Secret of the Incas (1954)

Film: Secret of the Incas (1954)

Stars: Charlton Heston, Robert Young, Nicole Maurey, Thomas Mitchell

Director: Jerry Hopper

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Robert Young: click here to learn more about Mr. Young (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we discussed They Won't Believe Me, which was made during Robert Young's time as a freelance artist after his contract with MGM expired.  This was the best and most interesting time of Young's career as a leading man, making movies like The Enchanted Cottage and Crossfire which won acclaim (and Oscar nominations, though never for Young).  But in the early 1950's, Young's career started to falter badly.  Without a studio contract he didn't get steady work, and couldn't guarantee a substantial part even if he could get decent billing.  By 1954, when he made today's film (his last film) he hadn't worked in a major movie in two years (and his last film had been a generic western from RKO called The Half-Breed).  Secret of the Incas didn't even have him as the star-Charlton Heston, who was having a bit of a hot streak coming off of The Greatest Show on Earth (and 16 years Robert Young's junior) got the leading man role while Young was decidedly supporting.  This could've been the end of Young's career...but his luck was about to change.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is focused on Harry Steele (Heston) who is a tour guide in Peru (the film was actually shot at Machu Picchu, a first for a Hollywood movie).  He is in search of a rare Sunburst (a gold & jeweled plate), and has a map of where it is but has no means of getting there.  He works with a double-crossing associate named Ed (Mitchell), who frequently tries to kill him.  Enter a woman, Elena (Maurey), who is beautiful but doesn't have money...and is trying to find a way to America.  Harry makes an exception to his "only for money" tours, and helps her, but uses her to to get to Machu Picchu, therefore getting him a shot at the treasure.  When he gets there he meets Dr. Stanley Moorehead (Young), who is also in search of the Sunburst, but doesn't have the coordinates like Harry does (Stanley also falls for Elena, but you'll be forgiven for ignoring this plot as Elena sure does).  Harry eventually steals the Sunburst, having to fight off Ed to get it (Ed dies, falling down a cliff to his doom), but returns the Sunburst to the Incan people, realizing he loved the chase (and Elena) more than the treasure itself.

If you're having a sense of deja vu reading that, you're not alone.  Secret of the Incas was a hit in 1954, but it's not a particularly good movie.  Heston is not quite sexy enough to pull off an adventurous role like this (he was better suited for the stoic biblical epics that would become his bread-and-butter), and Young is banal in his supporting part.  But Secret of the Incas is noted for being the clear inspiration for Raiders of the Lost Ark, and it's staggering watching this that Spielberg doesn't owe the writers money.  Not only do they completely crib Heston's look for Harrison Ford in the movies, but they actually steal scenes from this movie to put in Raiders.  The famous scene where they discover the location of the grail through light-and-mirrors...that scene actually happens in Secret of the Incas as Heston finds the Sunburst.  So if you're an Indiana Jones fanatic, you need to see this even if it's not great, simply to marvel in what was clearly an inspiration for the movie.

As I mentioned above, this was Robert Young's last movie, but Young would quickly transition to massive success on television.  For years Young had been doing a radio program called Father Knows Best, which in 1954 became a TV show which he made with Jane Wyatt.  He'd follow that a decade later with a second hit, Marcus Welby, MD.  Both series won Young Emmy Awards, making him the first actor to ever win Emmy Awards for both comedy and drama (actors like Edie Falco, Carroll O'Connor, & Ed Asner would eventually follow).  Young would continue to make reunion films & specials for both series (as well as being the spokesman for Sanka for years), but would largely retire after Marcus Welby, dying in 1998 from respiratory failure at the age of 91.

OVP: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)

Film: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)

Stars: Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, Walter Hampden, Alan Marshal, Thomas Mitchell, Edmond O'Brien, Cedric Hardwicke, Harry Davenport

Director: William Dieterle

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Score, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Maureen O'Hara-click here to learn more about Ms. O'Hara (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I mentioned last week, Maureen O'Hara is a strange choice to do in a retrospective about Alfred Hitchcock.  In 1939, she did have her first major role in his Jamaica Inn, but it didn't bring the kind of mainstream success that later films would bestow on Hitchcock's leading ladies, and as a result it's not one of the films that we'd consider a "major" picture in her career (O'Hara might be the only actress all year where if I was making a list of her most important movies, I'd skip Hitch).  The first really important film of her career, instead, came about in 1939, and would star her Jamaica Inn costar Charles Laughton in one of his most iconic roles, as Quasimodo in a retelling of Victor Hugo's classic The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

(Spoilers Ahead) This is one of the most famous (and longest) stories in all of fiction, so I'm going to breeze through this, but for those who are new to the story, get ready to head to 15th Century France.  Here we have King Louis XI (Davenport) who is overseeing tumult in Paris as a group of gypsies have entered the city, some without a permit.  One of these is Esmerelda (O'Hara), a beautiful young woman who takes refuge in Notre Dame Cathedral (where she can claim "sanctuary" from the law) and it's here that she meets Quasimodo (Laughton), a man suffering from facial deformities & deafness who spends his days ringing the bells of Notre Dame.  She also meets young Captain Phoebus (Marshal) with whom she falls in love, Gringoire (O'Brien), a young man she marries out of pity, and the cruel Claude Frollo (Hampden), who becomes obsessed with her even though he assumes her beauty is a temptation from the devil to drive him mad.  This is indeed the case, as he murders Phoebus out of jealousy, but frames Esmerelda for the crime.  Quasimodo saves Esmerelda from the gallows, and watches as people lay siege to Notre Dame Cathedral as he defends it...all-the-while the king realizes that Frollo was the one who murdered Phoebus, and sets the guards on him, with Esmerelda to go free.  The film ends with Esmerelda joining her husband Gringoire, now in love with him, and Quasimodo looking on from afar, wishing to be a stone gargoyle so he does not feel the abandonment of Esmerelda, his love.

The film is considered a landmark today, and did launch O'Hara's career, but little about her rings true for Esmerelda.  Her performance here requires her to be beautiful (check), but not much else, and O'Hara wasn't always at her best when the script wasn't asking more from her.  She also has the slightest hints of her Irish accent here, which reads even more ridiculous for a woman playing a gypsy dancer.  Charles Laughton is considerably better, and genuinely inhabits his Quasimodo...I know this might be controversial both because it's a bit overacting & also because his portrayal of Quasimodo strips the character of a good chunk of his humanity (especially toward the end), but I was fascinated by his work here, and think it's one of the better performances that Laughton gave.  It's him who lifts this story to classic status in a way she doesn't, but it's a middling classic at best...in a year like 1939, you gotta stand out.

We're going to jump quite a bit ahead in O'Hara's very long career next week, so I'll talk more about what her life was like after Hunchback then, but I'd be remiss if I didn't touch on the film's two Oscar nominations.  Of the two, the Sound nomination feels better.  The siege of Notre Dame, and of course the infamous, omnipresent bells add presence & a bit of depth to the film, and I was impressed with the way that the designers found ways to make them gain some of the symbolism of Hugo's novel.  The Scoring nomination feels odd.  Yes, Alfred Newman did a fine score, but that's not really what the goal of the "Scoring" category is, which is a look at both the score itself but also additional original music (usually this featured musicals or films with musical plots, which Hunchback isn't).  Church music does show up to a slight degree, but it does feel like this was simply nominated on Newman's reputation alone, and while his score is good, it is a strange fit for this category.

OVP: The Long Voyage Home (1940)

Film: The Long Voyage Home (1940)
Stars: John Wayne, Thomas Mitchell, Ian Hunter, Barry Fitzgerald, Wilfrid Lawson, Mildred Natwick, Ward Bond
Director: John Ford
Oscar History: 6 nominations (Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Special Effects, Film Editing, Score, Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Sometimes when we're doing these theme week write-ups we're getting arguably the most important nomination for a film (particularly when it's an acting week), or in many cases it's perhaps the only nomination.  That's not the case today.  While The Long Voyage Home was definitely cited for Best Editing, and therefore is a legitimate inclusion in this week's theme, you'll notice nominations for Best Picture & Adapted Screenplay that seem a bit more "headline-y" in terms of this movie.  The film, one of the lesser-known Best Picture nominees from perennial Oscar contender John Ford, the film was a bit of a departure for the director.  After all, it wasn't made at Fox (it was for United Artists), and was a downer compared to some of the major hits he'd had in the previous two years like Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, and The Grapes of Wrath, arguably his finest movie to that point.  The Long Voyage Home did not equal these film's successes at the box office (it didn't turn a profit), but Ford would be back pretty quickly with the massive success of How Green Was My Valley to prove his value to Hollywood.  However, financial success isn't always indicative of a film's quality, and Ford never made an uninteresting picture, so I was excited to embark on this viewing.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is based on a series of plays by Eugene O'Neill, and tells the tale of a motley crew of men who are on a British Tramp Steamer, headed from the Caribbean to England during the very early stages of World War II.  The men aboard all have different dreams for themselves, from get-rich-quick-schemes to sex with the women they meet in ports to the most wholesome of the bunch, Ole Olsen (Wayne), who simply wants to go home to his Swedish mother.  The men, though, don't have an easy lot-in-life, or an easy voyage, as they are traveling with dynamite, which could explode in the rough seas, and along the way they will have to travel through English waters that are under attack.  As the film goes, we learn more about the men, and they learn about each other, particularly what they're capable of as one of them dies during a storm (Bond), and another (Hunter) is accused (unjustly) of being a German spy, when in reality his secret alcoholism has caused him so much shame he's been driven to this dangerous life even with a wife begging him to come home (he, of course, dies, as these are based on O'Neill plays).  In the end, happiness is only there for Ole, sent home but in the process dooming the fate of another sailor, and the rest of the men reluctantly return to sea, knowing they do not have the luxury of an escape from its grasp.

It's easy to see why The Long Voyage Home was not a hit in its day despite the presence of both Ford & Wayne.  The film is dark-even Ole, the sweet, lovable man who has women flocking to have sex with him, at one point is drugged in hopes of kidnapping him onto a boat crew before he's rescued, and the movie isn't shy about telling us the tales of these men & their horrors at sea.  The sequence where Thomas Mitchell's Drisk reads Hunter's Smitty's letters, assuming they contain evidence of Smitty being a spy but in reality its from a wife begging her husband to forgive himself & come home to her (and the subsequent moment where Smitty of course dies before he can absolve himself to her), will make you cry, and this is a movie that doesn't indulge sentiment.  The story's a bit broad, the first twenty minutes drag a bit, and Wayne's Swedish accent is, to put it charitably, ill-advised.  But this is pretty much the definition of a hidden gem, the sort of movie that you start watching at midnight & can't put down.

The film received six Academy Awards, and I honestly wouldn't begrudge any of them, even if they're earned to varying degrees.  The Special Effects are cool, though not particularly groundbreaking (the big scenes that got this nomination are the gigantic, swirling storm that kills Ward Bond's character, and the later attacks on the ship that kill Hunter's), and the Score is sturdy but unmemorable.  The screenplay is an achievement, though-even with the sloppy first twenty minutes, it melds together four different O'Neill plays (no easy feat), and the editing helps with that, making the chapters seamless while still connected.  Editing is the "invisible art," which isn't the case here (we know when one script ends & begins more because of tell-tale cuts), but the movie isn't shy about bringing out sequences showing the physicality of this life rather than just dialogue shots, and that wasn't the case even in all of Ford's work, much less most work of the era.

The best nomination was the Cinematography.  I didn't know that this was lensed by Gregg Toland, who was the most important cinematographer of the 1940's, and it was done the year before Toland's masterwork Citizen Kane.  If you've seen Citizen Kane as much as I have, you'll notice similarities in the way that Toland uses deep focus techniques, and really plays with light & size on the screen in a way that we normally attribute to Citizen Kane as being the pioneer of, but it's proved here that Toland was already starting to perfect these techniques in previous movies.  The effect is marvelous-The Long Voyage Home is breathtaking, particularly the way that it uses bright & shadow, where even a man running in the dark can be just staggering (I picked the top photo as an example to exhibit, this, rather than where we'd customarily go with a glossy shot of Wayne in the movie).  If you see this, and you should, notice how glorious the camerawork is here, and pity me for having to pick between this, Waterloo Bridge, and Rebecca when we get to this OVP writeup.

OVP: Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

Film: Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
Stars: Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Richard Barthelmess, Rita Hayworth, Thomas Mitchell
Director: Howard Hawks
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Special Effects)...there's some confusion over whether this film was also cited for Best Cinematography, and I'd love if someone reading this might help me out on what is "official" in terms of nominations, as IMDB and Inside Oscar list this as being one of ten nominees for Best Black & White Cinematography in 1939, but the AMPAS Database officially doesn't list it, saying the only official nominees were Wuthering Heights and Stagecoach.  I defer to the AMPAS database as my source-of-truth for the OVP, but if anyone has more clarification or sources, I'd love to read them.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

I'm sure there have been dozens of books and podcasts and articles about 1939, and it being the "greatest year in the history of the movies," but I always get a thrill getting to cross one of that year's movies off the list, as there's just that extra sheen of "one of the best" that comes with it.  Only Angels Have Wings is not one of the Best Picture nominees of 1939, but looking at that cast list & director, you have to assume it was close.  Jean Arthur had been on a stampede in recent years with Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington & You Can't Take it With You, while Cary Grant & Howard Hawks had made arguably one of the greatest comedies of all time the year before with Bringing Up Baby.  Combine in a "newcomer" in the form of Rita Hayworth & Thomas Mitchell the year he won his Oscar, and this is a pretty pedigreed movie.  What's surprising about it in hindsight, is how groundbreaking some of the effects are and occasionally deep the cast makes the picture.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Geoff Carter (Grant), who runs a piloting company in South America that delivers mail.  His flyers, including a pilot in the opening scenes, regularly die-this is a dangerous job, and one that Geoff loves, even when he hates it.  Of course, you can't have a film like this without a beautiful woman, and that's spunky Bonnie Lee (Arthur), who is a piano player who comes to this corner of the world and falls in love with Geoff.  Geoff eventually hires his former nemesis McPherson (Barthelmess), who let his partner "Kid's" (Mitchell) brother die in a plane crash, and coming with McPherson is his new wife Judy (Hayworth), who used to be romantically-involved with Geoff (and yes, this is the closest that Cary Grant ever came to the "Judy, Judy, Judy" line, though he only ever says the name to Hayworth twice-in-a-row, so that's an apocryphal quote in Grant lore).  The film continues with McPherson making a daring plane landing, this time initially saving the Kid's life (though he ends up dying of injuries eventually), and Geoff not being willing to admit to Bonnie that he wants her to leave.  However, he makes a bet with her with a trick coin (that only has heads) that she should "stay if it lands on heads," and once Bonnie realizes this is the closest he'll ever get to saying he loves her, she decides it's enough and stays with him.

Only Angels has some superfluous parts.  You know me-I love me some Rita Hayworth, but she's completely unnecessary to the plot of this movie, and you have to assume she got such key billing & the scenes she did because Harry Cohn was pushing for her.  The ending is also a bit saccharine for my tastes-I don't like women who are coming across as doormats, and Arthur isn't Lauren Bacall or Joan Crawford-we don't really know that she's "choosing to stay" even though she'd be fine on her own.  She plays Bonnie as too precious for my taste.

However, I liked Only Angels a lot.  It was disturbing initially to see Cary Grant play someone other than a gentleman, admittedly.  The way he doesn't instantly charm Arthur's Bonnie, you wonder if you've entered some sort of twilight zone, but as the movie progresses, he does a good job with this part.  Geoff is probably in love with Bonnie, but he's more in love with danger & the camaraderie of these men at the outskirts of their world, a makeshift family that understands the suicidal risks they need to take to feel alive.  It's a darker film than the call sheet & director would suggest, but that darkness, that underbelly, especially in Grant's performance, is what sells it.

If the film wasn't going to get in for Best Picture, Oscar paid attention to the nomination it did deserve (Special Effects) and the category it was shortlisted for but (apparently) wasn't nominated for (Cinematography).  The cinematography here is incredible.  The aerial shots are amazing, particularly through the mountains, and they blend perfectly with the special effects.  Yes, in hindsight you can see the strings attached (metaphorically) to the plane crash sequences, but given the time these are incredible shots, and the cinematography in my opinion doesn't age at all.  Unlike many sort of "stunt" films of Classical Hollywood, where the nomination (look at something like Beneath the 12-Mile Reef for an example) came just for the impressive sequences, this is still beautifully shot on the ground too.

While the City Sleeps (1956)

Film: While the City Sleeps (1956)
Stars: Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, George Sanders, Howard Duff, Thomas Mitchell, Vincent Price, Sally Forrest, John Drew Barrymore, James Craig, Ida Lupino
Director: Fritz Lang
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Rhonda Fleming-click here to learn more about Ms. Fleming (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We continue on with our look at the career of Rhonda Fleming with a second noir film for RKO.  By this point in her career, Fleming's fame had largely passed, or at least was nearing its tail-end.  She'd continue to headline films for the rest of the 1950's, and we'll get to one of the final films that she starred in next week, but after several years as the Queen of 3-D, she was no longer at Paramount and RKO wasn't putting her in gigantic epics.  You can see that here when, rather than being the main character (or at least his love interest, as the billing order suggests), she's largely sixth or seventh in terms of actual screen credit, and doesn't even share the screen with the film's proper star, Dana Andrews.  Still, though, While the City Sleeps is an impressive and rather frank look at serial killers in the 1950's, focusing on a fictionalized version of the real "Lipstick Killer" William Heirens.

(Spoilers Ahead) After the death of his father, spoiled media heir Walter Kyne (Price) is pitting three key figures in his dad's news organization (Jon Day Griffith (Mitchell), Mark Loving (Sanders), & Harry Kritzer (Craig)) against each other for essentially the job of "CEO" of the organization while Kyne enjoys all of the wealth and privilege of being the titular head of the conglomerate.  Essentially he's using a recent string of murders of young women perpetrated by an unknown assailant (whom the audience knows from witnessing one of the crimes in the opening scene to be Barrymore's Robert Manners) as a proxy fight to see who is worthy enough of snagging the story and getting Kyne more sales.  Each of these men have a key asset in their fight: Griffith has Edward Mobley (Andrews), a savvy former crime beat journalist who now hosts an Edward R. Murrow-style nightly news program and recently has become engaged to Nancy (Forrest), Loving has Mildred Donner (Lupino) a lascivious and ambitious newspaper columnist, and Kritzer has Kyne's own wife Dorothy (Fleming) with whom he's having an affair.

The film progresses with each of these men and their allies duking it out, all-the-while trying to suss out Barrymore's killer.  The film is very much an ensemble piece (though Andrews is decidedly the lead), and this makes it easy to compare and contrast the different performances.  By far the best one is Lupino, playing up her sexuality to the hilt (she flirts with anyone that moves, particularly Mobley, getting him to kiss her while he's engaged to Nancy), and getting all of the best lines.  Barrymore is, well, not great as a mama's boy killer who seems to have no real reason other than his own adoption to hate the world and the women in it.  But the film keeps humming with us genuinely guessing who might end up on top in the newspaper fight, and watching Thomas Mitchell of all people try (unsuccessfully) to be corrupt when he's really just a good guy (as are all of Mitchell's characters).

Fleming's role is small (she's in more of the back half than the front half, but regardless she's got a relatively small part, especially compared to Forrest or Lupino).  She's good in it though-Fleming got her start as a character actress, and makes the most of the work she does here.  There's that great scene where she instinctively puts on her sunglasses to not give away any tells that she's lying, or the way that she speaks to Lupino's Mildred with the confidence of a woman who knows she'll never really be caught as long as she's beautiful.  It's not really a lead performance at all, but it's solid work, and she does a great job in the ensemble, even if Lupino is the one stealing the film.

OVP: The Hurricane (1937)

Film: The Hurricane (1937)

Stars: Dorothy Lamour, Jon Hall, Mary Astor, C. Aubrey Smith, Thomas Mitchell, Raymond Massey, John Carradine

Director: John Ford

Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actor-Thomas Mitchell, Best Sound Recording*, Best Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Turner Classic Movies could play a John Ford film every single day and no one would bat an eye.  More than Hitchcock, more than Kazan, more than even Capra, his films encapsulate what that channel is championing: great stars, great stories, and grand-scale epic filmmaking.  Ford’s filmography, spanning over 100 films long, is a daunting task for any movie-going completist, and I was both surprised and not at all shocked (if one can be both things) to learn that The Hurricane, a mostly forgotten film from 1937, was one of Ford’s many, many pictures.

(Spoilers, right ahead!) The film tells the story of Terangi (Hall), a Tahitian sailor who is about marry Marama, the daughter of the chief of the small island of Maukura (Lamour).  Hall, though white in appearance (this was the 1930’s, and casting white actors as people of color was very much in vogue), suffers from discrimination due to his Tahitian heritage, and eventually is arrested for punching a white man who baited him with a racist comment.  Terangi cannot handle being imprisoned and away from his beloved, and pulls a Jean Valjean and breaks out of jail.  He constantly gets caught, however, and is eventually sentenced to sixteen years.  All the while the governor of Terangi’s home island (Massey) refuses to have Terangi brought home to finish his sentence, and unrest rules the island.

Of course, being that this is a Ford picture, Terangi finally breaks free, and in the process, accidentally kills a guard (an act punishable by death).  He flees to his home island and is in hiding for a short while.  Before the governor is able to try Terangi for the murder, however, a storm reaches the island that throws everything into chaos.  The island is destroyed and eventually Terangi, his wife, and their daughter flee from the island into the ocean.

The movie, released in 1937, was made during the first great period of the all-star disaster film, with a supporting cast that includes Mary Astor, C. Aubrey Smith, Thomas Mitchell, Raymond Massey, and John Carradine.  This genre would become a major box office draw in the 1970’s, but in fact had an earlier heyday with films like In Old Chicago, San Francisco, and The Stars Look Down.  This was my first encounter with the 1930’s-brand of disaster films (I’ve seen some of the bigger ones from the 1970’s), and I will say that it suffers a bit in comparison.

My biggest problem with The Hurricane was the chief cast.  Hall and Lamour are both very beautiful, but they don’t have a lot of character growth or substance.  Hall makes Terangi too simplistic, like he’s channeling Johnny Weismuller’s popular Tarzan character rather than a man who has had human contact his entire life.  Lamour breathes little life into her Marama as well, oftentimes just trying to strike a dramatic face and say something ominous while waiting for her man.

The supporting cast is of little consequence as well.  Despite starring a host of reliable character actors, no one stands out, including Thomas Mitchell, who received an Academy Award nomination for this film.  Mitchell who made a career out of playing a doctor (as well as Scarlett O’Hara’s father) was considerably better with stronger material in his two 1939 classics, Gone with the Wind and Stagecoach.  Here he is playing a similar style character, but appears far more on autopilot, and this nomination comes as a bit of a surprise.

The thing to recommend The Hurricane, however, is that great title sequence.  The movie received Oscar nominations for Score and Sound Recording (winning the latter), but had there been a Visual Effects category at the time, it’s hard to fathom this not winning.  The fact that the oceans of water, the falling buildings and the dangerous trees were managed without the assistance of computer effects is nothing short of spectacular.  While I cannot quite get to my “you should see it” three-star rating with this movie, if you can catch the title sequence on YouTube or a fortuitous channel-surfing, I recommend sticking around.

Those are my thoughts on The Hurricane-what are yours?  If you haven’t seen it, what do you think of Lamour, Hall, and Mitchell?  Do you think that Mitchell (the first Triple Crown of Acting Winner) is an underrated performer?  Share in the comments!