h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If you're looking to get out of the hot sun and enjoy a cool movie, Elektra and I recommend this freebie film for your Saturday delectation: a high-minded tale of facial injury, religious devotion, and excrutiatingly bad neckties entitled 'Kid Monk Baroni'.

As its star Leonard Nimoy later remarked, this film was the sort of thing that 'made unknowns out of celebrities'. Unfortunately, his first starring role was a box office flop, condemning Mr Nimoy - a really good actor - to another 15 years of obscurity before he broke through with 'Star Trek'.

Warning, folks: this is a boxing flick. Okay, wait, hear me out. It's not a BAD boxing flick. For one thing, there's not a lot of boxing in it. Elektra noted approvingly that there is a dearth of blood-spattering on the audience, and no gore. There is, however, a fair amount of discussion of exactly how much damage you can do to yourself by making a living having the daylights punched out of you.

Overall, there is a lot of high-minded discussion going on: about immigrant communities, socio-economic conditions, that sort of thing. The title character, an Italian kid with a chip on his shoulder due to his facial scarring, wants to sing in the choir and go straight with the blandly-named Emily Brooks from Buffalo, but first, he must ring the changes and taste the temptations of the fight game. Fairly predictable, even to Father Callahan, the fighting Irish priest.

As fight movies go, the whole thing is pretty tame. The 'Syndicate' don't off anybody, even though they've dropped 20G's at the end of the action. There is not one gat, shiv, or explosion in the whole film. Sensitive people should be warned that there IS some brief classical music. And there are the aforementioned bad ties - one of the monstrosities Nimoy was sporting gave me a flashback to the tie rack in my Dad's closet when I was a kid.

The direction is decent, and the writing is clever in places. There's humour, too - I defy you not to enjoy Pete the compulsive kleptomaniac, and the rest of the Billy Goat Gang. Yes, Billy Goat Gang. It's one of THOSE movies. Afficionados of early 50s US TV will not fail to spot the fact that Nimoy's sidekick, Angelo, is played by Jimmy Olsen from the old 'Superman' series. I kept expecting him to say, 'Gee, Mr Kent, do you think I could get a picture of you and Superman together?'

All in all, it's an hour and a half well-spent. If you care to enjoy Nimoy's early humiliation, here it is on archive.org:

http://archive.org/details/Kid_Monk_Baroni

A clever touch at the end, where the main characters are off-screen, apparently on their honeymoon, and the bit-part actors get to brag on them at mass. May they live long and prosper.

'made unknowns out of celebrities'

sorry for butt-in
Dmitri, hootoo putting server trouble on meand I've just had to re log in and I can't get to our one to one

I had the same problem.