Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925)

Director: Donald Crisp
Writer: Jack Cunningham, based on the novel Don Q’s Love Story by K. & Hesketh Prichard
Stars: Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Astor, Jack McDonald and Donald Crisp

Index: That's a Wrap!

It’s a long while since I’ve seen the original The Mark of Zorro, a Douglas Fairbanks vehicle based on the first appearance of Zorro, a short story called The Curse of Capistrano, published a single year earlier. Zorro came quickly to film.

However, this is only a sequel in name, as it was based on a Don Q novel instead, a Spanish character called Don Quebranta Huesos, who first appeared in 1904, so predated Zorro. Don Q’s Love Story was the first Don Q novel after a couple of short story collections, all written by a mother and son writing team.

Here, due to Hollywood story manipulation, Don Quebranta Huesos becomes Don Cesar de Vega, son of Don Diego de Vega, now formally outed as Zorro. He’s a Californian of Spanish blood, though almost the entire story unfolds in Spain, with young Don Cesar visiting “for a period of travel and study”, as per a tradition for eldest de Vega sons.

Fright Night (1985)

Director: Tom Holland
Writer: Tom Holland
Stars: Chris Sarandon, William Ragsdale, Amanda Bearse, Stephen Geoffreys and Roddy McDowall

Index: Make It a Double.

After Heaven Help Us, Stephen Geoffreys was given the lead part in Fraternity Vacation, then found the role for which he’s most known, Evil Ed Thompson in Fright Night. It made his name and it doesn’t shock me that it was his second Make It a Double pick.

What shocked me was how much (and how little) I’d remembered of this film from my last viewing many decades ago.

I remembered the core of the story, about a teenager, Charley Brewster, who realises that his new next door neighbour, Jerry Dandridge, is a vampire, but nobody believes him. So he turns to his hero, Peter Vincent, a horror actor and host of the TV show Fright Night Theatre, who is a renowned vampire killer. Of course, Vincent thinks Charley’s mad too as vampires aren’t real. Until he realises that they are.

The Great Impostor (1960)

Director: Robert Mulligan
Writer: Liam O’Brien, based on the book by Robert Crichton
Stars: Tony Curtis, Edmond O'Brien, Arthur O'Connell, Gary Merrill, Joan Blackman, Raymond Massey, Robert Middleton and Karl Malden

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Like many, I thoroughly enjoyed Catch Me If You Can, the 2002 movie with Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio. It was fiction but based on the true story of a ballsy conman called Frank Abagnale, Jr. who became different people to get what he wanted. Well, partly true, because many doubts have been cast on the veracity of his claims and I can see why. Some of them do seem to have been borrowed from this film.

This is another true story about a different ballsy conman who became different people, a man called Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been debunked and yet it came first by half a century. Tony Curtis plays Demara, and he’s called him his favourite role from a long and distinguished career.

While Abagnale did what he did for money, Demara seems to have done what he did for a much better reason: to help people. Well, that and because he simply can’t grasp why anyone has to settle for less than they’re worth, just to comply with society’s rules. He learns that as a child when his father loses his small chain of movie theatres then is hired back as a simple projectionist. It isn’t right, he thinks.

Heaven Help Us (1985)

Director: Michael Dinner
Writer: Charles Pupura
Stars: Andrew McCarthy, Mary Stuart Masterson, Kevin Dillon, Malcolm Danare, Jennie Dundas, Kate Reid, Wallace Shawn, Jay Patterson, John Heard and Donald Sutherland

Index: Make It a Double.

While Stephen Geoffreys’s second choice for Make it a Double was the film he’s best known for, Fright Night, he picked this first. It’s an odd mix of comedy and drama that gave a number of young actors early roles: it was the third for Andrew McCarthy and Mary Stuart Masterson, but the first for Kevin Dillon, Patrick Dempsey and, indeed, Geoffreys.

The version I watched still had the original title of Catholic Boys intact, but I can see why it was changed for the American market. It may have misled a lot of viewers, given that half of it is serious drama, exposing everyday life in a strict Catholic school, St. Basil’s in Brooklyn, but the other half is wild comedy, not quite to the degree of Porky’s but far closer than would be guessed with a title like Catholic Boys.

The lead character is Michael Dunn, who we watch transfer into St. Basil’s and try to find a place in the established pecking order, which ends up being as one of five boys who coalesce into rather than naturally form a group. That’s them on the poster.

Strike (1925)

Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Writers: Proletkult under the direction of Valerian Pletnev
Stars: First Workers’ Theatre of Proletkult

Index: That's a Wrap!

As propositions go, the series of seven silent Soviet Union propaganda films called Towards Dictatorship of the Proletariat isn’t very high on my priority list. However, only one was made and it was the debut of Sergei Eisenstein, who came out seriously swinging.

After a quote from Lenin about the strength of the working class being organisation, part one of six promises us that “All is calm at the factory”. So far, so boring. However, then the cinematography leaps into action.

There’s a great characterful close up, a tasty dissolve, a delightfully choreographed shot of a busy hallway and a gorgeous high dolly shot through a factory floor. That’s the first twenty seconds. No, I’m not kidding.

No Way to Treat a Lady (1968)

Director: Jack Smight Writers: John Gay, based on the novel by William Goldman
Stars: Rod Steiger, Lee Remick and George Segal

Index: 2025 Centennials.

I love plucking films I’ve never heard of out of filmographies entirely due to research. Rod Steiger was a giant of American cinema, which means that there’s no shortage of films I could have chosen to celebrate his centennial.

This is one I’d never even heard of before, but he’s both the lead and the villain, he was at the height of his powers a year after In the Heat of the Night and he plays a character who plays other characters to strangle women and taunt the police. The fact that it’s based on a William Goldman novel was just a bonus.

As the film starts, he’s Fr. Kevin McDowell, an Irish priest with red hair whistling his way down the road to visit Mrs. Molloy, widow and lapsed Catholic, so that he can drink her port, tickle her mercilessly and then strangle her to death. It’s clearly all to do with his mother.

The Wizard of Oz (1925)

Director: Larry Semon
Writers: L. Frank Baum, Jr. Leon Lee and Larry Semon, based on the story by L. Frank Baum
Stars: Dorothy Dwan, Oliver Hardy, Curtis McHenry and Larry Semon

Index: That's a Wrap!

While the production values of this take on L. Frank Baum’s classic story don’t come close to the famous 1939 version, there’s a lot here that might surprise. And hey, they’re a heck of a step up from The Patchwork Girl of Oz in 1914, a film written and released by Baum himself!

He died in 1919 so didn’t have a hand in this but his son, credited as L. Frank Baum Jr. even though his name was Frank Joslyn Baum, did. However, it’s hardly faithful in its adaptation, even by the low standards of other versions, including 1939, which changed a lot more than the colour of Dorothy’s slippers. After all, the Wicked Witch of the West only got 26 pages in the original book!

She isn’t in this version at all and I wish that Dorothy wasn’t either. It’s not that namesake Dorothy Dwan isn’t a capable actress; it’s that the character has no substance. When we first set foot in Kansas, a clearly aged Aunt Em and a stunningly rotund Uncle Henry are working their fingers to the bone, while Dorothy has no interest in helping. She isn’t even dressed to help! She flits around gathering flowers and looking precious, as if that’s all the world ever wants. I wanted her to break a nail and pout in the corner, so I could get on with the movie.

That Man Bolt (1973)

Directors: Henry Levin and David Lowell Rich
Writers: Charles Eric Johnson and Ranald MacDougall
Stars: Fred Williamson, Byron Webster, Miko Mayama, Satoshi Nakamura, John Orchard and Teresa Graves

Index: Make It a Double.

Fred Williamson’s second Make It a Double choice is a couple of years older than Bucktown but he was already established, especially with blaxploitation staples like Black Caesar and its sequel, Hell Up in Harlem. What surprised me is that this isn’t another of them.

In fact, it rather relishes how it keeps us on the hop as to what it actually is. Sure, there’s a blaxploitation feel at points, but there’s much more James Bond, much more kung fu movie and much more general seventies thriller, the colour of the lead the most unusual aspect.

That Man Bolt is Jefferson Bolt, who’s trying to be Jim Kelly when we first see him, stripped to the waist and working through a kata even though he’s locked up in a Macao jail. He’s not Jim Kelly but he looks good anyway. And then in comes an Aussie to cut him loose and ferry him over to Hong Kong. That’s Carter.

Bucktown (1975)

Director: Arthur Marks
Writer: Bob Ellison
Stars: Fred Williamson, Pam Grier, Thalmus Rasulala, Tony King, Bernie Hamilton, Art Lund and Tierre Turner

Index: Make It a Double.

I’ve reviewed Bucktown for Pam Grier’s First Thirty but it was also one of Fred Williamson’s two Make It a Double picks. While it came at a crucial time for her, it’s definitely a better film for him, giving him a good introduction then building him far more than I expected.

It initially feels like an episode of a TV show. Everything kicks right in: the opening credits, the funky music and the action. The very first scene is cops lusting after a hooker, but they rush off to beat up a black guy at the station as a train pulls in.

Getting off that train is Duke Johnson, who’s in Bucktown to bury his brother. And that’s the Hammer, who sees the cops but doesn’t do anything, just gets a cab to the Club Alabama. “Do you believe in God?” the cabbie asks him. “Then you’re in the wrong place.”

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.