The Sky Above Berlin

I mentioned back at the beginning of October when TCM brought back the Two for One mini-series that I had recorded several movies that various of the co-hosts selected. Tonight (Nov. 30), the presenter is David Byrne from the group Talking Heads. His first choice is Michael Powell's A Matter of Life and Death at 8:00, which I first blogged about ages ago. That's followed at 10:00 PM by a second film that mixes both black-and-white and color as well as having supernatural themes: Wings of Desire.

The setting is contemporary (at least for when the movie was released in 1987) West Berlin, at a time when Germany was still divided and tshere was still that pesky wall around the western sector of Berlin. Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) are a couple of trenchcoat-wearing angels who can only see the world in black and white and who try to comfort people who live very lonely lives in spite of the fact that West Berlin is a big and crowded city. However, people can't actually see or hear the angels and the angels don't have much power to change humans' actions. The angels have been around since before the beginning of history, and among the places they spend a lot of time is at the main public library, where one of the men is a very elderly man, Homer (Curt Bois, who had fled Nazi Germany in real life and had a small role in Casablanca; here he's in his mid-80s).

Another notable person touched by the angels is actor Peter Falk (playing himself). Falk is in West Berlin to shoot a movie about Germany just after the fall of the Nazis, although the plot of the movie-within-a-movie is unimportant for the story of Wings of Desire. Falk has taken up sketch artistry, but more important is that he seems to be one of the very few people who has a sense that there's some sort of presence around him.

The one other notable figure with whom the angels get involved is Marion (Solveig Dommartin). She's a trapeze artist from France working for a traveling circus, and realizes that the circus is about fold and leave her once again without a job. She retires to her trailer, where it's through her eyes that we first see the world in color, although here it's looking like the sort of more pastel colors from 1950s or 1960s photography.

Damiel sees Marion, and this time, he's the one who's touched, or at least as touched as an angel can be when such an angel has been around for millennia and is unable to feel human emotions. Damiel, however, decides that if he could, he'd like to give it all up to become a mere mortal human so that he can be with Marion. And wouldn't you know it, but Damiel wakes up one mornign near the Berlin Wall with the world around him in color, although he can't recognize colors. He's human now, but he also discovers that in the preceding night the circus has closed shop and Marion is no longer with them. Will Damiel find Marion?

There's not much of a plot to Wings of Desire. Or, there is a plot, at least involving Damiel wanting to become human to be with Marion. However, that plot doesn't really come in until the latter third of the movie. Before that, there's a lot of exposition, and the first two-thirds of the movie movie really slowly. That may be a problem for some viewers, especially native speakers of English, since most of the movie is in German while Marion's inner thoughts are revealed in her native French. There's a reason why it's not an uncommon view that Wings of Desire is somewhat pretentious.

However, the cinematography in Wings of Desire -- both the monochrome and color -- is gorgeous, highlighting some very photogenic parts of West Berlin as well as making suitably slummy those parts that didn't get as much chance to recover from the war for whatever reason (eg. their proximity to the eventual wall. The acting is good as well, and all of this combines to make the sort of movie you can see why some people regard it so highly.

The quality of Tubi movies

I've mentioned a couple of times how, in addition to a ton off stuff on my DVR, I've also got a bunch of movies on my watch list on a couple of the FAST services, especially Tubi and Pluto. However, I have to admit that Tubi gets some pretty doubtful prints. I noticed this when I was watching an old MGM movie that I don't think I've ever seen show up on TCM: A Lady to Love.

The lady in question is played by Vilma Bánky, who was big in the silent era but quickly tailed off in the sound era because of her severe accent. We don't hear her for a while, howver, even though this is a sound film. That's because the movie starts with the male lead, Edward G. Robinson. He plays Tony, an Italian immigrant vintner in northern California, although the movie doesn't say anything about when it's set, what with it having been released at the height of the Prohibition era. Tony is getting to the point where he's really getting ready to find a wife so he can have some kids and keep the family business going. So, as he tells a priest as well as his second-in-command Buck (Robert Ames), he's going to go to San Francisco and find himself a wife.

While in San Francisco, Tony eats at a restaurant and meets waitress Lena (that's Vilma Bánky), whose accent is explained as her being a Swiss immigrant. He decides that this is the woman for him, and when he gets back to the winery has Buck help him write a letter proposing marriage and inviting her to the vineyards to start a new life. However, Buck points out that he should send a picture so Lena will remember who this is. Tony sees himself in the mirror and realizes he's no prize, while Buck is reasonably good-looking for the standards of the early 1930s. So Tony send's Buck's photo so that Lena won't reject him.

Fast forward to the day of the wedding. Tony has already bought a wedding cake, despite Lena not being there yet. Apparently, she's going to arrive in town at the train station and come home to be married immediately. Except that Tony never makes it to the train station, as we see Lena at the station waiting for somebody to show up and pick her up. The mailman brings her from the station to Tony's home, with Tony still not there. However, Buck is there, so when het gets to the car, Lena sees him and thinks he's Tony, since Tony sent Buck's photo, not his own.

Everybody but Buck goes out to look for Tony, leaving Buck and Lena alone long enough for them to develop a bit of an emotional attachment to each other. And then, just as Buck is explaining that he's not Tony, everybody else brings Tony back -- with two broken legs from a car accident. Now Lena feels a duty to Tony to marry him even though she would prefer Buck if she could have a normal choice.

A Lady to Love was based on a stage play, and much of it does have a stagey feel to it, although part of that is also due to the early talkie nature of the film. There was a remake in the late 1930s, They Knew What They Wanted, that I haven't seen either. As for the movie, it's interesting enough, although the sort of thing where I can see why people who aren't already movie buffs are going to have trouble getting into a movie like it. Robinson does well enough, although I feel like he's really overdoing the accent here.

I mentioned the quality of the print above, and one really weird thing about this one is that, about 20 minutes in, there's... a vintage TCM bug in the lower right (the old banner logo before the rectangle with the .com address). It also has the quality of a 16mm print for TV, but then a lot of early sound films don't have great picture quality.

Flight Test Center

I'm always surprised at how many new-to-me movies there still are on TCM, even from the studio era. I don't just mean movies that I'd already heard of the title but have never gotten around to watching; I mean things that I didn't know existed until they showed up on the TCM schedule. Another such movie that I recorded some months back is Toward the Unknown.

The opening credits as well as a card on screen thanking the US Air Force clearly give away, if you will, that this is going to be a movie about avaiation, and specifically test piloting. After all those credits, a man drives up to Edwards Air Force base, getting waved through the guard house, where the two men on duty identify the man as Maj. Lincoln Bond (William Holden) and wondering what he's up to know, which implies that he has a past.

We then hear radio chatter from the pilot to the ground about the difficulties one of the planes is having; that plane eventually crashes and burns, while Maj. Bond watches from the ground. At the officers' club, Maj. Bond hears from a fellow officer, Maj. Lee (Murray Hamilton), that the plan was being flown by Gen. Banner (Lloyd Nolan), who still likes to do test piloting even though you'd think as a general he's far too important for that as well a far too old. But this is also foreshadowing for what's to come later in the movie.

Maj. Bond then meets with Col. McKee (Charles McGraw), in a scene to provide character exposition and plot advancement. Bond has returned from Washington, and would like to start test flights. He had piloted planes in the past, but then the Korean War came. Bond was shot down and taken POW by the North Koreans, who tortured him until he broke. As a result, nobody really wants to trust him or let him fly planes again.

But one of the defense contractors is trying to sell the Air Force on a new plane, and that means lots of test flights as well as people to fly support behind the plane being tested. Maj. Bond does a test flight of the plane being marketed, and comes to the conclusion that the plane has fundamental engineering flaws that are going to make it unfit for purpose. Nobody wants to believe him thanks to his past in North Korea, and because other, lesser pilots don't spot any flaws.

Further complicating matters are two other subplots. One has been referenced before, which is Gen. Banner's advancing age. Maj. Bond sees him come close to collapse after a flight, but Banner still wants to conduct test flights. Worse is that Gen. Banner has as a secrtary and love interest Connie Mitchell (Virginia Leith). Connie is also the ex-girlfriend of Maj. Bond, from the days before he was taken prisoner in Korea.

Toward the Unknown doesn't tread any new ground -- or should I say airspace since this is an aviation moive. But what it does it does competently enough. And for the people into aviation is has a lot of footage that they'll like. It also has a fair number of good supporting performances. In addition to the aforementioned Nolan and McGraw, Paul Fix shows up as another general, while James Garner has one of his earliest roles as another test pilot. Toward the Unkown is certainly worth a watch for aviation buffs.

Thanksgiving 2024 briefs

We've finally reached Thankgiving here in the US, which means a long weekend for most people as long as you aren't in retail and have to work Black Friday. It also means some changes in programming on regular TV channels and something slightly more special, if you will, on TCM. This year, Thanksgiving morning and afternoon include seven of the ten Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers pairings, starting at 6:30 AM with The Gay Divorcee. Unfortunately, one of the three that's getting overlooked is my favorite of them, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. It's only once we get to prime time that TCM is giving us more traditional family movies like Life With Father (1:45 AM) and Yours, Mine, and Ours (9:45 PM).

The "special" programming continues on Friday, which is really why I wanted to do this post. Unfortunately, the morning kicks off with a repeat of all six episodes of The Power of Film, running through to 10:30 AM. After that, it's five films that are celebrating their 75th anniversary in 2004, concluding with two greats, White Heat at 3:45 PM and The Third Man at 6:00 PM. And then, in prime time, it's a night of Monty Python, much if not all of which is I think TCM premieres, starting with Monty Python and the Holy Grail at 8:00 PM.

Unfortunately, I also have to mention a couple of recent passings. Director Jim Abrahams died yesterday at the age of 80. Together with the Zucker brothers, he made several comedies that have become classics, starting with Airplane!. There were also Hot Shots! and the first Naked Gun movie.

Dying on Tuesday, Nov. 25, but not hitting the news until after Abrahams' death, was that of actor Earl Holliman. Holliman was a supporting actor in a ton of well-known movies in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Forbidden Planet, Giant, and The Sons of Katie Elder. He also did a lot of TV, with probably his biggest TV role being opposite Angie Dickinson on Police Woman in the mid-1970s. Like a lot of B-list stars of that era he also did game shows, notably Pyramid in the 1980s. Holliman was 96.

The Great American Pie Company

One of the movies I watched recently off my DVR was in a time slot where TCM had left enough time to be able to program a short before the end of the block. That short was The Great American Pie Company.

The star here was Chic Sale, who to me comes across as MGM's answer to Will Rogers, except that he often played older than he really was. Not in this case, however. Instead, he's Ephraim Deacon, a henpecked husband in the heart of the depression who makes a little extra money when his overbearing wife has him sell the pies that she made. However, Ephraim worries about Phineas Doolittle, another local man who also sells his own wife's pies.

Worse, Ephraim is hungry, and Mrs. Deacon knows exactly how many pies she made and how much money she should get from the selling of those pies, so Ephraim can't eat any of those pies no matter how forlornly he looks at them. Instead, he comes up with an idea, although it's going to involve Phineas....

The two men meet up and sit underneath a tree that has a bench around it. I think I've mentioned that tree before on the blog as MGM had at least one specific tree they put a bench around (they may have had more; I haven't been able to watch enough films together and pay close enough attention to see whether all the scenes are of the same tree) like the one that was in On Borrowed Time. Ephraim comes up with some cockamamie idea about the two men going into business together, while Ephraim uses the spiel as an excuse to pilfer Phineas' pies.

The Great American Pie Company looks like an odd short 90 years on, but back in the day American had a much more rural population than it does now, and there was a strain that liked to look down on the yokels; recall the famous Variety headline "Stix Nix Hick Pix". This short wouldn't have been for the rural market, I don't think. And certainly not coming from MGM; Fox was better at making the sort of film the rural folks like since they had the original Will Rogers.

Yet another musical biopic

Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby are songwriters who aren't as well remembered by name today as some other writers, in part because they didn't write any well-known Broadway musicals, or as much in the way of songs that have stood the test of time. A few have, such as Connie Francis' recording of "Who's Sorry Now", or "I Want to Be Loved By You". But they still had enough of a legacy when MGM started doing a series of biopics of songwriters that they too were the subject of one: Three Little Words.

The movie opens up in 1918. Bert Kalmar (Fred Astaire) is part of a vaudeville double act with his long-suffering girlfriend, Jessie Brown (Vera-Ellen). Bert wants to marry Jessie, and she'd be willing to, but she wants him to settle down, or at least stick to just vaudeville. Bert wants to try all sorts of other things in entertainment, such as music, screenplays, and even magic acts. Jack of all trades, master of none is an idea that makes Jessie nervous.

So Bert has to try his other work in secret. When he goes to a place out by Coney Island to do his magic show as "Kendall the Great", playing the piano is Harry Ruby (Red Skelton). Harry isn't just a piano player; he'd like to write his own songs and seems to have some talent for it. But the producer doesn't need new songs. He needs a magician's assistant for Kendall, or at least one who can be the man behind that curtain you're not supposed to pay attention to. It's not an auspicious beginning, however, as Harry screws up the act.

Some time later, Bert is back on stage with Jessie in a successful show, at least until he injures his knee in a backstage accident. Jessie thinks this is a perfect time for Bert to take up songwriting, as that's something that could help make ends meet once the two of them are married. But Bert thought of that as a bit of a hobby compared to "serious" playwriting. So they go their separate ways for a while, although they do eventually get married.

Bert writes one moderately successful tune, but only the one. When he's with a music publisher, the two of them hear one of the pluggers in the front office playing a tune over and over. That someone is Harry Ruby, and the two agree it's a catchy enough tune. So the publisher brings Harry in for the two of thm to try to match words and music. Eventually, Bert realizes who Harry Ruby is from his past, and they have a breakup of their own.

Except that the one song they worked on together becomes a big hit. And Harry takes out an ad calling Kalmar and Ruby a hot new songwriting team. So they have to start working together, and obviously the pairing pays off since we wouldn't have a movie if the pairing didn't. Eventually, however, old differences come back up and derail not only the professional partnership, but also their friendship. It's going to take some doing to bring the two men back together.

Three Little Words is a competent and pleasant enough movie, but I think it's going to appeal more to people who are fans of that era of music than a more general public. That's because a lot of the songs don't hold up all that well apart from "Who's Sorry Now" (sung by Gloria De Haven) and "I Want to Be Loved By You" (sung by a young Debbie Reynolds with Carleton Carpenter). Red Skelton is quite good in a role that provides a bit of comedy, but is nowhere near as zany as in most of his movies. Fred Astaire, unsurprisingly does a good job in both the acting and the dancing parts of the movie.

There are a lot of other music-related biopics I'd recommend first, but Three Little Words is certainly worth catching the next time it shows up on TCM.

Mystic Pizza

It's hard to believe that the movie Mystic Pizza is over 35 years old now, and at the point where it's getting inclusion in TCM lineups. It aired a month or so ago, so I recorded it, and now it's got another airing coming up tonight at 10:15 PM.

Jojo (Lili Taylor) Barboza is part of the Portuguese-American community that makes up a significant minority of working class towns from eastern Connecticut through Rhode Island and to the part of Massachusetts due south of Boston. She lives in Mystic, a town known for its maritime history museum Mystic Seaport, and is about to walk down the aisle to get married to lobsterman Bill Montijo (Vincent D'Onofrio). She gets to the altar and is about to do the whole vows thing, and... she faints. Flash back to how she got here....

Some months back, Jojo is a young woman working at Mystic Pizza, a pizza joint run by Leona (Conchata Ferrell) and her husband, the sort of downmarket place known for cheap formica tables and the like. She's a waitress there with her two best friends, sisters Daisy (Julia Roberts) and Kat (Annabeth Gish, no relation to Lillian) Araújo. Daisy isn't certain what she wants to do with her life, while Kat is the bright one with promise. She wants to become an astronomer and has even been accepted to Yale, but the money for tuition is an issue.

Kat also leads lectures at the Seaport planetarium and takes on a third job to make more money, that of playing babysitter to the young daughter of Tim Travers (William Moses), an architect who graduated from Yale himself. Tim's wife is currently working in England for several months while he restores one of the old houses in Mystic for them to use as a second home, hence the need for somebody to look after the child from time to time. Now, it's fairly obvious from the first scene, but Kat is going to develop a strong bond not just with the kid, but with Tim too, which is a problem since he's married.

Jojo, as we've already mentioned, is in a relationship with Bill. She seems to be in it for no small part for the sex, and in a role reversal from the Hollywood stereotypes for relationship desires, it's Bill who wants the long-term commitment which is why he keeps trying to convince Jojo to get engaged and then marry him. Her being unsure of this threatens to destroy the relationship and is part of why she faints at altar.

As for Daisy, one night when the three young women go out to a bar in town, a bunch of townies presumably from Yale (which is really on the other side of the state from Mystic) show up because one of them, Charles Windsor Jr. (Adam Storke), is from a wealthy family that has a vacation home in the area. He thinks he's hot stuff and challenges the yokel locals first at darts and then pool, where Daisy easily bests him. The two start a relationship themselves, but of course it's another relationship where you know it's also going to hit a bump in the road because of the stark class differences between the two.

Who will find love in the end and who won't? Well, to get the answer to that question you'll have to watch the movie.

Mystic Pizza is a well-made movie, aided in no small part by location shooting mostly in towns near Mystic. All three of the female leads are good, as is D'Onofrio. Obviously, with the focus on the women, younger women are going to enjoy this one more than younger men. And if you don't pay too close attention, you probably won't mind the fact that the story is fairly formulaic.

Tokyo under half a minute

Another of the movies that I think I recorded during 31 Days of Oscar and have been meaning to watch before it expires, is the World War II film Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.

The movie is based on a book, which is based on a true story. As everyone knows Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, sending the US into World War II. The surprise attack was a shock to American morale, and something needed to be done to improve that morale, both among troops who were going to be sent into the Pacific theater, and civilians on the home front. Lt. Col. James Doolittle (played in the movie by Spencer Tracy), came up with the daring idea to try a raid on the Japanese Home Islands.

Of course, this wasn't going to be easy. With the fall of the Philippines and Japan having effective control over a good portion of the western Pacific, there was no land base from which bombers could take off. And over in Europe, bombers could fly from the UK, drop their payloads over Germany or one of the occupied countries, and return to the UK. That's not something that could be done in the Pacific. Instead, bombers would have to take off from an aircraft carrier, which has a notoriously short runway. That, and they wouldn't be able to fly back to the carrier, instead having to fly on and hope they could reach the part of China that hadn't been taken by Japan yet.

Doolittle sets out to recruit men for the mission, with the caveat that they don't know yet what the mission is going to be because of the fact that it has to remain top-secret until the last minute. Among them is pilot Capt. Ted Lawson (Van Johnson), who as the movie opens has recently been married and is about to start a family (Mrs. Lawson is played by Phyllis Thaxter), or at least was hoping to before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Lawson is the main character here mostly because he's the one who in real life after the raids wrote the book Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Gunner on Lawson's plane Cpl. David Thatcher (Robert Walker).

Lawson's crew, and the crews of a couple dozen more planes are sent to Florida for training, since they have to practice short takeoffs at low speed. Some of the men are smart enough to figure out part of what's going on, but they have to keep it a secret for obvious reasons. Eventually they fly west to San Diego, before the planes get loaded onto ships taht are going to be transported across the Pacific until they can get close enough to Japan to attack -- at least if they can avoid Japanese subs. This portion of the movie, however, is the part for a bit of comic relief as there's a sort of friendly rivalry between the flyboys who are part of the Army air corps (the US Air Force as a separate branch not being founded until after the War) and the Navy men on the ships.

Eventually, the raiding planes take off, earlier than planned once the element of surprise has been lost. They bomb Tokyo and some other places in Japan, and make their way across the Sea of Japan to China, barely making it and in some cases having to ditch just before getting to shore. Lawson and several of his men are pretty substantially injured. How are they going to get to safety? Well, of course we know they do and that Lawson gets back to America since he wrote the book. But it's actually a surprising amount of the film that's set in China.

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo was filmed in the first half of 1944, with the movie being released late in the year. This was while the war was still raging. As a result the movie is fairly formulaic and more designed to be a morale-booster than something even-handed. Then again, that's in part because what actually happened was fairly well known by the public of the day. Even with all that in mind, watching 80 years later, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo is a pretty good movie.

It's also interesting to see the credits list of the movie as it opens up. This was one of Robert Mitchum's first movies. (Wikipedia says it's his debut, although I could swear that The Human Comedy came out earlier. Perhaps it's his first screen credit.) Several B-listers, like Don DeFore and Leon Ames show up, while Wikipedia says a very young Blake Edwards has a small role.

Movie adaptations

I mentioned not too long ago that I had several more recent movies that aired on TCM during 31 Days of Oscar that I was going to have to get to before they expire from my DVR. One of them from the early 2000s is Adaptation.

Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) is a real-life screenwriter, and writer of the screenplay for Adaptation. Before that, he worked with director Spike Jonze (director of Adaptation) on Being John Malkovich on the movie Being John Malkovich. As Adaptation opens, Charlie is trying to come up with an adaptation of a book called The Orchid Thief, by an author named Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep).

Now here we need to stop and go back a bit. Susan Orlean is also a real person, like Kaufman, a Manhattan writer who came across an interesting story about a man who went into the Florida swamps to try to poach a species of orchid that's considered very rare. So she decided to write a long-form article about the case for The New Yorker, and eventually turned that into the book The Orchid Thief. I haven't read the book, but by all accounts the story is about subject material that might make for an interesting movie. Except that the way Orlean wrote The Orchid Thief apparently made it hard to adapt the book directly into a movie.

So part of Adaptation is about the fact that Kaufman is developing a case of writer's block trying to turn The Orchid Thief into a workable screenplay. Except that the movie isn't a documentary by any means. For one thing, the real-life Kaufman invents a twin brother, Donald Kaufman (obivously played by Nicolas Cage as well), who is an aspiring but unsuccessful screenwriter. Donald goes to seminars run by famed screenwriting professor Robert McKee (Brian Cox). Donald comes up with ideas that are ridiculous largely because they're the stereotype of a bunch of tropes put together to come up with something that might be a story.

Getting back to Charlie and Susan, The Orchid Thief is also based on a real person, John Laroche (played by Chris Cooper, who won a Supporting Actor Oscar). Today we'd call the guy Florida Man, although I don't know that the term existed 25 years ago. He's a "hold my beer" type who has developed a series of all-consuming passions, only to drop one to pick up the next, with orchids being the current passion. Susan, however, begins to figure out that she really doesn't have any passions in her life, so she gets fascinated by John, in part because of the New York class bigotry and in part because he can have passions where she doesn't seem to be able to.

Charlie continues to try to write that screenplay, while Hollywood producer types are increasingly getting on him to finish the damn thing so that they can start filming it. Eventually, his plot part about trying to write that screenplay comes together with the plot of Susan writing the book while getting to know Laroche. The movie goes in ways that real life didn't, although I won't reveal those.

Adaptation is an interesting movie that veers off in all sorts of unexpected directions. Some people might have a bit of a problem with that considering that at the heart of all this is a book that's actually based on real people. I didn't know anything about the book or the movie before going in to it, so I didn't have any of those problems. Instead, I was able to sit back and enjoy what is a bit of a wild ride, and a lot of fun. If you want something different, Adaptation certainly fits the bill.

Murder, My Sweet

A few months back I did a review of the Robert Mitchum movie Farewell, My Lovely, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler about the detective Philip Marlowe. I mentioned at the time that the book had been turned into a movie 30 years earlier with the title Murder, My Sweet. That earlier version shows up on TCM tonight (Nov. 22) at 11:45 PM, so I recently sat down to watch the movie so I could do a review here.

The story is mostly the same between the two movies, although Murder, My Sweet does a bit less in part because of the Production Code. Here, it's Dick Powell playing Philip Marlowe, and as the movie opens he's blindfolded in an investigation room of a police precinct being questioned about the things that have happened to him in the last few weeks as part of cases both he and the police have been investigating. Flash back to some time ago, and "Moose" Malloy comes to Marlowe asking for information about the whereabouts of former nightclub girl Velma Valento. Moose has just done a seven-year stretch in prison and, having been released recently, wants to find the girl he loved. She apparently doesn't love him enough to have kept writing, although her old boss at the nightclub claims she's dead.

The following morning, Marlowe receives a call from a Mr. Marriott, wanting him to work as a go-between. Marriott is paying a sort of ransom to get back a jade necklace that was stolen. He doesn't want to go alone because of the danger, and he's right to be afraid. At the rendezvous, somebody hits both of them over the head, knocking Marlowe out (and giving him the sort of concussion you'd think would make his memory an issue) and killing Marriott.

Also interested in the neckless is the Grayle family: elderly father Leuwen (Miles Mander), trophy second wife Helen (Claire Trevor), and Leuwen's adult daughter from his first marriage Ann (Ann Shirley). Ann shows up at Marlowe's plays with a phony identity trying to get information; in fact the necklace belonged to Ann's stepmother. Ann and Helen at various points in the story each want to hire Marlowe, so he's naturally unsure of which of the two to trust, or even if either of the two he can trust. And there are other shady figures here. Somebody's putting words into Moose's ear that Marlowe knows where Velma really is, and then someone who may or may not be the same person as the previous someone basically kidnaps Marlowe and drugs him up for three days.

Eventually, Marlowe is able to put everything together, although as with that other Philip Marlowe story The Big Sleep, how well everything winds up fitting together is an open issue.

Obviously, as this wasn't the first version of the story I watched, I found myself thinking about the Robert Mitchum Farewell, My Lovely as I was watching Murder, My Sweet. I think each of the films has its advantages and disadvantages. In the case of Farewell, My Lovely, having been made in the 70s works in that there's more that can be discussed, such as Velma's nightclub now serving a predominantly black clientele. There are also a few other subplots. But what works better for Murder, My Sweet is that it has a contemporary setting during World War II. Farewell, My Lovely is done as a flashback to the summer of 1941 and a lot of the time the movie has the look of something that's too Hollywood clean for a simulation of the 1940s as they really were.

Mitchum was a natural as Philip Marlowe; Dick Powell wanted the role (well, really he wanted Walter Neff in Double Indemnity) precisely because everybody thought he wasn't a natural to play a hard-boiled private detective. Powell pulls it off well, and it changed his career; for the rest of his career he was able to get meaty dramatic roles.

Both versions of Raymond Chandler's story are worth watching, and tonight's your chance to catch the Dick Powell version.

I accidentally let a couple of foreign films expire from my DVR

I've mentioned several times recently that I've got a ton of foreign-language films in my queue of films to watch. However, as I have YouTube TV, their "DVR", or library, is one that only keeps things on the cloud for nine months before they expire. There have been a couple of films that I watched and meant to blog about but never got around to doing, and one that I had to interrupt part of the way through and never got around to finishing. So each of them will get a paragraph here, and if I ever get around to tracking them down and watching them in full again, I might do a full-length review. (Frankly, I need to get a Chromebook or laptop so that I can take notes/do the skeleton of a post as I'm actually watching a movie. Perhaps then I wouldn't have such a backlog.)

First up is the Japanese silent I Was Born, But This tells the story of two kids who seem to have moved to a new town a they're starting off in a new school. The film deals with their experiences at the new school, as well as discovering that their father isn't quite as heroic as they might have thought he was. The thing that struck me watching this is how Hollywood conventional the movie was. The other limited number of Japanese silents I've seen have been stuff designed to have a benshi provide ongoing commentary/narration, which this doesn't do at all.

Another Japanese movie was Conflagration. This movie is based on a true story of a monk who inexplicably burned down a temple in the years following World War II. Radical author Yukio Mishima wrote a book about the incident positing one set of theories as to why, while this movie takes the book and comes up with its own theories as to what would drive a monk to do such a thing. I have to admit this wasn't a favorite.

And then there was the French pre-war film The Rules of the Game. A pilot who just did a daring transatlantic flight steps into a love triangle, or really something more than a triangle, as there are multiple couples stepping out on each other. And then everybody ends up together out in the country. When it comes to "best films of all time", this is one of those movies that always seems to make the critics' lists. But I found myself thinking of Au hasard Balthasar while watching it. That's another French film that critics love to put on their lists but that I, while finding it a good movie, isn't something I'd think of as an all time great.

I also recorded some foreign films during 31 Days of Oscar, and we're getting up to nine months since that began, so I've got several more foreign films I need to watch soon. But there are also two more foreign films coming up as part of the Two for One series that I intend to blog about.

Briefs for Nov. 21-23, 2024

Tonight sees the third night of the Powell and Pressburger programming salute, and that brings several movies I have to record. First up, at 11:30 PM, is Hour of Glory, aka, The Small Back Room a movie about the men in Britain defusing World War II-era bombs that never went off. I saw this one on a previous TCM showing many years ago, having briefly mentioned it in a post at the end of 2017. However, not having done a full-length post on it, I'm planning to record it again. I'm pretty certain I haven't seen the last two movies of the night: Tales of Hoffman at 1:30 AM and The Lion Has Wings at 4:00 AM.

It's only earlier this year that I did a post on Rome Adventure, which introduced Suzanne Pleshette to the world. The story isn't the greatest, but there's some nice Italian scenery. The movie shows up on TCM at 11:45 AM on Friday, Nov. 22.

As for the final movie I want to mention coming up TCM, it's a short that's airing as part of the Saturday matinee block: Hot News Margie, which I first mentioned in 2013. It's a short about a lady reporter trying to get a story, which isn't much since it's a just a one-reeler. But it has a very surprising for the early 1930s punchline. It comes up in the 8:00 AM half hour on Nov. 23.

Thankfully, as of this writing, nobody has died to merit mention in a briefs post, and certainly not a post of their own. Why do I always get the feeling that that's going to change once I post something like this?

Private Secretary

I'm always interested in a new-to-me pre-Code, so when TCM ran Behind Office Doors some months back, I decided to record it to be able to watch later and do a post on it. Recently, I finally got around to watching it, so now we get the post on it.

Mary Astor plays Mary Linden, and as the movie opens she's walking up to her apartment where she lives with a co-worker roommate Delores (Kitty Kelly) who is hosting a party. One of the guests suggests they play a truth or dare-like game, which introduces Mary to Ronnie Wales (Ricardo Cortez) even though what we learn about his character makes us wonder how he learned about the party. Ronnie seems interested in Mary, but he's trapped in a loveless marriage, one of the tropes of movies of the day. Mary isn't interested in him beyond friendship, however.

Mary works for the Ritter Paper Company as the personal secretary to the president, John Ritter (Charles Sellon), and she's really the one who runs the place, as she knows everything before the boss knows it. Mary wasn't interested in Ronnie the previous night because she actually has the hots for one of the young salesmen there, James Duneen (Robert Ames). This, even though he doesn't realize it and it's an era where she can't be direct with him. Mary uses confidential information to help James get ahead, which seems highly unethical, but there you are.

Ritter, having built the company up from nothing over the past 40 years, has reached the age where the doctors tell him he has to retire, but what to do with the business? There's a depression on, the movie hiavng been released in 1931, and finding someone willing to buy the place might be tough. Mary is forward-thinking, however, and suggests that Ritter sell the company to the employees, who will pay back Ritter from the firm's profits. This would allow for promoting someone from the inside to the position of president, and we know who Mary has in mind.

But James doesn't get that Mary is interested in him, and has a string of girlfriends. He even hires his latest girlfriend to be secretary to the president once he gets that job, despite the fact that said girlfriend is utterly unsuited to the job. Things get even worse when Mary sets James up with a business connection with a prominent banker, and James winds up getting engaged to the banker's daughter! It's all too much for Mary, but what's she going to do? Will she end up with the right man and be able to find true happiness?

Despite the fact that Behind Office Doors is a pre-Code and certainly touches on any number of subjects that wouldn't be discussed a few years later, the ending becomes surprisingly conventional and doesn't quite hold up to the promise the first half. Mary Astor does well, but Robert Ames wasn't really leading man material here and Cortez isn't given enough to do. Still, Behind Office Doors offers an interesting enough look at the way Hollywood viewed business back in the early 1930s.

Shades of Grandma's Boy

It wasn't all that long ago that I did a post on the Harold Lloyd silent Grandma's Boy. I've got a bunch of silents sitting on my DVR, and one that I wanted to get to before it expired was The Boob. For reasons that will become clear, I couldn't help but think of Grandma's Boy as I was watching.

The star here is a man who's not well known to me, George K. Arthur, and that's because his career didn't really survive the coming of talking pictures. Arthur plays Peter Good, who supposedly works as a farmhand on a farm somewhere in small-town USA. He's got a girl he pines for in Amy (Gertrude Olmsted), but Amy wants better things in live, so when big-city Harry showed up, she immediately took to him to the point of accepting his marriage proposal after just a week.

Peter wants to win Amy back, and his friend Cactus Jim, a stereotype of the drunkard cowboy, suggests dressing up as a real cowboy, which needless to say doesn't impress Amy one bit. However, since Harry is from the big city, the belief is that he must be involved in bootlegging, this being Prohibition and there being no other reason for city slickers to show up here besides going to the roadhouses that supplied city folk with alcohol.

Peter vows that he's going to find some of these bootleggers and take them down, and that by doing so he's bound to win Amy's heart. He learns that Amy and Hary are going to go to a roadhouse called the Booklovers which, as it turns out, is indeed a place flouting Prohibition. It also has a floor show that needs to be seen to be believed. Also at the Booklovers is Jane (a young Joan Crawford on her way up the ladder to stardom). She's actually working for the feds in fighting the people making and selling illegal liquor. When Peter shows up and makes a mess of things, Jane gives him a second chance because he's just an amateur with an interest in going after bootleggers too. They need the help of the people after all when a large section of the country hates Prohibition.

Peter goes to a mill in the middle of nowhere where a couple of guys are digging up a coffin that is filled not with a human body but with a bunch of booze. Harry is supposed to meet these men there on his way to getting married to Amy. But Peter shows up first, leading to a climactic fight in -- or should I say on -- a speeding automobile.

Jacqueline Stewart presented this as part of Silent Sunday Nights, and she mentioned that the movie got scathing reviews at the time of its release, as well as mentioning director William Wellman's comments that at least he could take pride in having directed Joan Crawford in her worst movie. To be honest, I think I have to come down more or less on the side of the contemporary critics, although I don't think I'd go quite that far. The movie doesn't really work, for a bunch of reasons, including Arthur not being right for the role. It also feels more like a series of scenes than a coherent plot, and Cactus Jim is just terribly unfunny. Stewart made mention of Peter's black juvenile companion, Ham Bunn, as a stereotype. I think I'd have to disagree with her, as Cactus Jim is far more offensive than Ham Bunn.

The Boob has received a Warner Archive release, and it's in the public domain, although the print TCM ran had a "new" score, in the sense of it having been composed for the film's resurrection from obscurity 20 or so years ago.

Let's take these blocked funds and set a remake of The Asphalt Jungle in Egypt!

A lot of times I record old movies off of TCM without knowing much beyond the synopsis. Such was the case when I saw the new-to-me movie Cairo show up on TCM some months back.

The movie starts off with a pre-credits scene of a plane landing in Cairo, with a Maj. Pickering (George Sanders) getting off the plane. In his conversation with the customs officials, he says he does "design" and that he's come to Egypt to do "research" on Egyptian antiquities, presumably to get ideas for his "design". He then goes to one of the museums, and while a lady is leading a guided tour, the Major makes eye contact with anothr man. Clearly the Major has other ideas.

After the credits, which serve in part as an opportunity to show some scenery of Cairo that would be nicer if it were in widescreen and in color, the Major meets Willy, who unbeknownst to the Major now has a wife and a young child. The Major has an offer for Willy that could make Willy $25,000, but of course that can't possibly be a legitimate offer. Indeed, as part of the conversation, the Major reveals that he was in prison in Germany and his cellmate was a master forger of passports. Willy's wife hasn't heard the conversation, but she's no dummy, realizing that the Major is bad news.

The Major is also looking for a man named Nicodemos (Eric Pohlmann), who is the cousin of the Major's old cellmate back in Germany although he's never met the Major until now. Nicodemos knew from his cousin that the Major had some sort of plan that was big, but figured that, not having heard from the Major, the plan was off. But now the Major has shown up, and is trying to get together a bunch of people to help him carry out his plan, which could net them a cool $250,000.

That plan involves stealing a bunch of antiquities and then smuggling them out of the country. The Major obviously needs money to get everything together, but he also needs expert people. One is an import-export man; Nicodemos is the money man; there's also Ali (Richard Johnson) as the gunman should anything go wrong. Ali decides to take the deal in part because he had a small farm somehwere up the Nile that he'd like to get back. If that sounds familiar, think Sterling Hayden and the horse farm in The Asphalt Jungle.

Indeed, you'd be right. Of course, if you had watched the opening credits closely you would also have noticed that the movie is "based on a novel by W.R. Burnett". So it's not too difficult to figure out where the movie is going to go. The heist isn't quite going to go to plan, and then, to make matters worse, there's going to be a double cross. Never mind the Hollywood Production Code; the Egyptian authorities would never have condoned a movie in which the characters successfull steal antiquities, led by a westerner.

Unsurprisingly, this is a fairly weak imitation of The Asphalt Jungle, since George Sanders is the only star power here and the script is rather weaker. Having Egyptian settings can't save the movie either, especially since they're in black and white. When TCM ran Cairo, they put it in a slot long enough to have time left over to run one of James FitzPatrick's Traveltalks shorts where he visits Egypt. That is in color, and more spectacular despite being 25 years older.

Ayn Rand does Cyrano de Bergerac

One of those old movies I'd seen show up several times on the TCM schedule but never got around to recording or watching was the 1945 film Love Letters. With that in mind, the last time it ran on TCM, I made a point to put it on my DVR to get around to watch later. I've finally watched it, so now you get the review.

The movie starts off in Italy in World War II. Serving near enough to the front to hear the bombs are Alan Quinton (Joseph Cotten) and his friend Roger Morland. Roger has a girlfriend back in England named Victoria (Jennifer Jones), but Roger isn't much of a romantic, so he has Alan write the love letters to Victoria on behalf, which seems like nonsense since surely Victoria would recognize this as not her fiancé's writing. Worse, however, is that Alan realizes he's falling in love with Victoria even though he's never met her, while Victoria is in love with the letters, not with Roger.

At any rate, the letters are about to stop in part because Alan doesn't want to write any more, while Roger is going to be going back to England anyhow to train as a paratrooper. And on top of that, Alan gets injured in combat too and faces a lengthy recuperation before going back to England, no longer having to fight in the war. Roger visits Alan's parents, and has them tell Alan that he's married Victoria.

Some months later, Alan finally returns to England and visits his parents. He's had an aunt die in the meantime and bequeath him a place in County Essex, which is good because he knows that's near Longreach, which is the place where Victoria lived. However, Victoria isn't going to be around since Roger died in an accident before Alan got back to England. Meanwhile, Alan also has a fiancée himself, except that he's come to learn that since writing all those letters to Victoria, he's no longer in love with his fiancée.

Unfortunately, by this time Roger has died in an accident. Alan's brother tries to cheer him up by taking him to a party, wher he meets a woman named Dilly who happens to know Victoria and realizes that a drunken Alan is talking about Victoria when he talks about having written those letters for Roger in Italy. Alan finally goes to Longreach, only to learn that Victoria is dead too, which is not actually the case. The real truth is that Dilly is Victoria's cargiver, and that Victoria stabbed Roger to death, only to immediately develop a case of amnesia, taking the name Singleton. Dilly is terrified of what's going to happen should Singleton remember that she's really Victoria and especially if Victoria figures out she's talking to the guy who actually wrote those love letters for Roger.

Love Letters has what to me is a fairly ridiculous premise, but one that I suppose will appeal to people who like a certain type of romantic movie, such as Random Harvest. Not that I liked Random Harvest, although for me Love Letters didn't sink to being quite as mawkish as Random Harvest. Still, Love Letters is definitely another of those movies where you're going to need to watch and draw your own conclusions.

Sweet November (1968)

One of the movies that's on my DVR and is coming up on TCM in the near future is Sweet November, which gets its next TCM showing tomorrow (Nov. 17) at 6:00 PM. So I watched it in order to be able to do a post on it.

Anthony Newley plays Charlie Blake, a British-born businessman trying to bring the family's box-manufacturing business to America. As the movie begins, he's been in the States for three years, but never got a New York driver's license, which is why he's at the DMV in Manhattan to take his written driver's test now that the old license expired. The DMV administers the test a bunch of times a day to a room full of people, and sitting behind Charlie is the frankly obnoxious Sara Deever (Sandy Dennis). Sara keeps asking Charlie if he knows the answers to the questions on the test, and the proctor dings Charlie for cheating, throwing him out of the exam room!

In real life, this would be enough for a normal person to want to be rid of a malign presences like Sara. But Sweet November is a movie, so Sara bumps into Charlie after the test and takes him to a hot dog stand for lunch despite his just wanting her to give him directions so he can eat alone in peace. Sara takes Charlie to a park bench so they can eat their lunch, and starts asking him questions that are way too personal. Sara gave me vibes of the Liza Minnelli character in The Sterile Cuckoo, although I think Sweet November was released first.

Sara eventually invites Charlie over to her apartment in Brooklyn, and it's there that she has an odd proposition for him. Sara is a bohemian who finds a different man every month who she thinks is in need of some sort of TLC, and offers each of the men the chance to have a one-month relationship with her before going on to the next man to "fix". Charlie is in Sara's eyes obviously way too conventional and strait-laced, so she'd like him to live with her for November and maybe get a different view of life.

Amazingly, Charlie says "yes" to all this and acts like he's just going to take a month out of life even though he's got a business to run and is supposed to go up to Toronto for a big business meeting that he just blows off. And he doesn't tell any of his underlings where he really is. None of this makes any sense, but as I said a few paragraphs back, this is a movie, not real life.

Charlie also doesn't seem to have any friends in his personal life despite having been in the States for three years while Sara only seems to have neighbor Alonzo (Theodore Bikel). But despite all this, Charlie falls in love with Sara, and would like to stay with her past the end of November! He senses there's something wrong, however, and Alonzo tells him the secret as to why Sara is the way she is and why Charlie shouldn't want to stay after the end of the month. Will the couple stay together?

The big problem I had with Sweet November is, well, twofold. One is that Sara is just such an irritating character (not Sandy Dennis' fault, of course). In addition to The Sterile Cuckoo I mentioned above, I was also thinking of Barbra Streisand in The Owl and the Pussycat, a movie I hated mostly because of the sociopathic nature of the Streisand character. The other problem is that the script has no bearing in reality. Charlie is just going to drop his business for an entire month? And none of these people really know anyone in spite of having been in New York all this time?

Some people obviously liked Sweet November, however. It had enough fans that somebody thought at the beginning of the current century that a remake would be in order. I haven't seen the remake. But give the original a try and judge for yourself; you may be one of the people who likes it too.

The Notorious Landlady

A few weeks ago, I did a post on The Velvet Touch. I was thinking about that movie a I watched another movie that for some reason I though was coming up on the TCM schedule soon, The Notorious Landlady.

The movie starts off with a bit of a prologue in a fashionable part of London where the residents include elderly Mrs. Dunhill (Estelle Winwood). On her travels in and out of the neighborhood, she has to deal with one of those bratty kids who keeps popping up to be bratty whenever that's what's needed for the plot. As the movie opens he likes to terrorize people by pointing his cap gun at them. Everybody hears a shot, except that this time it's not from the cap gun but from one of the other houses on the square.

Fast forward several months. Carly Hardwicke (Kim Novak) lives in one of the houses on the square, and has offered a flat to let, preferably to a couple. One family does show up, but they realize that this is Carly Hardwicke, and walk away, which means that she has a past. It doesn't take much to guess what that past is, since we saw the prologue. So we know what the "notorious" in the title is referring to.

Not knowing is Bill Gridley (Jack Lemmon). Bill is an American, working in the Foreign Service and having just been transferred to London from Saudi Arabia. So of course he wouldn't know what happened six months previously. He cottons on fairly quickly that Carly, dressed as the maid of the house, is in fact not a maid but the lady of the house, and that she's alone. Carly had wanted a couple to rent, but she's hard up for money, so she relents and rents the entire second story to Bill.

The next day at work, Bill mentions where he found a place to rent, and the name sounds very familiar to Bill's boss, Franklyn Ambruster (Fred Astaire). Ambruster does a bit of research, and realizes that Hardwicke is presumed to be the one who fired that shot that everybody heard in the prologue. The belief is that it killed her husband, who has been missing ever since that shot, and that Carly is therefore the obvious suspect in a murder case. The only thing is, nobody's been able to find Mr. Hardwicke's body, which is kind of important if you're going to try someone for murder.

Having an officer in the foreign service be involved in a case like this wouldn't do for the Americans, but they don't have much choice since Bill is renting that flat. So Ambruster brings in Scotland Yard and they impress on Bill the idea that he should help them in getting information by more or less spying on his landlady and getting whatever information he can that will either help prove her guilt or exonerate her.

It's not too hard to guess where things are going to go for much of the rest of the movie, since this is a more comedic mystery. Bill is going to fall in love with Carly, but there's going to be one misunderstanding after another that makes Bill think perhaps Carly really is a murderess. However, since it's a lighter movie, the viewer can presume that she is in fact not the killer. And indeed, Mr. Hardwicke does eventually show up.

The Notorious Landlady is another of those movies that doesn't quite work, in large part because it has to hew to so many of the tropes of the genre that we know where it's going to be going. If it were a noir, we'd know Mrs. Hardwicke is bad news; here, we know that some coincidence is going to come to exonerate her. The script is also a bit unoriginal, making unnecessary homages to some classic films. The Notorious Landlady was filmed in 1961 and has one scene of Jack Lemmon tell Kim Novak he "adores" her that felt like it came straight out of the final scene of The Apartment. And there's a scene of a shower drain that looked like it could have been taken from the editing room of Psycho. The Notorious Landlady also runs 123 minutes, which is a good half hour too long for material like this.

So I'd say it's with reason that The Notorious Landlady is not the best-remembered movie for any of its stars.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Another of the more recent movies that I recorded during 31 Days of Oscar that I'm having to watch before they expire off my cloud DVR is one that's only 20 years old: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Jim Carrey plays Joel Barish, who lives in one of those Long Island suburbs that's been turning more downmarket ove the past few decades, working some sort of office job that requires him to commute on the LIRR. One day, when he gets to the train station, he decides impulsively to get on a train going in the other direction, out to Montauk, even though it's the middle of winter. On the beach in Montauk, Joel sees a blue-haird young woman, but writes in his journal instead. The two wind up on the same train back, however, and the woman is outgoing enough to make the first move approaching Joel.

The woman is Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), and she seems to be one of those people who can be fun, but also way too outgoing and a bit too high-energy as a result. Still, the two start a relationship, albeit with strong hints that the relationship isn't going to work out and the two are going to break up eventually. Indeed, one day when Joel shows up at Clementine's place there's another man there, Patrick (Elijah Wood) wondering why Joel is there. A few days later, Joel goes to the bookstore where Clementine works retail, and she acts like she doesn't know Joel at all. And another guy shows up who is clearly Clementine's new boyfriend.

Joel talks to some of his friends about all of this, and they have a shock for him. They give him a business card from a company called Lacuna (Latin for "hole" and usually used in English with the sense of "gap"). They're a company that does the sort of thing that would be considered controversial. People come to them with uncomfortable memories, and ask the "good" doctors at Lacuna to erase those memories from their minds. When Joel finds out about this, he's pissed.

With that in mind, Joel goes to Lacuna and demands from Dr. Mierzwiak that Lacuna perform the same procedure on him so that he too can forget Clementine. The procedure involves bringing in a bunch of stuff associated with the memories in question, followed by the patient taking a pill to knock them out at which point the Lacuna employees come in to remove the memories. The patient will wake up feeling a bit hung over but with all the memories gone.

This time, however, Lacuna sends a couple of less-experienced employess. One is the aforementioned Patrick; the other is Stan (Mark Ruffalo). Complicating matters is that Stan's girlfriend Mary (Kirsten Dunst), another employee at Lacuna, shows up, and Mary and Stan act extremely unprofessionally. So much that the procedure begins to go wrong when one of the wires gets disconnected.

This disconnection causes Joel's memory to go haywire and his subconscious to decide that perhaps he didn't want to undergo the procedure at all. (Joel, being unconscious, can't reveal that he might like to withdraw consent.) So Joel starts trying to compartmentalize his memories with Clementine in places that wouldn't otherwise be identified with Clementine so that Lacuna can't find them.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an intriguing movie that Wikipedia refers to as a "cult classic". I can understand why. For the most part I liked the movie, except that I found myself having some big ethical problems with the whole premise of wanting one's memory erased. Never mind the plot hole that there's way too much outside the patient's purview to erase all the memories. Star Trek: The Next Generation did an interesting episode on the same premise of an alien race erasing the crew's memory of the race, only for them to discover signs that there are all sorts of unexplained gaps.

Still, the story is told very well and the acting is quite good, with Carrey showing he can do drama as well as zany comedy. If you haven't seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind before, it's definitely worth watching.

The Swiss Conspiracy

I've got an acquaintance on one of the non-movie blogs I regularly read who works for a Swiss multinational and jokes that he "will work for raclette" and that he goes off to the fondue mines. So when I came across a new-to-me movie available to stream on Tubi called The Swiss Conspiracy, I knew I had to watch it.

The movi was released in 1976 and was based on the existence in those days, as an opening title card also read in voiceover tells us, that Swiss banks were highly valued for their absolute secrecy, with accounts being numbered and nobody revealing the names behind the numbers. Of course there are humans behind the banking system, so it's theoretically possible to get at the humans in some way. Cut to a shot of a man eating dinner in a restaurant, with a waiter coming in pushing a cart full of food, only to reveal he's got a gun, shooting the patron dead!

We then go to the Hurtil Bank in Zürich, run by the Hurtil family, with the current president being Johann Hurtil (Ray Milland). Somebody comes in wanting to see the president, and carrying a letter. That person has received a blackmail letter, saying that that blackmailer knows the recipient has an account at the Hurtil bank and that if the victim doesn't pay up SFr. 1 million, the account information will be made public. This is an obvious problem for the victim, but it's just as much of a problem for the bank, as they don't want to reveal that they've been compromised.

Hurtil and his vice-president, Benninger (Anton Diffring), feel like they can't really go to the police, at least not with the emphasis of handling things through the traditional legal system, since the result would be a trial which would reveal way too much information about the loss of banking secrecy to the general public. So instead, they bring in a former agent from the US Treasury department, David Christopher (David Janssen).

At the same time Christopher is at the bank, he's introduced to two people of note. One is Denise Abbott (Senta Berger), who is a blackmail victim, having blackmailed men herself as their mistress and then hiding the money with Hurtil. You'll notice I wrote "a" blackmail victim, not "the". In fact, there are five victims. One has already been killed as we saw at the beginning of the movie; Abbott is a second; and Christopher is about to meet a third, Hayes (John Saxon), who is a Chicago mobster and absolutely pissed to see Christopher since he things the bank has gone to the American authorities. There are more victims: Texas oilman McGowan (John Ireland), and Dutch businessman Kosta.

Christopher's job is to find the blackmailer and handle the matter with discretion. Hurtil himself would seem like a place to start, as would Benninger. But beyond that, who? And when some thugs go after first Christopher and then Hayes, you have to wonder whether Swiss bankers would know enough to be able to hire such hitmen. (I must admit I have zero experience with Swiss banking.)

The Swiss Conspiracy feels like the sort of movie that might have been made because the producer had funds that they had to use in Switzerland, and wanted to get some Hollywood names (or former names) who wanted a working vacation in lovely Switzerland. That, and the movie has the feel of a TV Movie of the Week with a bunch of formerly big stars, much the way that The Love Boat did except that the running time is twice that of a traditional TV episode. The Swiss Conspiracy is moderately entertaining, but ultimately forgettable.

Bunbury

I've mentioned a lot how I've got a bunch a movies on my DVR that need watching before they can expire. With that in mind, coming up next is the 1952 adaption of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest. Having finally watched it, I can now do a review on it.

The movie opens up in London, at the apartment of one Ernest Worthing (Michael Redgrave). He's visited by an Algernon Moncrieff (Michael Denison), who claims among other things to have Ernest's cigarette case. This, however, is a ruse, as the cigarette case is one with a dedication from a Cecily that Ernest claims not to know anything about. And it's about to get a whole lot more complicated. Ernest theoretically does know Cecily, except that Ernest isn't Ernest. Ernest is really Jack Worthing, who lives at an estate out in the country where a much younger Cecily is his ward. Ernest is a fake identity, a made-up poor brother used by Jack as a ruse to be able to get away from his country home and go down to London.

And, to be fair, he's not the only faker out there. Algernon has created a fake identity, too, that of Bunbury, a friend who lives out in the country and is an excuse for Algernon to get away from London to go to the country. And once Algernon learns about Cecily, he'd like to go see her and put the moves on her. And Alergnon has a young female relative of marriageable age himself: his cousin Gwendolen (Joan Greenwood), still living with her mother, Jack's aunt Augusta, Lady Bracknell (Edith Evans).

Worthing and Algernon meet the two women, and Algernon comes up with a way to leave Jack and Gwendolen alone. Except that Gwendolen thinks this is Ernest Worthing, not Jack, a deception Algernon is perfectly willing to keep up. So when Aunt Augusta starts questioning Worthing, this being an era when the parents had to approve of marriages, Jack has to make up a pedigree about having been abandond as a child.

And then to make things more complicated, Algernon figures out where the Worthing country house is, and shows up unnanounced. Cecily and her governess, Miss Prism (Margaret Rutherford), immediately presume that this is the Ernest that Jack keeps talking about, something that displeases Jack to no end when he shows up. Algernon-as-Ernest proposes to Cecily. But then in a move that ups the complexity another level, Gwendolen also shows up, claiming that she too is engaged to Ernest, even though we all know there is no Ernest.

The Importance of Being Earnest is a movie that really demands a lot of attention while watching, as it's mostly in the dialog and there's a lot going on. It is, however, very well acted, and sure to be a delight for anyone who's a fan of the works of Oscar Wilde. I have to say that I haven't seen or read that much of Wilde's work, although obviously I think I did a review on the 1940s MGM adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Grey ages ago.

What if a bunch of amateurs tried to make Knute Rockne, All American?

Football season is firmly under way, and a little known movie that TCM ran during 31 Days of Oscar because it received an editing nomination is the biopic Crazylegs. It's getting an airing on TCM tomorrow (November 12) at 6:00 AM, so now is the time for the post on it.

Crazylegs is about early NFL star Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch (playing himself); as the movie opens he's on a football field in civilian clothes and it seems like he's about to retire. The movie was released in 1953 and in real life, Hirsch didn't retire until several years later. We then get some narration by Lloyd Nolan, who plays the part of Hirsch's high school coach, Win Brockmeyer. As you can guess, we're about to get the obligatory flashback to Hirsch's high school career....

Elroy Hirsch grew up in Wausau, WI, and got the nickname "Crazylegs" from his odd style of running, which he claimed came from running two miles to school every day and dodging various things in the sidewalks or on the side of the road. He finished high school in 1941, at a time when the college game was in some ways more corrupt, but in others didn't necessarily offer the money that's in it today. Hirsch's girlfriend and future wife Ruth (Joan Vohs) is accepted to the University of Wisconsin, so Elroy follows her there to play football.

But Elroy seems to care so much about football that he doesn't have time foor poor Joan. As a result, it's an on again, off again relationship although they do eventually get married (and in real life they were married 50-plus years until Elroy's death). World War II comes, but Elroy surprisingly doesn't get shipped off to fight. Instead, he enrolls in a Marine Corps program that allows him to do pilot training in conjunction with college, except that it's based out of the University of Michigan. So he goes there and becomes a several-sport star, eventually serving stateside after graduation.

Now, at this time, the NFL didn't exactly offer a lot of money, and there was a rival league, the All-American Football Conference. Hirsch had been drafted by the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL but decided to play for the Chicago Rockets of the AAFC. Unfortunately, he gets several injuries, ultimately getting hit in the head and a skull fracture that threatens to end his football career. But since he only knows football, he starts training like a maniac to try to get back to the professional game. Since this is a biopic, and the movie makes clear in the opening credits that it has several members of the world champion Rams of 1949 and 1951 playing themselves, we know that Hirsch is going to wind up on the Rams and then eventually be an integral part of their championship team.

The are a bunch of problems with Crazylegs. One is that Hirsch's story isn't as cinematic as you might think. There's just not enough conflict to sustain a truly interesting picture. (Contrast this with, say, I, Tonya, which is loaded with conflict.) The movie was made on a fairly low budget, and that shows. A lot of real footage from Hirsch's games is used (this is probably what got the editing nomination), but it's in old newsreel format while the staged action is all blocked for a 1.66:1 aspect ratio. Having to edit the newsreels for that really makes them look poor-quality.

Elroy Hirsch also wan't much of an actor, although at least he's only playing himself. He comes across as an appealing personality, and you can see why people would like him and why someone might want to do a biopic of him. Lloyd Nolan is professional as always, and elevates anything he's in, no matter how dire everything around him is.

So Crazylegs is a bit of a curiosity, and one that football fans might enjoy.

Caught Plastered

I had a couple of Wheeler and Woolsey movies on my DVR that haven't expired yet, and thought that I'd already done a post on Caught Plastered, having watched it already a few months back. But for some reason a search of the blog says I never wrote that post. So I watched it again to do a quick refresher and be able to do a full-length post on it here.

Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey once again play a pair of friends, Tommy Tanner and Egbert Higginbotham respectively. Also once again, they have to live by their wits, getting off a train in a small Midwestern city called Lockville as the movie opens -- except that it's a freight train they've been riding as hobos since they have no money. They make their way to a drugstore, where they meet the proprietress, "Mother" Talley (Lucy Beaumont). She's thinking of selling the place to get the money to go to a retirement home and because she can't afford to buy any more drugs being sold to the store by pharmaceutical rep Harry Watters (Jason Robards Sr.).

Meanwhile, at City Hall the polic chief, Morton, is getting raked over the coals. Lockville bills itself as the driest town in American, this being Prohibition. But the bootleggers have been able to keep bringing booze to town, threatening the town's reputation. Eventually, we learn that Harry is in cahoots with the bootleggers. Or, at least, the drug company he's a part of is using the alcohol syrup base in their patent medicines as a front for producing booze for regular drinking. Just can't adulterate the medicines too much or people might notice.

Tommy and Egbert decide they're goin to help "Mother" out by helping her turn the drugstore into a going commercial venture. To that end, they use their vaudeville skills to start an afternoon radio show on the local station that's designed to promote the drugstore. This attracts Peggy (Dorothy Lee), daughter of the police chief, and she winds up falling in love with Tommy because Bert Wheeler and Dorothy Lee were often romantically paired in the Wheeler and Woolsey movies.

Harry feels like he's getting tricked out of what he thinks he deserves as the right to take over the store to use it as a front for a speakeasy. So he decides to get Tommy and Egbert into legal trouble. He comes up with a new lemon syrup-based product, except that it's got so much of the "medicinal" alcohol in it that the fountain drinks based on this syrup aren't legal. Once Tommy and Egbert are arrested, Harry can get Mother to sign over the store to him.

Caught Plastered is one of Wheeler and Woolsey's earlier efforts, and frankly is a bit weak in the script department. There's also no real spectacle the way there was in the big numbers of some of the pair's other early movies like Rio Rita. There is the same rapid-fire vaudeville banter between the two, combined with what would be con artistry if the pair were supposed to be a bad guys. If you like Wheeler and Woolsey, you'll probably like Caught Plastered. But if you were trying to introduce people who have never heard of the pair to them, I'd start with a different movie.

Synecdoche, New York

I mentioned at the beginning of October how TCM is running their Two For One programming feature they first ran in the spring, and how I recorded several of the movies. Now that the series is being rerun I can do posts on all those movies. We are now up to Synecdoche, New York, airing tonight (Nov. 9) at 10:30 PM.

Philip Seymour Hoffman Caden Cotard, and as the movie opens it's the first day of autumn, although time changes very quickly as the movie goes on. I could swear I saw a newspaper dated 2005 in the opening scenes, although based on the age of Caden's daughter in that opening scene and her age later, it would have to be a good 10 years earlier. But part of the conceit of the movie is that it always makes it uncertain what time it really is. (Caden also addresses a package to Berlin with a pre-unification German postcode later in the movie, for example.)

Anyhow, in the opening, Caden is a drama professor at Union College in Schenectady, NY, living with his first wife Adele and their four-year-old daughter Olivia. A pipe in the bathroom goes haywire, hitting Caden in the forehead and sending him to the emergency room, where they eventually suggest he seen a neurologist, who won't tell him what's really wrong with him and whether he's got a terminal condition. But he's determined not to let this stop him from producing Death of a Salesman.

At some point along the way, Adele divorces Caden and takes Olivia to Berlin. Adele becomes a successful visual artist there, while Olivia falls under the spell of a woman who has her get a bunch of tattoos and become a performance artist. If none of this makes any sense, well, as I said, the film plays with time and has a decidedly non-linear story. Caden, meanwhile, starts seeing Hazel, who works at the box office and buys a house that's constantly on fire. (See what I said above about none of this making sense.

Caden's production of Death of a Salesman gets noticed by some people in high spaces, as Caden eventually receives a letter from the MacArthur Foundation informing him that he's been named one of their "fellows" for the next year, receiving what is commonly known as a "genius grant" to be paid out in 20 quarterly installments. There are no strings on a MacArthur fellowship. With this in mind, Caden sets out to write the great American play.

And the play is going to be big in scope, as Caden goes down to New York City and rents a dilapidated warehouse to stage a free-form play about real life. But is this really a play? Events in the attempt to complete writing of the play, which never seems to have an audience and never seems to get done, increasingly get mixed up with the things going on in Caden's real life, such as trying to find Olive after all these years. One begins to wonder whether Caden is going crazy, and whether any of the events in the movie are or were real, or all just figments of Caden's imagination.

In the TCM introduction, Ben Mankiewicz and his guest Patty Jenkins talk about how Synecdoche, New York really divided critics and will divide viewers too. Some think it's great, while others think it's a bunch of stuff that doesn't make any sense put together, even if that's part of the point. I have to say I tend toward the latter view. The plot, if there even is any, didn't work for me, and if the movie is just supposed to be the presentation of insanity, well, I just didn't get it. As I sat down to write the review, I found myself thinking of Fight Club, another movie where a lot may just be figments of the main character's imagination, but a movie done in a way where it mostly works. Synecdoche, New York isn't like that at all, instead going for pretention claiming to be brilliance. Sorry, but it's not brilliant.

Guys and Dolls

The next movie coming up on TCM that I DVRed the last time TCM ran it is Guys and Dolls, at 8:00 PM tonight, Nov. 8. IT's airing as part of a night of movies based on Damon Runyan stories.

Guys and Dolls was based on a Broadway musical, and the opening gives that away immediately. There's a long, extremely choreographed scene showing a fictionalized view of Times Square someplace both a bit exciting, but also possibly a bit dangerous because of the crime. Whether the choreography is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of personal preference, I suppose. The choregraphy is of an extremely high technical standard, but that also makes the whole scene totally artificial, which has always been one of the issues I've had with musicals.

Eventually, the scene stops on two guys: Nicely Nicely (Stubby Kaye) and Benny (Johnny Silver) who are underlings of Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra). Nathan has a reputation as a facilitator of gambling, and has been running one of the biggest floating craps games in the city. However, he's recently lost his preferred location, in part thanks to a crackdown by Lt. Brannigan (Robert Keith). That, and he's got a very long-suffering girlfriend in Adelaide (Vivian Blaine), who is the headliner at the Hot Box. She's been pushing Nathan to marry her for years, to the point that she's written totally fake letters to her mom saying that they're already married and have several children. (Wouldn't Mom have come down from Providence at least once in 14 years?)

Also in the original Times Square choreography sequence was a group of Salvation Army-like missionaries, running a mission for the downtrodden which seems like it would be impossible to do in midtown Manhattan if only because of how high the rents would be. The face of the missionaries, because they need a pretty face to try to bring the bums in, is Sarah Brown, with the technical head of the branch being her uncle Arvide (Regis Toomey). However, they're not having much success, and the head of the organization is threatening to shut the branch down.

These two strands come together thanks to the return to New York City of another professional gambler, Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando). Nathan needs $1000 to be able to rent the location where he wants to host the craps game, and thinks he can come up with a sucker bet to get the money from Sky. However, his first idea fails because Sky is no dummy. So Nathan comes up with a better idea. He wagers that Sky can't get a woman to go to Havana with him, where Sky is planning to inspect his operations down there. Nathan gets to pick the target, and picks... Sarah Brown.

Sky is a smooth operator, and even claims to know the Bible thanks to having read all those Gideon bibles in hotel rooms being a well-traveled person. But certainly getting a missionary to abandon her mission to go on a date in Havana? Then again, Sky is no dummy either, and quickly finds leverage, offering to bring a bunch of sinners to the mission's next revival meeting in exchange for Sarah's accompanying him to Havana. Of course, Sky begins to find himself falling in love with Sarah....

I think how much you like Guys and Dolls is going to depend upon how much you like musicals, and how much you like Damon Runyan. I already implied above that I had a bit of a problem with the choreography of the opening scene, and the big craps game at the climax has the same sort of choreography. I also had a problem with the dialog, in that most of the gamblers talked in a very artificial way. It also goes without saying that Marlon Brando was not a professional singer by any means. All of this is a bit of a shame, since at the heart of the movie is a story that's not a bad one. Guys and Dolls really ought to be better than I found it.

TCM November 2024 spotlight: Powell and Pressburger

Kim Hunter and David Niven in A Matter of Life and Death (Nov. 30, 8:00 PM)

Most months, in addition to TCM having a Star of the Month, they also have some other programming block where they have one night a week every week fitting a theme. This time out, that's a salute to British director Michael Powell, and his screenwriting partnership with Emeric Pressburger that resulted in a series of fine films from just before Britain entered World War II through to the early 1950s. For the first three Thursdays this month, TCM will run Powell movies. (November 28 is Thanksgiving, so TCM has a different tribute instead of Powell and Pressburger.)

In addition to the movies, there's a new documentary on Powell and Pressburger, featuring director Martin Scorsese. That airs tonight (Nov. 7) at 8:00 PM and again on Nov. 14 at 10:00 PM. Tonight's features include The Red Shoes at 10:30. One of the previous times it aired I only got to watch about half of it. It's a gorgeous movie set against the world of ballet, although since ballet isn't my thing I found the presentation of the subject material a bit of a slog. There's also 49th Parallel overnight tonight, or early Nov. 8, at 2:30 AM.

November 14 brings One of our Aircraft is Missing at 8:00 PM. I see that I did do a post on it back in 2022. I've got it on DVD somewhere, although my DVD had some playback problems, so I may record it even though I don't think it's one of Powell and Pressburger's best. For that I think I'd pick A Canterbury Tale at 3:30 AM Nov. 15. Finally, November 21 includes the fine comedy I Know Where I'm Going! at 8:00 PM and the new-to-me Tales of Hoffman at 1:30 AM November 22.

I was going to say that I was disappointed that not included in the tribute is A Matter of Life and Death, but a second look shows that's it is airing on TCM in November, just not part of the Thursday night lineups. Instead, you can find a third showing of the Scorsese documentary at 5:45 PM on November 30 followed by A Matter of Life and Death at 8:00 PM.

The Heavenly Body

I've got another bunch of movies that are on my DVR coming up in fairly rapid succession on TCM. Thankfully, this time the first one gets an early morning airing while the other two are in prime time, so I don't have to start blogging about them too far in advance. The first one is part of a day of the films of Hedy Lamarr: The Heavenly Body, at 8:00 AM tomorrow (Nov. 8).

You could say that the title is a play on words, as Hedy Lamarr herself was one of the beauties of Hollywood. But the title also refers to an actual body up in the firmament. William Powell is the male lead here, playing William Whitley, an astronomer whose work, as makes sense, keeps him up at night since you can't really go to an observatory and make astronomical observations while the sun is shining. So he gets home from work and has his dinner just as everybody else is getting up and having their breakfast.

This everybody else includes William's long-suffering wife Vicki (that's Hedy Lamarr, as if you couldn't tell). She really wants her husband to take a vacation from work (never mind that there's a war going on; the movie was released in early 1944 and the war will become a plot point). He can't however, because he's got something big coming up. He's discovered a new comet, and if he's done the calculations correctly the comet is going to smash into the Moon -- as the Moon has no atmosphere even smaller meteors aren't going to burn up the way they might when they're approaching Earth. That impact is coming up soon, and William has to go to the observatory to do a presentation on it at the exact moment the comet is going to hit. (In reality, I don't think we had powerful enough telescopes at the time to see such an impact, but I could certainly be wrong on that.)

Worse for William is that his wife gets his astronomy mixed up with astrology. Astronomy is, of course, real science, while astrology is anything but. And if it got out that an astronomer was married to a woman who actually believed that nonsense, well, imagine the embarrassment for poor William. But this was the 1940s, when women were still mostly housewives and passed their days gossiping over the back fence, or at least that's what Hollywood would have us believe. And Vicki's neighbor, the widow Potter (Spring Byington), believes in astrology. She takes Vicki to her personal astrologer, Miss Sibyll (Fay Bainter), who gives Vicki the horoscope that she's going to meet a romantic stranger.

And wouldn't you know it, but a strange man stops by the Whitley place the next night while William is at work. That man is Lloyd Hunter (James Craig), who is the local air-raid warden. He looks fit, but he was a war correspondent who covered stories in all sorts of exotic places before getting injured and being reduced to supporting the war effort on the home front. Unsurprisingly, Vicki thinks this is the exotic stranger she was destined to meet, while William is understandably jealous.

Of course, the Production Code rather dictates the outcome of a movie like The Heavenly Body, and that's part of the problem with the movie. With a film like Grandma's Boy that I blogged about yesterday, you also know who's going to wind up with the girl at the end. But in that case, there's a clearly designed bad guy to root against. Lloyd isn't really a bad guy, and there's no good reason for Vicki to have a true dilemma. It also doesn't help that the humor tries too hard to be zany, and really shows that.

The Heavenly Body isn't exactly a bad movie, but it's another one where it definitely wouldn't be the sort of movie I'd show to non-movie buffs to try to get them intrested in any of the film's stars.

Grandma's Boy

I mentioned a month or so an early Harold Lloyd feature that I had on my DVR when TCM aired two one-hour features in a Silent Sunday Night's Block. After blogging about For Heaven's Sake, the other movie in that block was Grandma's Boy.

Harold Lloyd once again plays The Boy, although there's an establishing sequence before we see Lloyd. The Boy lives in a small town called Blossom Bend, one of those towns that John Nesbitt would have talked about in his Passing Parade shorts, as it really is the sort of place that's been passed over. The Boy would be a mama's boy, except that he lives with Grandma (an actress named Anna Townsend whom I hadn't heard of before). And he's been that sort of boy his whole life, incredibly timid and finding everybody walking over him. (The shot of a one-year-old Boy already wearing the Harold Lloyd glasses is a fun little sight gag.)

Cut to the present day, when The Boy is 19 years old (Lloyd, who plays him, was 28 at the time) and all grown up, at least physically. Emotionally, he's just as much a coward as he always was. But he's interested in The Girl (Mildred Davis, who would marry Lloyd the following year and remain married for 45 years until her death). Mildred isn't uninterested in him, but he's not the only Boy in town. Also interested in The Girl is The Rival (Charles Stevenson, who was 35 at the time and looks it). The Rival is a bully, and treats The Boy like dirt, largely because he knows he can get away with it.

The night of the big dance comes up, and the Boy, having had his one suit destroyed by The Bully, is given Grandpa's old suit, which is in mothballs since it dates back to the Civil War (remember, that would only have been 60 years prior to the movie, and had Grandpa been alive he probably would have been in his early-to-mid 80s). Grandma's trying to help her grandson because she knows he's going to have to strike out on his own someday and the world is going to be way too cruel to a coward such as the Boy currently is.

That night, the police discover that a tramp who has been through the town several times before and been a problem for the police every other time is back in town and causing all sorts of criminal mayhem. The police deputize all the adult men in town, except for The Boy, having run out of badges. Grandma realizes he needs serious help. But how? She decides to tell her grandson about Grandpa's (Lloyd again, this time with ridiculous sideburns) exploits in the Civil War, aided by a special magic charm that she then gives to The Boy.

You can probably guess where the movie is going to go from here, but then a movie like Grandma's Boy isn't so much about suspense as to what the destination is going to be as much as it is about how they get to that destination. Harold Lloyd, despite being relatively early in his career and not having worked much with features, still does so expertly, providing a good mix of both sight gags and suspense.

There's a reason I like Harold Lloyd a whole lot more than Chaplin, and films like Grandma's Boy are part of that reason.

TCM Star of the Month November 2024: Ruth Roman

Unfortunately, as of this writing, The Baby is not part of the Roman tribute

We're into a new month, which as always means new programming features on TCM, including a new Star of the Month. This month, that star is Ruth Roman, and her movies will be airing every Tuesday in prime time. I currently have one of her films on my DVR, and that one is airing overnight tonight at 1:15 AM (so still Tuesday in the Pacific time zone): Invitation.

Roman is not the star here; that honor goes to Dorothy McGuire. McGuire plays Ellen Pierce, recently married to architect Dan Pierce (Van Johnson) and having a father Simon (Louis Calhern) who spoils her rotten; as the movie opens he's just bought her another fur coat. However, Dad has a reason for spoiling his daughter. She's sickly, subject to bouts of shortness of breath. In fact, that goes back to a case of rheumatic fever Ellen had as a kid. Normally, resting for a few minutes helps, but in her last episode, Ellen actually passes out!

Ellen get picked up by Dad's chauffeur to go to his palatial estate on Long Island wher eshe also meets with family doctor Pritchard (Ray Collins). They insist that she's going to get better, and in fact, they've just heard about a possible new treatment for her condition. On the way home, she stops off to see another doctor who is a friend of the family, Dr. Redwick. This visit is a bit tougher thanks to Redwick's daughter Maud (Ruth Roman). Maud was Dan's girlfriend, or at least she thought she was. She loved Dan and he only considered her a friend. Maud expected Dan to marry her until Dan decided to marry Ellen in what was seen as a big surprise to everybody, as we learn in a flashback. Maud hasn't forgiven Ellen, and tells Ellen that she's only got a year with Dan, after which Maud is going to win him back forever.

Of course, Maud has reason for making this comment. We eventually learn, again in part through flashbacks, that Ellen's childhood rheumatic fever has left her with a damaged mitral valve. Nowadays, it's the sort of thing that could be cured with routine surgery, but in those days such a surgery would have been considered a dangerous experiment. Indeed, such a surgery is the "possible new treatment" everyone else is discussing, but so far it hasn't had anything close to a 100% success rate. As things stand right now, but nobody has been telling Ellen, her mitral valve is deteriorating and will probably kill her in a year or so, hence Maud's nasty comment.

As for Dan, business hadn't been going well for him, until Ellen's father contacted him. Dan always liked Ellen as a friend although as with Maud he didn't honestly love her. When Ellen's father learns that Dan doesn't have any love interest, he suggests that perhaps Dan could marry Ellen and make her last year of life happy. In exchange, Dad would use his extensive contacts to get good jobs for Dan. Of course, all of this is to be kept a secret from Ellen. And, of course, as in Dark Victory, the doomed patient is going to find this out. At least in the case of Invitation, however, there's the possibility of that new treatment.

Invitation was made at MGM, and to be honest, it comes across as one of those MGM movies where they still had all the gloss in the world but couldn't use it to make a mess of a plot come out any better. Ruth Roman's character is way too mental; Ellen similarly goes off the deep end when she discovers the deception; and Calhern doesn't come across as particularly fatherly here. It's once again a script problem and not the fault of the actors.