Eleanor Roosevelt is a macguffin

Some time back, TCM did a birthday tribute of movies starring British actress Flora Robson. One of the movies that I hadn't heard of before sounded interesting enough, so I decided to record it: Great Day, which is obviously not to be confused with Great Day in the Morning or other movies with similar titles.

It's 1944 in Denley, one of those small towns in England that would have been considered idyllic in the days before World War II began, although obviously that war has changed everything. The local women, as in many towns, have formed a "Women's Institute" to help do charity things for the men on the front. One day, the women of the Institute are called for a special meeting: they're told that US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt will be visiting the following day to see how local women on the British homefront are getting along, but that this news is a secret. That seems a bit of a plot hole in that first, can an entire town keep news like this a secret, and second, how did the rest of the town know to show up if only the Women's Institute members were informed of the visit.

But then, the impending visit of Mrs. Roosevelt isn't the point of the movie. Instead, the movie looks at how the war has been affecting the village, with a closer look at one family in particular, the Ellis family. Flora Robson plays Elizabeth, the matriarch of the family, who has been keeping the family going during the war even though that's not always easy. First is that there's a consistent strain between Elizabeth and her husband John (Eric Portman). John had served in the Great War, but has reached the age where there's not much for him to do in a small village like this. He doesn't seem to have a job and has turned to drink as well as memories of his heroic service in the previous war, clearly feeling emasculated. He's also reached the point that the local pub doesn't want to extend any more credit.

The Ellises have an adult daughter, Margaret (Sheila Sim), who has a complicated life of her own. She's a Land Girl, one of those young women who worked on the farms during the war while so many of the men were away fighting since Britain didn't have quite so many men to spare as the US. In her case, she's lucky to be able to work on one close to home, run by unmarried Bob Tyndale (Walter Fitzgerald). He's much older than Margaret, but he's a thoroughly decent human being, and genuinely likes Margaret. He's asked for her hand in marriage, and Margaret is not unwilling to accept, knowing that such a marriage would provide the financial stability that she can't get from her home life. However, she hasn't made the engagement public for a couple of reasons. One is that Bob has a nasty sister who thinks that Margaret is just a gold digger. But the other is that before working on the farm, Margaret has a boyfriend in Geoffrey, who is now fighting the war. Well technically not now, as he's got a couple days' leave and shows up in Denley hoping to see Margaret. Margaret doesn't want to break his heart; and besides, she still loves Geoffrey while only considering Bob a friend.

Both story lines reach a climax that evening, with a few other minor subplots worked in, like making alterations to a dress for the little girl who's supposed to deliver a message to Eleanor Roosevelt. All of the subplots are worked out, and Roosevelt, seen only as an arm, shows up with the locals considering this a great morale booster.

Great Day isn't a bad movie if you could judge it on its own. But it has a couple of issues in that you can't really judge it for what it is. One is that it was released a year after A Canterbury Tale, and even stars two of the leads from that movie in Portman and Sim. A Canterbury Tale is one of the great British World War II movies, while Great Day is much more a programmer. But Great Day also had the misfortune of going into production too late, only getting a release in April of 1945 (and well after the war when RKO distributed it in the US), by which time the need for such a morale-booster had passed.

Great Day is an OK movie punctuated by good performances from Robson and Portman. But as far as British World War II movies go, I'd definitely select A Canterbury Tale, or even Millions Like Us.

For some values of "glorious"

Hollywood legend has long had it that silent film star John Gilbert was brought down by the advent of talking pictures and his having a voice that wasn't particularly suited to the new medium. Recently, TCM ran a night of movies dealing with the transition to sound, including the one credited with starting Gilbert's end: His Glorious Night.

The setting is one of those European resorts that catered to the upper crust of European society, especially in the pre-war years the nobility, that would have seemed exotic for American audiences of 1929, with an added vibe of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. It's the sort of place where the visitors amuse themselves watching polo and steeplechase, and dressing to the nines to go to dinner. Staying at the resort is Princess Orsolini (Catherine Dale Owen), accompanied by her mother Eugenie (Nance O'Neil) and a much older military attaché, Col. Krehl (Gustav von Seyffertitz). The princess is betrothed to Prince Luigi (Tyrell Davis), although he's an absolute drip and this is clearly a marriage of political convenience.

John Gilbert plays Captain Kovacs, a military officer who, however, is not of high birth. He meets Orsolini, and it's love at first sight like Vronsky and Anna Karenina, except that in this case Orsolini is only engaged, not actually married. However, Orsolini discovers that Kovacs isn't of the nobility, and that makes going any further in their relationship a decided no. Mom and Krehl find out what's going on, and they're pissed about it. Kovacs, understanding that a lot of what's going on is being driven not by the princess but by her handlers, figures out a way to try to get back at them all, which is to make himself look even worse than he really is, so that if this information comes out it would be an even bigger scandal. To this end he drops hints of having spent time in prison and the implication that he's still a conman and the relationship is part of a con.

Mom wants to see Kovacs personally, and she and Krehl hope that they can come up with some way to get Kovacs to leave the resort, even if they have to pay him off to do it. Their plan is to get to his suite and look for any love notes the princess may have written to Kovacs, and then impress upon him that he could get in trouble if he doesn't leave. Kovacs is having none of it, and makes the demand that the princess spend an evening alone with him in his suite. However, while they're trying to talk things out, Orsolini faints. Since this happens on the balcony and Kovacs has to get Orsolini back to her room, this gets seen by at least one other person, and gossip gets around. Worse, at breakfast it's discovered that Kovacs is still there.

His Glorious Night was the first John Gilbert talkie to be released to theaters, although it was the second one filmed. While the movie may have helped to start the downward slide of Gilbert's career, I have to say that it's not because of Gilbert's voice. True, it's not as stereotypically deep as some other stars' voices would prove to be, but it's not as bad as legend would have you believe. Instead, there were a bunch of other factors at play. Chief among them is the dialog, which is terrible, and doesn't serve anybody well. Gilbert's protestations of love here were parodied in Singin' in the Rain, and it's easy to see why anybody who remembered the movie (and Arthur Freed was at MGM already in 1929) woud make the comparison. Catherine Dale Owen comes across as wooden here, and like a lot of early talkies the direction feels like it's done for the benefit of the microphone and not for artistic reasons.

I'd also suggest that with the depression about to come, there was also going to be a range of new faces coming to the movie screen to replace many of the stars of the 1920s. For the young romantic comedy type, Robert Montgomery was already at MGM and would make waves the following year in The Big House; Clark Gable would make even bigger waves in A Free Soul; and the elegant type could be done by someone like Leslie Howard who had the British accent for it. The sorts of movies that Gilbert featured in would be going on their way out.

TCM ran a restoration print of His Glorious Night, and the print itself looks and sounds quite good. It's just a shame that it couldn't have been in service of a better story.

Jigokumon

It's been a little while since I've done a post on a foreign film, and as I've been stating I've got a bit of a backlog of foreign films on my DVR, to the point that I've had any number of them expire before even getting around to watching them. As an example, Un carnet de bal was on overnight and I had the previous recording on my DVR, but when I went to watch it in conjunction with the upcoming showing, it had expired. A film that I watched just before it expired showed up during 31 Days of Oscar: Gate of Hell.

The movie is set in medieval Japan during a short period known as the Heiji Rebellion, in which a couple of competing groups of samurai were battling for control of the government. Endo Morito (Kazuo Hasegawa) is loyal to daimyo Kiyomori, whose family is under threat from another group of samurai. To get the rest of the family to safety, Kiyomore comes up with a ruse: his sister's official carriage will be ridden not by his high-ranking sister, but a lady-in-waitng, Kesa (Machiko Kyo). Morito is to accompany that carriage while the daimyo's family makes it to safety. Morito gets Kesa to safety, although not without some difficulty, and falls in love with her along the way.

After the war is over, Kiyomori wants to reward Morito for his loyalty, willing to grant Morito one favor. Morito's wish is to have a marriage arranged between him and Kesa. Normally, their social classes wouldn't have resulted in them ever meeting each other, but Kiyomori could make it happen with his stature. There's only one catch: in the meantime, Kesa got married to someone who is of her social stature, Imperial Guard member Wataru (Isao Yamagata). Kiyomori could have tried to arrange a marriage between Morito and Kesa had she not been married, but he can't really force Kesa and Wataru to get a divorce.

Morito, for his part, isn't about to take no for an answer. If this were Hollywood, it would be the basis for some sort of noir on the theme of obsession, but this is medieval Japan so the movie takes a completely different tone. There's a slow buildup as first Morito tries to win Kesa's affection by winning the big horse race. When that doesn't work, Morito tries more direct means. But Kesa and Wataru aren't so willing to see Morito, since he's already shown himself to have a violent temper. Kesa's maidservant lies about Kesa's whereabouts, leading Morito to threaten to kill Kesa's aunt if Kesa won't talk to him.

It leads up to a climax in which Morito plans to kill Wataru, which would leave him free to marry Kesa if she's a widow. But the plan doesn't necessarily, well, go according to plan....

Gate of Hell won an honorary Oscar for the Best Foreign Film, having been released before that was an official competitive category. It also won a competitive Oscar, for color costume design. Those costumes, along with the color cinematography and production design, are all quite good. On the negative side, however, Gate of Hell is an extremely slow burn as a movie, being the dramatic equivalent of a one-joke comedy. That slowness doesn't always work in the movie's favor, so some people may find it a bit of a slog even though it clocks in under 90 minutes.

Double Dynamite

Tomorrow, December 10, is not the birth anniversary of writer/diretor Melville Shavelson. However, TCM is spending the morning and afternoon with his work, starting with Double Dynamite at 6:30 AM.

Frank Sinatra plays Johnny Dalton, a bank teller at a southern California bank in an era when bank tellers were supposedly more prestigious than they are today. I say "supposedly" because in this case Johnny isn't paid as though the job had any prestige. He's got a co-worker Mildred (Jane Russell) who's also his girlfriend, and whom he'd like to marry. The problem is that neither of them earns very much, with a secondary problem of Johnny being too timid. The best he can do is take Mildred to lunch at the Italian restaurant next to the bank. Working at the restaurant as a waiter is Emile Keck (Groucho Marx). When Emile hears about Johnny's problems, he suggests that Johnny needs to live dangerously and do something daring.

And wouldn't you know it, but on the way back from lunch, Johnny has just that opportunity. There's a mugging going on, and Johnny saves the victim from the two assailants. It turns out that the victim is Hot Horse Harris (Nestor Paiva), a well-known bookie who repays Johnny's kindness by taking him to the betting parlor in back of a shirt shop and gives Johnny $1,000. But there's a catch. Johnny is supposed to place a bet on one of the horses. With Hot Horse's help, Johnny has multiple bets pay off, winning something like $60,000. In theory, Johnny can use this money to buy Mildred some of the finer things she's want in life, and even marry her, since this amounts to several years' income.

At this point, the natural question from Mildred would be to inquire about the source of the income, since gambling by the tellers is something that's frowned upon. They're supposed to have probity. Worse is that when Johnny returns to the bank, it's to the news that something has gone wrong and the bank is short $75,000. The bank manager and president understandably assume somebody is embezzling, which would make Johnny's story about suddenly having saved a professional gambler and making money on hot horse tips something nobody's going to believe. Especially when it turns out that the betting parlor was a pop-up place that's moved locations to evade the police.

How is Johnny going to get out of this? Well, he enlists the help of Emile, who sees this in part as a chance to live high on the hog for a while. But Emile's schemes don't seem to work at all and only implicate Johnny further. Things go from bad to worse, and even Mildred is caught in the web of suspicion: Johnny had bought her a fur for a Christmas present, and the bankers see the tag. But of course both Johnny and Mildred are innocent, and with the Production Code, that innocence is going to have to be borne out in the end.

Double Dynamite was made at RKO in 1948, but held up for release until 1951. Having finally seen it, I can understand why. Sadly, it's not particularly good, being more madcap than anything else and a plot that's just too darn far-fetched for its own good. It's hard to understand why Johnny would go back to Emile for advice, or how somebody like Emile wound up as a waiter in a hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant in the first place. However, I can also understand better now just why Frank Sinatra was so desperate to get the role of Maggio in From Here to Eternity. Movies like Double Dynamite were a sign of his flagging movie career, which he seriously wanted to revive. Of course, we know now that he did get the part and would go on to win an Oscar for it. But Double Dynamite had nothing to do with that.

Appointment With Death

It's not too long ago from the point of when I wrote this post that I did a post on a Lauren Bacall movie. It's even slightly more recent that I did a post on a movie based on an Agatha Christie novel. Today brings a post on another of those all-star Agatha Christie movies, this one a book I didn't know much about before seeing the move show up on TCM during Lauren Bacall's term as TCM's Star of the Month: Appointment With Death.

The movie opens in 1937 in New Jersey. Emily Boynton (Piper Laurie) is the widow of a wealthy businessman who has one daughter of her own by her late husband, Ginevra, and three step-children from her late husband's first marriage. The Boynton lawyer, Jefferson Cope (David Soul) is discussing the will with Emily. Well, actually, two wills. Apparently it was Dad's original intention that Mom be the head of the trust, judiciously using that money to keep the four children taken care of until Emily dies. This, even though the three step-children are adults by now, one with a wife of his own. Two days before Mr. Boynton died, he wrote out a new will that split the estate among the four children and the widow equally. Emily for fairly obvious reasons doesn't like this, and blackmails Cope into destroying the updated will in the fireplace.

The kids are, for equally obvious reasons, not happy about this and suspect that there was in fact a second will out there but cannot yet provie it. Lennox (Nicholas Guest) is married to a nurse, Nadine (Carrie Fisher); Raymond (John Terlesky) is the youngest; seemingly afraid to do anything to cross his stepmother; and daughter Carol rounds out the family. As a way of getting over the grief of the passing of the family patriarch, Emily suggests that a transatlantic cruise to England followed by a Mediterranean trip to the Holy Land would be just what the doctor ordered. It's also a good way to get away from Cope, since Emily knows what secret he holds over her head.

On the way to Europe, they meet some intersting characters. Lady Westholme (Lauren Bacall) is one of those beautiful Americans looking for a man with class and finding one in the late Lord Westholme who was looking for money which his wife's family had. Miss Quinton (Hayley Mills) is an archaeologist looking to do some digging in Mandatory Palestine, and Dr. King (Jenny Seagrove) is fresh out of medica school. Finally, when the boat docks in Trieste, the lot meet Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov), who claims to be on vacation.

Now, we know that Poirot isn't going to get that nice vacation he was hoping for. Everybody makes their way to Jerusalem and then to Qumran, which was one of the big archaeologic sited back in the late 1930s. And it's there that Emily finally gets what's coming to her. But who did it? If you've been watching the movie carefully -- or even not so carefully since this is an Agatha Christie story and you know the formula -- you'll know that most of the other main characters in the piece minus of course Poirot are suspects. Col. Carbury (John Gielgud) is part of the British administration, and he lets Poirot do an investigation as an official investigation might cause some problems since Lady Westholme is a sitting member of Parliament. In the end, Poirot will solve the case....

Appointment With Death follows a formula, but it looks like one of those movies where everybody was getting up there in years and the steam was running out of the formula. As a result, there are some nice locations, although the story and the acting aren't the greatest of the series. (From what I've read, Agatha Christie fans don't consider this one of her best books, never mind the changes made for the screen.) Still, it's an Agatha Christie movie with an all-star -- or mostly-star -- cast, so it will wind up being entertaining enough even if not up to the standard of some of the earlier movies.

Ragtime

I've metioned on quite a few occasions how, having been born in 1972, I grew up hearing about the release of a bunch of movies that might have sounded interesting, except that I was much too young to see them in the theater on their original release, so only got around to them much later. Another example of this is Ragtime, which TCM finally ran at the beginning of 2025 in honor of Debbie Allen's 75th birthday. So of course I recorded it, and eventually got around to watching it and writing up this review as part of the backlog of movies to post about.

The movie starts off in the first decade of the 1900s, although I think it doesn't quite get all of the historical events it portrays as quite accurately contemporaneous. Part of the opening involves Evelyn Nesbit (Elizabeth Montgomery), the chorus girl who was at the center of the celebrated case of Harry Thaw murdering Stanford White which was also covered in the movie The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, which I blogged about all the way back in 2011.

Among the people interested in Evelyn is an unnamed young man known only as "Younger Brother" (Brad Dourif). He's the somewhat shiftless younger brother of a woman known as Mother (Mary Steenburgen) who married up to a man credited as Father (James Olson). Father runs an explosives factory and employs Younger Brother; Father is also not happy at all with his brother-in-law's dissolute life. Father is about to have a lot more to worry about, however, when a young black woman Sarah (Debbie Allen) gives birth and leaves the baby with the family, not being able to support it herself. Mother takes pity on Sarah, offering her a servant's job which will at least give her a place to stay and take care of the baby.

Meanwhile, performing in various clubs in New York City is Coalhouse Walker (Howard Rollins), a fairly talented pianist. It doesn't take much to guess that he's the father of Sarah's child, so when he learns of the news of this abandoned child he's eventually able to put two and two together, showing up at the family's house asking to see Sarah, who isn't quite happy to see him although the two eventually reconcile and plan to get married. Those plans are put on hold, however, when Coalhouse is driving back to New York and is stopped by a racist firehouse chief Conklin (Kenneth McMillan) who claims Coalhouse is going to have to pay a toll to go down the road. When Coalhouse can't pay it, the firemen trash Coalhouse's Model T, leading to a cause célèbre. Theodore Roosevelt passes through town on a whistle-stop tour, so Sarah decides she's going to try to get the president's attention which might help her husband's case. Unfortunately, the police assume she's someone out to attack the president so they accost her, beating her to death.

This drives Coalhouse off the deep end, and he and some of his radical black friends respond with a campaign of terror against white firemen, ultimately leading to their takng over the J. Pierpont Morgan Library with the demand of handing over Conklin to their vigilante justice. Younger Brother, chafing under his brother-in-law's control, wants to rebel, and since he knows explosives, he gets in touch with Coalhouse offering to help with explosives. This brings us to probably the best known part of the movie, which was the return of classic era star James Cagney after 20 years away from the screen. He plays New York Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo, whose job it is to try to get a non-violent resolution to what eventually becomes a hostage crisis. After all, the library holds any number of priceless artifacts that nobody should want to see destroyed.

Ragtime was based on a book by E.L. Doctorow which I haven't read, but which is from what I've read of reviews an incredibly complex book that was thought to be tough to translate to the big screen without excising a lot of it. As it is, the movie runs over two and a half hours, yet some reviewers still think too much was excised from the book. Not having read the book, I have to say that I think the movie can stand by itself as a pretty darn good story, even if it is a bit long and has some characters who I think could have been excised without losing all that much. The performances are good and the production design is very good. If you haven't seen Ragtime before, it's definitely one worth watching.

Oliver!

It's about five years ago now that I did a post on the 1948 British adaptation of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. As far as film adaptations go, however, the best known adaption is probably the musical version, Oliver!, which started on the stage before the rights to make a movie out of the musical were procured and the British did a movie version of the musical. That movie went on to win Oscar's Best Picture of 1968, meaning TCM could run it in 31 Days of Oscar and give me the chance to finally cross it off my list of well-known movies to watch.

The review that I wrote for the 1948 version is relatively close to the plot of the 1968 version, which is unsurprising considering the two movies are from the same source material. I do notice, however, that Bill Sikes (played in 1968 by Oliver Reed) was for some reason spelled "Sykes" in 1948. The 1968 musical opens with Twist already nine years old and in the workhouse orphanage, with the opening song "Food, Glorious Food" leading to the sequence where Oliver asks for a second helping of gruel.

This again gets Oliver sent to apprentice from an undertaker, and again to run away, leading him to London which is where he meets the Artful Dodger (Jack Wild) in a sequence that results in the other very well known song from the musical, "Consider Yourself". The Dodger is one of a whole bunch of children working as pickpockets for Fagin (Ron Moody, consciously trying not to give Fagin anything that might make him seem obviously Jewish in another big change from previous versions of the story). Fagin, for his part, works for the nasty Bill Sikes, who lives with girlfriend Nancy (Shani Wallis) who takes a liking to little Oliver.

Oliver goes out on his first job together with the Dodger and a third kid. The Dodger steals a wallet from Mr. Brownlow (Joseph O'Conor), but it's Oliver who's left holding the bag so to speak as the other two kids run away before Oliver and Oliver is the one hauled before court. But there were witnesses who saw it was a different kid who did the actual deed, so Oliver is sent to the custody of Mr. Brownlow. There's an obvious bit of foreshadowing here, as Brownlow has a portrait of his niece, a yound woman who looks surprisingly like little Oliver.

In another change from the 1948 version (and the original book), there's no Monks character who knows about the locket that had belonged to Oliver's mother who died in childhood. Instead, the locket remained in the possession of Mr. Bumble who ran the workhouse where Oliver lived the first nine years of his life. Also in this version, Sikes is smart enough to know that Olvier might possibly spill the beans about Fagin and his gang, and ultimately Sikes himself, if he stays with Mr. Brownlow long enough. This leads to Sikes and Nancy kidnapping Oliver and taking him back to Fagin, although Nancy has a change of heart that brings about the movie's climax and fairly sudden ending. There are a lot more songs, although to me none of them are as memorable as the first two I mentioned.

If you like musicals and you haven't seen Oliver! before, then do yourself a favor and watch it. From a technical point of view it's very well done. The acting from the adults, especially Moody as Fagin and Reed as Bill Sikes, is also good. Unsurprisingly, the kids are romanticized a bit. As for the musical numbers, they are exceptionally well choreographed, almost like clockwork, and won an honorary Oscar since choreography wasn't an official category. However, I'm one of those people who isn't the biggest fan of musicals and found the choreography here a bit too machine-like. For me it was similar in that way to Guys and Dolls: the scenes are very well constructed from a technical point of view, but left me rather cold. So if, like me, you're not the biggest fan of musicals, consider yourself (no pun intended) warned.

Tarzan Triumphs

I mentioned some months back that TCM would be running the at least some of the Tarzan movies during the Saturday matinee block, and that I had one of them on my DVR to do a review on when it came up on TCM again. That movie is Tarzan Triumps, which is getting its next TCM airing tomorrow, Dec. 6, at 10:00 AM.

Johnny Weismuller appears again as Tarzan, together with Johnny Sheffield as Boy, although the series has moved from MGM to RKO. The means that Maureen O'Sullivan, who played Jane, couldn't come along since she was still under contract to MGM. So Jane is back in the UK to look after her mother what with there being a war on. Tarzan, who lived an idyllic life away from western influence, would presumably just like to go on living that life, not even being bothered by the people from the next tribe over. That would be the city of Palandria, whose princess Zandra (Frances Gifford since the movie neeeds some female eye candy as well) rescues Boy from a cliff but needs to be rescued by Tarzan.

Not long after this opening sequence introducing Zandra, a plane flies overhead. It's filled with Nazis, who need critical raw minerals to keep the war effort going. They send in a paratrooper, Lt. Schmidt, who gets injured in the middle of the jungle and is eventually found by Tarzan who saw the plane flying overhead and then saw it crash. Tarzan saves the paratrooper, not realizing he's a Nazi and that he's going to be in danger. He may not care for the war, but the war certainly cares about him. Schmidt tries to radio for help, but Cheeta the chimp is smart and steals a critical part that Schmidt would need to work the radio, and that's going to bring more Nazis looking for Schmidt and the missing part of the radio.

Meanwhile, a larger group of Nazis has shown up in Palandria looking for those raw materials, and willing to subjugate the people of Palandria to get those metals. Zandra escapes, but gets injured in the process. She wants to tell Tarzan about the danger that's about to face him, but Tarzan still doesn't care, wanting to live in peace unmolested by anybody else. Boy is bright enough to listen to Zandra, and even tries to help her convince Tarzan that something's terribly wrong, but these attempts only make Tarzan angrier.

But then the Nazis show up looking for their radio, and kidnap Boy in the process. They take Boy back to Palandria and torture him to try to find out where that lost radio part is. It's only when Tarzan loses Boy that he's spurred into action. He hasn't cared about the war, but now that it affects him personally, he can do something to fight the bad guys. Of course, this being a World War II movie, you know that Tarzan is going to win and the Nazis lose.

Tarzan Triumphs is no great shakes, but it's also not as laughably bad as some might have you believe when they criticize the movie series for melding Tarzan with a World War II morale booster. The idea of having the interlopers be Nazis is no dumber than having them be anything else. And the Allies did have good reason to be worried that the Germans would try to advance south looking for raw materials. But there are people out there who see the all-consuming war effort from the point of view of 80 years in the future, and feel the need to show how much better they are than the "rah-rah" patriotism of the day. Ultimately, Tarzan Triumphs is a silly little B movie that's enjoyable enough; had it been about somebody other than the Tarzan character it would probably be unremembered much like a lot of other B movies from the era.

I Married an Angel

I've mentioned on a few occasions that I'm not the biggest fan of the singing of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. But I do watch their movies to do posts on here because the pair were a big thing back in the 1930s and I feel a bit of an obligation to see a wide variety of movies to post on here. So I recorded their final film, I Married an Angel, the last time it showed up on TCM, and recently got around to watching it. It's getting another airing on TCM early tomorrow morning (Dec. 5) at 3:45 AM, or overnight tonight if that's the way you look at things.

I Married an Angel was released in the summer of 1942, several months after the US entered World War II, but is based on a play turned into a Rodgers and Hart musical in 1938, which is why the opening informs us the story is set in Budapest in those gay times of years gone past. Anna Zador (Jeanette MacDonald) works as a secretary at the Palaffi bank, run by the third generation of Count Palaffis, with the current Count Palaffi played by Neslon Eddy. Anna has a crush on the Count, and brings wildflowers from the country to his office every morning, but Palaffi's executive assistant Marika (Mona Maris) says the count doesn't notice them. Or Anna, who is really only in the typing pool so why would she be noticed by the count? Besides, Marika is pretty certain the count is interested in her.

In fact, the Count is interested in a lot of pretty, upper-class women to the point that people see him as a sort of playboy, with the most important among such people being the largest depositors in the bank. They could move their assets elsewhere, which would start a run on the bank that would likely cripple it. So he really ought to get married and settle down. When another of the assistants, Whiskers (Reginald Owen) hears that the count is not only not planning on settling down but hosting an extravagant costume party for his birthday, Whiskers has Marika give an invitation to a regular bank worker -- Anna, of course -- to make it seem at least a bit more like a work function.

Anna doesn't have the money for the sort of costume that people wear to these high-class costume balls in movies of this era, so she wears a largely homemade angel costume instead. This subjects her to some ridicule because she clearly doesn't fit in, and didn't necessarily want to be in the spotlight like this even if it allowed her to get close to the count for one night. What Anna doesn't know is that Palaffi had said that the only woman he'd ever marry would have to be a real angel. So during the party he goes into one of the drawing rooms while everyone else is out on the terraces and lawns partying away, and falls asleep and starts dreaming. (I'm not giving anything away here since in the context of the movie, we know that what follows is an extended dream.)

In the dream, Anna comes back to him as an actual angel, named Brigitta, telling Palaffi that she's just the sort of angel that Palaffi needs to marry to save the bank. Palaffi marries her and takes her on a honeymoon to Paris, although he finds out that being married to an angel isn't all he bargained for. The first issue is that the angel is just too virtuous, with the sort of inability to lie that leads to her telling truths that people don't want to hear. If anything, that's going to make the investors more likely to want to start a run on the bank. Of course, we know that this is the sort of movie that's going to have a happy ending, with several songs along the way for both MacDonald and Eddy.

To be honest, I Married an Angel isn't exactly a bad movie, although my view of the sort of singing that MacDonald and Eddy do stands. It's just not my thing. As stated above, the movie was released in the summer of 1942, and I get the impression that public tastes were really changing, accelerated by the US entry into World War II. Several stars of the 1930s (notably Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer) saw the writing on the wall and retired, but I think MacDonald and Eddy were suffering the same fate if you will, only without a voluntary retirement. I Married an Angel was a box office failure and gets panned by the critics, but I don't think it's any worse than the other MacDonald/Eddy movies I've seen.

For some values of "nice"

Some months back, TCM ran a Sunday night double feature of films starring Deanna Durbin. The first was It Started with Eve, but when I sat down to watch it I had the distinct feeling I'd seen it before. So instead I watched the other, Nice Girl?, to do the obligatory post on here. Now, as it turns out, I have seen It Started With Eve, but have never done a post on it; I wouldn't be surprised if the last time it was on TCM was before I started blogging since Deanna Durbin was at Universal and TCM doesn't get the rights to their films all that often. So I'll watch it again and eventually do a post on it.

Durbin plays Jane Dara, middle daughter in a family that is somehow middle class enough to have a maid Cora (Helen Broderick), as well as a father Oliver (Robert Benchley) who is doing experiments on the diets of rabbits that Jane helps with. Indeed, Dad is hoping to get a fellowship with a prestigious institute in New York to be able to help fund his studies. Jane has a boyfriend in Don Webb (a young Robert Stack), who has an interest in cars and could probably make a reasonable living as an auto mechanic, although I get the impression that even in those days this wasn't necessarily the profession a middle class man would want his daughter to marry.

A running subplot is Cora's relationship, or her being pursued by, the mailman Hector (Walter Brennan), who also leads the town's band that meets in the small-town park band shell for holidays like July 4, this being one of those Connecticut small towns that populated Hollywood movies like this in the years leading up to World War II. Hector brings Oliver a special delivery letter informing him that the foundation is sending a man from New York to look over the experiments with a view to the foundation funding these experiments. Jane goes to the train station to pick that man up: Richard Calvert (Franchot Tone). Richard has done research on various pygmy populations and the extent to which diet has made them short, and this has caused him to travel all over the world (and as we'll see later, have an impossibly big New York apartment for someone of his employment). That travel makes him sophisticated in the eyes of the three daughters, all of whom put on airs in the hopes that he'll take an interest in them, even if they're all too young for him.

Eventually it's time for Calvert to go back to New York, and Jane offers to drive him to the train station, in Don's convertible since Don's working on her car. However, she sabotages the convertible so that it won't get to the station on time, meaning she has to drive him to New York. They get stuck in the rain, and in a series of coincidences, Jane winds up wearing a pair of pajamas belonging to Richard's sister while her own clothes are drying. Then when Calvert makes it clear there's no romantic interest between them, Jane drives home in the middle of the night, arriving home at a scandalous time and making the whole town gossip about her.

Now, this is a Deanna Durbin movie, so we know that everything is going to come out right in the end. But to see exactly how that's going to happen, you'll have to watch for youreself. Nice Girl? is the sort of movie that I can see why it would appeal to fans of Deanna Durbin, especially back in 1941 when it was released. However, I can also see why Deanna Durbin was growing tired of these ingenue roles and wanted something more talent-stretching. This being Deanna Durbin, there are also several opportunities for her to sing, which again fans of hers will enjoy. The misunderstandings plot doesn't always work, and to me it felt wrapped up a bit too quickly. But for the most part Nice Girl? is simply inoffensive fun.