Todd’s Movie Blog

As in years pass I am throwing out some suggestions for alternative films to watch this Christmas Season.  Since last week I put forth one of John Wayne’s less than good films, I thought I would throw out one of his best.  3 Godfathers was another of those great collaborations between Wayne and director John Ford and is essentially a retelling of the three wise men.

As the film opens Wayne, Perdro Armendarez and Harry Carey, Jr rob a bank and head off into the desert with sheriff Ward Bond and his posse in pursuit.  Coming upon a wagon that has been attacked by Indians, they discover a pregnant woman dying and about to give birth.  Helping with the delivery, the woman extracts a promise from them that they will get the baby, which has been named after the three of them, to safety, and then dies.

And so begins a desert crossing trek filled with danger from dehydration, starvation, and attacking Indians, while the posse keeps gets closer.  Armendarez and Carey both die, but Wayne , encouraged by the spectral images of his two dead friends to keep going, manages to arrive on Christmas Eve in the settlement the wagon was heading for where he delivers the baby to the woman’s family and is arrested by Bond.  But it all ends well with Wayne being accepted as a part of the baby’s family and getting a light sentence from the judge due to his heroism.

Yeah the ending is schmaltzy, but you get a great adventure story and those amazing shots of the Monument Valley that appear in all of Ford’s westerns.  John Wayne is at his toughest and most ingratiating, and is even genuinely funny in some of his exchanges with Armendarez and Carey (Don’t talk Mexican in front of the baby!).  And besides, Christmas is a time to be a little schmaltzy.

I like John Wayne movies, there was a time back in the eighties when you couldn’t say that without upsetting some people (I remember in college an older vet on the GI Bill just ripped me a new one for suggesting True Grit when scheduling the campus movies for the semester, the irony was he wasn’t even a member of the film club).  Emotions about The Duke run high and his acting ability is often overshadowed by his politics.

Which is a shame because he was a good actor, he wasn’t Olivier, but he wasn’t Sonny Tufts either.  Like many actors he knew where his niche was and when given the opportunity could really shine, The Searchers and The Shootist being two prime examples.  But every now and then, John Wayne Ultra Patriot would take over and suddenly a movie would become a ridiculous diatribe about The Duke’s beliefs (The Green Berets anyone?)

One of the craziest examples of his gung ho politics is a lesser known espionage potboiler he made in the fifties, Big Jim McClain.  The plot, supposedly based on true events, detail the investigation of Communist activities in Hawaii by super spy John Wayne and his partner James Arness, trying to bring down bemused spy master, a pre-Batman Alan Napier. That’s enough to start the giggles right there.

But wait, it gets better.  The film has not one, not two, but three narrarators. Harry Morgan quotes Nathanial Hawthorne to open and close the film, an unnammed narrarator details how all of this actually happened.  Then The Duke makes like Mickey Spillane and narrarates the rest of the film himself.  A sample of his wittiness is this gem, “Hawaiians work hard all week but when the weekend comes, watch out!”

The scenery is beautiful, which is a good thing because outside of Wayne romancing an innocent secretary of one of the Commie bigwigs, not much happens in the film except for The Duke berating the fact that he can’t even arrest those Godless Commie bastards, even when they commit kidnapping and murder, because they use our own Bill of Rights against us (Not even Jack Webb can hold a candle to The Duke when it comes to righteous indignation).

Yes this is an action extravaganza where crimes are committed and no one gets caught or prosecuted.  Most of the screen time is filled with Wayne eating with his new girlfriend while discussing the case or The Duke using that fool proff investigative technique of accusing someone of being a Red and then leaving thier office or home in disgust.  The movie ends with Wayne being so frustrated at being hamstrung by the very law he ironically is sworn to uphold that he goes to the head Commie’s house and beats the crap out of everyone there, which gets him arrested, then proclaims after another Harry Morgan recitiation, that Mr Hawthorne doesn’t need to worry,  America is still going strong. Cue the credits.

Considered one of the worst films ever made, I don’t think it is quite that bad, though it is pretty silly.  Made to cash in on both the Blaxploitation craze and the popularity of Jim Kelly from his break out role in Enter the Dragon, the film bounces through several cliches that are turned on their head.

The plot involves The Mafia trying to muscle in on Scatman Crothers’ Watts based karate school.  When he can’t be intimidated, The Mafia joins forces with their Watts rivals to trick him into being killed in a crooked card game. His best student Jim Kelly decides to leave the CIA and teams up with Crothers’ daughter Gloria Hendry, to get some martial arts revenge.

The plot is pretty serious but it is the images that will make you laugh so hard, tears will run down your face.  This is one goofy film, from the minute a toupe wearing Crothers whips out some stiff karate chops on some stuntmen to the ending battle in an out of control car wash spewing suds everywhere.  In between we find that the hero’s name is actually Black Belt Jones (everybody just calls him Belt), a romantic romp on the beach between Kelly and Hendry that is really a running karate battle, an assault on The Mafia’s headquarters by Kelly and a bunch of beach girls that hang around his house with all of them dressed like Ninjas, a car chase where Hendry is trying to get dressed and loses her panties out the passenger window (guess where they land and what their reaction is), and of course the climactic karate battle with everybody in waist high soap suds where Kelly knocks them senseless and then Hendry tosses them into a garbage truck by their crotches.

I have to wonder if Black Belt jones was a spoof and nobody got the joke. On the one hand, it is hard to believe that anyone would take this film seriously, but then again Holllywood is known to take some bizarre films as serious endevors  (Howard the Duck anyone?).  Maybe the makers thought it was a comedy and the producers thought it was an action film.  Whatever the case it is a fun viewing experience.