TREE FOR ALL

Merry Christmas to everybody!

If you're a bit burned out on all the standard Christmas classics, I may have a new selection for you: This past Friday my film historian pal Richard hosted his annual Christmas party/movie night, and the feature selection was 1950's Trail of Robin Hood...

...a Roy Rogers western in ghastly "Trucolor" from Republic. The story concerns, I kid you not, crooked Christmas tree growers poaching tannenbaums off of Roy's pal Jack Holt's tree farm, because Holt wants to sell the trees cheap to needy families, and his competitors are afraid he'll drive down prices.

A bunch of other cowboy stars, like Rocky Lane, Kermit Maynard, William Farnum, Ray "Crash" Corrigan, Tom Tyler and Rex Allen, among others, show up as themselves to help Roy get Holt's trees to market. Needless to say, Roy is also aided by Trigger, here billed second in the credits as "The Smartest Horse in the Movies," and by his tireless dog Bullet.

It was awesome, and as Richard pointed out, it's a great illustration of how progressive the values championed by old school western programmers often tended to be: Evil businessmen or bankers versus heroes who stuck up for ordinary people.  Roy is even bilingual in this one, singing one verse of a wonderful cowboy swing song in Spanish.

One more Christmas weekend opening:

Molly's Game--Aaron Sorkin of A Few Good Men and The West Wing makes his feature directorial debut with this intriguing drama, which he also scripted in his usual fast-talking manner. It's based on a memoir by Molly Bloom, not the Joyce heroine but the hostess of insanely high-stakes celebrity poker games in L.A. and New York during the first decade of this century.

Her games were legal, until, inevitably, she crossed the line by taking a "rake," and they weren't anymore. She was busted by the feds, but refused to sing for them; against the prospect of years in prison, she clung to her personal and professional discretion.

It's a pretty engrossing story, and Sorkin's dialogue steers it briskly through its twists. The glue that holds the picture together, however, is the lead performance. Ably supported by Idris Elba as her standoffish lawyer and Kevin Costner as her standoffish Dad, Jessica Chastain has the best role so far of her young career, as a complex and flawed but ultimately brave and ethical woman who might have been referred to, in an earlier age of movies, as a "stand-up dame."

ROTOR OATER

Aviation &/or obscure western movie geeks, be advised: Friday at 8 p.m. EST Turner Classic Movies shows Under Mexicali Stars, a 1950 yarn from Republic Studios, starring Rex Allen (“The Arizona Cowboy”) and his sidekick Homer (Buddy Ebsen), this time on the trail of nefarious counterfeiters. It’s a perfectly ordinary singing-cowboy programmer of the period, with one exception—a helicopter, at that time a newfangled contraption, plays a major role.

The villains use what appears to be a Hiller UH12A to purloin wagonloads of gold without a trace, little knowing that on one such run the intrepid Rex (in reality one of Republic’s gang of crazed stuntmen, no doubt) has grabbed hold of the aircraft’s wheelgear and hitched a ride to their hideout.

Homer, meanwhile, unravels the mystery to the authorities in this burst of Shakespearean exposition: “It explains the vanishing footprints…How they stole the gold without leavin’ a trace…With those things you don’t even have to touch the ground, so no wheelprints!” During the climactic scenes, the villains use the craft to pursue our hero, and when Rex at last gets the upper hand, the final baddie standing makes a desperate dash for the craft before Rex flattens him.

This all-but-forgotten little horse opera was released in 1950, barely four years after the Bell 47 first hit the civilian market. It may be one of the first feature films in which a helicopter is a crucial plot point.

Several RIPs: To poor Amy Winehouse, passed on at just 27, to Broadway & TV character actor Tom Aldredge, at 83, to the luscious original “Bond Girl” Linda Christian, at 87, & to veteran producer & production designer Polly Platt, at 72.

Early in his career Raja Gosnell, director of The Smurfs, which opens tomorrow, was editor of…

Monster-of-the-Week: …1986's Monster in the Closet, an amusingly literal piece of schlock spoof from Troma. So the title character, who surprisingly does not resemble Marcus Bachmann, is this week’s honoree…

My fondest memory of this film is a scene near the beginning, in which John Carradine plays a blind man whose service dog likes to hide his white cane from him. As I recall, the furious Carradine assures the dog that he will have his revenge, because though he can’t see, he can “hear an ant piss on a sponge.”