MR. PEABODY AND THE MERMAID (1948)

Forty-nine year-old Mr. Peabody (played by 56 year-old William Powell) goes on a Caribbean vacation with his wife, who's 17 years younger than him.  It's never explains how, but somehow they have enough money to rent a beachside mansion with a full-service staff.  Anyway, 56 year-old Powell is depressed that he's going to be turning 50 soon, so he goes for a walk and he hears some annoying, I mean, beautiful singing coming from a nearby island.  He goes out there and...nothing happens.  Finally, 26 minutes into the film, he meets the mermaid in the title, so he promptly brings her home and dumps her in the bathtub.  Then, for whatever bizarre Hollywood logic reason, his once loving wife suddenly turns mean when she sees a large fishtail sticking out of the water.  So now, for nearly the remainder of the film, it's just Powell hanging out by his pool doing nothing.  I was surprised at how unfunny MR. PEABODY AND THE MERMAID was!  I thought this was suppose to be a comedy?

Ann Blyth is absolutely gorgeous (her beauty is the highlight of the film), but she has nothing to work with.  She never says a word and spends the entire film simply floating around in the water.  Also, the character of Powell's wife (played by Irene Hervey) was completely unlikable.  Slow pace, non-existent humor (example: the mermaid cries while underwater and wipes her tears away with a handkerchief.  Hardy-har-har.), woman littering on the beach, very little mermaid swimming action, dead on arrival acting, unsatisfactory ending.

I love William Powell, but this movie is lame as Hell.  Skip it.

It's a little known fact that the girl that Frankenstein's monster threw into the lake actually turned into a mermaid and that the monster himself escaped the fire at the mill.  They later hooked up and ran off to Hollywood, CA were they lived happily ever after and operated a pet store for the next 54 years until it burned down.  The fire was captured in the documentary PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE.  After collecting the insurance money from the fire they retired and moved to Cedar Park, TX where I still occasionally see them holding hands.

LADY IN A CAGE (1964)

Now here's an interesting (and gritty) little gem.  Released in 1964, at the height of the 60's Psycho-biddy subgenre's popularity, LADY IN A CAGE tells the story of a controlling middle-aged woman (Olivia De Havilland) who lives in a nice home in what used to be in an upscale neighborhood, but isn't so upscale anymore.  One morning she's riding up the small elevator that she had installed to help her recovery from a broken hip and the power goes out.  This is decades before cell phones so her only options are to break out and drop (her hip prevents her from doing this) or activating the emergency alarm that rings a bell outside the house.  Sounds...useless.  She rings the bell, but the only person who hears it is a drunken wino (Jeff Corey) who promptly breaks in and starts ransacking the place.  He does such a sloppy job of it that he attracts the attention of a trio of psychopaths (lead by a young James Caan) and they soon join in on the fun.  Things quickly get violent.

LADY IN A CAGE is a fascinating film that I would love to know more about.  The opening credits seem reminiscent of Saul Bass' title design sequence in PSYCHO, the story holds a very pessimistic view of a rapidly changing society, foreshadowing (dead dog), great wacked-out performances by the entire cast, but I think the thing that intrigued me the most was the early hippie, pre-Charles Manson Charles Mason-ish portrayal of the three main psychopaths.  I loved how Caan wore high water jeans with darken back pockets, Jesus sandals and a tied-up shirt.  It's a very California beatnik look (...at least from what I've learned in movies).  And I might be imagining things, but, at moments, Rafael Campos' unhinged performance looks a lot like Edwin Neal's brilliant performance in THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE 10 years later...the deranged look in his eyes, the uptick of the mouth, skinny unwashed body, his playfulness with the intended victims, the cat-like movement of his body, the gleeful way he looks at his knife, etc.

Well, anyways, I'm babbling, but if you're into the grittier side of older movies you should definitely check out LADY IN A CAGE.  It's dated (and campy), but I bet back in early 1964 this film packed a wallop.  Especially seeing Olivia de Havilland in a role that was such a departure from what she was known for.