J. Carroll Naish learns the meaning of Christmas

TCM is sprinkling a number of Christmas-themed shorts in among the Christmas movies they're showing up until 8:00 PM Christmas night, such as Star in the Night, which will be airing about 12:35 AM overnight tonight, following Chicken Every Sunday.

This retelling of the Nativity tale stars Naish as the proprietor of a desert inn, proud of the big new lighted star he's put on his roof as an advertising symbol. It's Christmas Eve, and our innkeeper is dealing with problems of his own, as well as the fact that the place is full up, and everybody who's a paying customer has problems of their own that are weighing on the proprietor too.

Into all that walks a young couple conveniently named José and Maria. Maria is highly pregnant, and might just have the baby tonight. This puts a pretty big crimp on everybody's plans, but, it's Christmas, so everybody decides to pitch in and make some scrificies of their own for the couple that's got even bigger problems.

It's hokey stuff, to be sure, but then again, it's also Christmas. I've been arguing that a lot of the great Christmas movies are pretty silly, but we watch them because they're also comforting. Star in the Night is no different, except that it's got to pack all of its schmaltz into two reels and the incredibly tight budget that the shorts were under.

Star in the Night has also made its way to DVD, as an extra on a release of Christmas in Connecticut (which I recommended last week, but will be airing againt at 12:15 PM ET on Christmas).

Making faces

1930s comedian Joe E. Brown was known for making strange faces in his movies, but that's not the kind of face-making I have in mind today. For, coming up at midnight ET tonight, TCM is showing Dark Passage. The basic gist fo the story is that Humphrey Bogart has been wrongly convicted of murdering his wife, and breaks out of jail in an attempt to clear his name. In order to stay a step ahead of the police, he undergoes plastic surgery, and comes out of it looking amazingly like Humphrey Bogart. This works because the film has a gimmick: the first 45 minutes or so (until Bogart wakes up from the plastic surgery) are filmed as though we're looking through Bogart's eyes. We never actually see what he looked like before the surgery, so for all we know he could have looked like James Cagney, or even Marie Dressler.

There are actually quite a few movies dealing with plastic surgery. Perhaps the best of them all is Eyes Without a Face, although the criminal here isn't the person undergoing the surgery, but the surgeon himself. For an example of escaped convict undergoing plastic surgery in order to conceal his identity in classic Hollywood, there's always Raymond Massey in Arsenic and Old Lace.

The face is the obvious way of concealing one's identity, and Raymond Burr uses this idea in His Kind of Woman: he lures Robert Mitchum to Mexico, with the idea that Mitchum will undergo surgery to be made to look like Burr, at which point Burr would have the Mitchum character killed off so that the authorities would think the ganster had died. (Ever heard of fingerprints and dental records?) A more exotic form of plastic surgery would be Roger Moore as James Bond getting a superfluous third nipple to look like the bad guy in The Man With the Golden Gun.

Perhaps Humphrey Bogart should just have dressed up as Lauren Bacall once he got out of prison. Of course, that's been done multiple times.

Arnold Stang has died

Veteran voice actor Arnold Stang has died. IMDb list his date of birth as 1925, but his family revealed the actual date to be 1918, making Stang 91. Stang did voices for one-reeler cartoons in the 1940s and 1950s, although perhaps his best-known voice work was as Top Cat in the Hanna/Barbera cartoon of the early 1960s. Stang also did live-action work on both TV and in the movies, although almost all of it was in supporting roles of the sort that would have been filled by character actors in a previous generation. The picture at left is Stang, with Frank Sinatra, in The Man With the Golden Arm. Stang also appeared as one of the gas station attendants who sees his station destroyed by Jonathan Winters in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and as a gangster who's a houseguest of Jackie Gleason in Skidoo.

To oomph or not to oomph

Or, Jane Fonda does comedy. One or both is the message of the movie Sunday in New York, airing at 4:00 PM ET this afternoon on TCM.

Fonda plays Eileen, a woman facing a bit of a moral quandary. She's engaged to be married, but her fiancé is pressuring her to have sex before marriage, which she's not so sure she should do. So, she goes down to New York City, to get some advice from her older brother. (Like that's a good idea.) Big brother Adam (Cliff Robertson) tells her she really doesn't have to have sex, and probably shouldn't. But that's a pretty big double standard. Adam, who is a pilot, has his one day off on this Sunday in New York, and he's determined to spend it bedding his girlfriend. And his little sister's visit has put a pretty big kink in his plans. He and his girlfriend go out to try to avoid getting the dreaded call that he has to sub for another pilot on a flight, and when that call comes, lil' sis goes looking for him, literally running into writer Mike (Rod Taylor) along the way. It's love at first sight....

Eventually, our heroine ends up back at the apartment with Mike, having taken him there to get him out of his wet clothes and into a bathrobe so that he can dry off before going back home. But before his clothes can dry, who should show up? Eileen's fiancé Russ (Robert Culp)! She can't tell him that she's got some strange man in just a bathrobe in the apartment, so Mike and Eileen go forward with the lie that Mike is actually Adam. This might just work, if only Adam doesn't suddenly show up (well, it is his apartment). Oh dear, what's a girl to do?

Sunday in New York is a movie that's a bit dated now; after the sexual revolution, almost nobody would be worried about the idea of having sex before getting married, and the ones who didn't want to would seek each other out to the point there wouldn't be any problem. Not only that, but the movie, while possibly seeming a bit racy compared to TV fare of the day like The Dick Van Dyke Show, is really quite tame by 2009 standards. And let's not ask how somebody living on a pilot's salary can live in such a posh Manhattan apartment. Instead, what Sunday in New York shows is that you've got quite a few actors who are better at comedy than one might normally think. Fonda did Cat Ballou and a few other light comedies in her younger days, but Robertson and Taylor didn't do so much. It's nice to see that they were able to carry it off fairly well. Sunday in New York is by no means the best movie ever made, and there's nothing groundbreaking about it, either. It's just one of those competent, enjoyable movies.

Speak of the Devil!

TCM is showing a bunch of "epics" today, and I don't particularly feel like commenting on any of them. The Fox Movie Channel isn't showing much of interest, either. So, it's off to IMDb to see who's got a birthday today....

And wouldn't you know it, but somebody I've mentioned twice within the last week has a birthday today: Dennis Morgan, who was born on this day in 1908.

Dinner and a movie

Tonight's TCM Essential, at 8:00 PM ET, is the wonderful comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner.

That man is Monty Woolley, here in the form of popular radio critic Sheridan Whiteside. He's on a speaking tour, and as part of a stop at some small city in the Midwest, he's been invited to dinner at the home of social climbers Ernest and Daisy Stanley (Grant Mitchell and Billie Burke). However, as he's walking up to the steps into their house, he trips on the ice, breaking his leg. This forces Sheridan into a wheelchair, as well as being forced to stay in the home of the Stanleys for some weeks.

Sheridan immediately sets about becoming the most obnoxious houseguest ever. Since he thinks the Stanleys are at fault for his predicament, and because he's naturally arrogant and self-centered, he insists that they give over the entire ground floor of the house to him and his personal assistant Maggie (Bette Davis, who gets top billing even though Woolley is the real star). This enforced stay in the Midwest has actually been good for her, as she finds herself falling in love with local newspaper reporter Bert Jefferson (Richard Travis). When Sheridan discovers this, he imports actress Lorraine Sheldon (Ann Sheridan) to try to take the man away from Maggie. That, however, is not the only thing Sheridan imports; he gets poor put upon nurse Mary Wickes; a brief appearance from Jimmy Durante, doing his best Harpo Marx impersonation; and even several penguins.

The penguins are evidence that The Man Who Came to Dinner is a fairly wild comedy, but it's also a very urbane comedy. It's based on a Broadway play that was hugely popular in the early 1940s, with Woolley in the main role, and includes a lot of references to events and people who would have been well known to the literati of the time. Despite the fact that this dates the movie for younger viewers, most of the comedy translates to any time, making The Man Who Came to Dinner one of the great underrated comedies.

Robert Wagner's bad hair day

One half of the above photo is a publicity still, the other half is a comic strip. I'm not sure which is which. Both, however, have to do with Prince Valiant, a movie version of which was made in 1954 and is showing tomorrow at noon ET on the Fox Movie Channel.

Set "in the days of King Arthur", the story in this version involves Norse Prince Valiant (Wagner, complete with a ridiculous wig) having to deal with the fact that his father (Donald Crisp) has had his throne taken from him. So, Valiant goes to England to enlist the help of King Arthur (Brian Aherne), or at least become a Knight of the Round Table and solve problems himself. Valiant's love interest, Aleta, is played here by Janet Leigh, who at least looks the part, while Aleta is also being chased by Gawain, who is played by a terribly miscast Sterling Hayden. There's also evil, in the form of James Mason....

Truth be told, Prince Valiant isn't all that good; it's more fun to watch because of all the big names put in the wrong roles. If you want to ask yourself what poor Sterling Hayden was thinking, you'll get that in spades. If you like swashbuckling, Middle Ages style, with a lot of location shooting, the movie is enjoyable enough, but nothing great, being a bit formulaic and fitting into the genre like a hand in glove. (That's both a plus and a minus; the minus being that you wonder if everybody was just going through the motions.) It'll probably be fairly entertaining for the kiddies, too. If you're trying to introduce people to classic cinema, however, this isn't the movie to do it with. Start with the Errol Flynn version of The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Amazingly, Prince Valiant got a DVD release.

Jennifer Jones, 1919-2009

Block photo
Jennifer Jones in Portrait of Jennie (1948)

Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Jones has died at the age of 90. I've posted a photo of her from Portrait of Jennie, since that's one of my favorite pictures in which she appears, but that's not the movie that won her the Oscar; that was several years earlier in The Song of Bernadette.

Jones was married first to fellow actor Robert Walker, and the two played young lovers in the 1944 movie Since You Went Away, hich must have been tough on them since by the time they were making that movie, their marrige was failing. Eventually, after the marriage ended, Jones went on to marry the film's producer, David O. Selznick, who exercised quite a bit of control in selecting parts for Jones (both before and during the marrigae). Indeed, it was only reading the obituaries that I saw Fox wanted Jones to play the role in Laura that eventually went to Gene Tierney.

Jones retired from moviemaking at a fairly young age, having stopped appearing regularly in the mid-1950s, and making only a few films in the 1960s before her swan song, the 1974 all-star disaster epic The Towering Inferno. Partly as a result of not having made movies for so many years, and partly because she by nature wanted to remain very private, Jnoes isn't as well-remembered today as other actors from her era.

Christmas in Connecticut

TCM has been showing Christmas movies on Thursdays in prime time this month; tonight starts off at 8:00 PM ET with the enjoyable comedy Christmas in Connecticut.

Barbara Stanwyck stars as Elizabeth Lane, a woman writing a Martha Stewart-style column for a popular national magazine, constantly mentioning her Connecticut farmhouse and all the wonderful homestyle things she does there. This all goes well until her publisher, Alexander Yardley (played by Sydney Greenstreet), decides he wants to do something for the war effort at Christmastime. That involves having a sailor, Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan) spend the holiday with Miss Lane. There's only one problem with this, and it's a big problem. Elizabeth can't even boil water, and her food columns documenting her life in Connecticut have been a complete fabrication; in fact, Elizabeth is an elegant New Yorker with a fine apartment and a taste for the high life. What's such a woman to do? She knows she's going to lose her job if the truth comes out, so she decides to make a new truth, that being the one she's been writing about in her columns.

Needless to say, it's no easy feat. Things get even more complicated when the two leads fall in love, since Elizabeth has been writing about having a husband and baby! But, this is a Christmas movie, and you know that, despite all the comedic entanglements that come from trying to keep up a lie by spinning ever bigger lies, everything is going to come out right in the end. Along the way, though, we get a lot of fun from Stanwyck, who was really adept at comedy, and a supporting cast that glitters. In addition to Greenstreet, there's Una O'Connor playing yet another housekeeper; Reginald Gardiner playing Stanwyck's "husband", actually in love with her despite the fact that she feels nothing for him and a lot for poor Dennis Morgan (who can't quite figure out what's going on), and the ever-enjoyable S.Z. Sakall as the chef who has been providing Elizabeth with all her recipes.

Christmas in Connecticut is nothing groundbreaking, but at the holiday season, it's not always important to have something big and important and snazzy; the same old warm things often do. And Christmas in Connecticut does wonderfully; it's an eminently likeable movie that knows it's nothing more than entertainment, but good entertainment at that.

How many times can I recommend Casablanca?

TCM is showing Casablanca once again, at 10:00 PM ET tonight, as part of the Star of the Month Salute to Humphrey Bogart. I've mentioned Casablanca quite a few times before, and am really only pointing it out today because tonight's entire TCM lineup is a good one for introducing people who don't know so much about classic movies to he topic. The night starts off with The Maltese Falcon at 8:00 PM ET, which is another movie that even the casual fan should have heard of. In addition to Bogart, it has Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet (both of whom show up in Casablanca), as well as Mary Astor as the girl. The characters are wacky enough, and the story engaging enough, for the movie to be good and nearly timeless. It is, of course, a remake of a 1930s movie, and both are based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett. Plus, it's got the iconic line about "the stuff that dreams are made of".

The night continues aftre Casablanca with two more equally good (and fairly well-known) Bogart movies: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre at midnight, and The African Queen at 2:15 AM. They're all good for the not-so-big fan of old movies. And, as I've argued a few times before, it's good that TCM spends some nights doing this, and not just programming the more obscure stuff like The Return of Doctor X. After all, how many people would realize they might want to try something like The Return of Doctor X without realizing that old movies can be a lot of fun in the first place?