EVERY GIRL SHOULD BE MARRIED (1948)

Poor Cary Grant.  He's a simple bachelor who just wants to be left alone to his simple life, but oh no!  Once Betsy Drake gets a look at him at the local drug store she begins stalking him.  Literally stalking him.  She initially flirts with him at the store, but he's not interested so she goes to his work, then looks up everything she possibly can about him all the way back to his old yearbooks!  Next she starts showing up at his favorite restaurants.  During one of these restaurant stalking outings she talks to him and leads him to believe that she has a boyfriend in an attempt to make him jealous (he's not), but then the lie backfires when the guy she says she's dating shows up and tries to rape her!!!  Not at the restaurant, but at his house.  In exchange for not calling the cops about the attempted sexual assault (she got away by bashing him in the skull with a shovel and escaping over a fence) he gives her a job in the basement of his store.  What a guy.  Things go on like this for the rest of the movie with Betsy badgering the living hell out of Grant nonstop and even continuing the fake boyfriend charade with the pervert dude and yet another guy! 

I guess the writers found all of this to be very funny (and maybe I'm looking into the story too much) but I found the whole thing depressing.  Poor Grant can't have a moments peace and Betsy, who is clearly mentally deranged, repeatedly places herself in dangerous situations in delusional attempts to get Grant's attention.  If the roles had been reversed and it was a male stalking a female all over the joint he would have been thrown in jail.

Watch if you want, but if want my advise: skip it.  If you need me I'll be in my room watching BRINGING UP BABY.

AMERICA 3000 (1986)

That poster might scream "Awesome!", but this post-apocalyptic action/comedy is nothing but a battle of the sexes snoozer with ugly environments, boring action scenes, zero nudity and unfunny humor.

Nine-hundred years after all out nuclear war, Colorado is just a burnt out desert populated by a bunch of cavemen-like dudes and cavewomen-like chicks who hate each other and are constantly having little skirmishes.  Boring skirmishes.  One day a cavemen falls in a hole and discovers an old fallout shelter full of crap like guns, a gold suit and a ancient boombox. Further fighting happens until the two factions discover that they should be making love not war and suddenly everybody throws downs their weapons and starts making out.  The End. So that's it huh?  Just sudden peace?  What about the eunuchs or the really ugly or that monster creature dude?  The population is just so perfectly aligned that everybody is now in a happy relationship?

What a crap movie.  The story is so bare that they had to utilize a narrator to keep things together. Everybody talks in some silly future language with phrases like "That's fan-plastic!" and "Plugart’s got neggie smarts for tricken no-one!"  There's no cars so that means no awesome Mad Max-style car chases.  Low-budget sets that look like garbage.

Not annoyingly bad, just boring.  I can't imagine that any adult seeing this for the first time would enjoy it.

APPOINTMENT WITH DANGER (1951)

A postal inspector is murdered and his body left in an alley.  The only witness is a nun who just happened to walk by when the body was being dumped.  Now postal inspector Alan Ladd is hot on the case and will stop at nothing to solve the crime.  

I love 1947's T-MEN.  It's a excellent little noir about some Treasury agents going undercover to infiltrate a counterfeiting gang.  The story is interesting, the acting is gritty, the cinematography by John Alton is beautiful...it's just a great film.  So that's what I had in mind when I found out about this 1951 caper film about a postal inspector who goes undercover to solve a murder and prevent a big mail heist.  Sadly though APPOINTMENT WITH DANGER doesn't hold a candle to T-MEN.  It's not a bad film, but the direction is kinda stale and the nun aspect.  Oh my Satan!  Every time she was on the screen everything came to a screeching halt.  If the entire nun story had been tossed in the trash it would have improved the film.  The heist gang scenes were entertaining, but that nun!  Painful.

Worth a watch for fans of old heist/undercover cop films, but it's not a noir.  Good acting though and I was especially surprised to see Jack Webb and Harry Morgan together 16 years before "Dragnet" as two cold-blooded thugs!!!