Todd’s Movie Blog

Nothing says New Years like getting your old paratroup gang together and robbing Las Vegas.  This is the original Rat Pack film that brought Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford together on film.  The basic plot is their elaborate heist of five casinos simultaneously on New Year’s Eve only to ultimately lose the money in an overly elaborate on the spur of the moment plan change to get the money out of town by hiding it in the coffin of a gang member who had a heart attack right after the heist.

The film really doesn’t have much plot, the first hour is taken up with Frank, Dino and Sammy sitting around The Sands knocking back enough liquor to set up a bootlegger for life, oogling showgirls, cracking wise and calling each other Chickee Babe.  But after all of this fun,they finally decide to actually get to the plot and the entire heist takes all of five minutes, then it’s back to the partying until the final bit with the twist ending and then the iconic final shot of them walking dejectedly past The Sands.

But who really watches a Rat Pack film for the actual pot, it’s to see how cool they are, enjoying their chemistry together as they obviously are having a fun time together, spotting cameos by their friends like Shirley MacLaine and Joe Gray, plus Dino gets to belt out a song.

Going for a more upbeat film than last week, We’re No Angels is one of the few comedies Humphrey Bogart made, and one of his best.  Bogie, Peter Ustinov and Aldo Ray, along with their pet Mamba Adolpe, escape from Devil’s Island.  Stuck in a small French coastal town over the Christmas Holiday while they wait for a ship to take them out of the country.  They get handyman jobs with a kindly merchant, planning to rob his store but end up instead helping the family make the store a success while Adolphe solves the problem of the unscrupulous lease owner of the store in his own way.  At the end they decide the outside world isn’t really for them and decide to return to prison.

A fun and lighthearted film, it has some wonderful images, a scene where the three convicts are working on the roof and look down through a window at the family having dinner is a poignant reminder to them that they will always be outsiders.  Ustinov, a scene stealer of the first magnitude, pulls back for once and fits in well with Bogie and Ray, supplying some great one liners to punctuate their scenes together. There are some fun scenes of Ray flirting with a shy Gloria Talbot and then ends up playing cupid for her.  Basil Rathbone plays the sleazy lease holder you can’t wait to see get his comeuppance.

But the film is Bogie’s and he shine in a series of vignettes where he decides to help the famiy make the store turn a profit and becomes the slickest salesman on the planet.  The real highlight is where he convinces a bald man to buy a silver comb and brush set.  Comedies don’t get any funnier.

I won’t be putting out another suggestion next week, too close to Christmas, but after Christmas I will be putting up a New Years film suggestion.

An odd choice I grant you, but as Crow T Robot once said, “What, like Christmas can’t have a good action sequence?”  The plot involves Bruce Willis as a NY cop visiting his estranged wife in LA over the Christmas holiday when her company’s Christmas Party is invade by terrorists (…or are they terrorists?).  The only one who can stop them is Willis, who is without weapons and shoes, having taken them off in an effort to overcome his anxiety over seeing his wife again by using a relaxation technique a plane passenger told him about.

An action packed blockbuster that made Willis an A list movie star, it might not have a lot of holiday cheer, but you don’t often see shoot outs and fist fights with Christmas lights and garland in the back ground either.  Willis goes through a horrendous amount of punishment in order to be reunited with the one he loves, and isn’t that a Christmas theme in a way.  Plus you got Allan Rickman in a signiture villainous role.  Yipee Kai YaH Motherf&*?$#@r!!!