The late-night/early-morning spot for Cubs fans asks for your thoughts on the Morel move to third base.
It’s Wednesday evening here at BCB After Dark: the coolest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. We hope you’re in a good mood this evening. Please come on in and spread some of that cheer. There’s no cover charge this evening. We have one or two good tables left. Bring your own beverage.
BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
This afternoon, the Cubs finished their hellish road trip by beating the Diamondbacks, 5-3. Kudos to Hayden Wesneski, who came up big when the Cubs needed him most—even if he didn’t know the Cubs needed him when he went to bed last night. Cody Bellinger seems to be emerging from his early-season slump. And Michael Busch is looking like a potential All-Star.
Last night, I asked you who should Jameson Taillon replace in the Cubs rotation. The question was nominally about Taillon, but it was really about Kyle Hendricks, who has been miserable so far this season. In any case, 75 percent of you think Craig Counsell should take Hendricks out of the starting lineup. It’s really sad to see a Cubs legend like Hendricks pitch this poorly. I hope I’m wrong and he snaps out of this and returns to at least what he was last season.
Here’s the part of the show where we talk about jazz and movies. You can skip these parts if you want. You won’t hurt my feelings.
We’ve played a lot of jazz covers of Beatles songs in this space, but we’ve never put a jazz version of a Wings song here before. So tonight we have trumpeter Freddie Hubbard performing Paul McCartney’s “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey.” There are too many musicians on this song to list them all, but George Benson is on electric guitar and Jack DeJohnette on drums, to name two of the more famous ones.
This is from 1971.
The Criterion Channel is doing a feature on film noir from the year 1950, which explains my last movie essay on Stage Fright. It’s a fabulous collection, but the only problem is that I’ve seen most of the great ones. Sunset Boulevard, The Asphalt Jungle, In a Lonely Place, Gun Crazy and Night and the City are stone-cold classics and Caged, No Way Out and Panic in the Streets are close to that level as well. So I’ve been reduced to watching some of the lesser titles, which mostly aren’t bad but certainly disappoint compared to those films. Still, it was a great year for movies.
So tonight I’ve got a short review of 1950’s One Way Street, directed by Hugo Fregonese and starring James Mason, Märta Torén and Dan Duryea.
Mason stars as Dr. Frank Matson, an angry and cynical man who has been reduced to fixing up wounded mobsters after a medical mistake killed someone close to him. At the beginning of the film, mob boss John Wheeler (Duryea) is counting up the proceeds from a $200,000 robbery. But Matson has a scheme to steal not only the money, but Wheeler’s girlfriend Laura Thorsen (Torén) as well. Laura is in on the heist, but she and Frank are nothing more than crime partners at this point.
Frank wants to split the money between the two of them and head by himself to Mexico City. But Laura, who has feelings for Frank that are unrequited at the moment, insists on accompanying him to Mexico City.
But on their way to the big metropolis, the private plane that they’ve chartered breaks its fuel pump and they are forced into an emergency landing in a small and remote Mexican village near the ocean. There they are met by a traveling preacher, Father Moreno (Basil Ruysdael), who convinces the two of them to stay in the village until the plane can be repaired. And if Dr. Frank could practice some medicine while he’s there . . .
The Mexican village is full of every cliché about Mexico that you could expect from a movie in 1950. But for the most part, they are positive clichés. The people of the village are helpful and accepting, poor but happy. They eat tamales and tortillas and weave baskets and make fine blankets. The main negative cliché is the band of bandits that menace the town, but this is a noir. You’re going to have to have some bandits.
The kindness of the villagers puts Frank on a kind of “Eat, Pray, Love” type of journey where he goes from being a cynical thief who only does medicine for the money to a kind man who opens up a clinic for the locals. He and Laura, formerly just partners in crime, become lovers. They end up deciding to stay in the little village.
But of course, mob boss Wheeler is not going to let Frank get away with stealing 200 grand and his girlfriend from him. So eventually, darkness comes to their little paradise.
Mason was an interesting actor who always played his heroes with a strong undercurrent of menace and his villains—actually, come to think of it, his villains were pretty menacing too. But they were sophisticated menaces. North By Northwest is perhaps the most famous example here. But the story here is Frank’s journey from being a thief (albeit one who steals from mob bosses) to a hero. I think you have to suspend a little belief to get to the place where Frank is at the end of the picture, but I guess it works because the movies have trained us to believe in it.
Duryea was arguably the greatest portrayer of movie villains of this era. John Wheeler is not his finest example. That’s not Duryea’s fault—the part just isn’t deep enough for him to get the full Duryea crazy treatment. It’s kind of a layup part for an actor of Duryea’s talents—he makes it, but you’re not that impressed.
One part that is more impressive is William Conrad playing Ollie, one of Wheeler’s henchmen. Conrad was at that point in his career where he mostly played villains on-screen, because of his weight, and mostly heroes on the radio, where no one much cared how much he weighed. Ollie isn’t a big part, but Conrad does a great job with it anyway.
(By the way, Gunsmoke, the radio program starring Conrad, was much better than Gunsmoke, the television program starring James Arness.)
One other thing that One Way Street has going for it is that it’s only 79 minutes long. This plot is not involved enough for them to stretch it out any further than that and I appreciated them keeping it short.
Is One Way Street a good movie? Eh, it’s fine. You won’t hate yourself for watching it, but it’s not memorable enough that you’ll be thinking of it the next month or even the next week. Mason is good, Conrad is great and the film is short.
Here’s the trailer for One Way Street. It’s actually pretty good. It would make me want to watch it if I hadn’t already just seen it.
There appears to be a couple of copies of One Way Street on YouTube. One of the prints actually looks decent enough to watch.
Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.
One of the biggest stories of the off-season was whether or not Christopher Morel could handle playing third base this season. The Cubs were desperate to get his powerful bat in the lineup, but his glove limited him to mostly DH last year. If Morel could handle third base, it would be a big boon to the team.
We’re a little over 10 percent of the way through the season, and Morel has turned plays like this one [VIDEO]
But there have been downsides as well. Obviously MLB dot com doesn’t put up a lot of highlights of errors, but Morel has made three in 14 games so far. I do have video of this one [VIDEO]
So give me a grade so far for the Christopher Morel move to third base. Consider this an early progress report. And tell us in the comments whether you think he will be able to improve on this grade as the season goes on or whether you think it’s set in stone.
Thanks so much for stopping by this evening. A special thanks to everyone who has voted and commented this week. Please get home safely. Recycle and cans and bottles. Tip the waitstaff. And join us again next week for more BCB After Dark.