Western History | The Mark of Zorro (1974)

Who's in it?: Frank Langella (Dracula), Ricardo Montalban (Fantasy Island, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan), Anne Archer (Patriot Games), and Yvonne De Carlo (The Munsters).

What's it about?: A TV remake of the 1940 Tyrone Power version.

How is it?: Poor Frank Langella can't catch a break on costumes. Between Dracula and this, he's a captivating romantic lead, but keeps getting stuck in outfits pulled off the Halloween aisle at K-Mart.

This is a very close remake of the 1940 Mark of Zorro. It feels weird that that's the one they went to, but by the '70s it was the definitive film version, not the old Douglas Fairbanks silent. The Disney show was also iconic at that point, but it a) would have been harder to adapt to a feature length and b) was already readily available on a lot of TV stations in reruns.

The production quality on the Langella version drops a lot from the original, being made for TV, but it tries to make up for that by putting Don Diego in costume as Zorro a lot more than Power's version ever was, including during the final sword fight.

And it's got some cool actors in the cast. Ricardo Montalban is the main villain (played by Basil Rathbone in the original), Anne Archer plays Diego's love interest, and Yvonne De Carlo is his mom.

It's not a classic by any stretch, but I enjoyed comparing it to the Power version and Montalban is especially enjoyable. I recommend it for fans of his.

Rating: Three out of five really sad masks.

Fourth Chair Army Invasion | The Expendables of Spy Movies

If you’re bummed about No Time to Die getting pushed back to November, have no fear. William Bruce West, Doug Frye, Evan Hanson, Rob Graham, and I have created the best spy movie in the world and you can enjoy it right this very second in your imagination.

Greystoked | Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948)

Noel and I are back to wrap up the Johnny Weissmuller era the same way we began it, with guest Ron Marz, who'd just returned from South Africa with stories of an actual safari . It's mermaids in Mexico and memoirs about mammals in this very special episode.

Presence of Mind (1999)

Who's in it?: Sadie Frost (Bram Stoker's Dracula), Lauren Bacall (To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, Key Largo), Harvey Keitel (The Piano, Pulp Fiction), and Jude Law (Enemy at the Gates, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Sherlock Holmes)

What's it about?: A pretty faithful adaptation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw.

How is it?: I read Henry James' The Turn of the Screw a couple of years ago and was fascinated by it. I hated it for most of the time I was reading it, but started warming to it by the end. And then after I had a chance to sit with it for a while, I liked it quite a bit, realizing that there are multiple ways to read it and that the most frightening ones are the least supernatural.

It's the story of a governess who goes to watch over a couple of orphan kids at an isolated, huge English estate. She starts to see ghosts. Or think she does. And she thinks the kids see them too, but they deny it. The question is: Is she seeing what she thinks she's seeing or is it all in her head?

I put it away for a while, but was reminded of it earlier this year when a new adaptation was released to theaters. I was curious about how Floria Sigismondi's The Turning would interpret the novel: Straight-up ghost story or psychological horror? Sadly, that movie tried to have it both ways, but not in a subtle, ambiguous way. I ended up mostly liking it, but eager to see a more straightforward adaptation, which is what Presence of Mind is.

Presence of Mind keeps James' ambiguity about whether the ghosts are real or imagined, but unlike The Turning, it understands that it doesn't really matter either way. The ghosts are actually a metaphor for something else that I won't spoil with speculation, but would be open for discussion even if I did. It's a good introduction to the ideas of the novel.

The Spanish estate that it was shot on isn't as gothic as I'd prefer, but it's gorgeous. And there's a familiar Hammer-esque quality to the setting and the costumes and even that so much of it is filmed in the bright light of day. Ghostly appearances in full daylight somehow make it more unsettling, not less.

And the cast is especially fun. Sadie Frost plays the governess and I like her subtle sensuality. She was also Lucy in Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula where she was much more overt. In Presence of Mind, she's repressed, but always about to bubble over. It's also clear that she has secrets which may be affecting her experiences at the estate.

Lauren Bacall is the estate's chief domestic whose relationship with the kids sometimes interferes with the governess'. And Harvey Keitel has what's almost a cameo as the mostly absent master of the house. Jude Law is also in it as Keitel's secretary, but it's an early bit part for him that I actually missed for blinking.

The kids, played by Nilo Zimmerman and Ella Jones, are also great. Finn Wolfhard plays the brother in The Turning and brings menace to the role that Zimmerman doesn't have. I like Zimmerman's take more, because it puts the spotlight back on Frost's character where it should be. She needs to be responsible for her actions, where Mackenzie Davis' governess in The Turning is more of a victim. (Brooklynn Prince plays the sister in The Turning with a similar vibe to Jones' version in Presence of Mind: a mixture of adorable and troubled that ultimately makes the character unreliable.)

I wish that Presence of Mind were more atmospheric than it is. That's what keeps me from loving it. But it makes me want to put the novel back on my reading list and also watch some other adaptations.

Rating: Three out of five touched tutors.

Western History | Zorro (1957-61)

Who's in it?: Guy Williams (I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Captain Sindbad, Lost in Space).

What's it about?: Walt Disney adapts Zorro as a TV series.

How is it?: Williams is the definition of swashbuckling and perfectly plays the balance between dashing Zorro and passive Don Diego. Gene Sheldon is also delightful as Diego's mute manservant Bernardo and Henry Calvin is a joy as the good-hearted, but wrong-sided Sgt. Garcia

I expected most of that, having watched an episode or two as a kid, but what I'd totally forgotten was the amazing sets and matte paintings. Disney threw some real money at the show and created a wonderful fantasy landscape for southern California with all kinds of great cliffs and passes and skull-shaped mountains.

And I had no idea that the storytelling was so 21st Century. Each episode is more or less self-contained, but they also connect and build on each other to tell longer stories. In fact, the first eight episodes were packaged together to become a feature film release in 1960, The Sign of Zorro. And that's not even the entire saga of the ruthless Captain Monastario. The evil officer takes 13 episodes to bring down and I was actually shocked when Zorro eventually succeeded and the story line ended.

Then, just as Zorro's thinking of retiring, a new enemy shows up in the form of a secret society that uses eagle feathers to communicate. The group's leader, the mysterious Eagle, lurks in the background for a while, pulling strings behind a variety of other villains and plots as he works toward a takeover of the entire state of California. And while Zorro competently overcomes every individual threat, a growing sense develops that he's getting in over his head when it comes to the Eagle's larger organization. The stakes are raised nicely as the show heads toward the first season finale. And while Zorro manages to pull out some kind of victory each episode, the wins get smaller and smaller as the Eagle gains more and more power, even taking over Don Diego's home.

Sadly, the Season One finale isn't entirely satisfying. Zorro pulls out a decisive victory, but it's also apparent that it wouldn't have been as decisive if the Eagle hadn't grown impatient and tried to stage a final coup before he was ready. His allies knew it was a bad idea and withdrew, but he insisted on moving ahead alone, which was a bone-headed play and led to his downfall more than Zorro's skill did.

Still, the first season is a strong run of almost 40 episodes, even if it doesn't perfectly stick the landing. One of the MVPs of the series is Don Diamond as a late addition to the cast. He's brought in as a foil for Sgt Garcia; someone for Garcia to boss around, but who doesn't follow orders so well. The two of them are hilarious together and bring a needed, lighter touch to the show just as it's starting to look rather grim.

Season Two features a major change in location. Instead of taking place in Los Angeles, the action moves to Monterey where a patriotic trader is trying to gather money for a massive supply shipment. Spain is at war, so the Spanish citizens of California see it as their duty to support their homeland by keeping up business. The trouble is that shipments of investment capital from all over California are being intercepted by bandits, so Don Diego has traveled to Monterey to oversee delivery of the money from LA.

He's accompanied by Bernardo and is eventually joined by Sgt Garcia and Diamond's Cpl Reyes as well, so the best characters from the first season are still there. But the locations were such an important part of Season One and I wasn't ready to let them go. Happily, the relocation isn't permanent, but it takes a while to get Zorro home. Unlike the original novel and some other adaptations, the Californian government in the Disney show isn't depicted as completely corrupt. But the governor isn't as wise or careful as he should be either, so his underlings are often able to get away with cruel activities. When that starts to happen in Monterey, Zorro has to smother the oppression or occasionally deal with other rebels who are just as brutal as their oppressors. These are interesting conflicts, but they go on too long for me.

My interest was renewed though with the introduction of some cool guest stars. Richard Anderson (Oscar Goldman from The Six Million Dollar Man) became a recurring foil for Don Diego. The two characters are old rivals and things get complicated when both men fall for a woman named Señorita Verdugo. I'm not usually crazy about these kinds of romance triangles where two people both like the third and the object of their affection refuses to make a choice. But it works in this case, because I feel like Verdugo actually makes a choice, but one of the men isn't paying attention. Whatever the case, Anderson adds a lot of fun to the cast and the plot wraps up in a really lovely way.

After that, Season Two abruptly and unceremoniously returns the main cast to Los Angeles in time for a few episodes with Cesar Romero as Don Diego's shifty, gold-digging uncle. There are still multi-episode story lines from there, but they don't flow from one to another the way earlier episodes did and there are a few that are just completely standalone.

The series never returns to the 13-episode arcs of the first season, but one of the best multi-part story lines stars Annette Funicello, who was given the role as a 16th Birthday present by Walt Disney. She plays a young woman who's come to Los Angeles to meet her estranged father. She's convinced that he lives there and she's even received letters from him postmarked Los Angeles, but no one has heard of the man. It's a cool mystery and Funicello brings a lot of conviction and spunk to her role.

Season Two ended in 1959, but Disney kept Guy Williams on salary and made four more episodes (hour-long this time) to run on the anthology series Walt Disney Presents. The first two ran in Autumn 1960 and formed a single story about a group of Mexican bandits who show up in Los Angeles to challenge Zorro's supremacy as local outlaw.

The next episode ran in January 1961, featuring Annette Funicello, who was back as a different character: a family friend of Diego's who's trying to elope with the wrong fella. And saving the best for last, an April 1961 episode had Ricardo Montalban and Wild Wild West's wonderful Ross Martin as a pair of scoundrels who know enough about Diego's past to suspect that he's Zorro. It's a great finale and makes me wish that there'd been a whole series just about those two characters.

Rating: Four out of five rapiers

Hellbent for Letterbox | The Paleface (1948)

Pax and I break down this Bob Hope brew co-starring Jane Russell as super spy Calamity Jane. Pax also talks about the 1952 sequel, Son of Paleface, while I reconsider Joan Crawford as a contemporary cowgirl in 1930's Montana Moon.

Western History | The Mark of Zorro (1940)

Who's in it?: Tyrone Power (Jesse James, Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamin Blake, The Black Swan), Linda Darnell (Blackbeard the Pirate, Black Spurs) Basil Rathbone (Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Son of Frankenstein, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes), Eugene Pallette (The Adventures of Robin Hood)

What's it about?: The origin of Zorro

How is it?: Since Johnston McCulley's novel jumps in after Don Diego has already become Zorro, creating an origin story means deviating from the book in big ways.

This version opens in Spain to show Diego's (Power) prowess at swordplay and horsemanship, then has him called back to California by his father. He expects (and dreads) a life of relaxation and comfort instead of the carousing and adventure that he's experienced in Spain. But he quickly learns that his father has been deposed as mayor and replaced with a tyrant whose rule is enforced by a ruthless captain (Rathbone). Diego knows that his parents will be in danger if Diego rebels openly, so he creates the identity of Zorro to put pressure on the new mayor.

It's a cool strategy, actually. While Zorro interferes with the mayor's cash flow, Diego befriends the mayor's wife and plants suggestions that she'd be much happier back in Spain. The plan is to get the mayor to leave voluntarily, but Rathbone's character is a bigger problem than Diego anticipated. He's actually the power behind the mayor and he won't be intimidated so easily.

Adding a romantic complication to the story is the mayor's niece (Darnell).

As you may or may not be able to tell from that description, the 1940 Mark of Zorro is very focused on Diego and there's actually very little Zorro in it. When Diego does put on the costume it's exciting, but it kind of reminds me of superhero shows from the '70s where 90% of the show is the secret identity and then you'd get a couple of big scenes with the hero to make it worth watching. Not that the Diego stuff is boring. There's a lot of drama and intrigue and some great character stuff. And the swords fights are extremely good, even when no one in them is wearing black.

There are some nods to Douglas Fairbanks' version that are worth pointing out. Fairbanks' handkerchief tricks are replaced by Power's having a general love for magic and sleight-of-hand, but he actually says, "Have you seen this one?" at least once. And Power's Diego also has Fairbanks' tendency to embed his sword in the ceiling until circumstances demand that he need it again.

Except for those details and a couple of scenes with Diego in costume, though, this is a great swashbuckler, but not a great Zorro film. In other versions, the character of Fray Felipe is a quiet man who nobly endures the oppression of the government, but here he's played with blustery gusto by Eugene Pallette, who's pretty much just redoing his Friar Tuck performance from Adventures of Robin Hood a couple of years before. There's also no deaf and/or mute servant and no Zorro cave under his estate (though there are secret passages in the mayor's house that Diego makes good use of). Really like the movie. Wish it had more Zorro.

Rating: Four out of five rapiers

La Forêt (2017)

Who's in it?: A bunch of extremely talented actors whom I didn't know before this.

What's it about?: When a teenage girl goes missing from a small town in France, the investigation uncovers all of the community's secrets. [French language with English subtitles]

How is it?: Wow.

I started watching La Forêt (listed as The Forest on Netflix) just because of its setting. I've always been into stories about small towns and even more so when they're located near huge, dark, old forests.

I'm not as into stories about child abduction or serial killers (I don't necessarily avoid them, but I don't seek them out, either), but it was clear from the first episode that this wasn't just a procedural about the hunt for a particular criminal. As the police and other members of the community start looking for clues, a lot of metaphorical logs get turned over and a lot of metaphorical bugs come pouring out all over everything.

The missing girl is named Jennifer and it quickly comes to light that she had some conflicts with a couple of her friends named Maya and Océane. Those girls are now behaving strangely which especially concerns Maya's mother, a police detective named Virginie who's taken lead on the case. And Virginie becomes even more invested when Maya and Océane also go missing.

The town is full of characters with secrets. Virginie's husband is clearly hiding something as is Océane's father. And one of my favorite characters in the six-episode series is Eve Mendel, a teacher at the girls' school whose past is so mysterious that even she doesn't know what it is. But details from Jennifer's case start triggering memories for Eve.

And then there's the police captain Gaspard Decker, who's new enough in town not to have secrets, but still plenty of drama. He has to decide how much room to give Virginie who isn't objective about the case for obvious reasons. He also has a teenage daughter whom he's concerned about considering all of these disappearances. And is that romantic interest between him and Eve?

All of these relationships and mysteries build to exciting revelations all throughout the series, culminating in a conclusion that ties up all the plot threads while also satisfying emotionally.

Rating: Five out of five priceless pedagogues with perplexing pasts.

Western History | The Mark of Zorro (1920)

Who's in it?: Douglas Fairbanks (The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, The Thief of Bagdad, Don Q Son of Zorro, The Black Pirate, The Iron Mask)

What's it about?: When the Spanish governor of California becomes oppressive, a seemingly foppish nobleman puts on a mask to protect the persecuted.

How is it?: I've seen this a few times by now and it's a very faithful adaptation of Johnston McCulley's novel, The Curse of Capistrano, in which Zorro first appeared. There are a couple of big differences though.

The first is Zorro's assistant Bernardo, a character who's barely in the novel. McCulley's version is deaf and mute, but The Mark of Zorro allows him to hear and gives him a lot more to do. He's not a major character, but the sense is that he's a clever and capable helper in Zorro's subterfuge.

Another difference is how Mark of Zorro handles Zorror's secret identity. The novel surprisingly saves the reveal until the very end, so the reader finds out who he is at the same time as everyone else. Mark of Zorro lets viewers in on the deception right away.

That's cool because it means we get to peek at parts of Zorro's life that the book keeps hidden. Like how Zorro comes in and out of his house. Underneath his mansion, he's got a cave with a couple of hidden entrances. There's a shrub covered, horse-sized outer passage, and in the house there's a secret door disguised as a grandfather clock. Everyone knows that Batman was inspired by Zorro, but sometimes we forget how much. It's all based on this Fairbanks movie though, not the novel.

Batman could take some more lessons from Fairbanks' Zorro on playing the idle playboy, though. Fairbanks' performance as Don Diego is brilliant. He always looks exhausted and bored, only perking up when he's irritating someone with an unwanted handkerchief trick. Christopher Reeve rightly gets a lot of praise for creating separate performances when he's playing Superman or Clark Kent, but he wasn't the first to do that. Fairbanks does the same thing as Don Diego and Zorro and I totally see why people are fooled.

That impressive bit of acting is nothing compared to the unbelievable acrobatic work that Fairbanks pulls off in Zorro mode, though. He leaps around and climbs over sets like he's inventing parkour. The final chase between him and the Spanish soldiers is a stunning showcase for Fairbanks athleticism as well as just plain hilarious.

Rating: Five out of five rapiers.

Western History Project

I'm starting a new viewing project that I think I'll keep track of here. It was inspired by Stephen Ives' documentary series The West. I watched the first episode again recently and since the series takes a chronological approach to the history of the American West, I decided that in between episodes I would watch movies that take place during the time periods covered by the previous episode.

So, Episode 1 is titled "The People" and is mostly about the indigenous folk who lived in North America prior to the European invasion. I'm not aware of films that cover that, except perhaps The Daughter of Dawn (1920), which is a silent film with an entirely American Indian cast and features only American Indian characters. I like the movie, but it's not specific about its time period, so while I could use it as a starting point, it could also be a movie that fits later in the timeline.

In talking about European colonizers though, "The People" brings up a couple of periods that have been more definitively adapted by Hollywood. The first is the Spanish takeover of the California coast, in part to secure it against Russian settlers who were coming in from the North. The Spanish expanded from their hold in Mexico to build forts and missions all up and down California. And of course this is the period covered by the Zorro stories. So I'll be starting there. I'm not going to watch every single Zorro movie I can get my hands on, but I'll hit the big ones and that's what this project will be about for a while.

The other major European invasion covered in the "The People" is the Lewis and Clark expedition. There aren't as many Lewis and Clark movies as Zorro ones, but I plan to at least watch The Far Horizons (1955) starring Fred MacMurray as Meriwether Lewis, Charlton Heston as William Clark, and Donna Reed as Sacajawea. It'll be a while before I get to that one though. I've got about a dozen Zorro movies to watch first.

After The Far Horizons, I'll watch Episode 2 of The West and see where that leads me next. And that's how this project will go. Please feel free to recommend movies to me and I'll add them to my list. Especially if you know of other Lewis and Clark movies that I should watch.

Nerd Lunch | The Final Star Wars Panel

I'd feel more sad about the final Nerd Lunch Star Wars panel if every member on it hadn't become such a valuable part of my life that I don't for a second imagine that this is any kind of parting of the ways.

But it is the last time we'll get together to talk about Star Wars in this format and that's a sad thing. In this episode, we clear away the table with a discussion of our favorite and least favorite contributions of the Disney Star Wars movies, both saga and anthology films, as well as where we expect / hope the series will go from here.