Reviews

Tom Cruise plays ex GI Brian Flanagan, who leaves the army determined to make his first million in the quickest time possible. It is soon determined that Flanagan is actually a narcissist with delusions of grandeur as we see a montage scene of Flanagan thinking it is possible to just walk into a high paying job on Wall Street or Madison Avenue without a college degree.

After a day of rejections the penny drops and he is forced to lower his standards. He goes into a bar on the Lower East Side and meets Doug Coughlin, (Bryan Brown), another Narcissist who works behind the bar. Coughlin is a wisecracking know it all, whose catchphrase is saying 'Coughlin's Law' before spouting some pearl of wisdom that isn't really wise at all. Doug offers Flanagan a job despite him having no experience in bartending.

Flanagan soon falls for Coughlin's endless tirade of BS laws that he has made up, without once questioning why a guy who knows so much is still just a lowly bartender, despite being well into his forties. It's not too long before the pair are the toast of Manhattan, with their dazzling displays of bottle flipping, despite most of the liquid they were pouring flying everywhere but in the glass. I guess people were easily pleased.

After falling out over a girl the two go their separate ways and two years later, Flanagan is now a respected barman in Jamaica. Here he meets tourist Jordan Mooney, (Elizabeth Shue), and the two form a romance and it seems Brian's life is idyllic, but the long shadow of Douglas Coughlin arrives in the Caribbean to block out the Jamaica sun.

Their tiff seemingly forgotten, Flanagan is pleased to see his old friend and is shocked to find that not only is he married, but married to a beautiful millionaire and amazingly she is even more shallow that Doug is.

Doug, quick with the banter and repartee, extols Brian's brilliance to his impressed patrons, but declares that Brian still has one flaw, and that is he believes he can work his way to the top and is a romantic at heart so he is not 'good' enough to do what he did and get to the top by hustling a rich woman and bets Brian 50 bucks that he can't do exactly that.

Brian, whom we have already established isn't too bright, accepts the bet and then commits his crowning folly, by cheating on the insanely hot, late 80's era Elizabeth Shue, with another woman. The smitten Jordan witnesses Brian go off with the 'rich chick' and feeling embarrassed and humiliated, packs her bags and flies back to New York, something Brian only finds out about the next morning when he calls on her.

With Jordan gone, Brian forms a relationship with the rich woman in hopes that he can do what Doug has done and sleep his way to the top and with the Jamaica season over, he flies back to New York with her.

However, the rich chick only sees Brian as her 'bit of rough' and doesn't seem to be in any hurry to make Brian's dreams a reality. Realising the hustler has now become the hustled, Brian breaks up with her and tries to repair his relationship with Jordan.

Jordan, asks why Brain humiliated her in Jamaica. But don't worry, our 'hero', the walking MENSA candidate that we know him to be, has his air-tight defence all ready to go. "Doug bet me that I couldn't land a rich chick, that I wasn't good enough to hustle her and when a guy lays down a dare, you've gotta take it".

Suitably impressed with his response, Jordan forgives him and they live happily ever after.....as if! Appalled at Brian's shallow and offensive reply, Jordan drops the bombshell that after too much 'sex on the beach' she is expecting Brian's baby before throwing him out.

The next day he goes to see Jordan again and comes face to face with her enraged Father, who offers him $10000 to stay out of her life. It's just a shame Jordan's father had no prior knowledge about Brian's penchant for doing stupid stuff for as little as $50, as his 'jumping off' point in these negotiations could have been a lot lower. Brian, tears up the cheque right in front of Jordan and her father.

With no job, prospects and a baby on the way He goes to see Doug, to ask for a job in his new nightspot. However, It is revealed that because of some bad investments, he has lost all the money and is essentially penniless, something his wife doesn't even know yet.

After Doug passes out drunk, Brian drives Doug's wife home and rejects her sexual advances. When he returns to Doug, he finds that he has cut his own throat with a Brandy bottle, leaving him in the red both literally and figuratively.

Devastated that the most negative influence he had ever known in his life is no longer around, Flanagan breaks down in tears when reading Doug's final letter to him. "Coughlin's law, Bury the dead, they stink up the joint, as for the rest of Coughlin's laws, ignore them, the guy was always full of sh*t", which to be honest, isn't exactly the reveal of the century for the audience.

Determined to win Jordan back and marry her, he goes back to Jordan's penthouse on Park Avenue, but the security guard has been given strict instructions to not allow him in, but the athletic Brian outwits him by sliding into the elevator as the doors are closing thanking God that he had the presence of mind to do this in 1988 before the invention of motion sensor doors.

After forcing himself into the penthouse he confronts Jordan, declares his love for her, promises to marry her and make an honest living and despite not saying anything more compelling than on their last meeting, this time, she agrees and leaves with him with her father cutting them both off permanently.

The end sees a very VERY pregnant Jordan only just declaring to Brian something that she must have known MONTHS before that she is actually expecting twins, proving that when it comes to honesty, Jordan may have a few issues of her own.

Despite my slightly scathing and sarcastic review. I still look upon cocktail as one of my favourite 80's movies and will not subscribe to the majority opinion that it is one of the worst films ever. It has a very 80's charm that even the strange storyline and poor(ish) script cannot douse.

I do remember that when this film came out, any visit to the local pub would always be accompanied by periodic glass smashing as the bartenders attempted to toss bottles and glasses behind the bar trying to emulate the mixology skills shown here.

Enjoy!

The spaghetti westerns of the 1960's altered the genre forever with the birth of the anti-hero, but back in the 1950's, the western movie was still very much the white hat vs the black hat affair. There was no room for such ambiguity and you knew where you stood as soon as the hero and villain were introduced and despite a few noticeable exceptions like The Man from Colorado, Lust for Gold and 3:10 to Yuma, you knew that Glenn Ford would always play the hero as he does here in The Violent Men.

Ford plays Captain John Parrish, the civil war veteran who moves west to recover from his war wounds, who becomes a small holdings rancher in a valley dominated by a hard nosed cattle Baron, Lew Wilkison (Edward G Robinson), whose long time goal is to own all the land in the valley to expand his own enterprise, and rid himself of the smaller ranchers like Parrish.

However, his dream had been put on hold for the last dozen or so years given that he had been crippled in the last range war. But now his brother Cole, (David Keith), has arrived, and Cole and his hired guns are once again putting the screws to the other rangers and farmers to clear them out by offering pennies on the dollar for their holdings and if that doesn't work, more persuasive methods are employed and the inevitable killings follow.

When one of his own ranch hands is murdered, Parrish decides to fight fire with fire in order to protect his property and the people who work for him. Fortunately, he's as fast with his brain as he is with his gun and employs some of his old army tactics to outwit, outfox and outgun his enemies.

Barbara Stanwyck is at her bitchy best here playing Martha Wilkison, the duplicitous wife of Lew who sick and tired of living with a cripple and is really in love with Cole and it is really she and Cole that are the ones terrorising their neighbours.

Dianne Foster appears as Judith Wilkison, the sympathetic daughter of Robinson and Stanwyck who dislikes the strong arm stuff and the killing and the way her parents are treating people., and to be honest, as good as she plays her part, she's a pretty pointless character as she neither progresses the story at any time, nor does she inform us of anything the audience hasn't already established for themselves.

The Violent Men is a great little horse opera, predictable at times, (as most westerns are), hit some great performances from Ford and Stanwyck, although I feel Robinson was slightly miscast and David Keith is woefully underused and I feel the tension between him and Ford could have been fleshed out more to give the final showdown between them some added gravitas.

If you love westerns in general, then you can't go wrong with this one and if you love westerns from the 1950's, in particular, well, You're gonna absolutely flip with enjoyment as you have a western from the greatest western era starring one of the best movie cowboys of all time.

Enjoy!

1962's Carry On Cruising was the sixth 'Carry On' film in the series and the first to be filmed in colour and not only had they upped the technology, but they had upped the comedy as well.

The previous movie, 'Carry On Regardless' had been disappointing in comparison to the previous four, as it dared to stray from the tried and tested formula that had made those movies a success. 'Regardless' had simply been a collection of comic vignettes bound together by a feeble main plot and it had not been received as well as Sergeant, Nurse, Teacher and Constable. The team had rightly decided that Cruising would return to what had worked before and brother did they!

Cruising was not without its casting difficulties. Firstly, only three of the main team are present and they were Sid James, Kenneth Williams and Kenneth Connor and all three carry the banner admirably. Joan Sims, Hattie Jacques were not available, Charles Hawtrey, originally slated to play Haines the cook, was dropped as he demanded star billing as well as a star on his dressing room door, a demand that producer Peter Rogers and director Gerald Thomas was not about to submit to. Instead, the main cast is rounded out by newcomers Dilys Laye, Lance Percival and Liz Fraser who had made her Carry on Debut the year before.

The plot follows a cruise liner and the exploits of her crew and passengers bound for the Mediterranean.

James plays the Captain, bucking for a promotion to a new Atlantic liner, who sees his chances slipping away due to the mishaps of his new inexperienced and inept crew members, Williams, Connor and Percival.

Laye and Fraser appear as the two beautiful, (and single), young ladies on a quest to find love on the waves and Connor, the ship's doctor is smitten with Laye immediately, although it is totally unreciprocated and he spends the majority of the movie attempting to win her affections.

Percival is an absolute riot as the sea-sick chef and it's a shame he never appeared in another Carry On film as he fit in perfectly. One of his first lines ranks as one of the best in the series, when he appears at the pre-voyage crew muster in full chef whites to which James asks "who are you?" with Percival replying "Take a wild guess".

Williams, appears as the posh voiced, well meaning first officer, whose overwhelming desire to do well and impress his superior, always backfire.

Carry on Cruising is a great early Carry On, the bawdiness the series would become known for was still a couple of years away and this is one of the safer films in the series as well a one of the most enjoyable.

A top ten 'Carry On' for sure.

Enjoy!

If there's anything good to say about the 2024 remake of Road House, is that it will get people reaching for the classic 1989 movie to cleanse the palette and the more people who watch the original the better, as it is simply a brilliant film.

Sadly, I can't say the same about this steaming pile of double deuce I have just witnessed. Is it even a remake? The similarities between the two are sparse. The main character is a bouncer named Dalton and he's hired by a bar owner to 'bounce'..... that's it, the only thing that would even make you think this was a remake.

Missouri is replaced with Florida, mullets are replaced with bullet heads and actors are replaced with Conor McGregor and Billy Magnussen.

With the occasional exception, (and I mean VERY occasional), remakes always fail. A lot of the time it's because they are being judged, at times unfairly, against the original. Others are simply bad movies trying to cash in on an illustrious name. 2024's Road House definitely falls in the latter category.

In 1989, the Double Duece was a bar that Dalton was hired to clean up because of the trouble makers that frequented it, the fact that the entire town was being run by a crime kingpin running a protection racket. Is just an extra problem he encounters and has to deal with.

In 2024, Dalton is hired BECAUSE of the crime kingpin, who wants to demolish the bar to realise his his real estate ambitions and Dalton isn't told about this until he runs foul of the goon squad sent to intimidate the bar and its patrons.

At least in the Double Duece there was usually reasons fights broke out. In the Florida Road House, people seem to pick fights because the guy next to him was turning oxygen into carbon dioxide too loudly.

To be fair to Jake Gyllenhaal, he does turn in a good performance given what he has to work with and he is the best thing in the entire movie. However, one thing is unforgivable, the CGI/AI action, it looks fake, cheap and takes you out of that reality instantly.

The character of Dalton has also been changed. Patrick Swayze's Dalton was good man, firmly in control of his emotions and attitude to life, spirituality and clinical in his profession. Gyllenhaal's Dalton is not even a bouncer to start with, he's an ex UFC fighter hustling the illegal fight circuit for PIN money who falls into 'bouncing' by chance and while occasionally getting involved in the action, he seems to be collecting $5000 a week for sitting down at the bar watching all the other 'bouncers' do the grunt work for him under his 'guidance'. He is also mentally disturbed and sometimes can't keep a lid on it. He is also suicidal...for about 2 minutes at the start, never to be mentioned again.

To show how unhinged this new Dalton is, he plants a bomb on a boat that is moored to a yacht that his girlfriend is held hostage on, and then detonates it remotely when they're still on board. You see, explosions are funny things, they're unpredictable and Dalton would have had no way of knowing whether that yacht would sink in 10 minutes or 10 seconds, a hell of a risk to take with an innocent life.

Now let's talk about two people I briefly mentioned earlier, Conor McGregor and Billy Magnussen. Jeez they are bad? McGregor is so over the top that any realism that this person could actually exist in real life is gone in a second. You've heard of over egging the pudding? Well here we have no pudding at all, just lots of egg.

Magnussen is as equally bland as he is bad. Again, this may not be his fault and the blame can certainly be placed on the script, as in one scene, he is seen getting a shave on the stern of his yacht in choppy seas, and the barber is using a cutthroat razor of all things and this absolute idiot seems shocked that he's getting hacked to bits by the barber with every stroke. I mean what did he think was going to happen?

2024's Road House is an OK action flick that suffers more for trying to pass itself off as a remake of a bonefide classic.....a bonefide classic I am now going to go and watch as it's always been a rewatchable favourite. However, I'm not going to be watching this version again anytime soon....if ever.

Enjoy!

Over the years we've seen many a good film that tells the story about senior citizens who refuse to grow old gracefully and here we have one of the best of recent times.

It is a remake of the 1979 George Burns film of the same name and remakes can be a hit and miss affair and they are seldom better than the original movie they are remaking and while this version does not succeed in being better than its 70's counterpart, it isn't really any worse either, although we do get a much MUCH happier ending here.

Given Sir Michael Caine's record when it comes to remakes, (some of them even being remakes of his own classic films), I'm surprised he agreed to do another as for the most part, they have been poor, but he hits the bullseye here.

Joe, Al and Willie (Caine, Alan Arkin and Morgan Freeman respectively), are three senior citizens all with financial problems, they've been screwed out of their pensions through some corporate chicanery and are receiving repo notices for their homes.

After Joe becomes an innocent bystander in a bank robbery and watching the ease in which the robbers take their score, he gets the idea that the elderly trio can also rob the bank in order to live comfortably for the rest of their lives and help a few needy people at the same time.

The premise is brilliant, the comedy is very funny indeed and all the main cast members shine and are a joy to watch. Support is also given by Matt Dillon as the hard FBI agent that needs to be outwitted, the still very beautiful Ann-Margret who plays Arkin's love interest and a woefully underused Christopher Lloyd.

In the days of 'the code' the ending would have had to be very different as they would never have allowed a film to be released that would show criminals actually getting away with their crime, but it is established very early in the movie that these men aren't malicious, violent and unscrupulous villains, but normal guys who have been the victims of a corrupt and uncaring system, a system they have been paying into all their lives and one that they trusted. Therefore, our sympathies are with them from the start and it is the banks who are the real villains of the piece and like all bad guys, they get their comeuppance in the final act.

I really enjoyed this movie, it's not violent, there is some, but mostly mild expletives used and has a feel good quality to it that a lot of people will relate to.

Give it a whirl. Enjoy!

An Early 80's non Bond outing for Sir Roger Moore, slotted neatly between Octopussy and A View to a Kill.

The first thing that gave me some pause that I may not be about watch a masterpiece of cinema was those four words, that a host of movie audiences dreaded seeing in the 80's - Cannon Films and Golan Globus, two people known for torpedoing their own projects and this nearly became another of those casualties. However, to be fair, this film is far from being Superman IV in how bad it is and I actually found it quite entertaining.

Sir Roger Moore Plays Dr Judd Stevens a widowed psychiatrist with his own private practice. However, his life is turned upside down when one of his patients is murdered in what appears to be a motiveless crime and later that same day, his office is ransacked and his secretary is also brutally killed by person or persons unknown,

Stevens is convinced that he is the actual target, but has no idea why and his supicions are confirmed when several assassination attempts are made against him. Just as concerning is the fact that one of the police officers assigned to the case (Rod Steiger), actually view him as the main suspect in the murders, not surprising given that he holds a grudge against the Psychiatrist for his involvement in the defence at the trial of someone who had killed his old partner. His bias and prejudice against Stevens is so blatant that he ultimately gets thrown of the case and his more sympathetic partner (Elliott Gould), takes over.

Stevens hires a low-end gumshoe (Art Carney), to help him uncover who or what is behind these murders and attempts on his life. Who to his credit and ultimately the loss of his own life, makes more progress getting to the bottom of why Steven's has been targeted in a few short days than the police do.

The film is engaging in many ways, but when the real reason is divulged as to why these events have transpired and he has been targeted, it all seems a little too absurd and the movie somewhat destroys whatever momentum it has managed to build up.

The great thing about this movie is Sir Roger Moore, playing very much against type. The wry comedy he was known to usually inject into his roles is totally absent which is great to see and he plays this role as straight as an arrow. Also, unlike Moore's two most famous characters, Simon Templar and James Bond, Dr Stevens is definitely not a man of action and it is great to see Moore play a character well and truly out of his depth when faced with hit men and having to fight to try and defend himself.

On the flip side, there is some bad things to say. The first and most noticeable is Rod Steiger. Already well known for being a bit of an over-actor even on his good days, he is literally chewing the scenery here and lays it on with a trowel and as a result you get a character that you neither like or have any sympathy for.

Carney's performance is also brilliant, but he is so underused here, that for the amount of time he is actually on screen, the producers could have got a lesser known actor to play such a small part for half the price.

There is also an appearance by Sir Roger's close friend David Hedison, and another close friend Bryan Forbes was hired to write and direct.

All in all, it's an entertaining and engaging movie with a few red herrings smattered about to keep you guessing. However, and I sure I'm not alone on this, I feel that the move should have ended 20 seconds earlier than it did as what happens at the very end, needn't have happened and it left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.

Give it a go. Enjoy!

I don't know why, but when a successful stage play is adapted for the screen, nine times out of ten, something usually gets lost in translation. There are noticeable exceptions such as Arsenic and Old Lace and 12 Angry Men, but a vast majority of these movie adaptations lacks that certain something that made the stage play such a success.

Luv from 1967 is one such example. Taken from the Tony Award nominated play of the same name, the movie didn't grab me as I felt it should have and I'm at a loss as to why.

Firstly, let's examine the cast. Jack Lemmon always delivers as does Peter Falk and they do here too so it can't be that. Elaine May is by FAR the best thing in the entire movie so it definitely can't be her.

Whilst the film does have some extremely laugh out loud funny moments, the wife swapping plot line is perhaps a little too 'icky' and things sway to and fro far too quickly for us to have had any chance to build up any sentiment, and none of the four leads are particularly likeable characters anyway.

Lemmon plays Harry Berlin, who we first see as a desperate man at the end of his tether about to commit suicide from a bridge over the Hudson. A timely interruption from Milt Manville (Falk), stops him. Harry and Milt were both graduates from the same college 15 years before and despite not having seen each other since, Milt treats Harry like an old and dear friend inviting him to his home for dinner. However, he has an ulterior motive. Milt is in a loveless, (and not to mention sexless marriage with Ellen (Elaine May). Milt has a mistress in the form of the sexy Linda (Nina Wayne), who won't have anything to do with him whilst he remains married. Ellen won't divorce him and Milt feels that if Ellen fell in love with another man, she will give him the divorce he wants so he can marry Linda. He chooses Harry to be the man to throw Ellen's way.

At first the plan works and Harry and Ellen fall for each other and Ellen asks for a divorce to marry Harry. Once finalised, Harry moves into Milt's old house and marries Ellen and Milt Marries Linda, but it takes no longer than six weeks for the bloom to fall off the rose.

Linda quits her job and Milt discovers she is nothing but a lazy slob who spends all day in bed and neglecting the housework. Linda also isn't happy with Milt due to his habit of selling their furniture to two nameless junk dealers and decides to leave him. Ellen discovers that Harry is nothing more than a neurotic bore whose constant fits and strange behaviour borders on insanity and his total lack of social skills has grated right through to her bone marrow to the point she actually despises him.

After a chance meeting between Milt and Ellen, they decide that they still love each other and that the grass was in no way greener after their divorce. They then plot to get back together by trying to set up Linda with Harry, but Harry's social ineptitude soon gives that idea the deep six. Left with no alternative, they lure Harry back to that bridge over the Hudson River in the hopes that they can persuade him to jump to end his perpetual misery as well as their own.

Luv is in no way a 'black' comedy, but it sure gets dark at times with all the plotting and scheming that goes on. Nina Wayne is woefully underused as the fourth wheel in this marital car wreck, as for the most part, the focus remains firmly on Harry, Milt and Ellen.

The scene where Falk sells his office chair to the junk merchants and throws it out of the window only then to have to crouch at his desk to stop his boss from finding out had me in absolute fits and because we all remember him most as the immortal Lt. Columbo, it's easy to forget what a marvellous gift for comedy Peter Falk actually had and it is on fine display here.

Not a bad movie, but not one I will be rushing to watch again any time soon, mainly because of that missing, intangible and unexplainable 'something'.

Enjoy!

Excuse the pun, but sitcoms are funny old things, they either become an instant success and hang around for years, (Dad's Army, Last of the Summer Wine, 'Allo, 'Allo, Only Fools and Horses, Never the Twain, Are You Being Served?), or they are successful but stay around only fleetingly, in some cases just to complete a certain story arc, (To The Manor Born, Just Good Friends, The Worst Week of my Life, Fawlty Towers).

You can also throw into this mix the 'Failed Sitcom', those shows that don't engender themselves to the general public and limp on for one series, (two at most), before being ignominiously cancelled, some deservedly so, (Yes, Bottle Boys, I am referring to you).

However, one show I feel that was never really given a fair crack of the whip that falls under this latter category, was this largely forgotten mid 90's effort from the BBC. 'Ain't Misbehaving' was written by Last of the Summer Wine and Keeping Up Appearances creator Roy Clarke , whose comedy pedigree and reputation was enough for the BBC to feel confident enough to take a punt on his latest offering.

The show starred Peter Davison as Clive Quigley, a meek and mild mannered seller of office equipment and furniture in a small Yorkshire town. His some what idyllic life is thrown into utter turmoil when he meets Sonia Drysdale, (Nicola Pagett), who drops the bombshell that his wife Melissa, (Leslie Manville), is having an affair with her husband David, (John Duttine).

At first, Clive is in denial, convinced his sweet and innocent wife has not strayed, until Sonia calls up the hotel room in which their other halves are conducting their clandestine dalliances and he hears her voice.

Sonia isn't as heartbroken as such a situation would usually demand, as is not her first rodeo when it comes to her husband's infidelity. She's more concerned about potentially losing half her hairdressing business and her house if she ever has to get divorced from this complete snake of a human being.

Clive on the other hand is devastated as his entire life revolves around his wife. Although sexually frustrated at her complete disinterest in 'marital relations', he cooks, cleans and answers Melissa's every call, whilst in contrast, she clearly couldn't give two solitary f**ks about him.

Sonia and Clive become unlikely partners in a a scheme to derail their fallen spouses' relationship with each other, without ever letting them know they ever knew about it in the first place.

In reality, apart from a few kisses and some fumblings, Melissa has not yet had sex with her lover as she is actually a mass of neuroses, not because of any feelings of guilt for her husband, but she fears being found out and exposed as a harlot in the neighbourhood although the intent and opportunity is there for her to do so and she always spends her time with her 'lover' in the bathroom being sick.

David, however,despite telling Melissa that he loves her, sees her as nothing more than a challenge and she is also not the only filly he is keeping in the stable.

Sonia and Cliff start spending a lot of time together in their quest to break up their erring spouses, something that Clive's secretary Ramona, (Polly Hemingway), notices immediately, and convinced it is they who are having an affair, starts to have romantic feelings for her boss as well, seeing him in a new and exciting light.

Over the course of the two series, Sonia and Clive begin to realise that they harbour their own feelings for each other and that their own relationship may be worth more to them than the marriages they are trying to save.

Between series 1&2 some changes were made, and not for the better either. Leslie Manville was replaced in the role of Melissa by Karen Drury and this was a definite downgrade as Manville's unhinged neurotic portrayal of the cheating spouse fearful of being caught in the act in series 1, are at times absolutely hilarious. This is a plot-line completely abandoned in series 2 as she and David have now consummated their relationship and she has now become a wanton, sex obsessed bunny boiler with no desire to hide her feelings for her lover from the world. This makes the character of Melissa even more fundamentally unlikable than she already was.

David finds this change in Melissa's demeanour intolerable and his feelings for her, if indeed he ever had any, cool considerably.

The character of Private Eye Chuck Purvis, who we only see in a single episode of series 1 played by Ian McNeice, is fleshed out considerably and appears in all episodes of series 2 only this time played by Paul Brooke and you get tired pretty quickly of this totally pointless and uninteresting character.

We are also introduced to Ramona's husband Lester in series 2. This guy is a total nutcase, completely unlikable and hard to envision as the man Ramona with all her airs and graces would have chosen for a husband and it felt like Roy Clarke was trying to take us down the Last of the Summer Wine route by filling up this quaint little Yorkshire town with completely over the top eccentrics, all that was missing from series 2 was a bath tub full of old men rolling down a hill.

Sadly, after the 2nd series, the BBC pulled the plug, which left me feeling a bit cheated as we didn't really see anything get resolved, despite the audience having invested six hours of their lives in these characters. The cheaters never got their much deserved exposure and comeuppance, the budding relationship between Clive and Sonia never really materialised and once again, we saw a TV show get cancelled without getting the proper ending the story deserved.

I enjoyed Ain't Misbehaving, but given that cheating on someone and being cheated on, isn't very funny, I guess the writing was always on the wall for any comedy who tried to suggest it was.

Enjoy!

We Brits love a good comedy film series. The Cornetto Trilogy, the 'Confessions' movies and of course the 'Carry On' films.

However, our penchant for movies with a recurring theme started way back in 1954 with the 'Doctors' series. Whilst not as long lived, productive or as engrained in British Culture as the aforementioned Carry On series, they are no less fondly remembered.

Whilst the Carry On output was exponential, producing 30 movies between 1958 and 1978, often churning out two a year, Only seven 'Doctor' movies were made between 1954 and 1970.

Despite being a completely separate entity, the connection that the 'Doctors' movies had with the Carry Ons runs deeper than most people think. They were produced by Betty E Box who was the wife of Carry On Producer Peter Rogers and they were Directed by Ralph Thomas, elder brother of Carry On Director Gerald Thomas and the younger Thomas brother actually works as Editor on this, the first movie in the 'Doctor' franchise.

The film centres around a group of medical students at St Swithun's Hospital. Some are green as grass first years, and others are returning students who had failed their exams the previous year and are coming back for another bite of the cherry.

One of them, Richard Grimsdyke (Kenneth More), keeps failing his exams on purpose as his Grandmother has agreed to supply him with £1000 a year for as long as he is studying and he doesn't want to see that annual stipend come to an end and given that back in 1954 you could evidently buy four pints of beer for only five shillings (25p in today's money), who can blame him?

Another, 'Taffy' Evans, (Donald Houston), keeps failing accidentally, because his obsession with Rugby, (which for some reason they keep referring to as football), makes him neglect his studies.

Tony Benskin (Donald Sinden), is the friend we all have, (but sometimes wish we didn't), the ladies man who's consistently broke and never buys a round of drinks. He seems to be studying for a degree in sexual malpractice, as he systematically sets about seducing as many student nurses as he can.

Nestled within these three is Simon Sparrow, (Dirk Bogarde), the innocent first year and the only one of the four who wants to take his studies seriously and pass his finals the first time at bat. However, this task is not made easy though given his three well meaning, but disruptive colleagues who strive to introduce Simon to the ways of the flesh with the numerous nurses they encounter at every turn and one in particular, Nurse Joy Gibson (Muriel Pavlow), steals his heart.

Simon also has to deal with an officious Dean of Students, who makes no secret of his dislike for the quartet of budding physicians and would love nothing better than to expel them all. However, fighting their corner is the brash and ill-tempered Sir Lancelot Spratt (James Robertson Justice), who sees the potential in all of them, (particularly Simon's), despite their numerous escapades.

Dirk Bogarde would reprise his role as Simon Sparrow in a further three 'Doctors' movies and it is interesting to compare how he is in this movie, with the confident and experienced doctor giving advise and self belief to a new brace of student doctors in his final appearance Doctor in Distress in 1963.

Whilst later movies in the series would become a lot more racy and bawdy, this is extremely tame in comparison, but it is a charming little comedy nonetheless. Doctor in the House would become a HUGE hit and in consequence pave the way for the movies that followed and also influence it's more well known 'Carry On' counterpart.

Enjoy!

When retrospectively looking back at any actor's or actress' career that is replete with masterful films and performances, it is sometimes hard to pick out the one crown jewel, not so with Sir Michael Caine. Whilst he has had that illustrious career, Get Carter is just head and shoulders above all the rest.

Caine plays Jack Carter a London mob enforcer who against the wishes of his 'employers', travels back to his home town of Newcastle upon Tyne to attend the funeral of his brother who has died under mysterious circumstances.

Despite it being made to look like a drunken suicide. Carter has other ideas and is convinced that his brother was murdered and in a bid to find out why and by whom, he starts to shake the tree of the Newcastle underworld to see what falls out and when Carter becomes the target of the local thugs and gangsters himself, he becomes more certain of his suspicions and more determined to avenge his brother's death and the people responsible are equally determined to get Carter before Carter gets them.

Gritty and uncompromising, the film is also a snap shot of working class North East England and the deprivations of living in a tough mining city fifty years ago. In fact, things were so bad in Newcastle that extensive urban planning to improve conditions in the years since, means that most of what you see in the film has long since been demolished, which at least gives the people who grew up in Newcastle around this time a nostalgic look back at the 'bad old days'

Although Caine's performance is superb, I still can't immerse myself fully in his character's back story, mainly because of his accent. A 'Geordie' accent is one of the most strongest found in all of England and is certainly not one that gets shaken off completely even after many many years. Caine's solid Bermondsey does not convince me that this is a 'northern lad made good' However, if I try to think of northern actors around at the time who could have not only played Carter, but do it as good as Caine, I draw a hard blank.

This film is pure gold, deserving of every ounce of praise it gets and is a milestone of British Cinema as it was also the blue print for every gritty British crime thriller for the next twenty years.

Enjoy!

The first Revenge of the Nerds movie realeased in 1984 was a wonderful sleeper comedy where the nerds beat the bullying Alpha Betas at their own game and won control of the Greek council at Adams College.

The second movie released in 1987 was not as good nor as funny as we saw the nerds continuing their battle against the alphas on a national level at the national fraternity convention at Fort Lauderdale in Florida.

The remaining ROTN movies were low budget TV affairs, and the decline in quality continued, but at least this third movie attempted to be the rightful successor to the original movie with the return to Adams College as well as the return of some of the original antagonists.

It is now 1992, eight years after the events of the original movie. Chief nerd Lewis Skolnick is now head of the Computer Science department at Adams and is now married to Betty, the sorority cheerleader whom he had sexually assaulted in the first movie and cheated on in the second.

Whilst Lewis and Betty's fortunes had improved over the last eight years, the fortunes of Head bully Alpha Beta Stan Gable had certainly declined. He is now a run down motorcycle cop with the Highway Patrol. He's still entrenched in his hatred of nerds and saddened by the fact that nerds have now taken over every facet of life at Adams College having seemingly learned nothing from his past experiences.

A new generation of nerds arrive at Adams including Lewis' nephew Harold and his best friend, drawn to the college not just through familial ties, but because of Adams nerd friendly atmosphere.

Also arriving on campus is Orrin Prince an old Adams alum and former Alpha Beta who has now enrolled his son Adam into the college. They are both appalled at what he sees and the decline of Alpha dominance.

Prince finds a natural ally in Stan Gable whom he meets at rush week. Prince is not without influence as he is President of the college and uses that influence to install Stan as the new Dean of Students so he can usher in a new era of Alpha dominance and introduce a new reign of anti nerd policies using the remaining Alpha Betas as his boots on the ground.

To deflect from his true intentions, Stan feigns a friendship with Lewis with also the ulterior motive to try to win Betty, his ex girlfriend, back again.

Prince uses the Alpha Betas to plant drugs in the Lamda, Lambda, Lambda house and all the tri-lambs get arrested. It is an action that Stan is not made aware of beforehand and even he thinks that this is a step too far, but despite his misgivings he remains silent.

In protest at the arrest, Lewis leads a workers strike all over the Adams campus and the tri-lambs call in an another Lamda alumni to defend them in court, none other than original Adams College nerd Dudley 'Booger' Dawson who is now a shyster lawyer.

The strike sees a complete shut down at Adams college with the gas stations, phones and electricity all being cut off. This makes Stan the laughing stock of the community. Prince has one last ace up his sleeve. He has been misappropriating college funds and unbeknownst to Stan, he has been having Lewis sign papers that incriminate him for the crimes.

This leads Stan for the first time to have genuine concerns that these allegations could completely ruin Lewis' entire life and that the nerd persecution has long since moved on from being simply college hijinks and has now become something a lot more malicious and sinister.

Lewis is arrested and put on trial and Stan is called as a witness, but when he sees all of the old original nerds arrive in the courtroom to give Lewis their support, he has his epiphany that his old enemies were never enemies at all and his 'friends' have been his real enemies his whole life. He makes an unprecedented statement to the court declaring Lewis innocent of all charges as well as the tri-lambs being innocent of the drugs charges.

Whilst the movie isn't brilliant, the fact that it feels more like a direct sequel to the first movie than the second movie did goes in its favour and therefore, I will happily declare it my favourite of the sequels.

The new nerds and alphas are instantly forgettable and not likeable at all and it's difficult for the viewer to invest themselves in an entirely new set of characters this far into the series.

Whilst not a patch on the original it's a fun watch, but being a made for TV movie, don't expect the T&A and F bombs that had been so prevalent in the first two films. Like the Police Academy movies, this nerd saga had lapsed into family friendly territory by this point and would sadly remain so for the fourth and final film.

Enjoy!

Sweet Home Alabama is a run of the mill romantic Comedy with a 'two worlds collide' plot. Watchable and enjoyable but in no way fantastic.

Melanie (Reece Witherspoon), is a well known and respected New York fashion designer and she's done all she can over the years to disguise the fact that she was born in a small town in deep Alabama to redneck parents.

When she gets engaged to political hopeful Andrew Hennings (Patrick Dempsey), she realises that her path to true love has a blockage in the road - A marriage to her childhood sweetheart back in Alabama, which is still very much unabsolved.

She travels to her old hometown to try to get her husband Jake, (Josh Lucas), to sign divorce papers to free her up to marry Andrew. And although they constantly fight like cat and dog, He still loves her and is reluctant to do so.

Another blockage in the road comes in the form of Andrew's Mother, (Candice Bergen), who strongly disapproves of Melanie and her pending marriage to her son and would like to see them break up and Andrew marry a girl more suitable in status.

It is not long before Melanie realises that you can take the girl out of the South, but you can't take the south out of the girl and a further realisation that she has been married to her one true love all this time.

As I said earlier, it's certainly watchable but just another rom com nestled between the countless rom coms made around the same time.

However, usually when the audience is presented with a 'love triangle' subplot, the 'other man' tends to be either a cad, a liar and thoroughly unlikeable with whom you're not supposed to have sympathy for and you don't feel bad when they get they dumped, but here the 'other guy' is Andrew who we see as a genuine, stand up, decent guy who we DO actually feel sorry for when the inevitable break up comes, especially when it is done so publicly.

Worth a watch, especially as for once, we get to see a rom com set somewhere other than New York or LA, but this also means that some regrettable southern stereotypes get used for comedic effect.

Enjoy!

Doris Day, Rock Hudson and Tony Randall had first teamed up in 1959 in the excellent comedy Pillow Talk. They reunited in the even better, (if that's possible), Lover Come Back in 1961. In 1964 they got together for the third and final time in Send Me No Flowers.

Unlike the their previous two outings which had been sex farce comedies where the plot centred around the devious Hudson's attempts to woo the virginal Day using deception and subterfuge, Send Me No Flowers sees Hudson and Day play an established married couple and for once, Hudson's Intentions throughout are noble and well intended.

Hudson plays George Kimble, a hypochondriac who overhears his doctor talking on the phone about a terminally ill patient with only weeks to live and mistakenly believes that he is the subject of the conversation.

With fate presumably closing in on him, he confides in his best friend and neighbour Arnold (Randall) and convinced that his wife Judy (Day) would not be able to cope on her own they conspire to find her a new husband before he pops his clogs.

After an incident with a runaway golf cart, Judy gets rescued by her old college boyfriend Bert Power, (Clint Walker), a walking ball of testosterone with millions of dollars in the bank to boot. Despite having a strong dislike for Bert, George is convinced by Arnold that Bert would Make the ideal replacement husband.

Whilst the film does offer some great laugh out loud moments, times had changed considerably since the last time the trio had started together. This movie is very 60's compared to the other two and comedies were also finding themselves increasingly out of favour with movie audiences as new darker and realistic styles of movie had become in vogue by the time this one was realised.

Once again, Tony Randall steals the entire movie as the supportive and emotional best friend whose way of coping with his friends impending demise is to bury himself in the bottle and as a result, spends almost the entire movie sloshed out of his brains which makes for some great comedic scenes. However, he does have competition in Hal March as the lecherous Winnie Burr, who exploits the misery of marital break ups by seducing the female divorcees.

Send Me No Flowers is certainly the weakest of the three movies, but is not without merit and is an enjoyable watch throughout and worth checking out, but it was wise not make any further follow ups with this trio as they were perfect for their time, but even at this point, that time had clearly passed.

Enjoy!

Smashing Time is a movie that doesn't actually know what the hell it is or even supposed to be. It's a comedy of sorts, then it's a musical, then it's a romance film and it pretty much fails at being all three.

Lynn Redgrave and Rita Tushingham play two Northern girls that arrive in London seeking their fame and fortune and the entire film is pretty much just a series of vignettes showing the ups and downs the pair experience after getting off the train. Neither of the two leads are particularly likeable and they proceed to screech their way through the terrible songs the script requires them to sing. 'CAAAAAARNABY STREET' being a particular annoying example.

However, as disappointing as the film ultimately turns out to be, it is a great look at swinging sixties London in 1967 in its full psychedelic glory. The colours and the visuals are amazing as are the fashions of the day, sadly a period which was all too short as within a few years, it was all over and 70's blandness took over. In fact, the film would have been better just being a travelogue of Hip and Trendy London instead of the focussing on the weak as all hell plot.

Written by George Melly of all people, the skits rarely succeed in raising a smile and the film tends to repeat itself at times and if you want to know what's worse than a film with a food fight to progress the plot, it's a film with TWO food fights to progress the plot although in one we do see the band The Tomorrow featuring a young pre-Yes Steve Howe getting some cream thrown right in his boat race.

The all-star cast fails to rescue it either with names like Michael York, Ian Carmichael, Irene Handl, Anna Quale, Peter Jones, David Lodge, Jeremy Lloyd and Arthur Mullard just doing the minimum the script requires and taking the money and running away.

It's just a shame that one of the few movies made in and around London in this period that actually utilised location shooting didn't turn better than it was.

When you think about 1950's pin up girls, the first name to come to mind for many will be Bettie Page. She was so beautiful, so vivacious that how she was never able to break into mainstream films and acting roles is a mystery even though we never really got to see her act in a cinematic role and the films we do have of her, are her scantily clad dances and burlesque/fetish shorts.

This 'documentary', (a word I use in its loosest possible definition), starts well and highlights Bettie's formative years and her break into pin up modelling, but then spends a large section in the middle not evening mentioning Bettie Page at all with the narrater skewing off topic explaining the changing culture and attitudes of the 60's and 70's, the relaxing of censorship, enthusiastically bashing Richard Nixon at every opportunity he gets and defending communism whilst filling the screen with as much unrelated T&A and unneeded muff shots as possible. Only mentioning Bettie again a couple of times to explain her cultural revival when 50's nostalgia became popular.....then it ends.

There are plenty of other Bettie Page retrospectives out there and I urge you to find them and watch them instead, especially Bettie Page Reveals All, which has Bettie telling her own story which I wholeheartedly recommend. Avoid this one if you can, it just isn't very good and somewhat fails in its mission.

This lovely little Romantic Comedy from the mid WWII period stars Jean Arthur as the highly organised yet frustrated spinster, Joel McCrea as the cynical GI on special duty and Charles Coburn as a mischievous and aged Cupid who sets about bringing the other two together.

In Washington DC in 1943, there was a housing shortage due to the.population increase brought on by an influx of government war workers.

Coburn plays industrialist Benjamin Dingle who arrives in Washington for a meeting with a senator two days before his hotel reservation becomes available. He smart talks his way into subletting the apartment of the beautiful Constance Milligan, (Arthur).

Dingle takes a liking to this strange and over organised girl whose morning schedule is meticulously timed to the second like a railway timetable. He deduces that this level of detail must be the result of a frustrated and lonely life and sets about trying to find her a husband.

He bumps into Joe Carter, (McCrea), a soldier in 'civvies' who's in Washington to receive his orders for a special mission overseas. He too is looking for a place to stay and Dingle sees Carter as the ready made Adam needed for his Eve in need. In a bid to bring the two together, he sublets half of his half of the apartment to Carter.

When Carter and Constance meet, the attraction is immediate and electric and despite the awkwardness of a situation where a man you hardly know sublets half of your apartment only then to sublet half of that half to a man she doesn't know at all, romance begins to blossom.

However Dingle has his work cut out as he needs to separate Constance from her boring, officious and passionless fiancé, keep Carter from the temptations of a city in which there are 'eight girls to every fella', get Constance and Carter sprung from the clutches of the FBI when they are suspected of being Japanese spies and find a way to get them married before Carter leaves for active service the next day.

This film was remade in 1966 as Walk Don't Run with Washington substituted for Tokyo and the war replaced with the 1964 Olympic Games, where a similar housing shortage transpired. With Samantha Eggar in the Arthur role, Jim Hutton in place of McCrea and Cary Crant as the elder statesmen bringing them together. Usually, when there has been a film with a remake, it tends to be the film you saw first that becomes your favourite version. However, I saw Walk Don't Run first and although I think it a very good flick, it is nothing compared to this original.

McCrea, more at home in westerns and dramas was actually a gifted comic actor and is a joy to watch throughout as is Coburn, an actor so versatile he could take on literally ANYTHING and do it well. However, it is Arthur who, (once again), shines out. I have seen many Jean Arthur movies over the years, but never have I seen her so, desirable, inviting and lustful as she is in this movie. When Arthur and McCrea kiss on the doorstep, she even grabs his face as if to totally consume him. Not a standout scene by any means, but one of the most passionate you will ever find during the motion picture code period that's for sure.

We now live in the days where we can 'de-age' actors to make them look younger than they are, but back in 1943, Jean Arthur was doing it naturally as she was 42 at the time of filming but looks at least 15 years younger. No CGI, no trick photography. War or no war, if I'd have married Jean Arthur one day and was told I'd have to leave her the next, I'd desert.

Enjoy!

Silver Streak is a wonderful action comedy released in 1976.

Gene Wilder plays George Caldwell, a LA publisher taking the train, (the titular 'Silver Streak'), to Chicago to attend his Sister's wedding. He's taking the train and not a plane because by his own admission, he 'just wants to be bored'.

He will soon find out that maybe taking the plane would have been the more boring option, because over the course of the next two days, he will find love, witness murders, become involved in an intricate art fraud plot, get thrown off the train on no fewer than THREE separate occasions, become a wanted fugitive and form an unlikely partnership with a car thief to save his girl and clear his name.

This movie was to be the first of three on screen pairings of Wilder with Richard Prior, who on paper would be an unlikely a match just as much they are unlikely action hero's, but together they always did work perfectly, although Prior's character in Silver Streak doesn't even make his first appearance until an hour into the story.

Jill Clayburgh plays love interest Hilly Burns and her character is given more to do than just be the pretty face on screen for guys to just gawp at. She's sexy, funny, sultry and likeable in equal measures and is a well rounded female lead.

Patrick McGoohan is the charming, yet ruthless villain of the piece Roger Devereau, the art dealer who will got to any lengths to preserve his ill gotten reputation.

The film is then fleshed out with some wonderful character actors too, which include Ned Beattie, Ray Walston, Lucille Benson, Scatman Crothers, Richard Kiel, (in a pre Bond non speaking role in which he plays a totally different killer with totally different metal teeth), and another Bond Alumni Clifton James, gives us an absolutely hilarious turn as another inept county sheriff who thinks Rembrandt is a federal agent.

The action comedy genre is nothing new, Silver Streak wasn't the first and it certainly wasn't the last, but it was surely one of the best.

It's a credit to Silver Streak that the only thing I found frustrating about the movie is that I never ever did find out what happens when you treat an azalea like nasturtium.

Enjoy!

Great little bittersweet drama from 1949 that tells the story of a man's rite of passage from becoming a doctor to finding out what being a doctor actually means whilst finding love along the way.

Glenn Ford plays Michael Corday the son of a famous surgeon (Charles Coburn), who returns home from Harvard with his own medical diploma in hand, eager to start his own journey as a physician. He is very much his fathers son, and his dad gives him some advice about not becoming emotionally involved with the issues of his patients and to treat his job as nothing more than a production line.

Michael begins his new role as an intern at Bellevue and soon earns the disdain of his colleagues and managers with his emotionless and seemingly uncaring attitude towards his patients, some of whom have some very serious and life changing ailments.

Things take a turn when he meets Evelyn, (Janet Leigh) a patient with a lung ailment and the prognosis is not good. Michael takes a liking to this girl and the two form a friendship which he tries to keep strictly plutonic. However, when a child he is operating on dies from haemorrhaging, he is tasked with breaking the news to the distraught and inconsolable parents, an experience that affects him deeply and makes him realise that whilst medicine may just be a job to him, the decisions he makes will have a profound effect on the lives of others.

Desperate to ensure that Evelyn doesn't meet a similar fate, he uses his position to pull some strings to ensure that his family friend and the best doctor he knows performs her surgery, which he watches anxiously.

The surgery is a success and she is expected to make a full recovery. However, he can no longer hide his feelings for her and the plutonic relationship with Evelyn has now blossomed into true love for both parties.

Michael's overbearing father, desperate for his son to forget her and concentrate on his career, arranges her discharge without telling Michael, who only finds out when he goes to visit her and another patient is in her bed.

Michael confronts his father and gets Evelyn's address and when they are reunited, he proposes marriage, which at first she is reluctant to accept, knowing the trouble it will cause with his father and also the damage it may do to his promising career, but her love for him is so strong that she soon agrees.

His father cuts him off and even refuses to meet his new bride. But his sisters played by Gloria DeHaven and future First Lady Nancy Reagan (Davis), as well as his brother in Law, (Warner Anderson), all embrace their new relative and fully support Michael's decision to go it alone knowing how overbearing their father can be.

Michael and Evelyn convert their small apartment into a local medical practice with Evelyn as the nurse and despite his new practice being on the wrong side of the tracks and nowhere near even close to being financially rewarding. He makes a name in the local community as a kind and caring GP.

Sadly, a family tragedy makes all involved re-evaluate their positions, Michael's father relents and asks Michael and Evelyn to move in with him, so he can repair their relationship, be more accepting and appreciative of his daughter in law and also get Michael's career as a world class surgeon back on track. They agree, but when Michael and his father are reviewing his active patients case notes, ready to hand over to the a possible replacement doctor, and seeing Michael's knowledge, concern and care for each and every one of his 'flock', it is the father that comes to his own epiphany that Michael is indeed already where he is destined to be and needs to stay there.

Coburn plays to type as the interfering patriarch, Ford gets to do something a little different than we'd seen him do before and we're treated to a wonderful early performance from Leigh whose character, so pivotal to the path Michael will take, would have been too much of an undertaking for a lesser talented young actress, yet she absolutely shines here running a gamut of emotions, from the worry about the illness from which she is suffering when we are first introduced to her, to the conflict she feels about potentially destroying Michael's relationship with his family at the benefit of her own relationship.

This is really a great movie, but it might be worthwhile have some tissues handy at some of the more emotional parts.

Enjoy!

Unlike those family friendly light action shows that adorned our TV screens throughout the 80's Tropical Heat came out in the early 90's. However, It was a bit more adult in its delivery as set in the Florida Keys, most episodes featured BIG chested scantily clad blondes in TINY Bikini's in the background of most episodes so it was hardly suitable for prime time. My Introduction came in early 1994. I was 20 years old, and I'd just moved out of my parent's house and had my first flat and I was still revelling in my new found freedom by staying up all night drinking beer and smoking cigarettes (and maybe other things too). And I discovered Tropical Heat purely by accident skipping through channels at about 2am. I really enjoyed it and was hooked from then on. Now I know that the show is HUGE in Serbia, but I'm not sure how big it was in other countries. One thing I CAN tell you for sure, is that you can ask 1000 random people here in the UK if they've ever heard of this show and about 999 of them will give the answer NO!

The show focuses on Nick Slaughter, played by Rob Stewart, (The Dana Andrews of the 1990's), a disgraced Ex-DEA agent now exiled to the tropical island paradise known as Key Mariah. He's a private eye who through financial necessity has formed an uneasy partnership with Sylvie Gerrard (Carolyn Dunn). She handles the paperwork and the books and he does the gumshoeing. However, given that this series lasted for three seasons and never once left the Island, Key Mariah must have had a higher crime rate per capita than Detroit and Chicago combined.

The efficient Sylvie is constantly butting heads with Nick, who would rather spend his time drinking at the Tropical Heat bar, run and owned by his friend Ian (John David Bland), who mainly appears for comic vignettes at the start and end of each episode, although his character is fleshed out and gets in on the action from time to time. Midway though season two, Bland was dropped from the series, (apparently bitter about his reduced role) and was replaced for the remainder of the series by Huckleberry Finn himself Ian Tracey, who played new bar owner Spider.

The plots of each episode are for the most part light hearted and comedic and the action was seldom gratuitous or overly violent and that was part of its appeal, that despite the added sexuality, it still remained predominately inoffensive, (unless you're a feminist that is).

In the intervening three decades since I first saw this show, I have now been able to hunt down a copy of all the episodes and I still watch them regularly....usually in the winter when it's blowing a gale or pouring with rain or even worse, snowing. As when the weather's that bad, (which is often here), it's nice to escape into a far away world of sun, sand, sea and BABES...and tap my feet to that damn catchy theme tune.

This TV show never fails to cheer me up.

If I were to compile a list of movie stars of yesteryear that today are largely forgotten, then Jon Hall would be at the pinnacle of that list. He had the physique of Johnny Weissmuller, the height of Gary Cooper, the voice of Randolph Scott and the good looks of Tyrone Power. So why, WHY on earth didn't this guy go on to leave a cinematic legacy on par with the great names mentioned? The answer is simple - He couldn't act for toffee. In fact, he hated acting, but in a similar way to James Cagney, he pursued the vocation purely because it gave him the finances to do the other things he actually wanted to do in life, such as flying and inventing things.

Luckily for Hall, in Kit Carson, he had Dana Andrews and Lynn Bari to help mask his obvious lack of acting chops is this engaging early period western. Hall plays the legendary titular character hired as a scout by Captain John C Fremont to accompany him, his troop and wagon train of civilians to California. However, Mexican General Castro, desperate for the Americans not to reach California to help the besieged American homesteaders there has armed the Shoshoni natives with rifles to do their dirty work for them. When this fails, Castro orders the attack on all the American haciendas and to wipe out the Americans settlers, which encourages the settlers to declare California an Independent Republic.

Not a bad little horse opera, but like all Hollywood westerns that feature real historical figures, revisionism took place then just as much as it does now. Kit Carson and John Fremont were real people and were together on quite a few expeditions over the years when the United States were expanding westward, but a needless love triangle between the two and Lynn Bari's character was added for some dramatic flair, which wasn't really needed. However, the film does give us a chance to see Bari play the female lead for once and not the bitchy 'other woman' characters that we saw her play all too often.

Worth a go, but don't expect 'How the West was Won'.

Enjoy!!