TWO-MINUTE WARNING (1976)

Ehhh.  I was expecting better.  More suspense, more disaster, more Charlton Heston topless.

It's football time, so 91,000 fans pile into the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on a bright sunny day to watch an exciting game between Los Angeles and Baltimore.  It's so exciting, in fact, that none of the 91,000 attendees notice the dude sitting on top of the scoreboard with a sniper rifle for nearly the entire game!!!  He's just sitting up there chilling, eating a Babe Ruth candy bar and staring down the scope of his rifle at various people.  Finally some genius on board the Goodyear blimp notices him and calls the cops.  They show up, brutalize a couple of innocent people and then eventually get around to confronting the sniper...94 minutes into the movie!!!  They do a horrible job at containing him and all Hell breaks loose.

As far as disaster films go, TWO-MINUTE WARNING is pretty weak.  The disaster (stampede) is all contained inside the stadium and if the police had done a better job of confronting the sniper nobody would have got hurt at all.  Top-billed Charlton Heston is alright as the police captain, but his role is very small.  The majority of the time is wasted showing the lives of various attendees: Jack Klugman as a idiot with a gambling problem, Walter Pidgeon as a pickpocket, David Janssen and Gena Rowlands as a couple who's relationship seems completely based on how much they can bitch at each other, Beau Bridges and Pamela Bellwood as a married couple with two children, etc.  All of their stories are boring and failed at persuaded me to care about any of them.

Mild pace, lackluster photography, soulless direction, unlikable characters, weak disaster, a man getting "butt-stroked", low body count.  Not a terrible film, just dated and meh.

THE MAYOR OF HELL (1933)

A small gang of street urchins (all with a heart of gold, naturally) idle away their time by skipping school, running a protection racket, vandalizing cars, robbing, stealing, assaulting people (I'm talking punching a old man through a window), etc.  Five of them are caught and sent to a reform school that seems less of a actual school and more of a prison work camp (probably due to the success of the previous years I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG).  The warden of this school hates kids and enjoys punishing them.  Soon though a gangster (James Cagney), who's been appointed Deputy Commissioner of Corrections, visits the school and falls in love with the young nurse and her more liberal views of reform.  Cagney pulls some strings and has himself appointed the head of the reform school.  For the next month, he and the nurse create a virtual Heaven on Earth reform school where there are no guards, the front gates are open and the boys rule themselves and even have their own court system.  But things can't stay perfect forever...

As a I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG-knockoff, THE MAYOR OF HELL is alright, but it lacks the maturity and emotional gut punch of that film.  And most importantly, it lacks Paul Muni's riveting performance.  Also, Muni's character was wrongfully accused and these kid's actually are a bunch of lowlife hoodlum fucks.  That said, they don't deserve to be abused, obviously, but the viewer has less sympathy for them when the first 10 minutes of the film shows them being a miniature crime wave terrorizing their neighborhood.

Comparisons to I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG aside, I liked Cagney's performance, but the story seemed very oversimplified and idealistic.  Also, when the kids first arrive at the camp the nurse made a big deal about how the one sickly kid needed to be placed in a hospital, but then when she and Cagney took over the sickly kid never did go to the hospital and he ended up dying!

Mildly entertaining pre-Code social commentary/gangster film.  It's also rumored that Michael Curtiz did some uncredited directing on this film.

The subtitles are incorrect because she clearly says "Why, you dirty rat."