Arthur

I wasn’t expecting to like Lady of the Night as much as I did, especially as I had seen it before and didn’t rate it highly back in 2006. I’ve also never been a huge fan of Norma Shearer, who was the biggest female star at MGM back then, only partly because she was married to Irving Thalberg, their head of production.

However, she’s highly impressive here in a double role, as the eighteen year old versions of the two babies we meet at the beginning of the film. One is born poor, her father already in handcuffs as her mother names her Molly; Judge Banning soon sentences him to twenty years. The other is born rich, to the very same judge, her name being Florence.

Shearer delineates these two characters in a number of ways and, while I’m still puzzled as to why nobody who meets both ever chooses to comment that they look stunningly alike, I never confused them once, even though they are actively compared often, including in their very first scenes.

The Monster (1925)

Director: Roland West
Writer: Willard Mack and Albert G. Kenyon, based on the play by Crane Wilbur
Stars: Lon Chaney and Johnny Arthur

Here’s an interesting movie, but not for the reasons we expect. I’m up for anything that’s got Lon Chaney in the cast, but he doesn’t do much in this film and he overdoes what little he does. His other two extant 1925 movies are notable for him rather than other people; this one isn’t worth watching for Chaney alone.

However, it’s absolutely worth watching for fans of director Roland West, made before The Bat and The Bat Whispers and outdoing both of them on the old dark house front. In fact, this outdoes The Old Dark House, which wouldn’t be made for another seven years anyway. Once it gets moving, every scene seems to feature at least one and often two or three different old dark house tropes arriving so quickly that we can’t close our eyes in case we miss some.

It does take a little while to get moving and much of that is because, while Chaney was the big name, it’s really a Johnny Arthur vehicle, a comedy horror with him getting scared at any opportunity that arises but somehow making it through to be the hero anyway. In that way, it’s as much a precursor to Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein as The Old Dark House.

Cross of Iron (1977)

Director: Sam Peckinpah
Writers: Julius Epstein, Walter Kelley and James Hamilton, based on the book by Willi Heinrich
Stars: James Coburn, Maximilian Schell, James Mason, David Warner and Senta Berger

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Cross of Iron is a polarising movie and it’s not hard to see why both sides think the way they do. The people who dislike it see the weak plot and overwhelming amount of explosions. That seems fair. On the other hand, the people who like it tend to love it because it isn’t about plot but immersion and overwhelming is the point.

Initially, it’s a little jarring, because of, well, everything. Sure, we’re in World War II, which isn’t unusual, but it seems so otherwise.

For a start, we’re on the German side, which I should emphasise is not necessarily the Nazi side. There’s only one Nazi in this film and he meets an appropriately awful end: the Russian soldier he raped in a barn bit off his penis and Sgt. Steiner walks in the rest of her platoon to do with him what they will.

Images (1972)

Director: Robert Altman
Writers: Robert Altman and Susannah York
Stars: Susannah York, Rene Auberjonois, Marcel Bozzuffi, Hugh Millais and Cathryn Harrison

Index: 2025 Centennials.

I’m very happy that I chose to review Images to remember director Robert Altman on what would have been his hundredth birthday, but it’s a challenging movie to watch or review.

Of course, he was never an easy director to nail down. He hopped genres for fun—this is arguably a horror movie—and involved actors heavily in the writing process by having them develop their characters from his initial ideas. Susannah York has a writing credit here as she actually wrote the book that her character is writing in it, In Search of Unicorns.

If there’s such a creature as a typical Altman film, then this isn’t it. It doesn’t feature a huge ensemble cast. It doesn’t appear to contain an ounce of satire. Only one member of the cast is someone he worked with often. However, it’s a highly personal feature that’s as close to pure cinema as an American horror movie has got.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)

Director: Michael Cimino
Writer: Michael Cimino
Stars: Clint Eastwood, Jeff Bridges, George KEnnedy and Geoffrey Lewis

Index: 2025 Centennials.

I could have sworn that I’d seen Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, along with every other film that Clint Eastwood made during the seventies, but I was wrong because this was new to me.

It’s an odd film in a number of ways. For one thing, it’s a very likeable film even though I’m pretty sure it shouldn’t be. If any character in it charmed us in real life, we’d be worse off for the experience. For another, it’s violent crime action in the seventies style but told as an easy and free sixties road movie. In fact, it’s not too hard to see it as a modern take on the end of the Old West from debuting Michael Cimino.

It starts out with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot meeting for the first time, even if the former isn’t introduced for quite a while. Lightfoot is Jeff Bridges, who walks into Dependable Pete’s Used Cars in leather trousers and steals a car. Five minutes on, he swerves into a wheatfield to avoid a preacher, knocking down the man shooting at him. Eastwood is the priest.

That Certain Summer (1972)

Director: Lamont Johnson
Writers: Richard Levinson and William Link
Stars: Hal Holbrook, Martin Sheen, Joe Don Baker, Marlyn Mason, Scott Jacoby and Hope Lange

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Hal Holbrook turned the lead role in this TV movie down when it was offered to him, as he felt that nothing much happened in it. He isn’t wrong, at least from one perspective, but it’s a groundbreaking gamechanger from another.

He’s Doug Salter, who’s divorced with a son, lives in San Francisco and runs a contracting business. That son, Nick, who’s fourteen years old, lives down the coast in Los Angeles with his mother Janet, but is about to fly out to spend a summer with his dad, who he misses.

They drive around and see the sights, talk to each other in classic movie voices and host a party for friends and neighbours to celebrate Nick being there. Nick gets to see dad at work and he meets one of dad’s friends, Gary, who’s a sound engineer.

Late in the film, Nick takes off and spends a day riding the trams; he isn’t running away so much as he’s going walkabout to think about things, but it worries his parents, of course. He does come back, I should add, and flies home with his mum at the end of the movie.

The Swan (1925)

Director: Dmitriy Bukhovetskiy
Writer: Dmitriy Bukhovetskiy, based on the play by Ferenc Molnár
Stars: Adolphe Menjou, Ricardo Cortez and Frances Howard

If The Rag Man was an emotional but highly predictable film for the whole family, then The Swan is all of those things but for women. This is a textbook weepie, the sort of stereotypical picture that men hated and women wept over.

It’s based on a Hungarian play, A hattyú, or The Swan, by Ferenc Molnár, a comedy whose comedy seems to have been lost in translation. On the other hand, it had tragic undercurrents which are emphasised in this version. Some of the scenes almost seem brutal in their tragedy and it’s hard to imagine comedy ever having been associated. And I say that as a devotee of the blackest English humour. I see Kind Hearts and Coronets as an absolute masterpiece. I have no issue with comedy and tragedy co-existing.

The story also seems to be so threadbare as to be archetypal. Was it successful because it’s the originator of a trope? I don’t know. Given that I liked the 1956 remake for its dialogue, a notion helped by actors of the calibre of Grace Kelly, Estelle Winwood and Agnes Moorehead, not to forget Alec Guinness, there to deliver it, I wonder if this struggles because it inherently doesn’t have much dialogue, as a silent movie.

The Rag Man (1925)

Director: Edward F. Cline
Writers: Willard Mack and Robert E. Hopkins
Star: Jackie Coogan

The first entirely MGM outing for child star Jackie Coogan arrived four years after his huge appearance in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid and it borrows from it considerably.

For a start, he’s an orphan again, though he has a place in an orphanage this time out. The catch is that the orphanage is on fire when the film begins and so, rather cleverly, is the title card that tells us that.

He does climb out, using bedsheeets that are tied together but they’re also on fire and they drop him on the ground and wrap around him, so the firemen putting out the flames inadvertently bounce him out to the street, where a cop chases him away because he’s only dressed in a nightshirt.

And so he’s on the loose in New York City, a couple of years younger than Macaulay Culkin was when he made Home Alone II and without a packed wallet that will get him into the Plaza Hotel. Instead he sleeps his first night in the back of a rag man’s horsedrawn cart, in which he also finds a sweater, a pair of trousers and a familiar looking hat. He has to cut the trousers down to size by placing them on tram tracks, but that’s only the first of his bright ideas that works a treat.

Missing (1982)

Director: Costa-Gavras
Writers: Costa-Gavras and Donald E. Stewart, based on the book The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice by Thomas Hauser
Stars: Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek, Melanie Mayron and John Shea

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Jack Lemmon was nominated for an Oscar on eight films. The first was for Mister Roberts in 1955, for which he won as Best Supporting Actor, and I coincidentally watched that this week as prep for its sequel in Jack Nicholson’s First Thirty. Now I’m watching Missing for his centennial, as it was the last of the eight nods, this time as Best Actor. He lost to Ben Kingsley for the year’s biggest picture, Gandhi.

It’s also a rather timely film, given the news of late, as it’s the true story of a coup, in Chile in 1973, when the U.S. aided the removal of the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, in favour of a brutal military regime run by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

More specifically, given that most of those names, like Allende, Pinochet and even Chile, are carefully never mentioned in the film, it’s a look at the effect of such a coup on a family. The missing man is Charlie Horman, a writer from New York state, and much of the movie is dedicated to the search for him by his wife Beth and his father Ed, the latter of whom has flown out specially after not getting answers he likes from the powers that be back home.