September Storm

Low-ish-budget adventure film from twentieth century fox. Sexy anne (joanne dru) and manuel (asher dann) meet up in majorca, and were doing okay. But along come treasure hunters joe and ernie and really louse things up. Eventually they all rent a boat to look for pirate gold, but so many set backs. Storms, lovers quarrels, jealousy and fighting. Even stinging jellyfish. Will they ever find the gold? Or will all the fighting keep them from ever getting to it? It's okay. Co-stars mark stevens, robert strauss. Stevens looks and sounds JUST like dean martin. Directed by byron haskin. He was nominated for FOUR oscars in the 1940s, and was given a technical achievement award in 1939.

Why, oh why do I waste my time watching 3rd run crap like this? I believed that this film was something worth watching at 6:00 a.m. on American Movie Classics, but boy, was I wrong! I'd have done better watching old reruns of "Let's Make a Deal." This film looks as if it were shot with a Brownie camera, the quality is so bad. It also resembles one of those old Italian sword and sandal jobs, with scenes switching back and forth for no reason. The film editor must've completed a correspondence course from the Rinky-Dink School of Film Editing. At least they could have asked Ivan Tors for a real shark during the underwater shark attack scene.

Mark Stevens looks sickly, Joanne Dru is OK, Robert Strauss is at his comic best, although he tries to play it straight, and Asher Dunn - he's cute. That's all.

MST3K - go for it. Everyone else - skip it. Especially at 6:00 a.m.

I can recall seeing Joanne Dru many times in films while I was growing up, noticing that she always seemed to have a rather large mouth. Time has changed things. Her mouth looks rather normal now, but her beauty has increased quite a bit. She has never looked better! The film, however, needs some work. The photography is simultaneously good and bad. Good underwater work, but overall it's grainy. The story, about lost treasure, and the acting by everybody else is so-so at best. Joanne did well. Still, I can recommend this film on the beauty of Joanne and the underwater scenes, which were very well done. I gave it a 7.

Tonight at the Museum of Modern Art, the people who supervised its 3-D restoration explained that Leonard Maltin gave this a Bomb rating and speculated that it was because he had seen it in a flat pan-and-scan version on TV; if one saw it as the film makers intended, in a theater, in 3-D, it was pretty good.

Yes and no. Anything with a screenplay by W.R. Burnett will have my respectful attention, and I have long liked Joanne Dru, well more than her career calls for; her appearance in two John Ford westerns and RED RIVER is more than enough in the way of credentials for me. Also, Byron Haskins uses the 3-D cameras to record underwater Technicolor like nobody's business. As the first half of the story progressed, I was uncomfortable with Asher Dann's monotonic performance as Majorcan eye candy for the girls, but could see the way that Burnett's script was leading the cast into a sordid tale of cross and double cross, with a fight over sunken gold and Joanne Dru. true, Robert Strauss as the dumb wisecracker he had played in STALAG 17 couldn't manage a decent line reading either, but at least Miss Dru and Mark Stevens could... and some of the lines were stinkers.

Still, it was going along well enough. Until the intermission, and when we returned, three sailors couldn't figure out how to get sea weed out of the propellers. Nor do Portuguese man-of-wars act like that. So long as the plot dealt with human greed and weakness, it was fine. Apparently Burnett has no interest in the sea, its flora nor its fauna, even though that's about half the movie.

As a result, my opinion of this movie went from "Very good. Maybe excellent" to "Watchable". It stayed that way for the rest of the picture, even as I noted the sharks made of rubber and the plot holes; the camera-work remained great.

Which means that the fellows were right. It didn't deserve the Bomb rating that Maltin gave it. But neither should you watch it except in 3-D.

September Storm is obviously one of those kind of movies they just don't make anymore. In the 1950s and early 60s, the ingredients for an adventure movie were an exotic locale, a handsome hero, a sassy and pretty girl and a couple of bad guys. This movie has all these ingredients and they are mostly put to good use. The story itself is simple: two shady characters convince a Majorcan sailor to use his boss's yacht to recover sunken gold. A lovely American model is thrown in to keep things interesting. The voyage leads to cross and double-cross as the men quarrel over the money and the "dame". Underwater scenes are actually filmed very well considering the period, although the use of a rubber shark is unconvincing. There are several cringey moments of sexism in the dialog that are reflective of the period. Perhaps the most outstanding is when the bad guy says something to the effect of "Why do I gotta cook? - we gotta woman".

There is some glaring unevenness in the characters. One moment they are literally trying to kill one another and in the following scene they're all one big happy crew. The ending is kind of open-ended and a tad unsatisfying but at least nobody got killed.