*SPOILER ALERT*
the Dark Night of the Scarecrow: (1981. dir: Frank De Felitta) Television movies were on the whole pretty bad back in the seventies, but there's an infamous handful which transcended their designated medium entirely. The Elizabeth Montgomery Legend of Lizzie Borden is an obvious one, and there's a thing called Bad Ronald which is spoken of with fervor; I never saw it, but from what I can glean, it's about a boy who moves about inside the walls of a house.
Dark Night of the Scarecrow is another such: not a great movie, but one which transcends its budget, trappings, and expectation. It's a revenant vendetta film in which an innocent is wrongly executed, then returns for dark vengeance, generally using farm equipment. Frank De Felitta, who wrote the madly popular blockbuster Audrey Rose, directs. The script is oddly good, and the acting is exemplary, with Larry Drake as the backward victim, and Charles Durning, Lane Smith (one of those guys you'd know if you saw him, and go, "oh, THAT guy,"), Claude Earl Jones and Robert Lyons as the doomed malefactors.
The build-up is gripping, the pay-off is pretty good, and I learned a few things. Like, when you know you're being hunted with murderous intent and you hear someone in the loft of your barn, don't go up there. A few corollaries: don't get your courage out of a bottle, and be careful where you store your wood-chipper. Here's another: when there's heavy machinery bearing down on you in the middle of the night in an abandoned field, don't try and reason with the driver. If he were a reasonable human, he'd be at home asleep, or out having a beer. Just run, alright? One thing about farm equipment is that it doesn't move so quickly. You have a fighting chance, but not if you stand there like an asshole.
Anyway, scarecrows have a high creep factor. I recommend it as a low-key, unpretentious pleasure.
the Fallen Sparrow: (1943. dir: Richard Wallace) A truly dark, claustrophobic and unsettling just-pre-war noir based on a novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, one of the greats of pulp (In a Lonely Place is hers, and, good as the movie is, I prefer the book). We catch up with John Garfield just as he's recovering from having been captured while fighting in the Spanish Civil War and tortured for some time by a sadistic Nazi. He's been in Arizona recuperating, and now he's on his way back to the Big Apple to figure out why his good friend, the man who saved him from his ordeal, has mysteriously died.
The plot points don't quite hang together, and you have to stretch your credulity some. Also, Maureen O'Hara, lovely femme as she is, is just too damn nice and earnest to be the necessary fatale. (In her defense, since this was made while the war was underway, had her character been seen as in league with the Nazis, it would not have played well, and it was probably a directorial decision to strip her character of her traditional fatale-propulsion.) Aside from those quibbles, though, Garfield is completely believable, indeed, mesmerizing, as a tough guy who's been broken by torture then cobbled back together again through sheer moxie and will power, and the lighting is creepy-dark and creepy-good.
Three Violent People: (1956. dir: Rudolph Mate) Well, it's a Western, so there's some violence, yes. I suppose they're including Anne Baxter in the "violent" titular trio along with southern gunslinging brothers Charlton Heston and Tom Tryon, but it's the fifties, so she's not allowed to be truly fierce, except maybe in her love for her man and her baby, and even then she has to exercise some decorum.
It starts out with a John Ford sort of absurdity: the kind of courtship that only happens in an old Hollywood movie, with no dynamic except histrionics and power-struggle, a ridiculous courtship, an impossible courtship. Once that's done, though, we can get on to the real plot, which involves carpetbaggers up against proud, Texan landholders. One of the great weaknesses of the film is that Tryon, although pleasant enough company, is no match for Heston (or, for that matter, for Baxter); the part really called for a Richard Widmark or a Kirk Douglas or, hey, how about a Paul Newman? Tryon's got a sort of Ricky Nelson haircut and this was the age of Elvis, so I'm guessing that's the fan-base they were going for.
One of the best parts is Gilbert Roland, dignified and elegant despite a role in which he must say "chihuahua" over and over. He has a passel of sons, including Robert Blake and (I'm not making this up) Jamie Farr. Elaine Stritch is very good, too, as the madam who spells it right out for Baxter at the beginning, before the wedding, what's going to happen when her man finds out her wicked pre-marital secret, and damned if the madam isn't spot-on correct. It's the fifties, so there's a sudden baby without any sign of pregnancy to disfigure Baxter's tiny little waist, a baby who comes into the world without causing pain or even mussage of hair or makeup, a very polite baby.
You get the idea. There's good stuff here, shuffled in with fifties Hollywood absurdity. Unlike so many other Westerns from the time, though, it manages to triumph over its many flaws.
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