I Married an Angel

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

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

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

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

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

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

For some values of "nice"

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

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

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

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

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

Maid for a Day

I've mentioned a couple of times now that I've been recording some of the shorts the TCM Saturday matinee block for when I want to blog about something on a day where I have another post that's not going to be a traditional review going up. We've got that again today, and this time the short in question is a Vitaphone two-reeler, Maid for a Day.

Peter Lind Hayes, credited here as just Lind Hayes, plays Freddie Hayden, a college student who wants to become a radio star, this being the mid-1930s. Needless to say, he gets teased by his roommates, although he tells them about the big hit his mother Grace (played by Peter's real-life mother Grace Hayes) had on stage with a song called "My Man Is on the River", performed on a stage with a curtain that depicts black people eating watermelons which of course everybody reviewing the movie today has to mention.

Grace is now working as a maid out on Long Island, where she serves a pair of society matrons. One of course, is her boss, while the other one is the boss' friend, who is running a bizarre little charity scheme, if you want to call it a charity. It's designed to set up a special beach just for the servants, although the real point of it is so that the rich people can have their own private beach without the servants seeing them. In any case, Freddie has gotten a job performing at that benefit radio show, which has elaborate musical numbers because of the live audience that's paying to show up.

It's only revealed later that Grace took on the job of a maid under an assumed identity to learn about maids for a performance she's going to give at some point in the future. She's saved her money from performing, and is somehow able to snag a ticket to the benefit. She has one of the ushers give a message to the producer telling him who she really is, which gets her backstage and ultimately performin in the finale, which just happens to be the song her son is doing.

I'd really only noticed Peter Lind Hayes in the movies he did when he was rather older, notably The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T and the terrible Once You Kiss a Stranger, so seeing him here so young is interesting. Grace Hayes isn't the best, but she's not exactly bad either. The songs are all rather odd choices for a short like this, notably one called "Two Cigarettes in the Dark". WIth all that, I can understand why Maid for a Day is even less remembered than other Vitaphone two-reelers.

TCM Star of the Month December 2025: Merle Oberon

Merle Oberon as Cathy in Wuthering Heights (Dec. 16, 8:00 PM)

Once again, we're into a new month, which as always means it's time for a new Star of the Month. For December, that Star of the Month is Merle Oberon, who was last TCM's Star of the Month back in early 2015. Oberon's movies will be airing on four of the five Tuesday evenings in December. There's going to be a break on December 23, since this being December, TCM has its annual marathon of Christmas movies that I'll be mentioning again when we actually get to the marathon.

TCM is only airing 17 of Oberon's movies, as far as I can tell. There are a couple of movies in the tribute that I'm not certain whether I've seen yet, so I'll be recording them. There's also at least one that's on my DVR that's airing, so I've already watched it and schedule the post for when it actually airs in a few weeks time. There also seem to be a few omissions of movies that I've blogged about before, which makes me wonder a bit about TCM's finances and what they're able to get the rights to. The Cowboy and the Lady was released by United Artists, although IMDb says that it got a DVD release from Warner Home Video back in 2016; I don't know whether that would be the Warner Archive or not. Also not showing up this month is A Song to Remember, which was released by Columbia. I'm not surprised the Fox stuff didn't show up; I'm not certain whether TCM would have to negotiate with Disney to be able to show that stuff nowadays since I don't recall how much of the back library Disney got when they bought part of Fox.

Glory Alley

I've stated two different general thoughts on MGM over the years. One is that, as probably the most prestigious Hollywood studio, they brought a lot of gloss to movies that would have benefitied from having no gloss. The other is that, once the Freed Unit musicals really got going, it was the other stuff made that's really a lot more interesting. Both of those thought came to mind as I was watching Glory Alley.

The movie is ostensibly set in New Orleans, although it's the MGM backlot's version of New Orleans, which has all the connotations you can think of. Working for one of the newspapers, although about to retire, is columnist Gabe Jordan (John McIntire), who tells his editor that he's never told the full story of boxer Socks Barbararossa (Ralph Meeker). So, as you can guess, we're about to get a flashback that tells us... the rest of the story. Wait, this isn't Paul Harvey, either the radio man or the character actor.

Some time in the past, before the Korean War (the movie was released in June 1952), Socks is about to fight a title bout. But as he's in the ring, he looks up at the very bright ring lights, and realizes... he can't go ahead with the fight! So he just gets out of the ring right then and there and goes to his dressing room in the basement to hide from everyone. Not quite everyone; there's his manager Peppi (Gilbert Roland), trainer of sorts Shadow (Louis Armstrong), girlfriend Angela (Leslie Caron), and Angela's blind father The Judge (Kurt Kasznar). Now, since Leslie Caron had a French accent, she and her dad are portrayed as having fled France when the Nazis occupied it, with Dad hoping to get the family assets back and Angela training to become a nurse to get the money for Dad to have an operation. Except that that last bit is only what Dad thinks; Angela in fact dances in one of the dive nightclubs which brings in rather more money. Anyhow, why did Socks just up and leave the ring? The full reason isn't explained until the end of the movie, but Socks looks at himself in the mirror and sees some of the toll boxing has already taken from him.

Peppi buys a bar of his own while Socks lets himself go, drinking heavily to the point that he's going to have to accept a pity job at Peppi's place. Peppi holds the contract of one other fighter, "Newsboy", which he gives to Socks. Socks intends to raffle off the contract to get some money and to get out of the boxing game for good, but he and Newsboy both get drafted to serve over in Korea. Then, in a truly nutty twist, Socks is able to show some real bravery and win the Congressional Medal of Honor, except that's an award he doesn't really want although he can't really sell it legally to make money.

Socks returns from Korea, and eventually tells Angela the real reason why he left the ring just as he was about to fight for the title, and... everyone lives happily ever after? Yes, basically that's what happens, and the "official" reason Socks gives for running away from that previous title fight is one that makes no sense.

In fact, the movie as a whole doesn't make much sense, seeing as how it veers wildly from one genre to the next. The characterizations are also all wrong. Ralph Meeker is asked to play something much too gentlemanly for a boxer who came up from poverty. Leslie Caron was most likely cast here because it was just after An American in Paris made her big. With her French accent, the studio had to make her character French, necessitating that back story. The melodrama with Dad's operation is an odd thing to shoehorn in here. Even worse is how the movie suddenly switches to the Korean War, looking like a cheap B movie at the same time it's doing this.

So Glory Alley goes wrong in so many ways, and yet that's something that actually makes the movie interesting, to watch how it goes so badly wrong. Not good, mind you, but interesting nevertheless.

A Dangerous Profession

George Raft was TCM's Star of the Month in January 2025, and as always that gave me the chance to record a couple of his movies that I hadn't blogged about before, including the noirish movie A Dangerous Profession. Eventually I got around to watching it and writing up this post to schedule some time in advance.

The movie opens up with a monologue narrated by Los Angeles police detective Nick Farrone (Jim Backus) discussing the bail bond industry and how it's quite the money spinner, with firms such as that of Joe Farley (Pat O'Brien) and Vince Kane (George Raft). Kane, for his part, is a former police detective himself before leaving the force to join the bail bond industry and living the sort of life that the police probably wouldn't approve of. Indeed, it's at a craps game that Kane is contacted by Ferrone.

Ferrone is taken to the home of Claude Brackett (Bill Williams), a stockbrocker who has just been arrested in a case involving stolen bonds and that's going to involve a fairly substantial bail of the sort that a bail bond company lke Farley-Kane may be able to help with. However, when Kane gets there, he realizes that Claude's wife Lucy (Ella Raines) is in fact his own former girlfriend. Complicating matters is the fact that Claude and Lucy were separated from each other up until Claude got arrested for the robbery.

Bail is high, and Lucy can't raise all the money for it, until a mysterious lawyer named Dawson comes up with a bunch of the money even though Claude and Lucy claim to know nothing about this lawyer. Worse is that Kane dips into a greater portion of the company's funds to pay off the rest of the bail than the company normally does, with everybody thinking that Kane is doing it for personal reasons, which would be to try to win Lucy back for himself. Lucy, for her part, is claiming that she only married Claude for his money and that she still really loves Kane. Just how honest is she being?

Farley is more concerned, and rightly so, when word gets out that Brackett has jumped bail, and then it's found out that Brackett has been murdered! Kane is trying to figure out who this mysterious Dawson is and who hired him. He's also trying to solve a murder and figure out why he's being followed. All of this is happening while he's got both the police trying to solve the murder, and a business partner who is none too happy with everything that's going on considering how much of the company's money is involved.

A Dangerous Profession is decidedly B noir, but it's entertaining enough. Everybody puts in a professional job, although the story itself feels like a bit of an overcomplicated mess at times. Even though this one was released by RKO and is therefore part of the old "Turner Library" that has always made up a substantial portion of the TCM schedule, I think it's not without reason that A Dangerous Profession isn't so well known.

The Fool Killer

Back in the spring, TCM ran its second season of Two for One, in which people from the movie industry select a double feature of films they feel are significant to them in some way or another. Both seasons got a rerun in the fall. One of those people was director Joe Dante, whose night is getting a rerun tonight. His first film at 8:00 PM is Night of the Hunter, with the second being a new-to-me film influenced by Night of the Hunter: The Fool Killer, at 10:00 PM.

Edward Albert (Jr.) stars as George Mellish. As the movie opens, were in rural east Tennessee some time not too awfully long after the end of the US Civil War. George lost both of his parents in a way that's not fully made clear and isn't exactly relevant to the plot anyway. Suffice it to say that George is living with foster parents, who treat him badly any time he does anything wrong. Eventually, George has enough of the abuse, so he grabs a go bag and stows away aboard the next train that comes, going west to parts unknown.

Unfortunately, when the train stops to take on water, George hops off, losing his bag when he can't get back on in time. Oops. So George becomes a sort of hobo, until he meets and old guy Jim Jelliman (Henry Hull), nicknamed Dirty Jim because he doesn't keep his house clean. Indeed, Jim calls young George a fool for trying to clean up the place, and then tells George what today we'd call an urban legend, about the so-called "Fool Killer" who stalks the countryside and chops people to death. It's almost enough to get George to run away again.

George continues to go west, with vague thoughts about wanting to become a gold prospector out west and even see the ocean. He meets another drifter, a man who for the longest time won't speak and doesn't seem to want to hear George say anything either. This man eventually reveals that his name is Milo Bogardus (Anthony Perkins). Except that he's not really Milo Bogardus, although we'll call him that because that's the only name the man has now. Apparently Milo fought in the Civil War and suffered some sort of injury that left him with PTSD and amnesia, such that when he was in the hospital recovering nobody knew his name. There was another dying soldier named Milo Bogardus, so they gave our Milo this name once the original Milo died. George seems to look up to Milo, although Milo might not be quite the role model one would like. Milo has no time for the traditional southern Protestantism of the era, so when they happen along a "camp meeting" revival show which George would like to attend, Milo is horrified.

This leads to George and Milo's parting and George's being taken in by a much nicer set of foster parents, the Dodds. But Milo eventually shows up again and is one again disgusted by the change he sees in George, leading to the film's climax.

Joe Dante suggested that The Fool Killer is some sort of tremendously good movie that never got a proper release back in the day which is why it's largely forgotten. (Indeed, the majority of the limited number of IMDb reviews date from the days immediately after the previous TCM showing.) While I'm glad Dante selected this film and gave everybody a chance to see it, I'm sorry to say it's not nearly as good as Dante makes it out to be. It's not bad, but to me it came across as the sort of movie that's trying really hard to be daring when in fact it really isn't. Perkins is given a very unappealing character to play, and I found the revival scene to be particularly badly handled. Still, as I said, I'm glad I got to see this, and will say that anybody else interested should watch and make their own conclusions.

His sister-in-law

Barbara Stanywck was TCM's Star of the Month back in March 2025, which gave me the chance to record a couple of her movies that I hadn't done posts on before. Among those was the melodramatic programmer His Brother's Wife.

Robert Taylor plays the he who has a brother and eventually a sister-in-law. The "he" in question is Chris Claybourne, the latest in a family line of medical researchers who, despite having been trained to do medical research, would rather be a playboy. To be fair to him, the research in question is the tick-borne disease spotted fever, which is affecting mining camps in the jungles of South America; since a lot of the basic research has to be done down there away from civilization, it's understandable why Chris might not want to go down there. This disappoints his dad (Samuel S. Hinds) and older brother Tom (John Eldredge), also medical researchers. Tom has an unseen fiancée Mary.

Chris makes an agreement with his family, which is that before he goes off to South America at the beginning of June to work with Prof. Fahrenheim (Jean Hersholt), he gets to spend the month of May doing what he wants. So he goes to the Crescent Club, a gambling establishment run by a guy called "Fish Eye" (Joseph Calleia). Working at the club as a tout who brings in rich guys to be fleeced by the club in exchange for a commission on how much they're fleeced is Rita Wilson (Barbara Stanwyck, who would go on to marry Robert Taylor after making this movie). Not that Chris knows Rita is workin for Fish Eye, or that she has debts of her own to him that she's basically working off. In any case the two of them fall in love, with Chris deciding to elope with Rita instead of going to South America.

Except that Chris runs up $5,000 in gambling debts that he can't pay off, passing off a bad check since it's generally believed he's going to go down to South America away from American law. Fish Eye is no dummy and calls Chris on his bluff. Dad can't mortgage the clinic again to pay off his son's debt, so Tom makes Chris agree that he (Tom) will pay off the debt in exchange for Chris' going off to South America for that two-year research hitch. If Rita really loves Chris, she'll wait the two years before Chris returns and only marry him then.

Rita is no dummy and understands that Tom is trying to get rid of her because she's déclassé and the Claybournes are high-class. So she goes into debt herself to pay off Chris' debt, not telling either Chris or Tom, and letting Chris go off to South America. She then starts working her wiles on Tom, getting him to dump that unseen fiancée and marrying Rita, who really doesn't love him and is certainly never going to grant him a divorce.

If that's not insane enough, Chris returns from South American before the two years are up and finds out about the marriage. He knows Rita is still at the Crescent Club, and discovers that she still loves him, although now it's Tom who won't grant a divorce. So he takes her to South America on the theory that this will make Tom finally grant that divorce. Meanwhile, the research into the spotted fever isn't going well, to the point that the South American authorities will charge Chris or Fahrenheim with manslaughter if they try out a serum on another local and that local doesn't survive. You can guess where this is leading....

His Brother's Wife is the sort of movie that audiences of the 1930s might have liked, but 90 years on seems dated and with a plot that veers in a direction that feels like a hilarious misfire. Stanwyck does the best she can with the material, as do the rest of the cast. This is one of those movies where the studio (MGM) has the ability to cast a fine stable of stars, even if the material more or less sinks the movie.

The sky of size

Another movie that I had sitting on my DVR until it very nearly expired was The Big Sky. So I made the point of watching it before it did in fact expire so that I could get this post on it written and scheduled for some future time.

The movie opens in Kentucky in the early 1830s, although the movie isn't going to stay there for long. Kirk Douglas stars as Jim Deakins who is transporting a body to Louisville. In the woods along the cart path he hears a bird, and when he goes to investigate he finds it's not a bird but a man good at bird calls, Boone Caudill (Dewey Martin), who for whatever reason first gives the name of his uncle, Zeb Calloway. Boone and Jim get into a fight at first, but become fast friends by the time they get to Louisville.

Boone's intended destination is St. Louis, where he plans to look for Uncle Zeb. Zeb (Arthur Hunnicutt) is a trapper who returns to St. Louis with his wares once a year since that's basically the end of civilization in 1830. Trapping in the upper Missouri River valley and the Rockies is difficult not just because of the mountainous terrain and bad climate, and not just because of the violent Indian tribes who for obvious reasons don't like having the white man impeding on their territory. No; there's also the fur company which lays claim to the fruits of the land, having set up several forts along the Missouri to trade with the Indians. They don't like having anyone else trying to trap or hunt in their perceived territory without them getting a cut, and that is apparently just what Zeb's been doing. Zeb's in jail for stealing whiskey from the fur company, and when Jim and Boone get sent to jail on a drunk and disorderly, they get put in the same holding cell as Zeb.

Zeb's plan is to go west again, up the Missouri on a boat captained by a holdover from the days this area was part of the French Louisiana teritory, Frenchy Jourdonnais (Steven Geray). They can always use extra crew, so Boone and Jim are allowed to hire on. The boat is also taking a Blackfoot woman up the river, Teal Eye (Elizabeth Threatt). She had been kidnapped by the rival Crow tribe but escaped some years back. Zeb, having found her and speaking a Blackfoot language better than anybody else in the crew, knows that returning her to her people is going to go a long way toward getting trading rights for them and not for the Missouri Fur Company.

But the Missouri Fur Company isn't going to go without a fight. They have their forts along the river, and send a man named Streak (Jim Davis) to try to sabotage Frenchy's boat. It leads to a series of adventures as the boat goes up the river and the men have to fight both the Crow and Streak's men along the way. Teal Eye and another Blackfoot named Poordevil know the lay of the land and are able to help. Things get more complicated, however, as Jim and Boone both fall in love with Teal Eye. Will they ever make it Blackfoot territory? Will they be able to make it home?

The story in The Big Sky is one of those rousing adventure yarns that boys of a certain age will probably like. I don't know how much historical accuracy there is in this movie however. Meanwhile, the print TCM ran wasn't very good. In fact, it felt like it came from two different prints, with some sections not being so bad while others looked like they were from a bad 16mm TV print. That might have something to do with the fact that the movie was edited down for original release from 140 minutes to 122. The TCM print was back up to 140 minutes. I don't know if the movie would have been better edited down to 122, but I think it certainly would have been better if it had been written to run only two hours if that. It's also a movie that screams for a Technicolor treatment instead of the black and white we have here.

So The Big Sky isn't exactly bad, but it could have been a lot better.

Thanksgiving 2025 briefs

For those of us in the US, today is Thanksgiving, which among other things means programming changes on a lot of regular channels before the Christmas season kicks off. (I'll probably start thinking of Christmas on Sunday, which I think is the first Sunday of Advent for those of us born Catholic.) TCM tends to have more family-friendly programming on the day, and is doing that again this year. Apparently, Carol Burnett is back for two nights to present a bunch of movies most of which she parodied on The Carol Burnett Show back in the 1960s and 1970s. I'm too young for the original Carol Burnett Show, although I was a very young kid when the comedy skits were cut up and put into a syndicated Carol Burnett and Friends package, so I remember some skits from there. Sorry.

Speaking of the TCM website, it's gotten another downgrade in the past week or so, as the TCM Database is no longer there. I liked to use it when I was writing up a post on a movie that I had watched off my DVR but not gotten around to doing the blog post on yet, as the TCM database tended to have the best synopsis for jogging my memory as I was rewatching the movie on the little video player in the corner of my computer screen. I also wonder whether it's eventually going to have a negative effect on getting the monthly schedules ahead of time, since the monthly schedule guide that TCM has is terrible: view "this month's highlights", without giving most of the daytime schedules.

And now that I'm looking at the monthly "highlights", I see something worse. I was looking at the monthly schedule somebody else was able to compile, which I downloaded just before the start of November. I noticed that Sunday night will have a two-movie tribute to Diane Ladd, who died at the beginning of the month: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore at 8:00 PM and Rambling Rose at 10:00 PM. Since I downloaded the schedule at the end of October, it was just before Ladd died at the age of 89. TCM's "highlights" page has it listed as "Diane Ladd's 90th birthday", as if she were still alive. Oh dear.

As for FXM's schedule, it still doesn't look like there's a whole lot that's been pulled out of the vault that hasn't been on the channel in a while. I do note, however, that I haven't done a post on the 1960s Pat Boone version of State Fair which is showing up on the schedule. So I'll have to record that and watch it for a future airing of the movie. I also forgot that FXM was one of the channels that Disney got when they bought out parts of Fox, as FXM was missing from my YouTube TV lineup for the first 10 days of November or so when YouTube TV and Disney had their contract dispute.

Jean, Jean, roses are green?

Maggie Smith died last year, leading TCM to run a programming tribute to her in December. One of the movies that I had never gotten around to reviewing was the movie that won Smith her first Oscar, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. So I made certain to record it so that I could watch it and write up this review.

The movie opens up in 1932, at the Marcia Blaine Girls' School in Edinburgh, Scotland. Girls are making their way to school for the opening bell, as are various faculty members, including Jean Brodie (Maggie Smith). When Brodie arrives at the school, she's buttonhole by the music teacher, Gordon Lowther (Gordon Jackson), who has been trying to get her to see him, even though he's married if unhappily. In fact, Jean is also the art teacher, Teddy Lloyd (Robert Stephens), making her personal life rather complicated.

Miss Brodie's personal life isn't the only thing that's complicated, as her professional life is, too. Jean is a bit of a free spirit, which gets her in conflict with the headmistress, Miss Mackay (Celia Johnson). She's also taken a couple of her students, notably Sandy (Pamela Franklin), and made them a sort of clique who Jean suggests are going to become a sort of higher-class group of girls. Added to this group is young Mary McGregor (Jane Carr), a Catholic orphan with an elder brother and enough of a trust fund to be able to pay for the schooling.

The other thing that makes Jean controversial is her political views. She visited Italy at some point in the past and shows her students slides from her vacation. But partly as a result of that vacation she developed an admiration for Benito Mussolini's governance. That's not a massive deal in 1932; remember that Cole Porter included a positive reference to Mussolini in the original lyrics to "You're the Tops" and one of Marie Dressler's dogs in Dinner at Eight was originally called "Mussolini". But the movie opens before 1933, and once Hitler comes to power, supporting Mussolini is much more questionable. Worse is that the Spanish Civil War starts and Jean takes the side of Franco even though pretty much everyone else in the UK doesn't like them. Mary's brother runs off to Spain, and Jean naturally believes that he's gone to join Franco's forces, and tries to convince Mary to run off to Spain to follow her brother.

Sandy is the one person who, despite being one of "Miss Brodie's girls", has a mind of her own as well, and doesn't always do what Jean thinks she should. So when Jean starts sleeping with Lowther despite still seemingly want to have a relationsihp with Lloyd, Sandy starts seeing Lloyd herself, even posing nude for a portrait. Except that Lloyd is also less than fully honest, as we learn that the portrait is in fact one of Jean. Tensions continue to rise, until there's the possibility for Miss Mackay of finally being able to get rid of Jean.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie isn't quite as complicated as my synopsis might make it sound, although you'll have to pay attention because of the high number of young girl characters. The movie, however, is much more Jean Brodie's story, and Maggie Smith is magnificent as Brodie, a woman who thinks she's much more hot stuff than she really is. The rest of the cast is quite good in support of Smith as well.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is another of those movies where, if you haven't seen it before, you really should.

Insert into slot A

Another of the movied that I recorded off of TCM some time back because the premise sounded interesting and that was wholly unknown to me when TCM aired it was the movie Flap. Having seen it, I can see why it was wholly unknown to me.

Anthony Quinn plays Flapping Eagle, an aging member of the Navajo tribe living on the reservation and drinking too much, making a meager living by transporting goods to and from the reservation. As the movie opens, he's hauling tchotckes through Tucson on his way to the edge of the reservation where one of those kitsch places is going to sell them as "authentic" Indian dolls. Except that Flapping Eagle misjudges a turn resulting in some of the boxes falling off the truck. When he and his friends Lobo (Claude Akins) and the much younger Eleven (Tony Bill) get out to pick up the stuff, it causes a traffic backup that results in police Lt. Rafferty (Victor French) engaging in a bit of police brutality on them.

Back at the reservation, Flapping Eagle talks to tribal lawyer Wounded Bear (Victor Jory) to find out if there's anything that can be done. To which, the answer is, not much. And it's not as if Wounded Bear is much of a lawyer anyway. He's more of a historian in that he's got the old copies of all the tribal treaties between the Navajo and the Americans, most of which isn't going to to Flapping Eagle any good in traffic court.

Life on the reservation is tough, and is only about to get tougher when the US government plans to extend the Interstate Highway System over land that happens to belong to the Navajo. This necessitates the exhumation and reburial of several bodies, as well as the placement of a whole bunch of heavy equipment on tribal land that's going to be cut in two.

But, at this point, knowledge of the old treaties is something that might finally be useful. Apparently, there was a clause in one of the old treaties that if the Americans abandoned anything on tribal land, it would become property of the tribe. Now, the construction equipment can't really be considered abandond, but Flapping Eagle gets the idea that the Navajo could cause something else to just happen to be abandoned on the reservation, as there's a disused railroad spur leading onto the reservation. Flapping Eagle gets the railroad switch in working order, and gets cars of a cargo train to be shunted onto the reservation, but not the engine or the caboose, since that would result in humans being held technically captive on the reservation.

When Flapping Eagle claims ownership of the "abandoned" railroad cars, this causes a national sensation, as news organizations from all over the country want to see what's going on with this human interest story. Of course, the government wants the original owners to get their stuff back, and that leads to a conflict with ultimately tragic results.

I can once again see why people would want to make the story that forms the basis of Flap. Unfortunately, the movie goes wrong in its execution. Flap and the other Indians are basically stereotypes, and not particularly appealing characters. I'm not certain whether Flap was supposed to be a dark comedy or a serious drama, but it consistently feels off in tone with the result that it's neither funny nor serious enough in its drama. Shelley Winters appears as a love interest for Flap, but she way overplays it and is more irritating than anything else.

Nazis at the American Film Theater

I've mentioned the American Film Theater in conjunction with a couple of films before; it was an ambitious plan in the mid-1970s to take relatively modern stage plays and adapt them into films that kept almost all the dialog while opening them up where cinema allowed for it. Another of the films from that series was on my DVR and I finally got around to watching it: The Man in the Glass Booth.

People with a good knowledge of history should know what the title comes from, although the play is not a historical drama in that the characters are not taken from real people. Maximilian Schell stars as Arthur Goldman, a Jew who survived one of the Nazi extermination camps, emigrated after the war, and became a wealthy property developer in New York City. At least, that's his story; Goldman is a bit of an odd bird. He lives in a penthouse apartment with serious security in the form of right-hand man Charlie Cohn (Lawrence Pressman), has a couple million in cash squirreled away, and has rather odd views of Jews and Judiasm. He also has some sort of vision where he keeps thinking he sees people on the sidewalk below coming for him; sometimes they're Nazis and sometimes they're, well, something else. He's also trying to burn off recognition of something on his skin, but it's not on the forearm where the tattooed concentration camp ID numbrer would be.

If you remember that the original "man in the glass booth" was Adolf Eichmann, who was kidnapped from Argentina and brought to Israel to stand trial for crimes against humanity, being put in a glass booth in a specially constructed courtroom for the trial, then you'll know where the movie is going. Mossad agents are able to get into the apartment and do a physical evaluation of Goldman that comports with medical records they have of him. This is not Arthur Goldman, who was killed in the concentration camp, but one of the camp commandants who was actively killing the Jews. So they drug him and Cohn so that Cohn can't fight back either, and then take Goldman to Israel where they intend to put him on trial.

Goldman freely admits to being a Nazi, but also says that he's not going to stand trial unless his captors give into certain demands, which they ultimately do because the demands are more delusional than a security risk. Goldman intends to defend himself, and also asks that he be called by his Nazi rank. The court, including prosecutor Rosen (Lois Nettleton) and the judge (Luther Adler) do. Goldman doesn't seem to be putting up much of a defense, instead acting increasinly delusional, until something happens that may just change the course of the trial....

As with the other movies from the American Film Theater that I've seen, I think you have to give producer Ely Landau credit for the idea, while at the same time admitting that again this is a movie with some serious flaws. For me, the first big problem is that the first half of the movie, set in New York before the trial, is incredibly slow. Some people may almost want to give up on the movie before it gets to Israel, which is a problem with the screenplay and/or the play itself. Something that again may be a problem with the screenplay is that Goldman as a character almost requires whoever is playing it to overact badly, since the character is delusional. Schell does that, although it's also a compelling performance -- one doesn't really care about the other characters in the story who are just there in service of the Goldman character. Schell received an Oscar nomination, losing to Jack Nicholson for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

From what I've read, the one truly good movie from the American Film Theater is The Iceman Cometh which I have not yet seen. The Man in the Glass Booth is interesting, but ultimately rather a mess.

Girl trouble

Next up on my list of movies that are on my DVR and getting another airing on TCM soon is one of Elvis Presley's final films, The Trouble With Girls. The TCM showing is tomorrow, November 24, at 8:30 AM.

Elvis Presley plays Walter Hale, who runs a traveling "Chautauqua" in the 1920s. These were named after Chautauqua in New York, which in the 19th century was the site of the Chautauqua Institution, a sort of forum of ideas and the fine arts. (The Institution still exists and hosts summer programs, but the traveling counterparts died out during the Depression.) So back in the 1920s before mass media become more prominent, programs like these functioned as somewhat higher-class versions of the traveling carnivals and medicine shows that show up a lot more often in popular culture to this day.

Walter's Chautauqua rolls into the town of Radford Center, Iowa, which is clearly the MGM backlot rather than location shooting, which is one of the many problems with the movie. He's got various musicians and lecturers (including Vincent Price in a small role as "Mr. Morality"), but is having the biggest trouble with Charlene (Marlyn Mason), the "Story Lady". She's joined up with Actors' Equity, and knows all of the employment rights that are due Equity members. She keeps reminding Walter of these, and trying to get all of the people involved with the show signed to an Equity contract.

One of the things that Walter's Chautauqua likes to do is hire a local child for one of the pageants they put on. There's an interracial pair of kids who would do, although ultimately the choice is little Carol Bix. Carol is the daughter of Nita (Sheree North), who works at the local pharmacy run by Wilby (a very young Dabney Coleman) in the days when drug stores did all sorts of things like serve floats as well as fill prescriptions. The only problem is, Wilby seems to have is eye on Nita's legs as much if not more as his business.

Radford Center has a nearby lake, and another of the lecturers is a swimmer modeled on Gertrude Ederle, who not long before the action in the movie would have been the first person to swim the English Channel. But the other purpose of the lake is that it's a place to dispose of Wilby's body after somebody offs him. Obviously, suspicion falls on some of the more shady characters who accompany the itinerant Chautauqua, because if you were somebody looking to con people and get away with it, what better way to get away than be part of a traveling show? Clarence, a gambler, is charged, although he's not the actual murderer. Will the authorities be able to find the real killer? Well, you might guess that Walter figures things out, and after the Chautauqua moves on to the next town we're told that it was only a few more years until various advanced technologies like radio and talking pictures would consign Chautaquas to history for good.

Having seen The Trouble With Girls, I can see why Elvis didn't make many more movies after this. He's out of place here with the beginnings of his "fat Elvis" hair. He's also not given much to do. The plot is all over the place, and worse, the big finale has some terrible editing in that it cuts constantly for no good artistic reason. The production values feel cheap, too, with the obvious use of all those buildings on the MGM backlot when movies were really beginning to spread away from the studios. The Gypsy Moths, which was released at just about the same time as The Trouble With Girls and which shows up on TCM at the end of this week, actually filmed on location in Kansas for example.

If you're looking for a good Elvis movie, I'm sorry to say that there are other movies you should watch instead of The Trouble With Girls.

City of Missing Girls

I've mentioned before that of the FAST platforms, TubiTV has a whole lot of Poverty Row B stuff that presumably fell into the public domain at some point and wound up obscure as a result. But the plots sound interesting enough and since many of the movies are short, it doesn't matter that much if they're not all that good. Another one that I watched recently is City of Missing Girls.

The movie begins with one of those old tropes in B movies, the montage of headlines telling us how a bunch of young women, in this case the sort of girl who'd try out for the chorus line with dreams of something bigger, have gone missing and in many cases found dead. The police in the form of detective McVeigh (H.B. Warner) are investigating, as is assistant DA James Horton (John Archer). Reporting on it and needling the authorities for the lousy investigating, is Nora Page (Astrid Allwyn), who is also liable to become a love interest to Horton. (Obviously not to McVeigh, who is much too old for Nora.) Anyhow, one obvious place of suspicion is the Crescent School, which teaches dancing and acting for the sort of woman who wants to get into it. In fact, the owner, King Peterson, also owns a nightclub and funnels some of the women there.

Another woman, Pauline Randolph, goes missing, and Nora starts investigating the case herself. Thankfully she's got a bit of an in as her father Joe Thompson is a theatrical booking agent and can get information on the sort of women who show up at these places. But it's only after Nora talks with Dad that we see him having another conversation, with Mr. Peterson, and that the two are in cahoots. Peterson is obviously involved in some sort of trafficking that Thompson doesn't want to be on the hook for, while Peterson intends to make certain that Thompson is held equally liable.

Pauline actually show up, much to her grandmother's relief, although Nora isn't able to get an interview with her as Pauline goes off with a friend just as Nora arrives. Nora, being an intrepid reporter, takes down the license plate number. As you can guess, this is going to be important later in the movie. Pauline is later found murdered. The other woman in the car is playing hard to find, until King Peterson gets an idea as to how to use her to his benefit, which involves framing Horton in this other woman's murder! Of course, even though this is a Poverty Row movie, it still has to follow the strictures of the Production Code, so we know that the bad guys are going to get caught.

City of Missing Girls has the sort of plot that you could easily see having been used in a Torchy Blane movie a few years movie. But here it's done on a much lower budget with the concomitant lower production values. It's not as bad as some people might have you believe, but at the same time there's a lot of good reasons why the movie isn't remembered beyond it having fallen into the public domain.

I'm glad that City of Missing Girls is now available on a FAST platform, and if you're looking for a way to spend 75 minutes, it'll do.

Roseland

Some months back, TCM ran a spolight on Merchant-Ivory productions, which gave me the chance to record a couple of movies that I hadn't seen before. One of those movies was a film that predated the later sterertype of Merchant-Ivory being about British period pieces for which the pair became famous: Roseland.

The title Roseland refers to the Roseland Ballroom, a dancing spot in Manhattan that operated for about 90 years before it was finally closed in 2014 and demolished to build a high-rise apartment building. But even by 1977, when the movie was released, it felt like the Roseland had seen better days, with a clientele of disproportionately older people who would have enjoyed going dancing when they were younger decades earlier, think the old Kinks song "Come Dancing". Roseland the movie is more or less an anthology film telling three stories.

The first one is called "The Waltz". Teresa Wright plays May, a relatively recent widow, who goes to the Roseland to have someone to dance with and not feel so lonely now that she's a widow after all these years. She likes to dance with Stan (Lou Jacobi), who is a widower, although is story is a bit more tragic as is revealed at the end of the segment. The main thrust of the story deals with the fact that when May dances in front of one particular mirror at the Roseland, she sees herself as she was back in the day, together with her late husband as he was all those years ago. But nobody else can see this.

The second story, "The Hustle", is the longest and most complicated. Christopher Walken, before becoming a star with The Deer Hunter a year later, plays Russell. He's a gigolo to Pauline (Joan Copeland), a childless woman who likes to dance at the Roseland. As the segment opens, she's celebrating her birthday at the Roseland, together with Russell and Cleo (Helen Gallagher) who gives dancing lessons in a small studio on an upper floor to make extra money. Invited to the party it Marilyn (Geraldine Chaplin), a divorcée who's between jobs but looking for a good one. She falls in love with Russell and may even be willing to make sacrifices to help Russell win the big dance contest. Russell makes intimations that the feeling is mutual, but he's got all those attachments to other women, too.

Finally comes "The Peabody". Lilia Skala is Rosa, an older widow who started coming to the Roseland and found a platonic dance partner in Arthur. The story is told in flashback, however, as Arthur has recently died. Rosa's big dream was to win the dance contest dancing the Peabody, although this contest has the reputation for having a contestant die since it's a tough dance for the mostly older people who enter the competition. Poor Rosa never seems able to enter for one reason or another, and then Arthur suddenly dies threatening to scupper things permanently.

I was mildly surprised to see Roseland get largely mediocre reviews. I found it to be a fairly well-done movie, albeit one that might not be to everybody's tastes thanks to a decidedly elegiac tone. As I mentioned above, the Roseland Ballroom shown here feels decidedly like it's full of faded glory. But the stories are interesting enough and not overly long, with the acting definitely worth watching. So definitely Roseland is one that's worth looking out for and watching, even if you disagree with my judgment on it.

Mary's bells

I think I've mentioned it before, but there's some lore in my family about how much my father hated the movie The Bells of St. Mary's. He was about seven years old when it came out, and was attending a Catholic elementary school in the Bronx, so of course the nuns took the kids to the theater to see this uplifting movie. Anyhow, some months back TCM ran this in a double feature with Going My Way, since The Bells of St. Mary's is in many ways a sequel to Going My Way. Not having seen either in their entirety, I recorded both, I reviewed Going My Way in conjunction with a subsequent TCM showing, and now am getting around to scheduling my review of The Bells of St. Marys.

Bing Crosby returns as Fr. Charles O'Malley, although he's pretty much the only character from Going My Way who shows up here. At the end of the previous movie Fr. O'Malley was being transferred from his old parish, so as The Bells of St. Mary's opens, he's showing up at his new assignment, the titular St. Mary's. This parish has a parochial school attached to it, but it's run by nuns who cannot lead Mass. The Mother Superior running the school is Sr. Mary Benedict (Ingrid Bergman), who rather incongruously is a Swedish-American nun, which makes you wonder when and why she converted from Lutheranism. The two get off on the wrong foot when one of Fr. O'Malley's first acts is to give the students a day off so that he can discuss with the nuns how to run the school

St. Mary's is in a parlous state, being an old building in need of significant repairs and having a lot of students who can't exactly pay a big tuition to attend. Indeed, the parish even sold off an adjance plot of land at some point in the not too distant past to wealthy businessman Horace Bogardus (Henry Travers). Bogardus is busy building a shiny new building on his new plot, and is presumably hoping the parish will have to close down so that he may be able to purchase the plot of land on which St. Mary's sits. Fr. O'Malley, meanwhile, sees the building under construction and gets to go inside it. He realizes this building would be perfect for the new St. Mary's school, and sets about using his gift of gab to try to convince Bogardus that the building would make a wonderful bequest.

Set against the backdrop of what's going to happen to St. Mary's parish are a couple of other subplots. One involves a new student at school, Patsy Gallagher (Joan Carroll). She's being raised by a single mother, Mary (Martha Sleeper). Mary has a sad story: she was married to an itinerant musician, who felt that he couldn't support a family on his musician's income and basically decided to abandon his wife and young daughter. Mary hasn't provided Patsy a very good life, but perhaps St. Mary's could take Patsy on as a charity case and do something? Fr. O'Malley, for his part, sets about trying to find Joe Gallagher for one of the climaxes.

There's also poor Sister Mary Benedict, who starts feeling unwell and finds out that there's something much worse going on with her, which will probably necessitate her having to leave the parish, although everyone else involved wants to avoid telling her how bad things really are. Of course everything works out for everybody in the end, since this is an avowedly Catholic, family-friendly film.

The Bells of St. Mary's isn't anywhere near as bad as my father would have you believe, although in his defense I can see why he'd have a negative opinion of it. Dad basically didn't have a choice in watching the movie and, while I can see it being described as wholesome and even family-friendly, the idea of a seven-year-old boy liking it is something that tests belief. The Bells of St. Mary's is also quite sentimental, at times way too sentimental for its own good. It also runs a bit slowly, at a touch over two hours. So although there's nothing that parents should find particularly objectional about The Bells of St. Mary's, it's also not something that's going to have strong appeal for young children 80 years on.

Oregon Passage

Another of the movies that was sitting on my DVR for a while that I needed to watch before it expired was the cavalry western Oregon Passage. Having watched it, I wrote up this review which is going into my queue of movies to post about at some later date since, as of this writing, I've got a few too many military-themed movies scheduled in close proximity.

The scene is 1871 in Oregon, which is already a state, but still has a bunch of Indian tribes in the less-developed parts of the state that aren't exactly happy about the encroachment of the white man. Chief among these are the Shoshone, led by Black Eagle. At a fort, the cavalry have enlisted the help of a member of a different tribe, a man named Nato, to try to find Black Eagle. He gives Lt. Ord (John Ericson information that sends the cavalry out on a raid. Unfortunately, they don't find Black Eagle, but Little Deer, a member of a rival tribe who has been kidnapped by Black Eagle with the intention of becoming Mrs. Black Eagle, as it were. The cavalry returns to the fort.

Now, Black Eagle is sure to be pissed about having bride stolen, never mind the assertion that he stole her himself. He's going to start organizing the various tribes to get together to raid the cavalry forts. But in the meantime, there's the other half of the story that we have to get to. Lt. Ord is serving under the fort commander, Maj. Dane (Edward Platt), who is decidedly ill-suited to commanding this fort. He's rigid and, having dealt with Plains Indians in the past, thinks he can just deal with the Shoshone in the same way regardless of whether that's working in reality. Worse, he's got a trophy wife, Sylvia (Lola Albright), whom he's brought to the fort from Washington presumable to keep her under his watchful eye since she's good enough looking to tempt other men.

Among those other men just happens to be Lt. Ord, although in Ord's defense, he apparently knew Sylvia back east so they have a past together. Sylvia thinks the two of them can just pick right up from where they left off back east. She's also inherited money, and keeps trying to convince Lt. Ord that if only they leave this god-forsaken fort together, they can run off to South America or someplace else where the US government will never find Ord. They can't stay in the US, of course, since in that case Ord would be a deserter and be found and probably executed.

Meanwhile, Little Deer, having been rescued by Ord's raid, seems to think this is some sort of omen that the two of them are destined to be together. To that end, she keeps making totems that are supposed to be symbols of this fate, not that Ord is intending to be with Little Deer. Not that he's malicious about it, it's more that he's focused on duty rather than love. He's also focused on trying to get Maj. Dane not to undertake policies that he believes are going to be a disaster. And, among all that, there's still Black Eagle out there, waiting to attack....

Oregon Passage is a competent enough B western, although it's one of those movies that feels rather formulaic and mildly old fashioned even by the standards of the late 1950s when it was released. It's not a bad little movie for the most part, although it's a fairly simple tale of good versus evil by the end. The one bigger negative is the print. There were some scenes that gave me the impression that stock footage was used from other movies, although I don't see any indication of this on IMDb. But the color quality and the focus seem to change from shot to shot. Oregon Passage is a good enough movie to sit down with on a rainy day, but nothing that will be remembered as an all-time great movie.

The Devil Is a Sissy

Up next in the movies that I recorded during Mickey Rooney's turn as Star of the Month and had to watch in rapid succession before they expired from my DVR is another of his juvenile roles in The Devil Is a Sissy.

Rooney is only one of three juveniles here who are all relatively close to being the lead. Nominally, that lead goes to Freddie Bartholomew. He plays Claude Pierce, a boy whose parents have gotten divorced and whose mom (Katharine Alexander showing up briefly for the film's climax) got custody of the swanky New York apartment and a house in Florida, forcing architect father Jay (Ian Hunter) to live in a more working-class part of lower Manhattan, where he's going to have custody of Claude for the next six months.

Claude is put in a school where there are the sort of kids who are heading the wrong way but, since this is an MGM picture and there is the Production Code, you know are going to come out right in the end. Chief among them are "Buck" Murphy (Jackie Cooper), who lives with a surprisingly nasty father (Gene Lockhart) and who is more or less the head of the "gang" of schoolkids, although it's rather less violent of a gang than anything you'd get later on. His best friend and co-leader of the gang is "Gig" Stevens, who has it even rougher than Buck. Gig's father is sentenced to the electric chair, and Mom has a new suitor willing to take care of Gig (played by omnipresent character actor Grant Mitchell) but whom Gig doesn't like. Gig has an aunt Rose (Peggy Conklin) who was a showgirl, and whom Mr. Pierce apparently saw on stage, but who never really cared for Gig's father.

It's into this that Claude steps. Claude tries to fit in, not knowing that these kids are a bunch of petty troublemakers who are liable to get Claude into trouble as well. Gig wants to scrape up $80 -- a substantial sum in the mid-1930s -- for the headstone for Dad's grave, although he only finds out later this is a down payment for the stone he really wants to get. And to get that $80, he first tries to ask Aunt Rose, introducing his friends to her at her penthouse apartment. When that doesn't work, he thinks about stealing spare tires along with Buck, but that's liable to get them caught and is difficult anyway. Claude knows a place where they can steal much more valuable stuff to pawn for the $80....

Doing so, however, gets all three kids and their parents hauled before juvenile court where the judge gives them probation and makes them see a probation officer. Claude, being the goody two shoes, is bound to go along with this. Buck and Gig, however, have no intention of doing it; besides, they've got worse families they want to get away from. The plot gets even more nuts when, as part of running away, they get in a car driven by a bunch of real hoodlums much more ruthless than Gig's father ever way. Claude also goes out in the rain to keep Buck and Gig from trying to run away, and gets a life-threatening case of pneumonia for his trouble.

I didn't realize it until after watching The Devil Is a Sissy, but apparently there were two directors, with W.S. Van Dyke taking over from Rowland Brown. I'm guessing that it's this that results in the movie having a very uneven tone, careening from trying to be tough to being fairly melodramatic. This, and the plot twists and turns suddenly in ways that are even more unrealistic than most Hollywood movies. The three juvenile stars do as well as can be expected, and among the adults Gene Lockhart is quite good as the nasty father. But the material is what prevents The Devil Is a Sissy from being anything more than pedestrian.

Sylvie et le fantôme

TCM ran a day of Jacques Tati films some time back, and I think that may be where I recorded a movie where he's well down the credits but has an important role. That film is Sylvie and the Ghost.

At a chateau in one of the rural parts of France, Sylvie (Odette Joyeux) is about to turn 16. It's a place with history, as hanging on one of the walls is a portrait of one of Sylvie's ancestors from a couple of generations back, Alain. Well, OK, Alain himself wasn't an ancestor so much as he was in love with Sylvie's grandmother. For this, Grandpa felt his honor besmirched and challened Alain to a duel which was fatal to Alain. Sylvie finds all this romantic, and insists that Alain has to be a ghost haunting the chateau, although nobody has ever seen said ghost.

Meanwhile, the family is falling on hard times. (Although the movie was released in early 1946, there are no references to World War II, so I'd guess the movie is supposed to be set sometime in the 1930s.) In need of money, Dad decides he's going to sell that portrait of Alain to make money. Sylvie is going to be heartbroken, and Frederick, the son of the art dealer who is coming over to help remove the portrait, understands this, and falls in love with Sylvie along the way trying to make her feel better about it. Once the portrait is removed, we learn that there really is a ghost (played by Tati through a reflection trick) who will now be roaming about the chateau since he doesn't have that portrait to stay in any longer.

With a 16th birthday party coming up, Dad gets an idea. Maybe he can put Sylvie's mind at ease by hiring an actor to play a ghost, getting from the employment agency an older man who has a reputation for playing the ghost of the dead king from Hamlet. Howevever, before that man can show up, Frederick returns, hoping to woo Sylvie. And then a thief shows up in the chateau because he's on the run from the police and figured ducking into a building would be a good idea. The servants don't know who is expected to play the part of the ghost, so figure both of these men are the man for the job, with the actual man eventually showing up as well. All three eventually put on the ghostly robes but have different personalities to confuse the rest of the people. The fact that the thief falls in love with Sylvie also complicates matters. And then there's the real ghost who, seeing that these actors have robes on, figures he can take the robes from them and go around the house. But the laws of cartoon physics don't always allow this.

I've said quite often that I don't always care for the foreign films that have big reputations among the movie critic set largely because such films have a tendency to be pretentious. But give me a movie with an interesting or fun premise and I'll give it a chance regardless of whether it's Hollywood or foreign. Sylvie and the Ghost falls into that latter group. It definitely has a different feel from a Hollywood movie, but for the most part it's a delightful little romp. Then again, it's also from the days before the Cahiers du Cinema brought about the French New Wave, which may have something to do with why there's a lot less of the arthouse feel here.

In any case, Sylvie and the Ghost is a fun little movie that definitely deserves to be seen and better known.

For some values of fabulous

TCM's prime time lineup tonight before Silent Sunday Nights is a pair of movies starring Jeff Bridges. I've blogged about the first movie The Big Lebowski (8:00 PM), back in 2017, so now it's time to do a post on the other movie of the evening: The Fabulous Baker Boys, at 10:15 PM.

Jeff Bridges stars as Jack Baker, and as the movie opens he's getting out of bed in the morning with a woman he clearly doesn't know well and only picked up as a one-night stand. He proceeds to get dressed in a tux, because, well, he needs it for his job that evening. He's been one half of the titular Fabulous Baker Boys, a jazz piano duet of him and his older brother Frank (Beau Bridges) that has been performing in lounges around Seattle for 31 years now. Other than that, Jack doesn't have much of a life. He drinks, goes to a jazz dive bar from time to time, and helps look after little Nina, a girl who lives upstairs and whose single mother seems to have a succession of boyfriends.

For Jack, being in a duo with his brother is a sort of "what might have been". But for Frank, it's what pays the bills and allows him to have a modest house in tract housing and raise a family. And because of that, Frank is fairly unsympathetic as to doing things with an end to actually making a living, high art be damned. If the two brothers have to play "Feelings" for the 84723th show, so be it. Jack goes along with it largely because he doesn't seem to have much ambition. Do just enough to put food on the table and feed his dog, and enjoy the free time.

But this sort of piano jazz duo is no longer paying the bills, at least not for the managers of the hotel lounges where the Baker Boys get booked. The implication is that they're going to need a singer if they want to keep getting bookings. So, in a standard trope, the brothers audition a series of women who range from "don't quit your day job" to "hilariously bad". That is, until the audition is supposed to be over, when walking in late is Susie Diamond (Michelle Pfeiffer), who naturally wows the brothers over with the high quality of her singing.

Not that being in this sort of trio is what she necessarily had in mind. She doesn't much care for Frank's businesslike attitude, even if it is what's getting them gigs. She complains about the shoes and outfits he's picked for her, and later complains about the music sets they have to play, too. But in the meantime, Susie's vocals are a minor hit, enough so that the three are able to get a gig at a swanky resort over the New Year's holiday.

It's there that Jack and Susie realize they've got feelings for each other. When Frank has to return to Seattle for a couple of days when his kid gets sick, that's when Jack and Susie act on those feelings. This even though Frank doesn't want that to happen since he knows that if it does happen, it's going to put a new sort of tension into the act that the act just doesn't need. And sure enough, that's what happens, although even then Jack still doesn't have the courage to go any farther with Susie.

The Fabulous Baker Boys is, to be honest, a fairly thin story, and one of a sort that we've seen before. And yet, somehow, the movie is successful, which I think comes down entirely to the acting performances, which are quite good. Not that you'd expect any less from three seasoned pros. Pfeiffer also did her own singing, and does have a capable voice.

I didn't get to see The Fabulous Baker Boys when it was originally released, and was surprised to see it was not a box office hit at the time. But I'm glad I've finally gotten around to watching it.

So this is Paris, at least as Hollywood perceived it

It's been a while since I've done a post on a silent feature, and I saw that I had a couple I had to watch off my DVR before they expired. So with that in mind, I watched the Ernst Lubitsch film So This is Paris and then wrote up and scheduled this post, which to be honest is only going to show up on the blog after the movie has expired from the DVR. But it's in the public domain, so you may be able to find copies on your favorite video platform if the music doesn't fall afoul of copyright issues.

Maurice Lallé (Andre Beranger) is doing a dance for his wife Georgette (Lilyan Tashman) in their Paris apartment, the reason being that the pair are actually professional dancers and this is rehearsal for their latest number, which would also explain why Maurice is dressed up (or down, if you will) as a sheik and there's a piano accompanist with them. Eventually, the camera pans out and through a window, and the action moves across the street.

Suzanne Giraud (Patsy Ruth Miller) is the sort of idle rich housewife who, as the intertitles tell us, read a certain type of hot but trashy novel while their husbands are away at work. In fact, Suzanne is just finishing up another such novel about a sheik when she looks through the window, and sees... a shirtless Maurice! But then her husband, a doctor named Paul (Monte Blue) returns home. He sees Suzanne acting strangely, and even calling him her sheik. It's only when he looks through the window and sees a still-shirtless Maurice sitting by the window that he begins to put two and two together.

Suzanne tells her husband to go over there and "demand satisfaction", although it's an excuse for her to keep looking through the window. He knocks on the door and is admitted into the apartment, at which point Georgette shows up to see who the guest is. Imagine everybody's surprise when it's revealed that Georgette and Paul have a past together from before they each married other people. And Suzanne can look through the window and see what may or may not be going on with Paul, Georgette, and Maurice. Paul, realizing this, tries to make it look like he's getting in a fight with Maurice, when in reality they're all being friendly.

Paul returns home, not realizing that he left his cane over at the Lallés' apartment. So naturally Maurice decides he's going to be a decent person about it and return the cane. Maurice acts way too nice to Suzanne, which confuses her, since she expected Paul to treat Maurice in such a way that he wouldn't want to have anything to do with either her or Paul ever again. Maurice flirts with Suzanne while Paul is ostensibly asleep in the other room. But he can hear everything that's going on.

So everybody has reason to try to get revenge on everybody else, starting with Georgette requesting the doctor come over, when in fact she's at a café. Paul races over, but gets stopped for speeding, at which point the first of many complications ensues.

I don't know if Paris was ever like it was depicted in So This Is Paris. Maybe it was among a certain social class, although it's the same social class that's depicted in a lot of Hollywood screwball comedies of the 1930s. The material here is pleasant enough, although to be honest it's the sort of stuff that would probably work better in a sound movie than a silent. Still, if you haven't seen it before, So This Is Paris is definitely worth watching at least once.

Fighter Squadron, only on land and in the Asian theater

Another movie that's been sitting on my DVR since TCM's Memorial Day marathon of war movies and is now getting another airing on TCM is Merrill's Marauders. That airing is tomorrow, November 15, at 1:45 PM. So once again, I sat down to watch the movie in order to be able to do a post on it here in conjunction with the upcoming airing.

The movie opens with narration over black-and-white World War II footage about the state of the war around the beginning of 1944. Britain held India, but were worried that Japan would try to break through to meet up with the Germans since Japan held most of Southeast Asia. The UK had even bigger manpower issues than the Americans, and the Soviets had not declared war against Japan, so a conference in Quebec resulted in a multinational force under General Joseph "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell to push back against the Japanese. The American portion of that force was commanded by Brigadier General Frank Merrill (Jeff Chandler).

The first objective is a town called Walawbum, which is inside Burma through miles of jungles and swamps that the Americans are going to have to march through. Merrill himself is part of that, despite the doctor (Andrew Duggan) foreshadowing that Merrill has a serious heart issue. (In fairness to the movie, the real-life Merrill did in fact have a heart issue.) One of the platoons is led by Merrill's protégé, Lt. Stockton (Ty Hardin). Merrill sees great possibilities for Stockton's career, except that Stockton is a bit too close to his men.

Eventually, the men do make it to Walawbum and are able to take the town, leading the Americans to think they're going to be relieved, as this was a very tough campaign that led to a lot of them being either killed or sickened by tropical diseases. Unfortunately for them, Gen. Stilwell shows up and tells Merrill that no, you're not getting relieved; in fact you're going to have to push on to the railhead at Shaduzup. Merrill isn't exactly pleased but has a sense of duty. He also has to give the order to Stockton, who in turn is going to have to deliver the message to his men who aren't going to like it. And we've seen that Stockton already has command issues, like difficulty in writing the "I regret to inform you" letters that go home to the families of the fallen soldiers. But fight on they do, since they don't really have much choice. And of course Stockton starts becoming a better officer.

There's another big battle at Shaduzup, which the Allies win. But there's still another objective, the airstrip at Myitkyina, and the soldiers, by now known as Merrill's Marauders, push on despite being at their breaking point. History tells us that the Marauders did win a battle at Myitkyina, and that the Marauders were disbanded not long after because they had next to nobody left who was fit to fight and they all hated Stilwell.

Merrill's Marauders is a well-enough made movie, done closer to location in the jungles of the Philippines, and has fine performances from both Chandler (in what was sadly his final performance since he suffered a back injury during the shooting and died from complications of surgery after filming wrapped) and Hardin. However, like a lot of other war movies of the era, it has a lot of the same tropes of character development, which is why I mentioned the recently reviewed Fighter Squadron in the title. The Merrill/Stockton relationship is reminiscent of the one between Edmond O'Brien and Robert Stack. There's also a comic relief character with animal involvement. This time, it's a man nicknamed Muley who is the keeper of the pack mule in the platoon. (The real Marauders did use pack mules.) Muley has grown too attached to his mule, while everyone else in the platoon sees it as a source of food.

Merrill's Marauders isn't a bad little movie, and in some ways it's more about the limits of endurance men can face rather than about the actual battles. But I can't help think that if it had been made a few years earlier and with a better budget that it could have been a movie with a much higher reputation than the one it has today.

Dated edginess

I've mentioned quite a few times before that I was born in the 1970s, so I have no real cultural connection to all of the 1960s countercultural stuff. That's why a lot of the popular culture of the era comes across as even more badly dated to me than older stuff, especially when it's material that feels like it was created by older people trying to remain relevant in a new generation. I couldn't help but think of that as I watched Some Kind of a Nut.

The movie starts off with what is mostly a bee's-eye view of New York's Central Park in the late 1960s. Eventually the scene settles on a couple having a picnic lunch and enjoying the summer sun. Fred Amidon (Dick Van Dyke) is a bank teller in an era when this was still considered a moderately prestigious job, on a blanket on the grass with fiancée Pamela Anderson (Rosemary Forsyth). Fred can't marry Pamela yet, becuase he's still waiting for his divorce from Rachel (Angie Dickinson) to be finalized. Anyhow, the bee lands far enough up Pamela's miniskirt that it would be a scandal to lift the skirt up to try to shoo the bee away, even though that's what needs to be done. And in trying to shoo the bee away, Fred gets stung on the face for his trouble.

Fred and Pamela were planning to take a vacation to celebrate the upcoming divorce. With bandages on his face from where he got stung by the bee, Fred discovers that it's uncomfortable to shave. So he decides that he's going to let his beard grow out while he's on vacation. This is a problem because, when he gets back to work at the bank, one of those large organizations that has a big prestigious headquarters in Manhattan, he's reminded that the bank has appearance standards for its employees. (To be fair, employees should look professional. There's a reason why things like septum rings have the reputation they do.) The bank somewhat understandably wants him to shave off the beard, as does Pamela. But Fred has decided that he's not going to, as a matter of principle.

For his trouble, Fred gets fired. He decides to spend his days with the burgeoning countercultural scene, such as with a Buddhist zen master (a scene including actor Robert Ito later of Quincy, ME if you remember the reruns of that show). Meanwhile, Fred still has friends among his former co-workers at the bank who have decided they're on his side and are going to start a protest. Pamela, for her part, still doesn't want Fred to have that beard, and she's going to get it cut off even if she has to use force to do it. Her attempts, however, don't quite work and only cause more chaos which brings Rachel back into the picture....

Oh boy have standards changed since 1969 when this movie was released. Obviously beards aren't the issue they were back then (although a lot of men of a type have decided to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction and grow Grizzly Adams-style beards; and if one tattoo in a place that wouldn't be revealed in shirtshleeves is OK, let's protest by getting full-sleeve tattoos). But even for the 1960s this seems out of date. And of course there's the look at the counterculture, which feels like it wouldn't be out of place in Dragnet even though a movie like this was clearly the opposite of what the Jack Webbs of the world were presenting.

The bigger sin, however, is that Some Kind of a Nut is supposed to be a comedy. But the zaniness here isn't funny so much as it is exhausting. And this from a movie that only lasts about 90 minutes. Still, some people may want to watch this to see just how things could go so badly wrong in the late 1960s, or for the location shooting of New York as it was in the summer of 1969.

Always Leave Them Laughing

I've got several films from Ruth Roman's time as TCM's Star of the Month that I didn't get to until just before they expired from the DVR. Now, she wasn't exactly the star in all of them; in some she played a supporting role such as in Always Leave Them Laughing.

The star here is Milton Berle, playing a man named Kip Cooper who, as the movie opens, has a successful thing going in the very new medium of television (the movie was released in 1949, and it's a bit surprising to see a movie studio talk openly about television this early in the game). A young man who thinks he's got the goods to become a star himself shows up at the studio, hoping to audition for Kip or his agent, or at least get the agent's advice. As you might guess, this leads to the inevitable flashback.

Kip is a vaudeville-type performer, although these are the days when vaudeville is beginning to die and the idea of comedians taking their show to the Borscht Belt or nightclubs in other vacation results isn't going to be that far behind, not that they quite realized it in the 1940s. Kip has talent, but he doesn't have material. Instead, he recycles old stuff without actually doing impressions. It's the sort of thing that's part of the reason why Kip is stuck in crummy third-rate theaters.

One day, Kip meets Fay (that's Ruth Roman), whose parents had been in vaudeville, and whose act Kip remembers and can more or less do from memory. He keeps auditioning for shows, and eventually gets a job that should well suit him. He was hoping for the lead, but doesn't get it due to nepotism; instead, his ability to learn everybody else's shtick makes him a perfect understudy. But it's also a part that's going to take him out on the road, keeping him away from Fay. And his continued insistence on not coming up with original material is never going to help his career.

Fay, meanwhile, is able to get a job in a show with a real star as a headliner, Eddie Egan (Bert Lahr). The show goes well until poor Eddie suffers a massive heart attack. But! Kip actually knows Eddie's old material to the point that he could have been an understudy to Eddie all along. It's because of this that he's able to fill in for Eddie, and make the show a success. But there are two problems. One is that Eddie is planning on returning at some point. The other is that Eddie has a wife Nancy (Virginia Mayo) who has a financial interest in making certain that the show must go on.

Still, we know that Kip is going to wind up with a TV show of his own, so how do we get there from here? For that, you're going to have to see the rest of Always Leave Them Laughing.

Milton Berle isn't exactly my favorite, and once again, Always Leave Them Laughing is the sort of material that feels like it would have been dated even when the movie was released back in 1949. Still, when Berle is called upon not to be the comic, he actually does have some acting ability in him. For me, it isn't quite enough to save the movie. Always Leave Them Laughing isn't terrible, but it's not memorable either.

Fighter Squadron

As I mentioned last week, Rock Hudson is TCM's Star of the Month for November, and his movies are airing every Tuesday in prime time. This includes today, which happens to be Veterans' Day in the US, a time when TCM normally airs a bunch of military-themed movies in honor of the day. As it turns out, TCM has enough military movies with Hudson in the cast to use for tonight's prime time lineup, although the last one is Hudson's debut where he only has an uncredited bit part with just a few lines: Fighter Squadron, which is on at 5:15 AM tomorrow (Nov. 12), or the end of the prime-time lineup.

It's 1943, and war is raging in Europe. Since the western side of the Allies haven't been able to start their land invasion quite yet, at least not across the English Channel, much of the action is air raids over targets in Germany, which comes with a fairly heavy price. The planes are supposed to provide support flying in formation, and stay at a high altitude to avoide the German surface-to-air missiles. One pilot, Maj. Hardin (Edmond O'Brien), thinks these orders are the wrong ones, and that the pilots need more flexible measures for dealing with the Germans. Indeed, he had flown over China wiht the Flying Tigers, so he's already been exposed to that greater flexibility. The problem, however, is that he engages in that flexibility in direct violation of those orders.

This goes up the chain of command, from Maj. Hardin's commanding officer Col. Brickley (John Rodney), to the generals, Maj. Gen McCready (Henry Hull), and above him Brig. Gen. Gilbert (Sheppard Strudwick). McCready has some sympathy, but others point out that the flexibility also comes with a short-term cost of more planes and pilots being damaged or lost. Brickley needs to think about keeping the men under his command safe to fly the next mission. Meanwhile, the other men in Hardin's squadron, notably best friend Capt. Hamilton (Robert Stack), like Hardin.

So the higher-ups decide to teach Hardin a lesson. Col. Brickley gets a promotion, and suggests that Hardin be promoted to take his place. Now that he'll be more or less grounded and have to have these other men now under his command, perhaps he'll understand why Brickley was the way he was with Hardin. Hardin tries to be nice to his men as the bombing raids continue, but there's one catch. He still believes in the idea that the men under his command shouldn't be married, because then pilots will think about their wives and not do some of the risk-your-life things necessary to carry out the mission. Hamilton just happens to be engaged, so he heads back to America when he gets leave and gets married, although he does return to the unit much to Hardin's consternation. More raids follow up to the unit's provision of air cover for the D-Day invasion.

Fighter Squadron is nothing if not formulaic, and decidedly a product of Hollywood. There's even a daft subplot about a pilot who has a series of girlfriends, and is able to get off base to see them through the ruse of obtaining a bunch of black cats. The other pilots don't like seeing black cats and ask him to take the cats away, which gives him a chance to go off base. It's supposed to be funny, but to me it was just irritating. Fighter Squadron is well-enough made, however, and I can see why audiences back in the day might have been entertained. Better and more inventive war movies, however, have come out in the intervening years.

Not as cool as rebel girls

In the second half of the 1930s, Katharine Hepburn famously got the label of "box office poison". Having seen some of the movies she made before heading back to the New York stage for a few years, I think it's not hard to see the self-centered characters she had a tendency to play combined with her mannered nature not working for audiences of the day. She's less self-centered in A Woman Rebels, but then there's the plot....

Hepburn plays Pamela Thistlewaite, a young woman living in Victorian England with her younger sister Flora (Elizabeth Allan) and widower father Byron (Donald Crisp), a judge who frequently travels to London. He's strict and has ideas about women that lead to them having a very narrow place in the world, something that Pamela strongly disagrees with. Dad thinks women should be wives and mothers, and it's past time for the two daughters to be married off.

So when Dad introduces the daughters to the world, it's a relief to him that Flora meets a nice young naval officer, Lt. Freeland (David Manners). Pamela meets a man too, Lord Gaythorne (Van Heflin), but the catch in his case is that he's already married, and there's no way he's going to be able to leave his wife. This is the Victorian era, after all, so the idea of getting a divorce would have been somewhat scandalous, even if the Anglican church had been founded precisely on the idea that the king should be allowed to get his divorce.

So when Lt. Freeland gets a post in Italy as a naval attaché, Pamela eventually follows to spend time with her sister, who is already with child. In fact, Pamela is with child as well, having been knocked up by Gaythorne, so her going off to Italy is convenient so that nobody in England will know of the baby. In Italy, Pamela meets diplomat Thomas Lane (Herbert Marshall), and kinda falls in love with him, despite her complicated personal life. And things suddenly turn as Flora's husband is killed in a shipwreck. The shock causes her to miscarry, and then ultimately die. But this gives Pamela an idea! She'll have her own baby, but pass it off as Flora's, with the idea that Flora died in childbirth and this poor orphan needs an aunt to raise it.

Pamela returns to England, and writes some fiction that she's able to get published in a ladies' magazine, before becoming an editor there when the regular (male) editor is out. This in an era when taking such a job, even if it is at a ladies' journal, is treated as kind of scandalous. Doesn't Pamela know she's supposed to get married?

Pamela's daughter, still thinking she's Pamela's niece and named after Flora, grows up with... Lord Gaythorne's son, things really start to get complicated. Technically, since they're half-siblings, they really shouldn't get married. But Pamela can't tell young Flora the truth for fairly obvious reasons. But Pamela is going to have to meet the elder Gaythorne about all this, and this time their tryst is discovered, so there's going to be scandal anyway....

I suppose the fact that the Production Code was in full effect partly drives what's going on in A Woman Rebels, but boy is the plot here nutty even compared to some of the other movies of the era that had to contort their plots to fit into Production Code strictures. And this I think is one of those places where the casting of Katharine Hepburn doesn't help. Bette Davis might have made the material seem fresh, but Hepburn is as cold and distant as ever here.

Still, there are people who like Katharine Hepburn, so watch this one for yourself.

Door-to-Door Maniac

Back in the spring, TCM ran a spotlight about singers in the movies. Country singer Marty Stuart sat down with Alicia Malone one night to talk about, among other things, his friend Johnny Cash, since one of the movies was part of an attempt to turn Cash into an actor: Five Minutes to Live. The movie was originally titled Door-to-Door Maniac, and that was the title in the program guide, but the print TCM showed had the re-release title Five Minutes to Live.

The movie opens up with Vic Tayback, playing con artist Fred Dorella. Fred is talking in a darkened room as though the events in the rest of the movie have already happened. He discusses how he met up with Johnny Cabot (Johnny Cash), and how this led to everything going wrong. Flash back to a robbery gone wrong on the east coast that ended in a running gunfight. Fred has a plan to rob a bank out in California where nobody knows who he is, but he's going to need a second, which is how he's introduced to Johnny.

After Johnny shows his sadistic side by shooting his girlfriend to death, the action moves to California. Fred is about to show Johnny exactly what his part in the bank robbery is going to entail. Nancy Wilson (Cay Forester, who also wrote the screenplay) is a typical suburban housewife with a husband Ken (Donald Woods) who is a vice-president at the local bank branch, with a son Bobby (Ron Howard at the age where he was still called Ronny). Mom is up for a big role in the local women's club, but Mom and Dad are the sort of couple who keep getting into arguments. We learn later that Dad has been having an affair and was planning on telling his wife about and that he was going to leave her.

Fred and Johnny have been casing the joint because the robbery doesn't quite involve the traditional guns the way that you'd see in a lot of other movies. Instead, Fred is going to use Ken's position at the bank to cash a check for a mid-five-figure sum, which was quite a substantial amount of money back in the early 1960s and which definitely needed a vice-president's signing off on it. As for Johnny, his job in the robbery is to hold Nancy hostage in her own home until Fred gets the cash and can get in touch with Johnny to tell him the robbery is a success.

Now, as you can imagine, there are some complications. One is the aforementioned affair, which might give Ken the motivation to let Johnny kill Nancy. The kid, however, is the bigger complication. Johnny may be a ruthless killer, but he doesn't want to kill children or have anything to do with them if he can avoid it, so he's not happy on finding out about little Bobby. Still, after Bobby goes off to school, Johnny tries to pass himself off as a door-to-door salesman of... guitar lessons?! OK, there are a few issues with the plot. But Nancy lets him in and he naturally pulls a gun on her. And then things don't quite go to plan over at the bank....

Five Minutes to Live is an ultra-low-budget movie with a lot of lesser-known actors, or at least in Cash's case someone known for singing and not acting. The acting here isn't the best, and as I already said there are a few plot holes. But the movie is decidedly entertaining despite its lack of quality. I don't mean that it's bad so much as there's a reason why it's not so well known even though it's got Johnny Cash in the cast. Its quirkiness, however, makes it definitely worth watching at least once.