The Joneses
2010
I covered this yesterday. Not a great movie, but kind of an
interesting one. Here is the HD
version of Amber Heard's nude scene. That's my film clip, but the collage below is
somebody else's sample taken from Deep at Sea's clip:
There Was a Crooked Man
1970
A little time-traveling music, Sammy!
Spoilers!
There Was a Crooked Man is a Western made a the end of the period when Westerns
ruled the earth. It stars Henry Fonda and Kirk Douglas, and features just about
every great character actor available in 1970: Lee Grant, Martin Gabel, Victor
French, Arthur O'Connell, Burgess Meredith, Hume Cronyn, John Randolph, Warren
Oates, and the Skipper from Gilligan's Island. Even if it were not a very good
film, watching it would be filled with nostalgic pleasure for any baby
boomer who remembers the pictures and stars that were so popular back in the
day.
Like me.
There are some days when it is really fun to run my little nudie blog, because
Crooked Man is not just a nostalgia trip, but a pretty good flick in its own
right, filled with plenty of cool-ass plot twists from start to finish. So I
doubled my pleasure. Hell,
I tripled my pleasure because I have never seen this film before and have always
planned to get around to it some day.
Kirk Douglas plays a robber with $500,000 hidden somewhere on the outside while
he does a 10-year stretch in a woebegone federal prison which seems to be lost
somewhere in remotest reaches of the unforgiving Southwestern desert. Kirk's
character is a charming, highly intelligent rogue and a natural-born leader who
soon pulls a McMurphy in the prison and becomes a favorite of the men and the
warden, all while secretly scheming to escape. Many key aspects of his plan are
hidden from the audience, and the final revelations subvert our expectations. We
like Douglas, and are familiar with his usual screen persona, so we expect that
his character will eventually do the right thing by the men who helped him
escape, and that he himself will come to some kind of acceptable ending, whether
his plan succeeds or not. The author and director are aware of our expectations
and use them to make the plot more interesting and surprising. Although the film
has many enjoyable elements, the casting of Douglas turned out to be the element
most necessary to make the whole project work.
The character has to con the audience just as convincingly as he cons everyone
else, and therefore the part needed to be filled by someone we can feel
comfortable rooting for, someone we trust to be an honorable man beneath his
cocky exterior. With a Jack Palance in the lead, we would expect him to be
utterly evil from the outset, and would therefore anticipate behavior which is
much more cinematic when it is utterly unexpected.
Entertaining film.
100% at Rotten Tomatoes and 7.1 at IMDb.
There were three female nude scenes in this film, but one of them seems to have
disappeared over the years. The gorgeous Pamela Hensley (later Princess Ardala
on Buck Rogers) was only 19 or 20 when she performed
this topless scene.
Jeanne Cooper showed a well-weathered breast as a well-weathered whore.
The third scene has not been included in the DVD or VHS versions of this film.
At one point in the film a bunch of high muck-a-mucks arrive at the prison to
dedicate a new mess hall built by the prisoners. Kirk's plan involves
engineering a prison riot and mass escape as a decoy for the real escape he
plans to accomplish elsewhere. Barbara Rhodes plays a famous actress who comes
to the dedication ceremony to recite a poem. As the prisoners begin to riot,
they rip off her clothing. In the original version she was seen running naked
outside the prison walls. In the DVD version she shows some cleavage inside the
prison while still half-dressed, but her subsequent nudity has disappeared. We
do have a still from the missing scene, seen below.
Kirk Douglas also does two real nude scenes and there is a group bath scene
among the male prisoners, if you're scoring at home.
