Desert Guns

Roger Moore is best known for playing James Bond in the 1970s, as well as Simon Templar on the British TV version of The Saint in the 1960s. So when one of his non-Bond movies shows up, I'm always willing to give it a watch. One of those movies, Gold of the Seven Saints showed up on TCM some months back, and is interesting in part because it's a western, a genre I don't think anybody would associate Roger Moore with. With all that in mind, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

Roger Moore plays Shaun Garrett, an Irish immigrant who has been trapping fur with his friend Jim Rainbolt (Clint Walker). As the movie opens, however, Shaun is riding into town one night looking to steal a horse, which is a serious offense. He's caught, and one of the men working for McCracken (Gene Evans), threatens to shoot Shaun. With that in mind, Shaun barters for the horse, paying with the one valuable possession he has: a nugget of gold.

That was an extremely risky thing to do, as Rainbolt tells Shaun when he gets back to Shaun up in the hills. The nugget, as both of them know, came from a gold strike that they discovered and so produced a bunch of gold. So in theory they should be rich, at least once they can get to civilization and deposit the gold with a bank or something. But having used one of the nuggets now, whoever gets paid with it is going to know that there's excess gold somewhere -- and they're going to go chasing after Shaun to find that gold. It doesn't take long before Jim looks back and sees a cloud of dust and white men on horses.

Shaun and Jim keep pressing forward, but because they're carrying all that gold, they can't move as quickly as the men pursuing them, meaning that eventually they're going to get caught. They look for a defensive position, and even hide the gold in a place that Jim can navigate back to, but not Shaun since he doesn't know the territory as well as Jim does. McCracken and his men do get to Jim and Shaun and get in a fight that results in Shaun's getting a broken leg. But Jim and Shaun are saved by a passing doctor, Gates (Chill Wills). As a result, Jim and Shaun are forced to bring him into their confidence. Eventually they wind up at the ranch of an old friend of Jim's named Gondora (Robert Middleton). In theory Shaun can recover there. But certainly word of that gold is going to get out and people are going to come looking for it.

Gold of the Seven Saints is one of those movies that's really only a western because it takes place in that certain time and place. As I thought about the movie while skimming it a second time to do this post, I suddenly remembered the old movie Nightfall, where a modern-day Aldo Ray waits for spring so he can fetch $350,000 buried under the Wyoming snow once it melts. There's something about the present-day setting that let the writers come up with better material instead of relying on western tropes. It's not that Gold of the Seven Saints is bad; it's just pedestrian. I'd probably have a higher opinion of it if had been made in the earlier days of westerns instead of being released in 1961.

Foreign Christmas movies

Some months back I mentioned the French film My Night at Maud's, which is set over the Christmas holidays and which, quite frankly, I hated. It's on early tomorrow (Dec. 23) morning at 4:15 AM, but having blogged about it already, I'm not doing another post on it. Instead, I've got another French film which has its climax in the Christmas season, but is not on the TCM schedule this Christmas: Sundays and Cybèle.

Hary Krüger plays Pierre, who as the movie opens is sitting at the commuter railway station in Ville d'Avray just west of Paris late one evening, seemingly waiting for somebody. Getting off one of the trains are a father and daughter. Dad is looking for directions to a Catholic boarding school. Dad is a widower and can't take care of the child properly, while grandma no longer wants to, so it's dump the kid off at a nuns' school. Pierre tries to make friends with the girl, and Dad is obviously quite put off by this. Pierre also follows the father and daughter to the gate of the school, where the nuns themselves are none too happy that this guy showed up so late.

We then learn that Pierre is unemployed, living on disability because of the experiences he suffered while fighting for the French in Indochina. A nurse named Madeleine took care of him, and this resulted in Pierre moving in with Madeleine after he was demobbed because he had amnesia and apparently no other family.

Pierre, remembering the little girl who was dropped off at the school, decides to go there one Sunday to inquire about her. The nuns think he's the father, since the real father doesn't show up like he said he would. So the nuns let the girl spend the Sunday with him, and the girl is quite happy to do so since she has no real friends at the school and nobody who visits her otherwise. Madeleine doesn't know about any of this.

However, some of Madeleine and Pierre's neighbors figure out what Pierre is doing on his Sundays, and they're worried for perfectly understandable reasons. A strange guy with a young girl who's not his daughter? What's not to worry about? So as Pierre is planning to celebrate Christmas at a gazebo in the local park with the little girl, the neighbors alert the police that something is going on with Pierre.

Sundays and Cybèle is the sort of movie that's close enough to arthouse that normally I shouldn't much like it. But while I didn't love it, I also certainly didn't dislike it the way that My Night at Maud's really put me off. There's at least an interesting premise here, although it's one that I don't know that it always works, in large part because I'd think somebody would have figured out what to do with Pierre by now. That, and I can't imagine the nuns just letting Pierre go out with the girl on Sunday without really knowing who he is. Certainly one of them remembered her being dropped off by somebody other than Pierre.

Of course, people who like more arthouse stuff will probably like Sundays and Cybèle even more, so watch and judge for yourself.

For some values of pleasure

I've been trying to watch the movies that TCM ran during Debbie Reynolds' turn as TCM's Star of the Month last month before they expire from YouTube TV's cloud DVR. I think I've gotten through all of the ones I've recorded, although I also think by the time I blog about them they'll have expired. I'm also pretty certain the order in which the posts on the movies show up won't be the same as the order in which I watched them, in part because at least one of the movies had similar themes to a non-Reynolds movie I wanted to blog about because it was coming up on the TCM schedule. That's more to say that there may be a few things in this or later posts that refer to posts I've already written but are only in the queue to show up on the blog at some point in the future. In any case, one of Reynolds' movies I hadn't heard about before the TCM showing was The Pleasure of His Company.

The "His" here refers to the male lead, that being the character played by Fred Astaire, although we don't see him at first. Instead, we see Reynolds, playing Jessica Poole. She's in a wedding dress at one of those high-class department stores where she's able to try on a gown with just a few attendants and her parents watching. Or, at least, her mom Katherine Dougherty (Lilli Palmer) and stepfather James Dougherty (Gary Merrill). Those two are talking to each other commenting on Katherine's father Mackenzie (Charle Ruggles) walking Jessica down the aisle and giving her away, while it really ought to be Jessica's biological father doing that. But James spent a ton of money sending telegrams all over the world trying to get in touch with bio-dad about the wedding, seemingly in vain.

Enter Fred Astaire. If you haven't figured it out yet, Astaire plays Biddeford Poole, nicknamed Pogo, and is in fact Jessica's biological father. He had some sort of wanderlust that caused him and Katherine to get divorced years ago when Jessica was still aged in single digits, and has spent the time traveling around the world like a playboy and racking up at least one more failed marriage. But he did in fact hear about his daughter's upcoming wedding, and has decided to show up for it. Not that anybody knows, so when he knocks on the door of the Dougherty house, it's there Asian butler Toy who answers the door.

Pogo immediately sets about taking over the house as though it was his all along, and you can see why he wound up divorced multiple times, and why it's a bit of a surprise that this movie is supposed to be a reasonably light comic drama. In fact, Pogo is so selfish that it's tough to see him as a sympathetic character. Surprisingly, Jessica has held a bit of a torch for Dad, if not a romantic one. She's followed his life as he's made the vintage equivalent of the gossip columns, leading her to keep a scrapbook and now be taken with him.

It's almost enough to put a crimp in the wedding plans. Jessica's fiancé Roger (Tab Hunter) is from a cattle-ranching family, and he's decided to change the honeymoon to Hawaii since there are some prize bulls there he's interested in seeing and the new couple can kill two birds with one stone to mix metaphors. But Jessica's dad shows up, and suddenly she wants to see the world with him. And Roger is pissed that Jessica and her dad can speak good French. Additionally, stepdad thinks he's about to lose his wife to her previous husband just because that previous husband is just so darn charming.

The Pleasure of His Company was based on a Broadway play, and maybe the material works well in front of a live audience on a more intimate stage. For me, the movie doesn't really work, largely because I couldn't help but find Fred Astaire's character to be such a selfish jerk, almost from the minute we see him when he moves himself into stepdad's study as if nobody's going to have a problem with this. I can't fault the acting, which is capable enough, but damn if that script isn't an irritant. The Pleasure of His Company is for me, in short, one of those movies where I couldn't really suspend disbelief.

On Moonlight Bay

Although there's a lot in TCM's Christmas marathon that I've both seen and blogged about before, there are surprisingly a few films that I hadn't yet seen. One of those is on my DVR from a previous airing, so I watched it in conjunction with the upcoming TCM airing. That movie is On Moonlight Bay, and you can see it tomorrow (Dec. 21) at noon.

The movie opens sometime in about the summer of 1916. War is raging in Europe, but in the small towns of the American midwest that, like New England, populated the movies of old Hollywood, everything was still peaceful. George Winfield (Leon Ames) is the vice-president of a bank in a small Indiana city, but he's moving on up, if not to a deluxe apartment in the sky, at least to a nice big house in a better part of town together with his wife Alice (Rosemary DeCamp), tomboyish adult daughter Marjorie (Doris Day), bratty son Wesley (Billy Gray), and maid Stella (Mary Wickes). Everybody else isn't thrilled with the move because even though it's just across town, it will take them away from all their friends. (Seriously, how long of a bike ride would it be?)

The two kids, being none too pleased moving into a new house, decide to go engage in a bit of trouble-making, culminating in trying some sort of target practice with a gun. However, they nearly hit neighbor William Sherman (Gordon MacRae). He's just finished up is junior year in college at Indiana University, and as is not uncommon for college students, is quite the radical. He claims not to believe in marriage, certainly doesn't like the sort of popular music that's playing when he and Marjorie go to the local fairground, and even ticks off Marjorie's dad with his comments on modern banking. Dad has a sensible (at least for this point in the movie) idea that Marjorie would be better off with somebody like piano teacher Hubert Wakely (Jack Smith).

Now, we know from Doris Day and Gordon MacRae's names being at the head of the cast that they're going to be right for each other, never mind the fact that Hubert is portrayed as an utter drip, that Marjorie ought to wind up with William at the end of the movie. But we're only about a quarter of the way through, so we know everybody's going to have to go through a lot before we get there. The first comes when Marjorie sprains her ankle just before the big Christmas charity ball, and Marjorie can't be bothered to tell William the truth about what actually happened. Instead, nasty Wesley makes up a story from having seen a silent film that Dad has taken to drinking and beating his wife and daughter. Nowadays, the teacher would be required to go straight to the police, but in those days, it was just gossip, but gossip that William hears when he arrives back in town.

By the time William graduates with the Class of 1917, Woodrow Wilson got the US into the Great War, and William decides he's going to enlist. He'd like to marry Marjorie before heading off to Europe, but her dad still clearly doesn't approve of any of this. How is this going to change?

On Moonlight Bay is one of those nostalgic movies that were quite popular during the years of World War II, and remained popular into the early 1950s, with this being toward the end of the cycle. It's filled with old songs for Day and MacRae to sing, and was a big hit at the box office, which resulted in a sequel, By the Light of the Silvery Moon (which I have on my DVR and will review at a later date). It's a nice little slice-of-life movie, and one that's easy to see why it was so successful. The one issue I had with it was the kid brother character, who is written to be particularly nasty; the bit about claiming Dad was drunk and beating Mom made me think of These Three. But a lot of people think his character provides great comic relief.

I prefer some of the other movies airing in this year's Christmas marathon, but I know a lot of people will enjoy On Moonlight Bay.

TCM's Christmas Marathon

This being December, TCM has been running Christmas-themed movies on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. We're getting closer to the big day, and we've reached the point of TCM's annual Christmas marathon. Starting with prime time tomorrow (Dec. 20) and continuing for 120 hours, through Christmas morning and afternoon but ending when prime time on Dec. 25 rolls around, TCM will have nothing but Christmas movies.

The first film, tonight at 8:00 PM, is Meet Me in St. Louis, which introduced the song "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" that has since become a Christmas standard. Some of the movies have much bigger connections to Christmas than a couple that are somewhat more coincidentally set during the Christmas season and may or may not be thought of as Christmas movies. In this post, I'm going to limit myself to mentioning a couple of films that I first saw as a result of last year's Christmas marathon and are showing up on the schedule again this year.

I'm putting this post up today instead of tomorrow because in fact I have a post scheduled tomorrow for one of the films in the marathon, On Moonlight Bay. See that at noon on December 21. I'm assuming that it's part of the Saturday Musicals series that TCM has been running following the Saturday matinee block (not running this week) and will be presented by Dave Karger.

In the early hours of Sunday, Dec. 22, at 2:15 AM, there's Miracle on Main Street, about a woman with a boyfriend on the run who finds an abandoned baby on Christmas Eve and decides to keep the baby, at least until the boyfriend comes back and shows what a nasty piece of work he is.

Noir Alley doesn't have its usual double airing at midnight between Saturday and Sunday followed by a repeat at 10:00 AM Sunday. However, the film in the 10:00 AM slot on Sunday, Dec. 22, is a noir set around Christmas: Lady in the Lake. I wasn't a fan of Robert Montgomery's use of a POV camera in directing himself as Philip Marlowe.

Silent Sunday Nights and TCM Imports are a part of the Christmas marathon schedule. TCM is running a block called Christmas Past which is a bunch of silent Christmas-themed shorts, at midnight between Dec. 22 and Dec. 23. That's followed at 2:15 AM by Mon Oncle Antoine and at 4:15 AM by My Night at Maud's, which I frankly hated.

Another Christmas noir is I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes (Dec. 23, 8:30 AM), while The Man I Love (Dec. 23, noon) has noirish elements.

December 24 and 25 repeat a lot of stuff shown over the previous three and a half days.

Sinbad the Sailor

One of those vintage action movies I had never actually seen before is the 1940s Douglas Fairbanks Jr. version of Sinbad the Sailor. So, the last time it was on TCM some months back, I finally got around to watching it, and now I can do the review on it.

As you can guess, it's Fairbanks who plays Sinbad. At the time the movie opens, Sinbad is already quite famous for his voyages and having told tales of seven of them. Famous enough, in fact, that the people he tries to tell the stories to already know all of them second hand. So Sinbad comes up with a flashback to a story of an eighth voyage....

Some time back, Sinbad and his friend Abbu (George Tobias) are on an island somehwere in the Persian gulf when another boat comes along. This leads them to a much larger boat, called the Prince Ahmed, which seems to be drifting. Sinbad and Abbu board, only to find that the entire crew of the boat is dead, having drunk poisoned water! (The movie is in Technicolor and the poisoned water is dyed green to make it especially photogenic and obvious that this is not good water.) By the law of salvage, this should rightly be Sinbad's boat, so he sails it back to the port city of Basra.

While on board, Sinbad discovers a map that looks like it could be the sort of stereotypical map from pirate movies leading to buried treasure, at a place called Deryabar, which is in the movie a reference to a legend of treasure from the days of Alexander the Great. And Sinbad has a medallion he wears with a Deryabar logo, something that he also finds on one of the ship's windows! However, when he gets to Basra, the next morning he sees that somebody has stolen the map. Also, the local authorities have declared a change to the law on salvage such that all rescued boats need be put to auction.

Thankfully, Sinbad is able to discourage all of the sailors from bidding at the auction with claims that the boat is cursed; after all, the entire crew died under mysterious circumstances. However, there's one person he can't stop from bidding. That turns out to be Shireen (Maureen O'Hara), one of the women in the harem of the Emir of Daibul (Anthony Quinn). Sinbad is able to use more trickery first to win the auction and then actually to pay for the boat, and sets off trying to figure out where Deryabar is.

The Emir knows that Sinbad has met Shireen, so he gets on a boat of his own with Shireen to follow Sinbad who will lead them to Deryabar. Except that there are a lot of twists and turns along the way along with shifting loyalties. Rounding out the cast is Walter Slezak, who plays the ship's barber but who clearly has some sort of ulterior motive for being on the boat.

This version of Sinbad the Sailor is one that will probably suit young boys looking for an adventure movie, the sort of audience who don't care anything about historical accuracy and are fine with a fictional world built on tropes that aren't meant to be offensive although some modern-day people will likely complain. Younger viewers are also not going to care all that much about the plot which is rather convoluted, and just sit back and enjoy the action. In that regard, the action is moderately successful, although people with more discerning taste will find the movie a bit lacking, I think.

Did Roger Corman ever work with Jack Webb?

Director/producer Roger Corman died last spring, and over the summer TCM got around to doing a multi-evening tribute to Corman. In addition to the horror movies, there was stuff presumably marketed at the teen demographic, which included the new-to-me The Wild Angels.

The movie begins with an establishing scene of a kid riding a tricycle on the sidewalkand nearly getting run over by a motorcycle, ridden by a guy called Heavenly Blues (Peter Fonda). Blues is on his way to visit his best friend and fellow motorcyclist Joe "Loser" Kerns (Bruce Dern), who is currently working on the oil rigs that are somewhere outside of the Los Angeles area. Loser's foreman is none too pleased about Loser having a guest up on the platform, so fires Loser with cause, and we learn that it isn't the first time something like this has happened.

Of course, it doesn't help that these motorcyclists also like to wear Iron Crosses. They're part of a Hell's Angels-like motorcycle gang that has taken on Nazi symbolism not so much because they seem to have any belief in Nazi ideology so much as it being a sort of rebellion about 1960s square society; in another context these people would be hippies living on a commune. Indeed, as we see, the bikers spend some time at a camp out in the middle of nowhere on their way to a place called Mecca, which also dovetails with why Blues, Loser, and the rest of their gang are going there. Loser's bike is there, and they're going to pick up it, although they have to deal with some Mexican-Americans and, this being the 60s, get in a fight with the Mexicans. The brings the police in contact with the two groups.

Most of the biker gang are able to stay ahead of the police, but Loser isn't, sending one of the motorcycle cops sliding down a ravine. Ultimately, while trying to escape, Loser gets shot, and injured seriously enough that he's taken to a hospital in the Los Angeles area. Loser's girlfriend Gaysh (Diane Ladd, Bruce Dern's real-life wife at the time), shows up at the hospital, where Loser is under observation but only by one policeman. Gaysh tries any number of ruses to draw the cop away, and this is of course a trick for Blues and the rest of the gang to "rescue" Loser. But the gang, being half wannabe neo-Nazis and half hippies, don't even seem to get the importance of the IV bad that's tapped in to one of Loser's veins. They can't properly attend to Loser's medical needs in hiding, so Loser dies.

The last third of the movie deals with the gang's desire to have a proper funeral for Loser, while also needing to stay one step ahead of the police. They're probably not going to be able to do both of those things, and as we see the funeral winds up not going to tradition, which also leads to the police finding out where the biker gang is.

As I watched The Wild Angels, I couldn't help but think of Jack Webb's TV shows from around this same era, especially Dragnet. The look at the biker gangs, despite the fact that the opening credits claimed to use real Hell's Angels, feels like the sort of utterly naïve look that someone who knows nothing about biker gangs would draw up, much like the caricatures Webb did. The only difference is that The Wild Angels isn't a springboard for preachiness on social issues of the day, especially what would have been Webb's strong anti-drug views. Heck, even the cinematography felt like a widescreen version of those cheap 1960s TV shows.

The Wild Angels is an interesting time capsule, but it's not a particuarly grate -- and most likely not a particularly accurate -- movie.

The Post

The next movie that I have on my DVR that's coming up on TCM is a foreign film that was new to me when TCM ran it several months back: Il posto. Various sites say that when it was first released in the US several decades back, it had the English-language title The Sound of Trumpets, but the print TCM ran only has the Italian title Il posto. It comes on early tomorrow (Dec. 17) at 4:00 AM.

A title card tells us that in the Italian region of Lombardy back in the time the movie was released (1961), people would try to get from the small towns in the region to the big and industrializing city of Milan since there was work there to be had. Cut to one of those small towns just outside Milan, where Domenico Cantoni lives with his parents and kid brother in an apartment so shabby that Domenico doesn't have a room of his own, while it's strongly implied that he had to quit his education since the family could only afford schooling for one child and the younger kid seemed smarter.

However, some sort of industrial concern in Milan is hiring for work at corporate headquarters, and Domenico has been accepted to apply for one of those jobs and take the aptitude tests. So the next morning Domenico sets out for Milan in the hopes of getting that job, which at least would provide him and his family with some stability. When Domenico gets to the office building and up to the fourth floor where the tests are to be administered, he finds a whole bunch of other people thinking as well that this is their big opportunity, despite the fact that the tests -- part aptitude, part odd physical testing, and part really weird psychological tests -- give off the decided impression that perhaps this isn't such a desirable place to work after all.

After the tests, Domenico meets one of his co-applicants, a nice young woman about his age whose legal name is Antonietta but who has the nickname Magalì. The two go out for coffee, and you get the feeling that perhaps they could start dating if they lived close enough to each other to do this on their off hours and if they were going to meet each other again. And, of course, if both of them get hired by the company.

Well, both of them do get hired, although they get assigned to different departments such that they work in different buildings and are rarely going to see each other as they don't even have the same lunch hour. And the next time Domenico sees Magalì, she accompanied by a couple of male co-workers about ther age as they're all exiting the building. So while that portion of his personal life is bad, he's also having to deal with a lousy professional life. Domenico has been assigned to administration, except that they don't have any real clerks' jobs open yet. So Domenico is going to have to work as a lowly messenger boy until one of the current clerks leaves. The good life is decidedly not as good as they might have thought.

Il posto is a movie that is more of a slice of life movie than one that has a fully-formed plot. As a result, I can see a lot of people, especially those who are predisposed not to like foreign films either for having to read subtitles or for the reputation of arthouse pretention, not particularly caring for it. However, as I watched Il posto I thought that it was trying to show how bleak things were for those who were in many ways being passed by as Italy was advancing from both a very rural state and the devastation of the war which had ended only about 15 years earlier. In the long run, such advancement is to the benefit of society as a whole, but for the people caught up in it without the proper work skills, it's a nightmare. And both the slowness of the plot as well as the stark black and white filming, really show this. So Il posto is a movie that I think won't work for everybody, but one that did work for me.

Not the cable channel

I think I've got one movie left from last March's TCM programming tribute to Ryan O'Neal to do a post on. That movie is Nickelodeon.

In the early days of film, the cameras, film stocks, and projection equipment had only recently been invented, and the companies that held the still-extant patents on these inventions banded together to make the Motion Picture Patents Company, based on the east coast and doggedly trying to prevent little companies from making movies without paying royalties to the big players. This led to smaller companies decamping to the west coast and ultimately creating the Hollywood motion picture industry. This backdrop is mentioned in a couple of title cards before we get to the main action, which begins in 1910 and is in black and white.

Ryan O'Neal plays Leo Harrigan, a divorce lawyer in Chicago who is about to lose a case through incompetency, forcing him literally to flee the courtroom and his angry client. He tries running away, eventually winding up at the back door of the Kinegraph Studio, an independent producer based out of Chicago and run by H.H. Cobb (Brian Keith), who is unsurprisingly worried about the Patents Company. But when he finds out that Harrigan is not a patent attorney and is also on the run, they wind up on a train together, along with actress Kathleen Cooke. Harrigan cribs from a Saturday Evening Post story to give Cobb plot ideas, and since this was the era when anybody and everybody was able to get into movies -- no film school experience necessary -- Harrigan winds up joining the crew, while Cooke heads off to New York to try to make it on the stage.

Cut to New York, where Cooke shows up at the wrong hotel. Also showing up at the hotel is Buck Greenway (Burt Reynolds), claiming to be selling clothes and also claiming to be looking for the head of a traveling rodeo. Some theater producers overhear this last half and ask Buck if he can ride a horse, which gets him a job in their stage show. Buck and Cooke also find out they wound up with each other's suitcases, right out of director Peter Bogdanovich's previous What's Up Doc?. They meet up again on a train bound for California.

Also on that train is Harrigan, who somehow has a suitcase that looks just like Buck's and Cooke's, so of course that one gets switched too. Harrigan gets off the train in the middle of nowhere in California looking for one of Cobb's directors, and is met at the station by Alice (Tatum O'Neal), who is one of those snottily precocious little girls. At a bar, he meets the crew of that director Cobb is looking for. The director basically vanished after drinking, and the rest of the crew more or less adopts Harrigan as their new director.

Eventually, everybody meets up again as Harrigan and his company start to make movies, become more successful, and want more artistic independence. They've also got patents people chasing after them and Cobb wanting his piece too.

Nickelodeon is another of those movies where it's easy to see why all of the people involved would want to make it. Peter Bogdanovich, when he was getting his start in Hollywood, talked with some of the still-living legends from the silent era, and they must have told him some crazy stories. However, for me, Nickelodeon comes up a bit short in part because it's a bit too zany and slapsticky at times, as well as feeling too much like a product of the 1970s, or at least the then-present as to the sensibilities of the early silent era. Tatum O'Neal's Alice in particular feels like somebody who wouldn't have existed in real life. So I can see why Nickelodeon was not a critical or commercial success.

The Rear Gunner

I was watching a movie off my DVR where it seems as though TCM screwed up the scheduling, as they had a full hour after the movie to fill. They did this with three World War II shorts, and today I'm going to mention the first one I saw, The Rear Gunner.

In the days after Pearl Harbor, lots of men were drafted, such as Pee Wee Williams (Burgess Meredith). When asked what he'd like to do to serve the military, he mentions how he'd like to be involved with one of those "flying fortresses". The military, in its infinite wisdom, assigns him to be an aviation mechanic; presumably he worked on farm equipment back home.

He's noticed by Lt. Ames (Ronald Reagan), mostly for being short. That's an advantage in aviation where space is at a premium. Having had to shoot crows as pests, Pee Wee is told by Ames that perhaps he could try being a gunner. Of course, you knew this was going to happen considering the title of the short. Pee Wee is a natural at this, and goes to a five-week training course run by an instructor sergeant (Tom Neal); also in the course is Benny (played by Dane Clark at the very beginning of his career under his childhood name of Bernard Zanville).

Eventually they graduate and go off to active duty, earning distinction because this is a short released in 1943 and the whole point of shorts like this was to increase morale on the home front and hopefully get more men to enlist. It's well enough made, certainly for what it's trying to do. Looking back on it from 80 years in the future, it may feel pedestrian since there's relatively little going on here. And, to be honest, there were wartime shorts that were better. Certainly, The Rear Gunner could have been improved with Technicolor. But Hollywood and the military's Motion Picture Units were turning out stuff like this so quickly that large budgets and things like Technicolor weren't always a consideration. As it is, The Rear Gunner is an interesting little time capsule.

Note that sources list the original running time as 26 minutes. It was edited down to 20 minutes at some point and that shorter edit is what TCM ran.