MGM makes a boxing movie

The next movie that I had on my DVR that's coming up soon on TCM is Tennessee Champ. That next airing is tomorrow, March 6, at 2:45 PM, so as always I watched it in order to be able to do a post on it here.

The nominal lead here, at least in terms of the actor getting the highest billing), is not the "Tennessee Champ" character, but a man named Willy Wurble (Keenan Wynn). As the movie opens up, he's in Vidalia, TN, playing fairly high-stakes poker. But just as he's about to win a big hand, violence breaks out, and Willy is forced to beat a hasty retreat in a rowboat across the river. He comes across another person affected by the violence, a man swimming in the river trying to get away named Daniel Norson (Dewey Martin). Daniel got in a fight with a man names Sixty Jubel and knocked the guy out, with Sixty hitting his head and dying in the fall, as Daniel tells Willy in the boat after Willy saves Daniel.

Willy's real job is as a boxing promoter, of a washed-up boxer named Happy (Earl Holliman). Happy is supposed to have a fight soon, but there's an issue with Happy's opponent. Willy gets an idea when Daniel runs into Willy and Happy in town the next day, which is to stage a fight between Happy and Daniel, even though Daniel knows nothing about Marquess of Queensbury-style boxing by the rules. Not even that Daniel knows much about fighting in general, to be honest. He's the son of a preacher man, and filled with the spirit of the God that pervades revival Christianity, which raises the question of how Daniel even got into that fight with Sixty in the first place.

But with the prospect of money coming in, Willy calls up his wife Sarah (Shelley Winters) and gets her to go on the road with him. This especially after Daniel knocks out Happy despite the staging supposed to be Happy letting the inexperienced Daniel hang around for several rounds before beating him. Sarah, meanwhile, realizes that Willy is back to his old ways of being dishonest with his boxers by not giving them a fair percentage of the take. Daniel, having won, gets christened the "Tennessee Champ", and vows to win enough money to be able to build a church of his own, since his real aim in life is to bring the spirit of the Lord that he feels to everybody else.

Not everyone is happy with this. Certainly not Willy, who sees his opportunity at a big payday about to go by the wayside. And not some of the other managers, who expect the fights to be more or less fixed. Daniel finds out that the fight game is fixed, and leaves, since he can't be dishonest. But there's still the question of getting the money to build a church. That, and Daniel's perceived need to atone for what happened to Sixty....

I mentioned MGM in the title of my post because Tennessee Champ is another of those movies where MGM could bring a lot of gloss to a subject, even when bringing that sort of gloss is exactly what this sort of movie doesn't need. Indeed, the whole religion angle turns the material into something that feels rather hokey. Plus, once again there's the question hanging over the story of how everything is going to be resolved in a way that satisfies the Production Code while also having a happy ending.

I do have to say, however, that Tennessee Champ isn't as bad as some of my comments above might lead you to believe. It's more something that could have been a lot better than it turns out being.

TCM Star of the Month March 2025: Barbara Stanwyck

Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity (March 19, 8:00 PM)

We've finally made it through 31 Days of Oscar, which means that we're back to the normal programming block on TCM. There's also a new Star of the Month: Barbara Stanwyck, whom a search of the blog reveals was Star of the Month a dozen years ago, back in December 2012. Stanwyck's movies will be on TCM every Wednesday in prime time, although there are enough movies that they continue into Thursday mornings.

Stanwyck's movies will be present roughly in chronological order, at least in the sense that each night is generally later than the previous Wednesday, although the movies each evening aren't in strict chronological order and there are some exceptions from one week to the next, especially come Thursday morning. This first Wednesday sees films from the beginning of Stanwyck's film career, so the first half of the 1930s, including one of my favorite pre-Codes, Night Nurse, overnight tonight at 2:45 AM.

The second Wednesday is roughly the late 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. This would have been a good time to run Stella Dallas, for which I already used a photo of a poster the last time Stanwyck was Star of the Month. Unfortunately, it sees as though TCM were unable to get the rights to Stella Dallas this time around, as it's not on the schedule. I can, however, recommend comedies like The Lady Eve (March 12, 8:00 PM) or Remember the Night (March 12, 11:45 PM), as well as point out that I've already got a post scheduled for another movie running in the second week of the Stanwyck tribute. More on that on March 12, of course.

March 19 sees movies from the late 1940s and 1950s, and more of a focus on noirish movies than the March 12 lighter focus. Obviously, this is where Double Indemnity fits in, as well as films like Sorry, Wrong Number (March 19, 10:00 PM) and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (March 20, 11:00 AM), from which I have a poster pictured at left. Also worth watching that evening is Stanwyck dueling with George Sanders in Witness to Murder (March 20, 1:30 AM) as well as the fun if mildly silly suspense film Jeopardy (March 20, 4:30 AM).

Barbara Stanwyck and Walter Pidgeon in Executive Suite (March 26, 11:15 PM)

The last Wednesday night is a fair deal of 1950s stuff, with the movies continuing into Thursday morning with a bit of a catch-all for some stuff that TCM didn't have the time to schedule elsewhere or wanted to put together since it's three westerns starting with Annie Oakley (March 27, 6:45 AM). Unfortunately, Forty Guns is not among those westerns. To be fair, however, TCM is showing quite a good number of Stanwyck's films, so one probably shouldn't quibble about missing movies. After all, Stanwyck made a lot of films before decamping to the small screen and The Big Valley.

Not the terrible Michael Crichton book/movie

I mentioned yesterday that I had two movies on my DVR coming up on TCM in quick succession. In fact, I think I've got more than that, although I didn't notice at the time I did the post on The Outriders. The next movie watched off my DVR is Kongo, which TCM will be showing tomorrow (Mar. 5) at 6:00 AM.

Walter Huston is the star here, playing a man named Flint. As we first see him, he's descending a rope from his bedroom on the upper floor of a building, and then crawling across the floor to a wheelchair. Flint is paralyzed from the waist down, and living somewhere in the jungles of central Africa, together with Tula (Lupe Velez), who is apparently his fiancée; and two factotums, Hogan and Cookie. Why the two men stay there, I have no idea, but apparently Flint has some sort of Svengali-like power over people. He's also going mad; he marks time by the month on a sign on the wall that says, "He sneered".

Presumably before coming to Africa, Flint was a stage magician in the States, because he performs magic tricks for the native tribe. Except, he's doing this to make them believe that he's some sort of god, so that they'll do his bidding, and make the area around where he lives forbidding for anyone he doesn't want to enter "his" territory. That, and he's been staying in Africa and marking time for reasons that are about to become clear.

In that distant past, just before he started marking time, Flint had a wife. But she ran off with an ivory trader, Gregg (C. Henry Gordon), and had a kid. Somehow, Flint was able to pay for the kid to be put in a convent school, and she's about to turn 18. So Flint is going to take "custody" of the kid, Ann (Virginia Bruce), and bring her to this middle-of-nowhere place as a way of inducing Gregg to come here as well. In addition to Ann, Flint also obtains a doctor, Kingsland (Conrad Nagel), in the hopes that Kingsland can perform an operation on him. Kingsland is addicted to one of the plant-based drugs in the region, and Flint is able to use that to maintain his control over Kingsland.

Flint's ultimate scheme is to have Gregg die while with Flint. Apparently, the natives have some sort of religious belief whereby if the father dies before marrying off the daughter, the daughter has to be sacrificed as well. So Flint's now obvious plan is to have Gregg die, which means that Gregg's daughter will never know happiness either. Of course, that plan is complicated by the other people in it not wanting to go through with it. Ann tries to nurse Kingsland back to health, and along the way, the two of them fall in love. They're both innocent, so they're going to have to try to make an escape as part of the movie's climax.

Kongo is apparently a remake of the silent West of Zanzibar, which I have not yet seen. Kongo, seen not in comparison to any previous version, is an interesting if bizarre little movie, and one that's got all sorts of plot messes. Why did any of these people stay with Flint in the first place? And how is Flint able to get all the props he needs for his magic tricks, as well as the copious amounts of western-style alcohol? Ah, don't pay any attention to these plot holes. Just enjoy the weird little movie.

The Outriders

I've got a couple of movies on my DVR that are coming up in quick succession on TCM, both on the calendar day of March 5, at least in the Eastern time zone. As a result, I'm doing a post on one of them a good 36 hours before it shows up on TCM. That movie is The Outriders, which is airing at part of a night of westerns that takes up the prime time lineup of March 4-5, with The Outriders itself coming on at 1:15 AM (so March 5 in the east, but still late evening March 4 in the west).

The movie has opening titles about a Camp Benton, MO, in the last year of the Civil War. Camp Benton is a prison camp for those Confederates that the Union has captured in that portion of the war theater. Or, at least, you'd think the Union might want to keep POWs away from where Quantrill's raiders were operating, but then, it hadn't really occurred to me to go down the rabbit hole of where Union prison camps were located. Anyhow, there are enough prisoners in close proximity that disease is going through the camp and apparently spreading out to the locals. So the camp commanders order the POWs into a mass bath in the nearby river.

This gives three of the POWs -- Will Owen (Joel McCrea), Jesse Wallace (Barry Sullivan), and Clint Priest (James Whitmore) -- the idea that perhaps they could try to escape. They do so by violently killing one of the Union guards (which seems like it would cause major problems with the Production Code later in the movie) but have the Union hot on their tails as they head south and west, stopping off at a farmhouse before being forced to leave again because the farmer figures out they're Confederate POWs. They continue their escape until they're confronted by a band of fighters. Except it turns out that the fighters, led by Keeley (Jeff Corey), are an offshoot of Quantrill's raiders.

When Keeley learns that Owen and company are from the South, he give them a chance to do something useful in lieu of being summarily executed as a security risk. Keeley has learned of a shipment of gold that's going from New Mexico to Saint Louis. That gold could be highly useful to the Confederacy if somebody could capture the wagon train and abscond with the gold to take it to Richmond. Perhaps Owen and the others could fall in with the wagon train and "guide" it to an area where Keeley and his men can ambush it. Since they don't have much choice, and do after all support the South, Owen and the other two head off to New Mexico.

The Wagon train is being headed by Don Antonio Chaves (Ramon Novarro) and accompanied by a bunch of relatively inconsequential crew but also a priest and the widow Gort (Arlene Dahl) and her adolescent brother-in-law Roy (Claude Jarman Jr.). Chaves doesn't want to hire Owen at first because he's already got enough men, but when Owen sees an Indian attack about to happen, he's able to foil it in a way that gets Chaves to accept him.

Now, here the movie has a bit of a dilemma. Joel McCrea as Owen is the male lead, and he's not shown himself to be a mean enough bad guy that he's obviously going to get his comeuppance. Yet the Production Code (and the historicity of the South having lost the Civil War, of course) demands that the robbery plot not be successful. How to deal with that? Well, part of it has to do with Owen getting to know the Gorts and that starting to play on him emotionally. But there's also the deft plot point of the movie being set at just the right time that news of Lee's surrender reaches the wagon train just before the point at which th ambush is set to happen. Owen can plausibly say he's no longer at war and switch sides. Of course, Keeley is still out there, and there are Owen's two companions....

The Outriders is actually not a bad movie, despite my comments in the above paragraphs giving the suggestion that I'd have Production Code-inspired problems with the resolution. It does what it does well enough, although it was released in 1950, a few years before westerns began to get more psychologically complex, so it feels like a rather simplistic film at times. Having been made at MGM I think doesn't help in that regard, although it does have good production values and nice Technicolor cinematography.

If you want another movie where you can just sit back and be entertained, and you're up for a western, you could do a lot worse than The Outriders.

The Frank Morgan Clip Show

As you can probably figure out from both the title of the movie and the title of my post, the Morgan in question is MGM's supporting actor Frank Morgan. He's playing himself, but this version of Frank Morgan is an actor who's gotten old enough that he wants to get out of acting and into producing, where he thinks the big money is. (This was, of course, before the auteur days, so becoming a director was as much contract work as being an actor was.) So he calls up the head of production, which is not Louis B. Mayer playing himself, but Leon Ames playing K.F., real name never given. KF has finally had it with the idea of actors getting ideas above their station, so he decides to approve Morgan's request, if only to show him not everyone can be a producer.

And, as you might guess, K.F. is quite right, with the bumbling, dyspeptic Morgan quickly falling way behind on production of the film he's been assigned. This, however, not before talking to a couple of people whose names you've seen on a ton of MGM movies but whose faces you don't normally get to see: Cedric Gibbons from the art direction department; sound recordist Douglas Shearer (yes, Norma's brother); and costume designer Irene. Production is stopped on the movie, and Morgan tries to save it by editing together the footage he's already got into something coherent.

However, Morgan knocks a bunch of film reels off the shelves, and seems not to pay any attention to what he puts back together, because while the "movie" he takes to the screening reel is theoretically a story about illicit lovers in 1880s country England, it's really one minute of that and 30 minutes of clips. There are a couple of one-reel shorts that I think are fully intact; the Passing Parade entry Our Old Car as well as a Pete Smith short on badminton. The rest, according to sources, is deleted material from other films. Eleanor Powell does a musical number; Virginia O'Brien sings with Tommy Dorsey; and some group I'd never heard of called the King Sisters do a World War II morale-booster thanking Christopher Columbus for discovering America.

I'm not certain what MGM were thinking when they put this into production; supposedly it was designed in part for overseas audiences, which makes me wonder whether they were making The Great Morgan for that part of the overseas market that hadn't been able to access Hollywood films during World War II. In any case, the movie doesn't work, not helped by the fact that Frank Morgan is even more of a blowhard here than his characters in other movies were. There's a great gag at the end, a mercifully short end as the movie runs just 57 minutes.

Briefs for March 2-4, 2025

So we've finally made to Oscar night, not that I've had all that much interest in this year's Oscars. I haven't seen any of the movies since I don't know how many of them make it to my local theater and I haven't even been in the theater since before the covid nonsense when I watched 1917 in January 2020. That was a ~10:30 showing on a Monday I had off from work; since the lockdowns ended the local sixtyplex has gone away from early showing with the earliest matinees on a weekday being about 1:15. And a quick check also shows none of the Oscar-nominated stuff getting a second showing here. But I think I've discussed all this stuff before

As for the Oscars themselves, I know about the kerfuffle around Emilia Perez. I think I actually came across the movie when I was watching the Tagesschau app (there's a version for the Roku box which is how I watch it) since I like to practice my German. Their review of the movie frankly didn't fill me with much promise that it might be anything I'd want to see. Having said that, it's also interesting to see the disconnect -- yet again, and this seems to be an increasingly common phenomenon -- between the professional critic types and more normal moviegoers. Will Academy members vote for Emilia Perez with the thought that they're sticking it to normies, or will they vote for something else?

Although the Oscars are today, there's still going to be one more day of 31 Days of Oscar on TCM tomorrow. That brings us another airing of The Pride of the Yankees (8:00 PM March 3) before we get to more pedestrian fare on Tuesday, including stuff like Flowing Gold, which has expired on my YouTube TV cloud DVR but still shows up as an upcoming recording because of the way their library works. Apparently, even though a program expires, you have to go in and manually remove it from the library if you don't want to be notified of upcoming showings. No biggie, of course.

I'm not certain if FXM is updating its rotation, since to be honest I haven't been paying such close attention to what they're showing as I've blogged about almost everything in the current rotation. A couple of noirs: Somewhere in the Night (Mar. 3, 7:10 AM) and Kiss of Death (Mar. 3, 10:10 AM and Mar. 4, 3:00 AM) are on the schedule, and I don't think I've seen them show up for a while. I'm even more confident that I haven't seen the Monty Woolley film As Young as You Feel (Mar. 4, 4:40 AM) in the rotation for a while. I don't know how much there is left that FXM wouldn't have to restore or at least digitize to be able to show on the channel and that I haven't blogged about. It may be time to break out the Will Rogers box set I've only done half of for some more vintage Fox.

Other than the death of Gene Hackman, the date of which I think has now been legally established as several days before the bodies of him and his wife were found, there hasn't been anything that would be considered a Really Big Deal, but several lesser or more recent names worth mentioning. First up would be Pilar Del Rey, who played the Mexican-American mother of the Sal Mineo character in Giant as well as appearing in other movies of the 50s. She was 95.
Joseph Wambaugh was a cop-turned-author who wrote true-crime novels that often were turned into films. Most notable among these would probably be The Onion Field, for which Wambaugh wrote the screenplay. Wambaugh died on Friday aged 88.
I didn't recognize the name of David Johansen, who also died on Friday at the age of 75. He played the Ghost of Christmas Past in Scrooged, but for 80s kids might be better remembered under the stage name Buster Poindexter, singing the song "Hot Hot Hot".

Remembering Gene Hackman: Superman: The Movie

Gene Hackman's death was announced the other day, and I mentioned that I had his appearance in the 1978 film Superman: The Movie on my DVR. So I decided to watch it and schedule it now and move some other stuff around to be able to do a review on it.

An opening establishing sequence mentions how the Superman comic book character was created in 1938, and that first issue apparently told the story of how Superman, real name Kal-El, was born on the planet Krypton a long time ago in a galaxy far away (wait, that's a different backstory). However, Krypton orbits a sun that's about to go nova, something that only scientist and prosecuting attorney Jor-El (Marlon Brando) is able to figure out. The rest of the Kryptonian elite don't want to panic the population. Jor-El also happens to be the father of infant Kal-El, so he creates a spaceship to send Kal-El to a distant planet which, as we all know, is Earth.

Kal-El's spaceship is perceived as a meteorite when it crashes into Earth near the town of Smallville, where Kal-El is found by Ma and Pa Kent (Glenn Ford and Phyllis Thaxter) and given the name Clark. They realizes he's got superhuman strengh, but keep the secret for various reasons, right up until the day Pa dies of a heart attack. Clark realizes he has to go off on a quest to figure out what his true purpose for being on Earth is.

Clark's (now played by Christopher Reeve) journey of course takes him to Metropolis, and gets him a job at a cub reporter at the Daily Planet, which is where he meets Lois Lane (Margot Kidder). It's also where he starts performing superhero feats, like when the helicopter Lois is riding in suffers a fault that leaves hanging off the edge of the Planet building. Clark Kent turns into Superman and saves her as well as doing several other good deeds. All of this brings Superman to public attention while nobody is bright enough to put two and two together to figure that Kent and Superman are one and the same. Meanwhile, Lois, despite being a modern woman, has hormones, so of course she's attracted to this big strong guy who saved her.

Superman: The Movie has a listed running time of 143 minutes, and at this point we're already into the second half of the movie without even having reached what is putatively the main plot line of the movie. That would involve supervillain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman). Lex seems to have only one employee, bumbling Otis (Ned Beatty), as well as a girlfriend, Eve (Valerie Perrine), and lives in a secret lair 200 feet below Grand Centra Station. Lex also knows that one of the things you can't really make more of is land, so land is the key to wealth. And he plans to increase his wealth in a wacky way. You'll know from your geography classes how the San Andreas fault runs through California and how it's moving Los Angeles closer to San Francisco on a millions of years timescale. The thinking is that the part of California west of the fault is going to sink into the sea, so Lex has bought a ton of land to the east so that when the west sinks into the sea, his land will be seafront land worth zillions. Now he just needs to speed things up by exploding the San Andreas fault!

Like I said, it's ridiculous, but it's also the sort of fiendish plot that allows for all sorts of special effects; remember, the all-star disaster movie Earthquake had only come out a few years prior. Lois is out west trying to get a story on the corporation buying up all that land, while Lex has discovered somehow that kryptonite is a chemical that saps Superman's strength. Lex lures Superman to his lair, puts a chain of kryptonite around Superman's neck, and leaves before waiting for Superman to die. So as you can guess something is able to save Superman, and he's able to fly off and derail Luthor's devious plot.

A lot of people give Superman: The Movie very high marks, which I guess is because it's one of the movies that really made the idea of the big-budget superhero movie a viable thing. That, and its iconic John Williams score. However, I have to say that this is a movie where if you find yourself actually doing thinking you'll see how little of it really works. The buildup goes on way too long. Many of the characters are just way too stupid. Even by the standards of the 1970s, I didn't find the special effects very good. I don't know if TCM had a bad print, but a lot of the photography looks oversaturated. And Reeve's acting isn't very good here.

However, it you don't think much about what you're watching, it's easy to see why Superman: The Movie was such a box office hit. It's certainly extremely terribly entertaining despite its flaws. And there is that John Williams score. And Hackman looks like he's having a blast getting to go way over the top with the idea of the supervillain. So while Superman: The Movie has a lot of flaws, on the whole I think the entertainment value does outweigh those flaws, especially if you don't think too hard.

Titas Ekti Nadir Naam

I've mentioned a couple of times over the past few months that I've got a bunch of foreign movies on my YouTube TV DVR that I won't necessarily get around to watching before they expire, for any number of reasons. One that I did, however, make a point to watch before it expired is the Bengali-language movie A River Called Titas.

The movie is really two films in one, with a couple of characters in both halves, with an extra character being the river Titas itself (now in Bangladesh; at the time the novel on which the movie was based was written it was still East Pakistan and the events in the movie are set over enough time that many events are definitely East Pakistan). In one of the villages along the river -- at least along the river for now; it forms channels which apparently dry up and change course over decadal time frames -- the villagers eke out a living by fishing, and by making jute from the appropriate plants from which they can make their nets as well as other things when they have excess fiber. Kishore is a young man in the village, who has a friend Subla. Basanti is a younger girl who, in a world without arranged marriages, might well grow up to marry Kishore. But Kishore goes off to a neighboring village where there's a festival going on, and there he's introduced to Rajar Jhi and summarily married off to her. He's going to bring her back to his village, but on the way back, river bandits waylay their boat and kidnap Rajah Jhi, who later escapes but floats to the river bank where she's found by unknown locals.

Kishore returned to his home village and, assuming that his wife was killed, goes mad. He doesn't know that his wife was found alive, or that he had impregnated her on the one night they were married. Fast forward 10 years, and Rajar Jhi has a son. As a widow she's seen as damaged goods, and she's taken to another village where hopefully they can find useful work for her. Coincidentally, that just happens to be the same village where Kishore and Basanti still live, Basanti being a widow too. Also somehow amazingly, neither Rajar Jhi nor Kishore seem to recognize each other. Well, Rajar Jhi seems to have some idea that she just has to be the soulmate for the poor benighted Kishore, although she doesn't let on why. Eventually Rajar Jhi and Kishore suffer a tragic fate.

More time passes, and Rajar Jhi's kid went off to a big city, where he was raised in polite society. The villagers, with the course of the river changing, are making less money from fishing. As a result, they're falling ever deeper into debt. The cooperative company which holds the debt, and which seems to be run by Muslims while the villagers are Hindus although this theme isn't explored in any depth in the film, wants to call in the debt, take over the village, and use the land for farmers. This takes up the entire second half of the movie, and seems to be an almost completely different movie from the first half although Basanti is still there.

A River Called Titas is a movie that was very well photographed, and would probably look really good if all of the original film elements had stayed in good condition. The bad news, however, is that the movie is all over the place in terms of plotting and pacing, with it in many ways feeling like it really should have been planned as two movies even if some of the characters appear in both halves. Stylistically, it fits in the tradition of Italian neo-realism, or perhaps Agnès Varda's La Point Courte, the latter being about a fishing village and having a clumsy tacked-on plot as well. Still, A River Called Titas probably should be seen once despite its flaws.

Gene Hackman, 1930-2025

Gene Hackman (r.) with Roy Scheider in the film that won him his first Oscar, The French Connection (1971)

Despite the fact that he turned 95 last month, it was still shocking to see the news this morning that Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman had died. Of course, that's because he died together with his wife and the family dog, which makes it sound like carbon monoxide poisoning or something similar; I haven't paid that close attention to the latest news.

Hackman's career spanned some 40 years, with his first big breakout role being in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. It would only take a few more years before Hackman got that Oscar winning role as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. Several other high-quality roles followed; I've got Superman: The Movie on my DVR but haven't gotten around to watching it yet. Hackman's diverse filmography includes westerns like Unforgiven which won him his second Oscar; action films like the remake of The Narrow Margin; and even period pieces like Reds and Hoosiers.

I haven't seen anything yet about a TCM tribute, although of course TCM's website is terrible for that sort of thing since the new redesign. I'm sure news will come out eventually.

Miracle full of pockets

Fairly early on in the history of this blog, I did a post on the 1993 movie Lady for a Day. It was directed by Frank Capra who, at the end of his career, remade it and slightly expanded the storyline under the title Pocketful of Miracles. The last time TCM showed Pocketful of Miracles, I recorded it, and finally got around to watching it so that I could do the review here.

It's the early 1930s, which means that there's already a Depression on, and it's still in the era of Prohibition. So there's a large financial gap between those out of jobs and those who have amassed fortunes in the illicit part of the economy. In the former is Annie, better known as Apple Annie (Bette Davis). She sells apples to make a meager living; one of her regular buyers is a guy called Dave the Dude (Glenn Ford). Dave is a superstitious dude, buying the apples from Annie because he thinks they bring him good luck. But instead of -- or maybe in addition to -- bringing him luck, he's also brought the presence of one Queenie Martin (Hope Lange).

This time around, Queenie is the daughter of a former acquaintance of Dave's. Her dad amassed gambling debts, and when he couldn't pay, he was killed. Queenie is hoping she can do something to show good faith. Dave, influenced by Annie's advice, gives Queenie a nightclub and makes her a star. Indeed, she's able to pay off the debts with the proceeds from her club, although she's eventually going to have to close once Franklin Roosevelt gets elected President and helps get Prohibition ended.

But that's a subplot, of course. The main story involves Annie. She's got a daughter Louise who somehow wound up being raised by nuns in Spain for reasons that I don't think are mentioned well enough in either version of the movie. Louise is all grown up, and has actually done well for herself, finding a boyfriend Carlos who is the son of a count, Count Romero (Arthur O'Connell). Louise (played by Ann-Margret at the beginning of her career) wants to bring her fiancé and her future father-in-law to meet Mom, which is where things hit a serious hitch.

Mom, of course, peddles apples to make a few bucks. But she's been lying for years to Louise. Instead, with the help of a hotel doorman, she's been getting hotel stationery and claiming to be living in one of those grand old apartment hotels. Annie just knows that when Louise finds out the truth, she'll be heartbroken. Worse, once the truth is revealed, Louise's fiancé will no longer want to marry her. Queenie and the others come up with the idea to put on a charade for just long enough to keep the Romeros in the dark until they head back to Spain that Annie really is a society lady with a judge for a husband and high-class friends. But will the charade work?

Well, if you've seen Lady for a Day, you'll know that the answer is yes, because a movie like this really wouldn't do with a downbeat ending. Having said that, I think Lady for a Day is a better movie for a host of reasons. One is that it was a contemporary film, having been released in 1933. Pocketful of Miracles is instead a period piece, so all of the backlot shooting really feels more out of place than a 1933-set movie actually filmed in 1933.

Pocketful of Miracles is also a good (or bad) 40 minutes longer, given in part to a new subplot about a Chicago gangster visiting New York as well as some nightclub numbers for Hope Lange. Lady for a Day is brisk; Pocketful of Miracles feels plodding. So of the two movies, I'd definitely recommend Lady for a Day well before I'd recommend Pocketful of Miracles.