April 19: What Happened to Jayne — A movie starring Jayne Mansfield.

I’ve seen almost every movie that Jayne had a major role in, so I’ve been making my way through her early roles. In Illegal, she plays Angel O’Hara, a singer whose testimony is crucial to the movie’s conclusion. 

The main star is Edward G. Robinson, who plays Victor Scott, a district attorney who has risen from the slums to become a courtroom star. He was mentored by an older man who made him promise to watch over his daughter, attorney Ellen Miles (Nina Foch). She’s in love with him, he’s in love with the job and therefore encourages her to marry another man, Ray Borden (Hugh Marlowe). 

When his spectacular courtroom abilities lead to an innocent man named Edwqard Clary (DeForest Kelley!) being put to death, he decides to give up the law and hits the bottle. While in court for a public drunkenness charge, he saves a man accused of murder by knocking out a witness, Mr. Taylor (Henry Kulky), who claimed that he couldn’t be taken out by a man the size of the accused. Now a civil lawyer, Victor ends up working for one of his former enemies, Frank Garland (Albert Dekker), a mob boss. Somehow, Garland keeps getting out of every case and it seems like there’s a leak. Spoiler — Ray isn’t the nice guy he seems to be and nearly kills Ellen, who shoots him in self-defense. However, everyone thinks she’s the leak, so Victor has to defend the woman he’s always been in love with. 

Robinson owned an amazing contemporary art collection used to decorate this film, including impressionist works by Gauguin, Degas, Duran and Gladys Lloyd. He was being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee at the time. Robinson had been graylisted, meaning that while not officially banned, major studios were hesitant to hire him. This is why a titan of cinema was working for a smaller budget at Warner Bros.

Based on the play The Mouthpiece by Frank J. Collins, this was directed by Lewis Allen, best known for the classic ghost story The Uninvited. It was written by W.R. Burnett and James R. Webb. Burnett wrote the novel Little Caesar, which made Robinson a star in 1931. Having them reunite for Illegal was a poetic, full-circle moment for the film noir genre.

If you’re someone like me who enjoys seeing props from other movies show up in a film, keep an eye out for the Maltest Falcon. You can see it on a bookcase when Victor enters the office of DA Ralph Ford.

While Jayne Mansfield’s role as Angel O’Hara is relatively brief, it was a calculated career move. At this point, she was being groomed by Warner Bros. as a blonde bombshell alternative to Marilyn Monroe. Her performance of “Too Close for Comfort” (though dubbed by Bonnie Lou Williams) served as her screen test for the world. It proved she could command the screen with the same va-va-voom energy that would make her a household name a year later in The Girl Can’t Help It. Seeing her play a canary (mob slang for a singer/witness) against a gritty veteran like Robinson creates a striking tonal shift in the film, moving from the dark, smoky corners of a courtroom drama to the glitzy, dangerous world of the nightclub.

April 18: King Yourself! — Pick a movie released by Crown International Pictures. Here’s a list!

Created and produced by Hisao Masuda and financed by The Arthur Davis Company, this film explores a range of Japanese martial arts and the abilities of some of the most famous martial arts masters of the time.

We kick things off with a terrifyingly efficient demo of the Japanese sword. It’s sleek, it’s sharp and yet Okinawan farmers learned how to stop them. These guys didn’t have katanas, so they turned their pitchforks and gardening tools into instruments of absolute destruction. We meet Teruo Hayashi, the Karate-do legend, who shows us how this Okinawan weaponry was used before Fujimoto, the Human Sledgehammer, fought a train and karate-chopped beer bottles. Then, Suzuki shows off his nunchaku skills.

We go from judo to the elegant but lethal Naginata-do. Often associated with female practitioners, it’s a master class in reach and timing. We also meet the legendary Gozo Shioda, the founder of Yoshinkan Aikido; watch Shinto practitioners fire walking and see sumo stable training with Takamiyama. 

Then, we head back into the world of Teruo Hayashi, who’s here to remind us that kata isn’t just a synchronized dance for a trophy. It’s a rehearsal for a funeral. The narrator, who sounds like he’s seen a few things he can’t forget, doesn’t mince words: Karate is severe and cruel.

The film takes a detour into the connection between Zen Buddhism and Budo as we watch Shuji Matsushita sitting in zazen when—WHACK—he takes a strike from an abbot’s kyosaku, the encouragement stick. It’s a wake-up call for the soul that’ll make you glad you’re just watching from your couch. Then, Taizaburo Nakamura steps up for the film’s absolute highlight. Using slow-motion footage that feels like it belongs in a Peckinpah flick, the movie shows how fast a sword cut is.

Before the credits roll, we get a peek at the forge of Amada Akitsugu, a national living treasure. Seeing a nihonto sword born from fire and a hammer is a reminder that these aren’t just weapons. They’re masterpieces.

If you have any interest in fighting, this is a movie for you.

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 17: Fake Bat Appreciation Day —Watch a movie with a fake bat in it.

It’s Fake Bat Appreciation Day, a holiday I just made up to celebrate the kind of cinema where the strings are visible, the wings are made of felt and the actors have to pretend they aren’t being pelted with a taxidermy project gone wrong. I wish I could watch A Lizard In a Woman’s Skin again so I could delight in the bats in it, but this starts with an animated bat and has a bat-on-a-string moment that lasts an eternity.

I’ve heard a lot of people say some bad things about this movie, and man, I realize I have no taste because I loved every single moment of it. I could go back right now and watch it again, which I can’t say I’ve done for any movie in a long time. 

Billy the Kid (Chuck Courtney, who played the Lone Ranger’s nephew Dan Reid on TV) has gone straight. He’s moved to a mining town to find a good woman and settle down. Well, he actually stole a good woman and made her his fiancée. He’s efficient like that. 

That girl is Betty Bentley (Melinda Plowman), and she’s a catch: she’s cute, she knows how to work a Winchester and her family owns the local mine. She’s also caught the eye of Count Dracula, played by the legendary John Carradine. I love Skinny Dracula, which is what I call any Carradine Dracula. This one is dumb enough to hide out in a silver mine when silver can kill him. What are you thinking? Then again, this Dracula also walks around during the day, so who are we to put limits on him?

Dracula decides to pose as Betty’s uncle to get close to her, but he’s got competition. Not just Billy, but also Dan “Red” Thorpe (Bing Russell, father of Kurt!), the man Billy cucked to get Betty. Red is so blinded by rage that he doesn’t even care that a vampire is snooping around his Western hometown; he just wants Billy dead.

This was shot at the same time as the movie it played double features with, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, both directed by William Beaudine as his last films. It took eight days to film both.

Carradine said of this movie: “I have worked in a dozen of the greatest, and I have worked in a dozen of the worst. I only regret Billy the Kid Versus Dracula. Otherwise, I regret nothing.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 16: Dead Fad — Find a fad, look for a movie about it and share.

Before it was a standardized extreme sport with professional leagues, paintball was part of a larger, slightly more chaotic campus fad called The Assassination Game. Students would stalk each other through dorm halls and libraries with suction-cup darts or water pistols. Gotcha! took this localized craze and elevated it into a Cold War spy thriller, suggesting that if you could navigate a UCLA library without getting hit by a paint pellet, you were basically halfway to being a CIA operative.

Jonathan Moore (Anthony Edwards) is a veterinary student at UCLA and an expert at Gotcha, a game where students hunt down one another with paintball guns. Look for the LJN tie-in line of Entertech line of paintball and water guns and the NES game, Gotcha! The Sport, which wouldn’t come out until 1987 and is only the paintball tournament from the beginning of this, but yes, it is a tie-in game.

Jonathan and his roommate, Manolo (Nick Corri), travel to Paris during spring break, where Jonathan meets Sasha Banicek (Linda Fiorentino) and loses his virginity. I mean, that’s a big jump from nerdy paintball-playing virgin to aggressive cuddling with the star of The Last Seduction, but good for him. Of course, there are all sorts of complications, as she’s being tracked by Russian spies. Turns out she’s a CIA agent from Pittsburgh.

Shout-out to this movie for featuring “Two Tribes” and “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood on the soundtrack.

Gotcha! was directed by Jeff Kanew, who also filmed V.I. Warshawski, Tough Guys, Troop Beverly Hills and Revenge of the Nerds. It was written by Dan Gordon (Tank, Let There Be Light, Passenger 57).

This movie is not Tag: The Assassination Game, nor is it Paintball Massacre or Masterblaster.

I definitely rented this from 7-11 off a spinner rack as a kid and was shocked by how much I liked it. Maybe I, too, dreamed of being a nerd spy, which never happened.