jayraskin1

This is an interesting film which is part gangster film, part film noir, and part social drama. For those interested in how deportation was used in the 1950s to get rid of undesirables, it is very educational and seems pretty realistic. I think the biggest problem with the film is the casting of the three leads, Victor Mature, Terry Moore, and William Bendix.

Mature is surprisingly good as a gangster, but he really has a good nature and looks heroic, so it is hard to see him as a thug. Moore was 21 years old at the time of the movie and Mature was 37. This type of age difference is not unusual in Hollywood movies of this time, but unfortunately, Moore looks 18 years and talks like she is 16, and Mature looks in his 40s, so the blossoming love relationship between them seems misplaced. There were probably 50 actresses from 25-45 who would have been great with Mature, but Moore just seems in the wrong picture. Moore is great in other pictures, like "Mighty Joe Young," but at 21, she lacks the gravity to be a counter-balance to Mature's brooding performance. He is also about a foot taller than her. She looks like his daughter when she is next to him.

Worse, William Bendix, one of the great comic actors of this time plays the villain. Anybody who has seen him in his "Life of Riley" television series or other comic roles he has played in can only be disappointed that he plays the villain straight without any comic touches. He is not bad as the villain, but it does seem a waste of his talents.

It does move along fairly well and does generate some suspense in the key scenes. Don't go in with high expectations and you'll enjoy it.

"Leonard, Part VI" was released in 1988, at the height of Bill Cosby's television career and popularity in the fourth season of "The Cosby Show," the #1 rated television comedy series in history. He had played a secret agent on "I Spy" for three years in the 1960s, so a spy spoof seemed a source of great material for him. Watching it today, it is a great mixture of satire and slapstick gags. The formula was essentially repeated ten years later with the three "Austin Powers" films. Both critics and audiences loved them. Why did they reject the similar "Leonard VI?"

The film looks great and is well-paced. It is about a retired secret agent who now runs a fancy restaurant, He is called out of retirement to stop a villain named Medusa (Gloria Foster) who has found a way to control all animals and brainwash them into murdering people. Cosby adds some interesting secondary plots. Leonard is trying to win back his wife who left him when she found him naked with a 19 years year old in a sauna. He also has to handle a daughter who has been seduced by a theater director (Moses Gunn). She wants to appear nude in a play on stage to become a star. This seems to be a direct reference to Cosby's troubles with Lisa Bonnet at the time, She played his daughter on television and appeared nude in a movie (Angel Heart). The fact that Cosby's super-hero spy is a family man adds a wonderful dimension to his character.

Why did the critics embrace "Austin Powers" and hate "Leonard Part VI?" I think there were two reasons. First Dawn Steel had replaced David Putnam as head of Columbia Studios. Putnam had greenlit Cosby's "Leonard." If it made a lot of money people would question why they had fired Putnam and replaced him with Steel. Steel, only the second woman to head a film studio, did not want a film that made her predecessor look good. She couldn't kill the film because of contractual obligations, but she could spread the word that it was a disaster. Unfortunately, Cosby himself seems to have believed this propaganda, as he apologized for the film and went on television and told people not to buy tickets to it in the weeks before it opened.

The second reason Hollywood hated it is that the villain is a vegetarian who wants to liberate all the animals in the world from man's oppression. This is a satire on P.E.T.A., While most people in the United States recognized the extreme silliness and madness of the organization, the wealthy, who run Hollywood, tend to back up and support P.E.T.A. with hugh contributions. They see them and themselves as they see the Metoo movement, strictly as heroes. Russians and Eastern Europeans are good for villains, Chinese are good for villains, blacks are good for villains or at least lower-level villains, but animal activists are the heroes of Hollywood movies and must never be considered as anything but saints protecting the poor animal victims of mankind's insensitivity and thoughtlessness.

The attacks on Cosby for his transgressing the Hollywood hierarchy in the film "Leonard Part VI" was a dress rehearsal for the attacks on Cosby in 2004 when he transgressed the boundaries of Hollywood elite with his speech calling for stronger black families before the NAACP.

I watched Jack Benny on television as child and enjoyed him, but I have only become a real fan in the last five years. I've re-watched all of television, heard most of his radio shows (I've listened from 1932-1951, I have six more years to go) and watched all of his available movies. Benny often denigrated his acting and movie career on the radio and television shows, but that was part of his act. In fact, I haven't found any movie that he was in that was bad, and most of them, like this one is well-made and fulled with charm. Even the much lambasted "the Horn Blows at Midnight" is a quite watchable comedy which has a twenty minute finale that is as wacky and surreal as anything that the Marx Brothers or Mel Brooks ever did. Anyways, this film is a smorgasbord of delights. Eddie Anderson, Monty Wooly, Binnie Barnes, Dorothy Lamour, Betty Grable, Edward Arnold, and Phil Harris are all delightful. Unfortunately, because the film is only 1 hour and 25 minutes, each of them just get 10 or 15 minutes of screen time and that is a little disappointing. It is like a variety show where each act just does a couple of numbers and you really want to see more. The movie is the only sex farce/comedy that Benny did. Benny was surprisingly handsome and debonair looking for a comedian. Those who just saw him on television (1950-1965) were watching him in his late 50s and 60s, after he had been married for 20 years to the wonderful Mary Livingston. Here he is still 45 years old and quite handsome. While a sex comedy, it is restricted by the Hayes Code to just a few kisses and suggestions of adultery. Benny and the beautiful women around him still make it work. By the way, note that Phil Silvers used Benny's hilarious acrobatic scene at the end of this film in "A Funny thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966).