Trapped (1949)

Director: Richard Fleischer

Cast: Lloyd Bridges, Barbara Payton, John Hoyt, James Todd

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Between the head cold that wouldn’t die, and the general feeling of exhaustion that filled the universe last fall*, I’ve been slacking on attending Circle’s regular Noir Night. Throw in the fact that before the movie they ran the 1923 animated short from Fleischer’s father, also titled Trapped, I can’t help but marvel that I go to one of the only theaters that still runs cartoons before a movie.

Did I Like It: Even beyond the amenities of the screening, it’s good to be back in the dim world of Noir. There’s something so simply intuitive about putting a hard on their luck schlub in the pursuit of an easy payday only to be completely ruined by that fantasy (it’s a fantasy at the moment) of consequences. Trapped hits all of the beats one would expect and need from the genre. There’s even a blonde (Payton) lurking around the edges of the film who can vacillate between victim and Iago-like manipulator for good measure.

But then the film takes a weird turn. All throughout the runtime, Stewart (Bridges) feels like the main character. He’s the schemer who is one step ahead of the coppers who are trying to bring the gifted forger back into justice. Most of the first act centers on his escape. Then, with twenty minutes left to go, Bridges gets arrested again. One might think he’s got a whole other escape in him before the end credits unfurl, but no. Lloyd Bridges suddenly becomes Sir Not Appearing In This Film. The final twenty minutes involves the Secret Service tightening their noose around a completely different character, Jack Sylvester (Todd).

This might have struck me as a flaw of the film, if it weren’t for the fact that we were all told before the film began that Bridges got quite sick in the middle of production, and with a B production there was no time to wait for him to get better. So it’s suddenly a story about Sylvester. Without Fleischer at the helm, this could have been a real mess, instead of a slightly off-beat one. It’s a testament to Fleischer’s skills that he could make as much lemonade out of the lemons available.

Just imagine how bad Conan the Destroyer (1984) would have been if Fleischer hadn’t been around to keep things under some degree of control.

*Now that that’s over with…

Airplane II: The Sequel

Director: Ken Finkleman

Cast: Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Lloyd Bridges, William Shatner

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. An extended cameo from Shatner actually led me to prefer this over the original Airplane! (1980) when I was a kid.

Did I Like It: But kids are idiots. Everything is tired here. The jokes are the same. Anything new is mostly jam-packed into the film’s opening minutes. I caught myself laughing at the courtesy van for Air Iran, even though it’s not a great joke, per se. Jokes about Ronald Reagan’s senility work now, but I can’t give extra credit for something being accidentally funnier than it had any right to originally be.

Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, and even Kareem Abdul-Jabbar steer clear, and it’s not exactly like Sonny Bono is an adequate consolation prize. Those that remain try their best to keep things breezy, but they are largely repeating old gags with only the slightest variation. Hagerty understands the assignment and remains adorable, while there are several times Hays looks at the camera, as if to beg us not to make the film a success to keep him from the threatened indignities of an Airplane III.

And yet…

The parts with Shatner still kind of hold up. He’s playing a character similar enough to Kirk that we all get the joke, but different enough that Paramount would have to cut one more check to Roddenberry. It’s largely some tame gags, but he is game and understands we’re laughing at him more than with him. He’s at the heights of his cinematic charms, having also had Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) under his belt earlier in the year. I’ll be honest, my most guileless laugh in the whole movie came when Shatner’s character was gently shoved into the outer orbit of a nervous breakdown at the sight of a glass tube with an array of blinking red lights. Those things were built for The Wrath of Khan but are recognizable to any Trek fan for being reused ad infinitum for decades in the franchise.

Joe Versus The Volcano (1990)

Director: John Patrick Shanley

Cast: Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. Although I can’t remember how it all ends, for some reason. That’s probably the best way to rediscover a film, now that I think about it.

Did I Like It: It’s certainly a charmingly weird film, I cannot deny it that. Starting with frames filled with dream-like production design from Bo Welch—hinting at the work he would do in a few years in Batman Returns (1992)—this world is not our own, and yet there are any number of moments that feel distressingly real, although most of those have to do with the horrifying drudgery of Joe’s (Hanks, being imminently Hanksy, even in a slightly off-beat milieu) job.

The secret weapon for the film is Meg Ryan, surprisingly enough. While she has always been a charming presence on film, she’s always felt more like a movie star. Here, she fully embraces the weird on display and very nearly disappears behind two distinct characters, before giving the people who showed up on date night the Meg Ryan we all know with her third character in the film. So few leading ladies are given the opportunity to to flex their craft, it’s one of the film’s stronger elements.

The one element about which I think I might truly bring myself to complain about the film is that the ending is something of an anti-climax. The volcano spits both the leads out, they figure out that Joe hasn’t been dying this whole time, and they sail off into the sunset. That may be why I can’t remember the ending; there isn’t much of one. It is a minor complaint, but might help to explain why the film never quite seeped into our collective thoughts the ways other films with this degree of talent have.