Bob Graham Movies

Maverick director Floyd Mutrux made his feature debut with this offbeat semi-documentary look at the realities of the Los Angeles drug scene. Mutrux and his camera crew follow a handful of real-life heroin addicts as they go through their daily routines of scoring dope and whiling away the hours until their next fix. (The dealers are played by actors, among them William Fraker, a noted cinematographer who helped shoot the film, and Billy Gray, a former child star from Father Knows Best.) Dusty and Sweets are a thirty-something couple whose often strained relationship is held together by their shared dependence on heroin. Kit is a blasé male hustler who turns tricks to support his habit. Tip is a self-described "everyday card-carrying dope fiend" who demonstrates his technique for ripping off supermarkets and explains how to keep up a habit behind bars. And a cheerfully blank teenage couple seem to spend their days either shooting up, nodding off, or wondering where to get more dope. Though featuring enough on-screen skin popping to make nearly any audience wince, Dusty and Sweets McGee's beautiful photography and languid mood captures the blissfully narcotic allure of Los Angeles in a way that makes the film compelling, while allowing its subjects to seem both human and tragic. Dusty and Sweets McGee also includes a soundtrack of vintage rock and roll radio, and a brief appearance by the group Blues Image, playing their sole hit "Ride Captain Ride". ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Mitzi Gaynor plays legendary vaudeville headliner Eva Tanguay, whose signature tune was the bouncy "I Don't Care". The film's actual producer George Jessel costars as "himself;" the gimmick is that Jessel wants to produce a biopic based on Tanguay, but can't get a handle on the story until he interviews all those who remember the lady. This throughline allows Gaynor to impersonate Tanguay without the added encumbrance of a plot. Well, there is a love story involving Tanguay and her vaudeville partner (David Wayne), and some welcome comic relief from "professional neurotic" Oscar Levant, but otherwise The I Don't Care Girl is more a revue than a movie. At the end, inveterate scene-stealer George Jessel shows up backstage during one of the flashback sequences, "Just to see how the story will turn out." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Weekend at the Waldorf is an unabashed remake of MGM's 1932 Oscar-winner Grand Hotel: in fact, at several points in the story, the cast makes pointed references to the earlier film. The posh Waldorf Hotel in the heart of New York is the setting for several plots and subplots. Ginger Rogers plays the Garbo counterpart, a successful but severely depressed movie star who wants to be alone. Walter Pigeon steps into John Barrymore's role, sort of; whereas Barrymore was a thief posing as nobility, Pigeon is a war correspondent posing as a thief. Hotel stenographer Lana Turner (originally Joan Crawford) latches onto tycoon Edward Arnold (originally Wallace Beery) in hopes of a life of luxury. And, in the film's biggest adaptation stretch, Van Johnson is cast as a war hero who, about to undergo life-threatening surgery, wants to thoroughly enjoy what may be his last days on earth. It takes a while to figure this out, but Johnson is supposed to be the character played in Grand Hotel by Lionel Barrymore: the meek clerk who, upon discovering that he's dying, blows his life savings on one last fling. On the whole, Weekend at the Waldorf is a lot more light-hearted than Grand Hotel, as indicated by the expository character played by humorist Robert Benchley, not to mention the presence of Xavier Cugat as the Waldorf's orchestra leader. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide