Shadow of the Thin Man

TCM has certain marathons they like to do in conjunction with New Year's, either New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. One of those marathons is to run all six of the Thin Man movies in succession. This time, that marathon is on the morning and afternoon of January 1, together with two more William Powell/Myrna Loy movies that are not Thin Man movies. Seeing this, and seeing one of the movies in the series showing up not too long ago, I recorded that movie: Shadow of the Thin Man, so that I could do a post for the upcoming airing. That airing is tomorrow (Jan. 1) at 2:45 PM.

Shadow of the Thin Man is the fourth film in the series, so after Nick Charles (William Powell) get Nora (Myrna Loy) pregnant which, if memory serves, happened at the end of the second film. The kid, Nicky (Dickie Hall), is now three our four years old, and living in San Francisco with is parents in the sort of house that I wonder how the heck a retired police detective could afford. (If memory serves, the excuse is that Nora comes from money.) Nick takes little Nicky to the park and instead of reading a fairy tale reads from the Racing Form. It's a sign that Nick is still into betting on the ponies. He's also still into drinking, as we'll see later in the film although it's exactly a big plot point.

The Charles family is planning on going to the racetrack, but on the way they get passed by a phalanx of police motorcycles accompanying somebody. That somebody turns out to be a police ambulance, as there's been a murder at the racetrack. Not only that, but the murder victim is one of the jockeys. As you might guess, police lieutenant Abrams (Sam Levene) would like Nick to help, but Nick is reluctant. Also as you might guess, Nick eventually does get involved, and everybody winds up being a suspect -- well, not quite everybody as Nora and little Nicky certainly aren't suspects.

The murder of a jockey is presumed to be because of corruption in horse racing, some sort of corruption that the jockey might have been about to reveal or some other such shenanigans. Link Stephens is behind the west coast syndicate, and one of his underlings, Whitey Barrow (Alan Baxter). Working for Stephens and not realizing what he's really doing is secretary Molly (Donna Reed). She's engaged to crusading reporter Paul Clark (Barry Nelson), and when part of the investigation involves a record book and a possible list of some sort, Molly gives Paul her key to the office so he can do some surreptitious investigation. However, he's caught out, and the person who catches him gets murdered by an unseen third party. Paul is understandably the prime suspect in this murder even though we know he's innocent of the killing.

There are other suspects, such as Claire (Stella Adler), the sugar baby who is being blackmailed, and a third killing along the way. As for who's doing the killing and why, Nick brings all the suspects to Lt. Abrams' office for the finale, where he reveals who the killer is. Or, should we say, the killer outs himself as is a trope in these movies.

Shadow of the Thin Man is entertaining enough. It's not quite as good as the original Thin Man movie, but audiences of the day probably didn't care since they didn't have access to the previous movies the way we do today. For them, the continuing antics of Nick, Nora, and Asta were worth the price of admission while the mystery is, if not beside the point, almost a bit of a macguffin. That said, the mystery is, like a Murder, She Wrote episode, adequate, with the rest of the movie providing sufficient entertainment.

TCM End-of-year 2025 briefs

I probably should have mentioned the passing of actress Brigitte Bardot earlier, and possibly even in a post of its own, although I don't think I've got that many photos from movies of hers I've done on the blog. FXM had run Dear Brigitte recently, but it doesn't seem to be on the schedule any time soon. I haven't seen any news of a programming tribute on TCM, although nothing for February has been released as far as I know.

Speaking of future programming, it looks like the FXM Retro block is still going, and now is the time that some movies are being brought back out of the vault. Not that I haven't already done posts on them, but they're still back on FXM after a while. The early 1980s Eyewitness, subject of a March 2021 post, will be on FXM on Friday. Nine to Five is on FXM on Jan. 3, and the original The Day The Earth Stood Still shows up on the early hours of Monday, Jan. 5 at 4:25 AM.

TCM's lineup for tonight seems to be movies set around New Year's Eve. At least, I think so, since I haven't seen Bridget Jones' Diary (8:00 PM). This morning and afternoon is Marx Brothers movies. So no That's Entertainment! series for once. I've mentioned The Thin Man in the past showing up on New Year's Eve, but that's actually the subject for another post.

It looks like my posting output this year is a bit lower than in years past. Oddly enough, that's probably because I'm well ahead in scheduled posts, around three weeks' worth. When I'm thinking more about what I'm going to post in the future, it's easier to overlook doing things like the briefs posts or mentioning someone who died. Oh, and I still have to write up a post on the January 2026 TCM Star of the Month, but that's going to be later today and scheduled.

Deep in My Heart

Tonight is the final night of Merle Oberon's turn as TCM's Star of the Month. One of her movies that I haven't blogged about before, but had on my DVR, is Deep in My Heart, which airs overnight tonight at 12:45 AM (which is technically December 31 in the Eastern time zone but still December 30 in more westerly time zones). So, with that in mind, I held off on watching the movie and putting up a review until I could do it in conjunction with tonight's TCM showing.

Deep in My Heart starts off with the MGM orchestra performing an overture. This is actually a medley of songs composed by Sigmund Romberg, who is the subject of the movie. After the overture and opening credits, we're introduced to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where a young Sigmund (José Ferrer) works as a waiter at a Viennese-style café owned by Anna Mueller (Helen Traubel), composing Strauss-style music for the band to play. A musical agent shows up and likes Romberg's ability, but notes that this is a type of music that's old fashioned: if Romberg wants to make it as a composer, he's going to have to write music that's more with the times.

Romberg does do this, coming up with a formulaic song called "Leg of Mutton", which brings him to the attention of J.J. Shubert (Walter Pidgeon), an impresario who together with his brother was about to open what is the Shubert Theater on Broadway that still stands to this day. Shubert is putting on a show with star Gaby Deslys (Tamara Toumanova) and would like Romberg to write a song for her. This leads to part of the dramatic tension of the movie, such as that is, in that Romberg has artistic principles while Shubert and a bunch of other people all know better than Romberg what would be commercially successful. Indeed, there's a scene late in the movie where an adolescent girl says she likes one of the songs, but decries the show as a whole as opera.

Back to the meeting with Shubert, and Romberg's song is enough of a hit that he gets to keep working with Shubert and makes a lot of money. Unfortunately, he spends even more money than he earns, which ultimately results in his declaring bankruptcy and being forced to go back to Shubert to work on the sort of material that Shubert knows will be a commercial hit and make Romberg a tidy sum of money. Along the way, Romberg meets another actress, Dorothy Donnelly (Merle Oberon), who is a bit of a champion of Romberg's and who has some pretentions to higher art of her own. While on a tour of Europe just after the Great War, she comes across a play called Old Heidelberg that she snapped up the rights to, to work on a translation with lyrics that could be set to music. She wants Romberg to write the music, and the result is the successful operetta The Student Prince.

To fill out the plot, there's a romantic angle involving how Romberg meets his wife Lillian (Doe Avedon) in the Adirondack resort town of Saranac Lake while trying to work on songs for a musical where he faces a very tight deadline. (In fact, this was Romberg's second wife; his first wife isn't mentioned and IMDb doesn't even list her.) But a lot of the movie is just an excuse to bring in MGM's stars to do musical numbers of Romberg's songs.

Not that this is a bad thing, of course; people who like the Freed Unit musicals that MGM was putting out in this era are probably going to love Deep in My Heart even if it is a slightly different type of music. For me, the one big problem with the movie is the sense that, the way things play out, Sigmund Romberg comes across as the sort of person whose life wasn't quite interesting enough to be the subject of a Hollywood biopic. The actors all do quite well with the material they're given, and the stars performing the musical numbers -- including Gene Kelly with his brother Frank; Rosemary Clooney; Cyd Charisse and her husband Tony Martin in different numbers; Ann Miller; and more -- are more than competent at what they're asked to do. But the music may not be to everyone's taste, and the dramatic scenes in getting to the musical numbers are slow.

Still, for anyone who wants a bit of musical history or who wants to see an MGM musical that isn't as well remembered, Deep in My Heart is a movie of a high technical standard.

Saratoga

It's fairly well-known that actress Jean Harlow died tragically young while she was in production for the 1937 movie Saratoga. Her fans demanded that MGM finish the movie so that they could see the last footage of her, and MGM relented and used a body double and voice actress to film the remaining scenes. For whatever reason, I had never actually seen Saratoga, so the last time it showed up on TCM I made the point to record it so that I could finally strike it off the list of films I hadn't seen.

Saratoga Springs, back in the 1930s and still today was known as a resort town that spent the month of August hosting a horse-racing meet that catered to the wealthy set. So, as you might guess, the movie deals with that horse set. Grandpa Clayton (Lionel Barrymore) owns Brookvale, a stud farm breeding racing horses. Or should I say owned, because he's fallen into debt and the bank is about to take everything from him. It doesn't help that his son Frank (Jonathan Hale) has incurred heavy gambling debts to professional gambler Duke Bradley (Clark Gable). But Duke likes Gramps as well as Frank's daughter Carol (Jean Harlow) and helps them keep the farm, or at least keep being able to run it, even if they're no longer going to own it -- Duke has the deed.

Carol, for her part has gone over to Europe to become cultured, where she meets a fellow American who's apparently been trying to gain some class too, Wall Street investment banker Hartley Madison (Walter Pidgeon). The two get engaged, although Carol is adamant that she's not going to use Hartley's money to buy back the deed to the farm from Duke.

Carol studies the horse-racing racket in an attempt to win back the money she'll need to buy the deed legitimately. This necessitates her spending a lot of time at racetracks all along the east coast, so she keeps meeting Duke and his gambling friends, Jesse (Frank Morgan) and Fritzi (Una Merkel). Fritzi realizes Duke is in love with Carol, and the more Carol keeps running into Duke, the less she dislikes him, to the point where you know the two are going to wind up together in the final reel even though Carol is still engaged to Hartley.

All of this is leading up to the eventual climax at Saratoga. Huntley has bought a horse after inadvertently outbidding Duke at a horse auction. Huntley wagers that this horse will be able to beat one that Duke is backing at the big race in Saratoga. Duke, for his part, has other ideas, and Carol still has divided loyalties....

It's hard to escape the poignancy of knowing that Jean Harlow died before Saratoga was completed while watching it. Not only that, but she was already terminally ill. Still, despite her health she does the best she can with the material and gives a reasonably good performance. The only thing is, the material isn't the greatest, not that this is the fault of anybody in the cast. They're all professional, while Hattie McDaniel as a maid gets to sing a verse as the whole train car does a song, and shows what a good performer she could have been if she had been given a real chance.

I also couldn't help but wonder what might have become of Harlow's career had she not died young. Sadly, I have the feeling that, as with several other big actresses of the 1930s, notably Joan Blondell or Kay Francis, World War II would have put a serious crimp in her career. She had talent, but the sort of roles that were good for her at MGM would have gone by the wayside once the more serious atmosphere the war engendered took hold.

The Land that Time Forgot

In the spring of 2025, TCM ran a spotlight of movies based on pulp literature. Edgar Rice Burroughs is best known for Tarzan in that vein, but he wrote any number of non-Tarzan books. One adaptation that TCM ran as part of the spotlight was The Land that Time Forgot.

The movie starts off with a different way of getting to the flashback: on a cliff on what looks like it could be the island of northern Scotland but isn't, somebody throws a bottle off the cliff into the sea. Eventually that bottle makes it to land some ways away, and a British sailor finds it, and that there's a message in the bottle. Reading the message leads us to the main action of the movie....

Head back to World War I. American Bowen Tyler (Doug McClure) is a passenger on a British ship, along with Lisa Clayton (Susan Penhaligon). This being the middle of the war, it's not surprising that there are German U-boats in the area, and that eventually one of them torpedoes the British ship. There are a couple of British Navy survivors along with the Americans, and they're piced up by the U-boat cpatain, Friedrich von Schoenvorts (John McEnery). Since some of the men are British officers, it's not surprising that con Schoenvorts makes the prisoners of war. It's also not surprising that the British and Tyler want to fight back against the Germans and try to take over control of the U-boat.

However, in a series of fights for control of the U-boat, the radio and compass get broken, so the people don't know quite where they're going, even though you'd think with a sextant and working watch they'd have some reasonably close idea of their latitude and longitude. Lost and nearly out of fuel, they suddenly spot a land mass that shouldn't be there, or maybe it's just a giant iceberg. Their working theory is that this is the mythical island of Caprona that was supposedly sighted by the first set of Antarctic explorers in the explorations of 150 years earlier. And there seems to be an undersea passage through the ice, how convenient.

So they go through the passage with the hope of putting in to work on repairs to the U-boat or some such. But their jaunt is rudely interrupted by creatures that look like dinosaurs. And then, later, they're attacked by hominids, but hominids of a fairly primitive species. On the bright side, the prohibited land of fire that the one hominid who sort of befriends them, being of a different tribe from the one attacking them, leads them to, is actually oil! Perhaps the 20th century humans can figure out a way to use that oil to get out of their predicament if they work together. But they're in a race against time. After all, there are hominids on the island who are more than willing to attack them, while at the same time if the underground oil catches fire it could cause catastrophic problems.

In reading the reviews for The Land that Time Forgot, I see a running theme of a lot of people who first saw the movie as young boys, loved it then, and then watched it again as an adult and can see that the movie definitely has the flaws you can imagine a lower-budget movie based on a pulp novel would have. I'd mostly agree with that assessment, although I'd add that the movie is also full of the sort of plot hole you really have to overlook considering that these are fantasy movies at heart. Taking that into account, The Land that Time Forgot is a fun enough movie, although certainly not great by any measure. Sit back on a rainy day, especially if you have a young son to watch it with.

Out of the Blue

It always amazes me just how many old movies there are that I hadn't even heard of until they show up on TCM, or nowadays, I come across them when I'm on Tubi or one of the other FAST platforms. Then again, there were quite a few lower-budget studios putting out B stuff. In this case, that studio is Eagle-Lion, and the movie in question is Out of the Blue.

George Brent plays Arthur Earthleigh, a businessman in New York who can afford one of those posh apartments with an open-air balcony. He lives there with his stodgy wife Mae (Carole Landis), who wants everything in the apartment to be just perfect. She's really irritated about her neighbor, artist David Galleo (Turhan Bey). He's an artist who has a German shepherd dog that insists on burying bones on the Earthleighs' side of the balcony, and that really ticks Mae off. She wants Arthur to get their lawyer and make David get rid of the dog, which is really more of an excuse to give David the character motivation to do what he does later in the movie. Meanwhile, watching from two stories above are a pair of spinster aunt types, Spring and Ritchie (Elizabeth Patterson and Julia Dean respectively).

Mae has to go up to Connecticut to visit her sick sister for the weekend, leaving Arthur alone at home. He goes out to a bar where he meets Olive (Ann Dvorak), who follows him back to the apartment because she's generally the sort of person following on from Katharine Hepburn's character in Bringing Up Baby. For fairly understandble reasons, Arthur wants to get Olive out of his apartment, despite her claiming to have a heart condition that can be helped by copious amounts of brandy. Arthur thinks he's succeeded in sending Olive on her way, but she goes into the guest bedroom and passes out on the bed.

The next morning Arthur finds out what has happened. Worse, Olive has completely rearranged the furniture, which is going to piss Mae off when she finds out. And then to complicate things further, when Arthur more forcefully tries to evice Olive he accidentally strikes her, causing her to faint and pass out on the ground. Arthur thinks she's died, and decides that the best thing to do is deposit the dead body on David's side of the balcony. David has a string of women visiting his place to do modeling work for him, such as current client Deborah (Virginia Mayo).

David finds the body, but also realizes that Olive is not in fact dead, a fact which is very useful because he now has a way to get back at Arthur and Mae, by blackmailing Arthur into allowing David to keep his dog, as well as making Arthur think the police are on to him. The two biddies upstairs see the body and naturally call the police, since there's been a string of murders in the neighborhood. As you can guess, things get rather complicated, although everything mostly works out for the good people in this story.

Out of the Blue is a movie that may work for the right sort of person. To be honest, the comedic premise isn't a bad one, making me think of The Trouble With Harry, although in that case Harry was really most sincerely dead. The issue I had with the movie, however, was the Olive character. She gets so obnoxious that it's difficult to have sympathy with her. It's almost as though I would have been OK with if it she actually had died. And since the story is basically one extended joke, it can be a bit tough if you don't like the character at the center of the joke.

But again, I can see why some people are going to love a movie like Out of the Blue, so watch for yourself and reach your own judgment.

The Yearling

Actor Claude Jarman Jr. died earlier this year at the age of 90. It's not overly surprising that he didn't get a full prime-time programming tribute. Instead, he's one of the people being honored in tonight's schedule of movies dedicated to people who left us in 2025. Jarman is one of the stars of The Yearling, which comes on at 2:00 AM.

Jarman, who was about 12 years old at the time, plays young Jody Baxter. He lives in a backwater part of Florida around 1880, together with his parents Ezra nicknamed Penny (Gregory Peck), and Ora (Jane Wyman). They're hardscrabble farmers, living the sort of life that Thomas Hobbes may have been thinking of when he called it "nasty, brutish, and short". It's certainly been short for Jody's siblings who are all dead. The land is swampy, the family is always one bad harvest away from starvation, and don't even have a well on their property. You have to wonder what sort of life Ora had before getting married to Penny.

So it's a disaster when a bear kills some of the livestock, and one of their hunting dogs gets injured as father and son chase after the bear. It isn't the first disaster to befall the family, and it isn't going to be the last either. Yet Jody seems surprisingly equanimeous about the whole thing, as though he's got a whole lot of maturing to do. Indeed, he's certainly going to seem immature when it gets to the main plot of the movie, although we still have a good ways to get to that because The Yearling is a fairly slow-moving movie, in keeping with the pace of life in the rural south of that era.

Eventually, another disaster does happen, when the Baxters are looking for some of their pigs that have gone missing and might have been stolen. While tracking through the piney woods, Dad gets bitten by a rattlesnake. Instead of sucking the venom out, an apparent folk remedy is that if you can get a deer liver, that will suck the venom out. So Dad is able to kill it and get enough of the venom out that he's going to recover. However, it turns out that the deer had a fawn.

Now, this is where the movie goes around the bend. Jody should be old enough to know how precarious an existence the family has. But instead, he wants to raise the fawn because the poor thing doesn't have a mother any more. Ora is strict and smart enough to know this deer is going to be trouble; just ask any modern-day person who's tried to grow a garden in an area with deer. Sure enough, the deer starts eating crops. Jody cries and cries that his Mom is being too strict and that Jody can build a bigger fence. But eventually things go too far, and Jody is going to have to kill the yearling himself, leading up to a rite of passage and an eventual happy ending.

The Yearling was made in color with a lot of location shooting, two things which help the movie. The acting is also quite good, with Jarman getting an honorary juvenile acting award. But the script is unbelievably mawkish in addition to making Jody look shockingly immature.

Note that The Yearling is getting another airing on TCM on December 30 at 5:45 PM as part of a day of animal films.

Sean Penn wants to live, too

One more film that I recorded during 31 Days of Oscar last February, never actually having seen it before, was Dead Man Walking. Eventually, I got around to watching it, writing this review, and saving it to post at some future date since I'm a couple weeks ahead on reviews and have multiple reviews saved in draft for when I have a bunch of films from a Star of the Month to write about.

Susan Sarandon plays Helen Prejean, CSJ, a Catholic nun from one of those orders that apparently believes not just going out in the community, but not requiring its nuns to wear a traditional habit to do so. She works with Sr. Colleen in an adult education center in and around the projects of Slidell, LA, doing some of the sort of social work you can expect from such a group of nuns. Somehow, a letter from one of the prisoners on death row comes to her attention; the Catholic Church, believing in redemption, has a prediposition to ministering to people like those on death row. So Sr. Helen decides she's going to take on a challenge, never having done anything like this before.

Sr. Helen goes to the peniteniary to meet the prisoner in question, Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn). (Poncelet is not in fact a real person but a composite of two of the prisoners the real Sr. Helen ministered to.) Poncelet is on death row for his part in the rape and murder of two high school sweethearts. He, for his part, insists that he should receive a commutation because, while he was at the scene, he wasn't the one who pulled the trigger, but his friend Carl. Sr. Helen agrees to support him abt the commutation hearing and appeals, despite the regular prison chaplain (Scott Wilson) warning her that death row inmates can be nasty, manipulative people who claim to want redemption but are only using this as a tacti to prey upon innocent little women like Sr. Helen.

Sr. Helen goes to the hearings, and is buttonholed after one of the hearings by... the parents of the two murder victims, Mr. Delacroix (Raymond Barry) and the Percys (R. Lee Ermey and Celia Weston). These three are, needless to say, not particularly happy with Sr. Helen's work with Poncelet. Doesn't she know that there was grieving family left behind? Couldn't she have been bothered to listen to their side of the story rather than just naïvely accepting Poncelet's story? So Sr. Helen goes to see the Percys and Delcroix to talk to them in more detail while also talking to Poncelet's mother and siblings, to get a much more complicated view of the case.

Along the way, as she keeps talking to Poncelet himself, she finds that he is in many ways the sort of thoroughly nasty person the chaplain said death row inmates can be. Poncelet can be arrogant, violent, and certainly a nasty racist even though the two murder victims happen to be white. The appeals fail, and Poncelet's execution date is set, with Sr. Helen offering to be the spiritual advisor to Poncelet. This leads up to a climax that's part I Want to Live! and part Angels with Dirty Faces.

The real life Sr. Helen Prejean is a noted advocate against capital punishment, and the movie is based on her own memoir also titled Dead Man Walking. As I've mentioned myself on several occasions, I don't trust the state to mete out capital punishment, although I come at this view from a rather different starting point than most anti-death penalty people. (I'd argue, for example, that a lot of the people who claimed to oppose police brutality when it visited George Floyd suddenly became a lot more accepting of police brutality, and deliberately harsh sentencing, on January 6, 2021.) But where I hated the climax of I Want to Live! because it was horrendously propagandistic, Dead Man Walking is much more nuanced: yes, the people involved in making the movie oppose the death penaly, but they also show us that a lot of the Matthew Poncelets of the world are in fact nasty people who destroy the lives of a whole lot of people they leave behind.

Dead Man Walking is also helped by outstanding performances from the two leads. So if you haven't seen it before, do yourself a favor and watch Dead Man Walking.

I know -- let's put on a minstrel show!

Continuing to go through the movies that I recorded when Mickey Rooney was TCM's Star of the Month in December 2024, this time it's another of the musicals he did with Judy Garland, Babes on Broadway. This is, of course, not to be confused with Babes in Arms which is another musical that Rooney and Garland did together although they play different characters.

This time around, Mickey Rooney is playing a young man named Tommy Williams, who is apparently all grown up since he doesn't have any parents around. That, and he's part of a trio calling themsleves the "Three Balls of Fire" together with Ray (Ray McDonald) and Hammy (future director Richard Quine when he was still in front of the camera). They have dreams of fame, but of course those dreams don't seem to be going anywhere in part because it's tough to make it in New York, and more generally tough to get noticed period. On their last night performing as the entertainment at an Italian restaurant, they get a big tip from a Miss Jones (Fay Bainter). It turns out that Jones is actually the executive assistant Thurston Reed (James Gleason), and she is able to get the Three Balls of Fire an audition with Reed.

Of course, Tommy is a bit stupid in that he tries to use this to get all his other friends auditions too, which is not what Reed would want. And the friends is a new one, Penny Morris (Judy Garland). She is the daughter of a music teacher, and works at a settlement house with underprivileged children. The settlement house is looking to do the fresh air thing; that is, get city kids out of the city for a couple of weeks and up to a camp in the Catskills or out in New Jersey or some such). Tommy and Penny both get the brilliant idea to set up a charity fundraiser of having the young people perform, except that Tommy intends to use it to raise the money to rent a real theater instead of helping the poor city kids.

That threatens to put the kibosh on what is also going to be a budding relationship between him and Penny, as you might guess since these musicals are nothing if not formulaic. But a wrinkle gets put in those plans thanks to World War II on the other side of the Atlantic. (The movie was released a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, although surely most of the filming must have been before December 7, making it interesting that this plot line is in the movie.) As a result of the war, British children were being evacuated to Canada and the US (as in On the Sunny Side which shows up from time to time on FXM), and they need help more than the settlement house kids. Also, Tommy has more sympathy for them and probably wants to bed Penny too, so he decides to be honest.

This gives Jones the idea of letting the kids use one of Reed's old, disused theaters if they can refurbish it (where are they going to get the money for that) to put on the show. The refurbishment offers the opportunity for probably the best sequence in the movie, as Penny and Tommy imagine the performers who played here in previous generations and do their impressions of what such performances might have been like. However, there are legal issues with the show going forward, combined with the fact that Reed doesn't exactly know his old theater is being reused. But, since it's a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland musical, we know that it's going to have a happy ending.

That happy ending is where the minstrel show comes in, and is the thing that pretty much everybody else brings up in discussing Babes on Broadway, because this is a long blackface sequence, much longer than there were in some other movies. And modern-day people have to point out how terrible it is that this stuff was popular back in the day. (Some might say still is, except that it's now womanface and men who don't look like convincing women calling themselves "trans" so they can get off on getting into what are supposed to be private spaces for women.)

In any case, Garland and Rooney give their typical rousing performances, and it's easy to see how the movie taken as a whole would have lifted the spirits of audiences on the homefront who had a lot going on in their lives by the time the movie was released. So Babes on Broadway is actually worth a watch.

Is it fast enough so we can fly away?

Trashy movies can be a lot of fun to watch: often times they're so bad that they're unintentially funny. It was with that in mind that I went into my viewing of The Betsy. It's based on a novel by Harold Robbins who was famous for writing this sort of trashy material, so knowing that you should know what you're getting yourself into.

The movie starts with a young Tommy Lee Jones. He plays Angelo Perino, a race car driver on what would be the IndyCar circuit, although I'm not quite certain if they referred to it that way back in the 1970s. At his latest race out in California, he loses control of his car and suffers an accident that looks nasty and is bad enough to have him wind up in hospital, but not so nasty that he winds up crippled or brain-damaged or anything like that. But on getting out of the hospital, he's met by young Betsy Hardeman (Kathleen Beller). Betsy and her great-grandfather Loren Sr. (Laurence Olivier) had been watching the race and are fans of Angelo for various reasons. Indeed, Betsy came out to California to bring Angelo to Loren Sr.

Loren Sr. now lives in Florida, where he's been tinkering on engine designs. Back in the day, he was the founder and president of the Bethlehem Car Company. This being the 1970s, the company is beginning to fall on hard times, especially since it's not one of the Big Three automakers. As we'll see in a later scene, Loren's grandson Loren III (Robert Duvall), now the president, has been branching out into all sorts of consumer goods. But back to that tinkering, it's really more than tinkering. In part because of the oil shock of 1973 and in part because of people like Ralph Nader, the American auto industry is in trouble while the government is threatening to put onerous regulations on what sorts of cars should be built and sold in the US. Loren Sr.'s tinkering has resulted in an enging that can supposedly get 60 miles to the gallon and be in a safe compact car. But he needs someone who can get the car built without attracting the notice of Loren III, which is where Angelo comes in. Loren Sr. is going to claim to use some of his own personal fortune to have the Bethlehem Car name put on a race car, which is why Angelo will be working for the company. In secret, of course, he's going to be working on the concept car, named the Betsy after the great-granddaughter.

In and among this, we learn how the family and company have wound up the way they have and why Loren III seems to care more about the divisions of the company other than the automotive division. A series of flashbacks take us to 1931, the day that Loren Jr. (the original Paul Rudd, not the one in films like The Cider House Rules and others) got married. Loren Sr.'s wife goes upstairs to look for him at the reception, and finds him having sex with one of the maids! And it's not the only affair Loren Sr. is going to have along the way, includng one that's much more "shocking", if you will. Loren Jr. has his own problems, climaxing in the great auto strike of 1936 which Loren Sr. only learns about when he returns from a long European vacation.

In the present day, Loren Sr. and Angelo learn that Loren III is spying on them and actively trying to get the Betsy nixed, in part because of Loren III's feelings for his own grandfather. Loren III (Betsy's father) is having an affair with a British noble, Lady Ayres (Lesley-Anne Down), whom Angelo also beds, which certainly complicates matters. Further complicating things is that Betsy clearly has a crush on Angelo, who is happy to reciprocate since it means more sex. But will the Betsy ever get build and sold on the consumer market?

As you can tell from all the sex scenes I mentioned, The Betsy is certainly trashy. Unfortunately, it's not quite as garish as some of the other great trashy works of previous decades, like Valley of the Dolls. Instead, The Betsy has a decidedly 1970s esthetic with pastels, gauzy focus, and interminable slow zoom-ins. It takes the movie from being a really fun bad to one that's more of a bit of work to get through, which is a shame, because the material has the potential to be unbelievably terrible.

Frank Morgan Star Vehicle?

Back in the day, the studios had access to a whole bunch of great character actors, most of whom weren't necessarily right for leading roles, at least not in the sort of prestige movies the studios put their stars in. Some of the character actors, when they did get leads, did so in B movies. Such is the case with Frank Morgan, around whom the movie Hullabaloo seems to have been designed.

Morgan plays Frank Merriweather, and as the movie opens he roaming the halls of radio station AJN looking for the talent department, as he's got a record he just knows will impress the talent scout types. But they've got enough auditions for the day, cut to bellhop Charles Holland and Virginia O'Brien of the deadpan singing routine both doing their own versions of "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny". This is really an opportunity for golfer Bob Strong (a young Dan Dailey, so young he's credited as Dan Dailey Jr.) to be introduced to the story. He's the boyfriend of Wilma Norton, daughter of one of the radio executives, who only has the job beause Wilma realizes this isn't the era where being the wife of a golf pro isn't a high-status position.

Also at the auditions, although not getting one, is Laura Merriweather (Virginia Grey), who styles herself a dancing singer, which doesn't make good radio. She tries to introduce herself to Bob, which makes Bob's fiancée jealous and basically scuppers any chance she has of getting a job. It's here that she meets Frank, who happens to be her father. He doesn't recognize her in part because he's got three ex-wives whom he hasn't seen in years because he's been trying to avoid the alimony that he doesn't have the money to pay. Together, the two go back to see Strong, who learns that Frank's talent is voice impressions. This gets him a job doing a version of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds, at which he's so good that he sets off a national panic.

This also brings all three ex-wives out of the woodwork (Billie Burke, Sara Haden, and Connie Gilchrist). Frank also fathered one child by each wife; the other two children are played by Leni Lynn and Larry Nunn. Frank needs to be able to pay off that alimoney, so all of the kids and even the ex-wives have a stake in getting Frank a job in radio. The kids, for their part, also have talent. Meanwhile, Bob has the difficult task of getting the Perkins pill company, led by Clyde (Donald Meeks) and his sister-in-law Lulu (Nydia Westman), to sponsor a new program for the network. Perhaps Frank would be a good fit for such a program. There are also all sorts of romantic complications along the way. Meanwhile, in a bit of cross-promotion for MGM, one of the episodes of the radio show has Frank doing a rendition of a scene from the then-current movie Boom Town, which Frank theoretically supplying the voices although in fact Frank Morgan was simply lip-synching to the real-life stars of the movie.

There's a fun idea behind Hullabaloo, although it's at the same time easy enough to see why MGM would only have this as a B movie and why it's not so well remembered today. Frank Morgan shows he's got talent, although he's not really a fit for lead acting. Giving audiences another chance to see a lot of routines, they way they would have in two-reelers, would have been another plus for MGM. Charles Holland, the black singer playing the bellhop, has quite a bit of talent as a singer but since this was 1940 it's obvious why he's not more famous. Virginia O'Brien's deadpan thing can be funny although I can understand why it might be an acquired taste to audiences in 2025.

Ultimately, Hullabaloo is a bit more of a time capsule than a fully coherent movie. But it's an interesting little time capsule.

An Angel at My Table

Another of the movies that I had sitting on my DVR for quite some time that was about to expire was on that TCM had on its Imports programming block, even though it's in English. That movie, from New Zealand, is An Angel at My Table.

The movie is based on the three-volume memoirs by New Zealand author Janet Frame, and is told in three parts which each bear the name of one title in those memoirs. Frame was born in 1924, and in a smaller city of the South Island which, as I understand it, was not the wealthiest area at the time as everything was moving north to Auckland and Wellington, never mind the economic depression that would have hit just as Frame would have started attending school. It was also an era when parenting was much stricter, so childhood wasn't exactly a happy time. Worse, the first part of the memoirs tell us that one of Janet's sisters drowned at a young age, while her brother suffered from what was likely epilepsy. Still, Janet at one point is given a school assignment of writing a poem given an opening line, and she writes one that's well received, to the point that she gets published in the local newspaper.

Fast forward to the mid-1940s. Janet (played as an adult by Kerry Fox) needs a profession to earn her way as an adult, and had long thought of becoming a writer. But to make money, she decides on her other desire, which was to become a teacher. Eventually Janet gets to the point where she goes to a real school to do the student-teacher thing. However, for some reason when the schools inspector shows up to watch the student teachers, Janet feels that she's unable to go on and just gets up and runs away from the school, suggesting that she's not going to teach and instead take on a menial job while working at being a writer. She attempts suicide once before another of her sisters drowns, with this latter incident sends her over the edge so to speak and into a mental hospital. The doctors have already diagnosed her with schizophrenia, which was almost definitely a misdiagnosis since Janet doesn't seem to have been hearing voices or any of the other classical symptoms of the disease. But since neuropsychiatry was primitive back in the late 1940s, Janet is forced to spend eight years in the mental hospital, where she's subjected to some 200 electroshock treatments before the doctors suggest brain surgery. The latter is only averted because she's been keeping up with her writing and getting a well-received book of her poems published.

For the third act, Janet gets a stipend that allows her to go to Europe to work on her writing, the feeling being that having more experience out in the wide world will make her a better writer. She goes to Spain, where she meets Bernhard, an American student spending the summer there. They begin a relationship, but it's going to be a doomed one since he has to go back to the States at the end of the summer. Still depressed (I wouldn't be surprised if Frame did suffer from depression that was misdiagnosed as schizophrenia, but the movie doesn't quite address this), she takes on more menial jobs while trying to write and eventually becoming a successful writer. I'm not giving much away with that since Frame was well enough known in New Zealand at the time the movie was made.

An Angel at My Table (taking its name from the second of the third volume of the memoirs), was released in 1990, only after the third memoir was published. Director Jane Campion had been impressed by the first volume and wanted to make a movie on it, but Frame herself requested Campion wait until all three volumes of the memoir were written and published. I mention this because this has something to do with the one big criticism I have with An Angel at My Table.

The movie is well-acted, and the production design is quite good as well. However, Campion's original intention, not being a feature film director at the time the first memoir came out, was to film the memoir as a TV miniseries in New Zealand. The movie as finished has the feel of something that was in fact plotted as a TV miniseries. And, like The Emigrants and The New Land, I think the material her is something that would indeed have worked well as a miniseries, especially with commercial breaks at the appropriate spots. But what we get is a movie that runs almost an hour longer than My Left Foot, coming in at 158 minutes. And boy does it feel long, and like there's still a lot that we're missing out on. So while I can mostly recommend An Angel at My Table, be forewarned that it's a slow and long film.

Bill Without Min

MGM memorably paired Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler in the movie Min and Bill. Dressler would sadly get cancer and die a few years later, while Beery would continue to play a series of similar characters. One such character was another one named Bill, in the 1941 film Barnacle Bill.

Like Min and Bill, Barnacle Bill takes place in one of those California fishing towns. Wallace Beery plays Bill Johansen, an ultimately good-hearted fisherman who is however both irresponsible in that he spends too much of his money on booze, and financially unsuccessful since fishing is a hard job that's not financially rewarding. The equivalent of the Min character here is Marge Cavendish, played by Marjorie Main. She's the daughter of one of the land-lubbers who make their living servicing the fishermen and their boats, Pop Cavendish (Donald Meek). There's some suggestion that Bill might marry Marge, except for all those financial issues. Indeed, Pop would even like to take Bill's boat in exchange for all of the money Bill owes Pop, but there's a catch.

Bill doesn't actually own the boat. In a fairly bright move, he put the boat in the name of his young daughter Virginia. She went to live with relatives when Mom died, since Bill is out to sea to much and wouldn't be able to take care of his daughter. As a result, it's been years since Bill has seen Virginia. But, as you can guess from this plot description Virginia is going to be showing up, now aged about 12 and played by Virginia Weidler. Bill can't really afford to feed her, so he basically pawns Virginia off of Marge, not that Marge can afford it. However, it'll do Marge to have another female around to help lighten the workload. And, as you might guess, Marge and Virginia set about attempting to tame Bill.

Now, since this is an MGM movie, you'll be right if you think that's what happens in the last reel, although there are going to be complications before they get to the happy ending. A lot of thos complications involve the fishing business. Bill would like to get a better boat, but naturally doesn't have the money for it. And part of the reason for that is because of the other big fisherman in the area, John Kelly (Barton MacLane). He's got a refrigerated boat, which means he can go out farther and get more fish. But he also uses that power to treat the other fisherman like dirt and pay them an unfairly low rate for their catches. Bill is the first one to stand up to John, and that encourages some of the other fishermen to start taking Bill's side.

Bill is eventually able to mortgage everything to risk it on that bigger boat he always wanted, getting people like his best friend Pico (Leo Carrillo) to accompany him on another fishing trip. But John Kelly isn't going to go quietly, and he has some of his men try to sabotage Bill's new ship. As I said, though, you know a movie like Barnacle Bill is never going to have anything but a happy ending.

I can see why audiences of 1941, when Barnacle Bill was released, would enjoy a movie like this. The fact that MGM would have kept Wallace Beery's more unsavory side a secret from the viewing public would have helped too. It's not that I dislike Beery's work, but knowing that Beery had the reputation of being the stereotypical mean drunk and difficult to work with does give one a different view of watching his movies. Still, on screen, Beery is able to project the lovable drunk, which audiences during the Depression loved. Barnacle Bill continues in that mold, while not breaking any new ground. It's worth one watch, but not a movie that will ever be considered a masterpiece.

Rudolph Friml, Jr.

Warner Bros. liked to make a lot of musical shorts, both two-reelers telling a bare-bones story and one-reelers that were more of a spotlight for a singer or a band. One that showed up recently was Six Hits and a Miss.

The opening credits are interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that they mention director Jean Negulesco, who was still at the stage of his career where he was directing shorts; he wouldn't graduate to features until a few years later with The Mask of Dimitrios followed by a string of interesting movies first at Warner Bros. and then at Fox. The other is that the band here is conducted by Rudolph Friml, Jr. That of course implies that Friml Sr. was someone of enough renown that there would be a need -- or have been a need back in the day -- to differentiate between the two. Sure enough, the original Rudolf Friml was a Czech composer of light operettas; you might know a couple of his works for having been turned into the Jeanette MacDonald movies The Firefly and Rose Marie.

As for the short, it involves Friml and his band, accompanied by a singing group called the titular Six Hits and a Miss for having a female lead and six men providing harmony, at least until the group was broken up by the wartime draft. They sing a song called "You've Got to Know How to Dance". And herein lies another interesting thing about this short. The song was earlier used in the 1936 movie Colleen, and here Warner Bros. reuses footage from the dance number that accompanied the song in Colleen to intercut the new footage. Now, it wasn't uncommon for such footage to be resued, or even movies to be re-released, as that was in 1942 the only way the stuff would get back out in the public and make a few bucks for the studio again. There was no television yet to have a late late show showing old movies.

As for the quality of this particular short, it's OK if not great. I'm not the biggest fan of these one-reel musical shorts since for the most part there's not all that much that was done beyond putting the camera in front of the band and maybe having a pair of dancers or more. So it's everything else going on with Six Hits and a Miss that makes the short worth mentioning.

TCM's Christmas Programming

It's a bit hard to believe that we're only six days away from Christmas, but here we are. TCM's holiday movie marathon is starting this evening in prime time, and will be continuing right through to the start of prime time on Christmas day itself. Once again, however, the Christmas programming concludes at 8:00 PM on December 25, which has always seemed a bit odd to me. Thursdays on TCM this month have been for movies dealing with heaven, if you will, and the final Thursday night in December will start with A Matter of Life and Death at 8:00 PM.

But that's still almost a week away, so looking at the Christmas movies seems a bit more relevant right now. The marathon kicks off with something that definitely is a Christmas movie, Holiday Affair at 8:00 PM today. Hard to believe that it's been 15 years since I first blogged about it.

One of the few "new to me" movies this year will be Prancer, which is on the schedule for Dec. 20 at noon. Gotta make a point to record that, although YouTube TV seems to want to limit how far ahead it goes on my Roku box. Apparently, Google did something that makes it an issue for the base-level devices like mine with less RAM.

Noir Alley is taking a week off, I think, but the late night spot between Saturday and Sunday does have Lady in the Lake (midnight between Dec. 20 and Dec. 21). It's not getting a repeat at 10:00 AM Sunday.

I don't remember the Clara Bow film Call Her Savage (10:00 PM Dec. 21) having a Christmas scene, but then it's been ages since I've seen it, having blogged about back in 2008. Maybe it's time for a re-watch.

The daypart of Dec. 23 is a bunch of stuff that's only set around Christmas and not traditional fare, which returns for the 24th along with some repeats, such as a second showing of Holiday Affair (Dec. 24, 4:15 PM).

Actually making a story about Salome might have been better

Another of those movies where I'd seen the title show up on TCM on a number of occasions, but had never actually watched it, was The Seventh Veil. So the last time it showed up on TCM, I finally got around to putting it on my DVR and watching it before it expired, so that I could do a post on it now.

Ann Todd plays Francesca Cunningham. As the movie opens, she's in a hospital late one evening, looking for a way to escape the hospital, as she looks around rather furtively when she's out in the hallway. She does get out, and goes to a bridge, where she jumps in the river in an obvious attempt to commit suicide. She fails, thankfully, since if she had succeeded we wouldn't have a movie. But she winds up in some sort of catatonic state where she won't talk to anybody who can help her. So the hospital brings in a psychiatrist, Dr. Larsen (Herbert Lom), who proceeds to drug Francesca up and bring about a state of narcotic-induced hypnosis, because this sort of psychiatric mumbo-jumbo was the hotness especially in Hollywood. (The title of the movie makes sense here, as Dr. Larsen says the narcotics will make Francesca remove her seventh veil, the way Salome voluntarily did.)

At least Gregory Peck got a Salvador Dali-designed dream sequence in Spellbound. Here, Francesca Cunningham suddenly becomes clear enough to understand and is able to remember everything perfectly in her hypnotic flashback sequence that lasts for most of the movie. Well, actually, there are multiple such scenes since the damn drugs keep wearing off. Francesca begins to talk about when she was a young girl of 14, at an all girls' boarding school, and getting into trouble for collecting specimens from the pond. She's got some musical aptitude as a piano player, but for getting into trouble, she gets caned, which causes her to miss out on a possible music scholarship. It's tough to play with sore hands.

Francesca's dad dies, Mom already having been dead for some years. Her closest relative is one of Dad's cousins, Nicholas (James Mason), who is old enough for Francesca to consider an uncle, although he hates that. Indeed, he is for whatever reason someone who doesn't want to be around women that much. But he's a failed pianist himself and sees the talent inherent in Francesca, and decides to start training her himself. And indeed, Francesca gets to the point where perhaps she could perform in public. She's also got a mind of her own, and meets American Peter Gay (Hugh McDermott) who has an interest in swing music that absolutely pisses off Nicholas. Nicholas is so controlling of Francesca and so wants her to have a professional career in music that he takes Francesca off to the Continent lest she run off with Peter. After all, she is still just 17 and Nicholas' ward.

You can see, however, why she wound up with psychiatric problems. Things are about to get worse, however. She spends years on the Continent, returns to the UK and finds Peter's gotten married, and then falls in love with Max, an artist Nicholas hires to paint Francesca's portrait. She's finally grown up, and in theory can choose whomever she wants as a romantic partner. So when she chooses Max, this drives Nicholas around the bend and forces Max to try to elope with her, leading to a car crash as they race away from Nicholas' London mansion.

Ah, this is all melodramatic and psychological silliness, wrapped up in a stylish package. And I will say that all of the technical parts of the film as well as the acting are very well done. But in addition to the story (the screenplay surprisingly won an Oscar), for me there was another big issue, which was the politics of the time in which the movie was released. Its British premiere was October 1945, which is obviously just after the end of World War II. No biggie there, but then you see the flashbacks take place over a series of years, and the present seems to be in a time that hasn't been affected by the war at all! No Italian Fascism, no mention of the encroaching Nazi menace during the montage of Vienna, none of that. It made things tough to believe for me.

But there are a lot of people who are going to love a movie like The Seventh Veil, so watch and judge for yourself.

State Fair (1962)

I mentioned a few weeks back that the 1962 Pat Boone version of State Fair was in the FXM rotation, and that it was one of the few movies currently in the rotatoin that I haven't done a post about. With that in mind, I recorded it so that I could do a post on it for the next airing. That airing is tomorrow, Dec. 18, at 6:00 AM, so now we get the post on it.

Sadly, the FXM print stars off with the opening credits in Cinemascope, before the action is panned-and-scanned down to 16:9. Pat Boone is driving the sort of sports car that would get used as a racing car but is also street legal. Boone is Wayne Frake, living in the small farming town of Banning, TX together with his parents Abel (Tom Ewell) and Melissa (Alice Faye) and his kid sister Margy (Pamela Tiffin). All of them are getting ready to go to the Texas State Fair in Dallas, held annually around the end of September to the beginning of October.

Mom is known for her canning skills, having produced award-winning pickles in a previous year. This year, she's planning on entering her mince meat, but she's also going to be put in a division that has her against more industrial kitchens, which seems rather unfair although hers is not the main story in the movie. Dad's story isn't either, although he's got a subplot involving the showing of his prize pig Blue Boy. Although Blue Boy is a pig that could well win the prize, he's also temperamental, and that could sink Abel's ambitions.

But, as I implied in the previous paragraph, it's really the two adult children's stories that are the bigger stories here. Margy is supposed to be a naïve small-town farm girl, although you'd think she'd have gone to Dallas with the rest of the family for previous editions of the fair. Here, on her first day at the fair, she meets roving reporter Jerry Dundee (Bobby Darin), who covers various attractions at the fair for the TV broadcasts and also does a musical lyrics game that Margy wins a consolation prize in. That prize is really just an excuse for Jerry to pursue Margy, although the pursuit is not in a bad way. The feeling between the two is mutual, with the question of what's going to happen to the relationship after the fair ends. This question is amplified when Jerry gets a good job offer, but it's to be a sportscaster in Big Ten football which would take him immediately to Chicago.

As for Wayne, he takes his car out on the dirt track for qualifying laps, and has one of the fastest qualifying times, which earns him a small prize that's presented by Emily Porter (Ann-Margret), a singer who's originally from New Jersey and doesn't know the first thing about farming, and knows that farm life isn't right for her. She really does fall for Wayne, and he even harder for her, but like Margy's relationship with Jerry, there's the question of how it's going to wind up. In Wayne's case, there's also the issue that he's supposed to have a girl back home. And he's also got the subplot of the big dirt track race that comes even after Mom and Dad's competitions.

This version of State Fair didn't get the best of reviews on its original release back in 1962, and I can see why, although I don't think it's anywhere near as bad as the critics or box office might lead you to think. One thing is that it is old fashioned; the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical came out in the mid-1940s and that's a decade after the first movie version (not a musical) with Will Rogers as the father back in 1933. I also have to say that Ewell is particularly badly cast as the father, not projecting rural Texas at all. Tiffin is also miscast, although to me it wasn't as bad as Ewell. The fact that there's some fair amount of location shooting helps, however.

All told, I think I'd recommend finding all three versions of State Fair to compare and contrast and judge for yourself.

Briefs for December 16, 2025

One of the bigger and more surprising obituaries is that of actor/director Rob Reiner, who was murdered over the weekend at the age of 78. It sounds like his son had some tragic mental health issues that led to self-medication and everything that follows from that. TCM just aired This Is Spinal Tap this past weekend before the news came out; as of now I don't know that there's been any further tribute scheduled.

However, looking at TCM's YouTube page, I see that there's already a TCM Remembers video for Reiner. I was there looking to see if TCM's year-end TCM Remembers piece has been aired yet. To be honest, I haven't been watching much live TCM, which would be why I haven't been paying close enough attention to whether the Parade of the Dead as I like to call it has gotten its release. So far, the piece is not on TCM's YouTube page.

I was going to do a briefs post for Dick Van Dyke's 100th birthday over the weekend, since I though the premiere of Mary Poppins was in prime time. It wasn't until lunchtime on Saturday that I noticed the centenary salute was during the afternoon, so my posting on it would have been too late. I did, however, record Mary Poppins, and, I think Bye Bye Birdie. I just have to check and make certain that they're both on my DVR since Mary Poppins especially is the sort of movie that I could see Disney wanting to screw around with the streaming rights.

In a similar matter, there's the question of the Netflix attempt to by Warner Bros./Discovery and what that's going to mean for TCM. I've been thinking some about it but never really wrote up any post, largely becuase I'm just not certain. There's been a fair bit of confusion as to where TCM is going to wind up. Apparently, WB/Discovery is splitting up with most of the cable channels not necessarily being part of the division that Netflix would be getting. And that's even if the deal goes through. Not only are there regulators who might want their say, there's also Paramount who put in a bid. Watch this space, as they might say. The one thing I would add is that I could foresee a problem if the WB film library (well, the Turner library that forms the backbone of TCM programming plus whatever else WB has added on in the past 30 years) and the TCM channel wind up in separate divisions.

I've finally seen the MGM Romeo and Juliet

Pretty much everybody does Shakespeare plays in their high school English classes, although which plays depends on the teacher. In my case one year we did Romeo and Juliet, and supplemented it by watching the Franco Zeffirelli version from the late 1960s. I've known for a long time that MGM did a version in the 1930s in response to Warner Bros. making A Midsummer Night's Dream, but for various reasons I hadn't ever gotten around to seeing this 1936 version of Romeo and Juliet in its entirety. So when TCM ran it during 31 Days of Oscar, I finally recorded it and watched it to do a post on here.

Now, with a movie like Romeo and Juliet, pretty much everybody already knows the story. Romeo Montague (played here by Leslie Howard) and Juliet Capulet (played by Norma Shearer) are adolescents (more on that later) from families where the older generation are rivals with a sort of blood-lust in the medieval Italian city of Verona. But Romeo and Juliet meet at a masquerade ball without knowing who each other is, and most definitely not knowing that the other is from that rival family who is supposed to be off limits. So they fall in love and meet each other surreptitiously, at least until Juliet's father (C. Aubrey Smith) insists on marrying Juliet off to somebody of an appropriate social standing who is not a Montague. Juliet's attempt to get out of this arranged marriage leads to tragedy.

Since the story is already known, any attempt to review a Shakespearean movie comes down to other factors. First up is the casting. I think I mentioned when I posted about A Midsummer Night's Dream ages ago that Warner Bros. was able to use mostly more classically-trained actors for the "serious" roles, while putting a lot of their contract players into Nick Bottom's acting troupe. MGM didn't quite achieve that, notably in the opening scene where hey have Edna May Oliver as Juliet's nurse and Andy Devine of all people as the nurse's assistant. Devine's character who is the Capulet who kicks off the fight in the opening scene between the Capulets and Montagues, is more of a man-child, especially in the medieval wardrobe.

Many of the main characters are way too old for the parts by cinematic standards, although back in the day it wasn't as uncommon on the live stage for people a few years older than the parts to be playing roles like Romeo and Juliet. Traveling stage companies wouldn't have had a 15-year-old girl available to play Julet. Shearer doesn't come off badly, while Howard has no difficulty with Shakespearean dialogue although he decidedly looks way too old. Ditto John Barrymore as Mercutio. Basil Rathbone as Tybalt is another one who can handle the dialog, and got an Oscar nomination for his trouble.

The production design is lovely, which is no less than can be expected from a studio like MGM. For music, much as Warner Bros. turned to Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, MGM also turned to pre-existing classical music; in this case mostly from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet. Unsurprisingly the music works well.

In the final analysis, MGM did about as well as could be expected from a Hollywood studio in trying to make Shakespeare, although you can see why Hollywood studios would start staying away from Shakespeare for a while. But, it's also not quite to the standard that Warner Bros. had set with A Midsummer Night's Dream.

White Shadows in the South Seas

A couple of days back I did a post on the John Gilbert film His Glorious Night, mentioning the transition from silent films to sound. One thing I don't think I mentioned in that post is how in the lead-up to fully talking films, there was a period in which some silent films, starting with Don Juan over at Warner Bros., didn't have dialog but did have synchronized scores and sound effects. An example of this over at MGM was White Shadows in the South Seas.

The movie was filmed almost entirely on location, which was a big deal for a movie of that era. As we saw in a movie like His Majesty O'Keefe that I did a post on some months back, the peoples of the Pacific Islands lived off the land -- or, well, off the sea -- until the arrival of Europeans who saw the resources as something to be exploited for use back home; in this case that resource is pearls as a valuable jewel. Dr. Lloyd (Monte Blue) is a doctor who ministers to both the Europeans and the locals, and has seen how the locals have not been able to adapt to the introduction of European civilization, with the result that "western" diseases are rampant among the Polynesian population.

This alarms Dr. Lloyd, but even more alarming to his is the fact that his fellow white Europeans just don't seem to care. All they want is those pearls, and they can't bother to give a fair price for the pearls regardless of what the harvesting does to the bodies of the divers who have to get the pearls from the oysters at the bottom of the Pacific. Dr. Lloyd protests to Sebastian (Robert Anderson), one of the traders, but to no avail. Well, worse, there is some avail, but it's in the opposite direction as Sebastian and the other traders decide they have to rid themselves of a meddlesome presence like Dr. Lloyd.

So to that end, they tell him there's a quarantine ship that needs a doctor and get him aboard. Except that this is a lie, and they tie Dr. Lloyd up on the boat and send it adrift, presumably to his death. Soon enough a storm comes up, and like the Minnow on Gilligan's Island, the ship breaks up and runs around on an isolated island, nearly killing poor Dr. Lloyd. The experience doesn't kill him, and it turns out that this is an inhabited island, albeit one that no white man prior to Dr. Lloyd has ever set foot on. They bring him back to their village for him to recover.

Not only does Dr. Lloyd recover, he takes to the Polynesian culture fairly well since he was predisposed to have it in for European ways from his time among the corrupt pearl traders. And he falls in love with Fayaway (Raquel Torres), one of the native girls. He's also able to ingratiate himself with the islanders when he's able to save a young boy who nearly drowns with more advanced western medical techniques. Eventually, however, other whites approach the island. Dr. Lloyd realizes this can only mean trouble, but the islanders don't see this and don't heed Dr. Lloyd's warnings....

Apparently White Shadows in the South Seas was conceived in part by Robert Flaherty, who had done Nanook of the North among other docudrama-style pictures. That was his intention for this movie, as well. But, the film was being funded by MGM, which was ironically much more focused on getting the movie done on budget than Flaherty would have been. So the western aspect of the story was enhanced and direction was given to W.S. Van Dyke. The resulting product is one that looks pretty thanks to the location shooting, but with a fairly conventional story. Not that Flaherty's "documentary" style would have been that much better.

Man Man

Another genre of films that I find myself getting jaded with is the 1960s spy movie. Well, not so much the parodies that sprang up after Doctor No made James Bond a big hit, but the "serious" spy movies that made the whole spy business seem like a cynical and meaningless game. That view was reinforced when I recently watched The Double Man.

The movie opens up with a brief establishing sequence in Berlin, which of course at the time was a divided city. Somebody leaves the American sector into the East, and there's talk between some intelligence types that results in a dossier showing the photo of Dan Slater (Yul Brynner). Cut to Austria, and a young man dies in a skiing accident that anybody watching the movie even without having seen the box guide synopsis of the plot knows fully well isn't really an accent. That man is Dan's son Robert, and news naturally gets back to Dan.

Dan works in Washington for the CIA under Edwards (Lloyd Nolan). Dan goes to the Austrian Alps in part to fetch his son's body and belongings, and in part to find out what really happened, since he has good enough reason to believe that it might not have been an accident. Presumably the Soviets knew that this was Dan's son and that Dan is a higher-up in the CIA, making him valuable for, well, reasons. Edwards and all the other CIA people have reason that this is a trap, designed to get Dan to some out of the way place where he can be captured or something; the exact nature of the trap isn't necessarily known.

Dan gets to the Tirolean ski resort of St. Anton, which in this print doesn't look quite as nice as it probably should. He begins to ask around, and goes up in the cable car that took Robert on his last ride, where he finds lovely young Gina (Britt Ekland), who was apparenty in the cable car with Robert and a couple of mysterious men on that fateful morning. But Gina won't talk to Dan. They get out at the same stop to ski the same route, and there's a third person, an older man who seems to be watching Dan.

Dan eventually talks to Gina's boss, Mrs. Carrington, which is an in to Gina, and learns that there were two men on the cable car, that older man and one wearing a ski mask so nobody can learn his identity. Further investigation reveals that all of these people are still in town, which piques Dan's curiosity. In any case, he also knows it's likely a trap, but he needs to be able to break it whatever it is. Edwards, for his part, is getting more worried and wants Dan to return home immediately if not sooner.

Sure enough, it is a trap, and the trap is that the Soviets have found a man that they can give plastic surgery to to look just like Dan. (Didn't they think about fingerprints?) They'll lure Dan to the ski resort, where they can capture him and replace him with the doppelgänger whom they'll send back to Washington. Yeah right this is going to work. Dan certainly has enough secrets that the replacement couldn't possibly figure out in such a short time.

And that's one of the big problems with The Double Man. The plot is daft, and in the end we just don't care all that much about these characters. And as I said earlier, although a good portion of the movie was filmed on location, it just doesn't look pretty at all. So I'm sorry to say that The Double Man isn't as good as it probably ought to have been.

Let's talk about surveillance, baby

One of those movies that, for whatever reason, I had never seen straight through from start to finish was The Conversation. So the last time TCM ran it -- not as part of the programming tribute to star Gene Hackman -- I recorded it and finally got around to watching it and writing up this post on the movie.

The film starts off with an extended sequence of a young couple, Ann and Mark (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest), meeting for lunch in San Francisco's Union Park, a busy place there are there are all sorts of people talking to each other and doing stuff. This is intercut with images of what looks like it could be a sniper on a balcony overlooking the park, as well as an older guy with a hearing aid who eventually unnerves Ann enough to make a comment that she thinks he's following them. And indeed, they are being watched, as the action pulls out to a van. In the van, supervising things, is Harry Caul (Gene Hackman). He's a surveillance expert, who has been contacted by Martin Stett (Harrison Ford), the executive assistant to the "Director" (Robert Duvall) of a large concern of some sort, to follow this couple for reasons not made clear to Harry and his staff.

Harry would prefer to work alone, as he's understandably a bit of a paranoiac considering the occupation he's in. But since a lot of the jobs require multiple sorts of expertise and people being eyes and ears from more than one location, he works with people like Stan (John Cazale) on this job, although Stan begins to get on Harry's nerves and ultimately takes a job with a competitor. Harry has an uneasy relationship with his girlfried who doesn't know what he really does for a living. And when Harry has a social function with some people he meets at a professional conference for the surveillance industry, he decidedly doesn't want to talk about how he got the information in a previous case back in New York in the late 1960s. This especially because that job resulted in a couple of deaths.

A major portion of the current job involves listening to the conversation Ann and Mark had in the park, which contains a bunch of seemingly innocuous stuff, as well as one passage that resulted in distortion, making it sound garbled. But this is where Harry's expertise comes in. He works on that tape and is somehow able to resolve the garbling and distortion, to the point where he can finally clear up that missing passage: "He'd kill us if he got the chance."

So Harry is naturally uncomfortable, since the implication is that the couple is in fear for their lives, and Harry doesn't want to be responsible for more deaths. He attempts to investigate further, and, hearing a particular hotel room mentioned, tries to find out what might be about to go on in that hotel room. Meanwhile, at that party following the surveillance convention, Harry realizes that his tapes have been stolen. This, as you might guess, only makes Harry more paranoid.

Now, I'm not certain quite how realistic The Conversation is, mostly because I don't know if it would have been physically possible to clear up that distortion on the original tapes even with the audio technology of today, never mind what they had in the early 1970s. There are some other plot holes around whether characters in the real world would have had the wherewithal to do some of the things they do, but I don't want to go into more detail in that regard since it would give away key plot points in the second half of the movie. In any case, The Conversation is as much a character study of the Harry Caul character as it is about what's going on in the actual conversation he's been asked to record. In that regard, The Conversation works extremely well, thanks to a very strong (and surprisingly not Oscar-nominated) performance from Gene Hackman. The supporting cast also does a fine job, and the general atmosphere of the film is consistently off-kilter, which I think it needs to be for a movie like this that's ultimately about paranoia.

If you haven't seen The Conversation before, you really should. It's a fine movie that stands the test of time fifty-plus years later.

Eleanor Roosevelt is a macguffin

Some time back, TCM did a birthday tribute of movies starring British actress Flora Robson. One of the movies that I hadn't heard of before sounded interesting enough, so I decided to record it: Great Day, which is obviously not to be confused with Great Day in the Morning or other movies with similar titles.

It's 1944 in Denley, one of those small towns in England that would have been considered idyllic in the days before World War II began, although obviously that war has changed everything. The local women, as in many towns, have formed a "Women's Institute" to help do charity things for the men on the front. One day, the women of the Institute are called for a special meeting: they're told that US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt will be visiting the following day to see how local women on the British homefront are getting along, but that this news is a secret. That seems a bit of a plot hole in that first, can an entire town keep news like this a secret, and second, how did the rest of the town know to show up if only the Women's Institute members were informed of the visit.

But then, the impending visit of Mrs. Roosevelt isn't the point of the movie. Instead, the movie looks at how the war has been affecting the village, with a closer look at one family in particular, the Ellis family. Flora Robson plays Elizabeth, the matriarch of the family, who has been keeping the family going during the war even though that's not always easy. First is that there's a consistent strain between Elizabeth and her husband John (Eric Portman). John had served in the Great War, but has reached the age where there's not much for him to do in a small village like this. He doesn't seem to have a job and has turned to drink as well as memories of his heroic service in the previous war, clearly feeling emasculated. He's also reached the point that the local pub doesn't want to extend any more credit.

The Ellises have an adult daughter, Margaret (Sheila Sim), who has a complicated life of her own. She's a Land Girl, one of those young women who worked on the farms during the war while so many of the men were away fighting since Britain didn't have quite so many men to spare as the US. In her case, she's lucky to be able to work on one close to home, run by unmarried Bob Tyndale (Walter Fitzgerald). He's much older than Margaret, but he's a thoroughly decent human being, and genuinely likes Margaret. He's asked for her hand in marriage, and Margaret is not unwilling to accept, knowing that such a marriage would provide the financial stability that she can't get from her home life. However, she hasn't made the engagement public for a couple of reasons. One is that Bob has a nasty sister who thinks that Margaret is just a gold digger. But the other is that before working on the farm, Margaret has a boyfriend in Geoffrey, who is now fighting the war. Well technically not now, as he's got a couple days' leave and shows up in Denley hoping to see Margaret. Margaret doesn't want to break his heart; and besides, she still loves Geoffrey while only considering Bob a friend.

Both story lines reach a climax that evening, with a few other minor subplots worked in, like making alterations to a dress for the little girl who's supposed to deliver a message to Eleanor Roosevelt. All of the subplots are worked out, and Roosevelt, seen only as an arm, shows up with the locals considering this a great morale booster.

Great Day isn't a bad movie if you could judge it on its own. But it has a couple of issues in that you can't really judge it for what it is. One is that it was released a year after A Canterbury Tale, and even stars two of the leads from that movie in Portman and Sim. A Canterbury Tale is one of the great British World War II movies, while Great Day is much more a programmer. But Great Day also had the misfortune of going into production too late, only getting a release in April of 1945 (and well after the war when RKO distributed it in the US), by which time the need for such a morale-booster had passed.

Great Day is an OK movie punctuated by good performances from Robson and Portman. But as far as British World War II movies go, I'd definitely select A Canterbury Tale, or even Millions Like Us.

For some values of "glorious"

Hollywood legend has long had it that silent film star John Gilbert was brought down by the advent of talking pictures and his having a voice that wasn't particularly suited to the new medium. Recently, TCM ran a night of movies dealing with the transition to sound, including the one credited with starting Gilbert's end: His Glorious Night.

The setting is one of those European resorts that catered to the upper crust of European society, especially in the pre-war years the nobility, that would have seemed exotic for American audiences of 1929, with an added vibe of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. It's the sort of place where the visitors amuse themselves watching polo and steeplechase, and dressing to the nines to go to dinner. Staying at the resort is Princess Orsolini (Catherine Dale Owen), accompanied by her mother Eugenie (Nance O'Neil) and a much older military attaché, Col. Krehl (Gustav von Seyffertitz). The princess is betrothed to Prince Luigi (Tyrell Davis), although he's an absolute drip and this is clearly a marriage of political convenience.

John Gilbert plays Captain Kovacs, a military officer who, however, is not of high birth. He meets Orsolini, and it's love at first sight like Vronsky and Anna Karenina, except that in this case Orsolini is only engaged, not actually married. However, Orsolini discovers that Kovacs isn't of the nobility, and that makes going any further in their relationship a decided no. Mom and Krehl find out what's going on, and they're pissed about it. Kovacs, understanding that a lot of what's going on is being driven not by the princess but by her handlers, figures out a way to try to get back at them all, which is to make himself look even worse than he really is, so that if this information comes out it would be an even bigger scandal. To this end he drops hints of having spent time in prison and the implication that he's still a conman and the relationship is part of a con.

Mom wants to see Kovacs personally, and she and Krehl hope that they can come up with some way to get Kovacs to leave the resort, even if they have to pay him off to do it. Their plan is to get to his suite and look for any love notes the princess may have written to Kovacs, and then impress upon him that he could get in trouble if he doesn't leave. Kovacs is having none of it, and makes the demand that the princess spend an evening alone with him in his suite. However, while they're trying to talk things out, Orsolini faints. Since this happens on the balcony and Kovacs has to get Orsolini back to her room, this gets seen by at least one other person, and gossip gets around. Worse, at breakfast it's discovered that Kovacs is still there.

His Glorious Night was the first John Gilbert talkie to be released to theaters, although it was the second one filmed. While the movie may have helped to start the downward slide of Gilbert's career, I have to say that it's not because of Gilbert's voice. True, it's not as stereotypically deep as some other stars' voices would prove to be, but it's not as bad as legend would have you believe. Instead, there were a bunch of other factors at play. Chief among them is the dialog, which is terrible, and doesn't serve anybody well. Gilbert's protestations of love here were parodied in Singin' in the Rain, and it's easy to see why anybody who remembered the movie (and Arthur Freed was at MGM already in 1929) woud make the comparison. Catherine Dale Owen comes across as wooden here, and like a lot of early talkies the direction feels like it's done for the benefit of the microphone and not for artistic reasons.

I'd also suggest that with the depression about to come, there was also going to be a range of new faces coming to the movie screen to replace many of the stars of the 1920s. For the young romantic comedy type, Robert Montgomery was already at MGM and would make waves the following year in The Big House; Clark Gable would make even bigger waves in A Free Soul; and the elegant type could be done by someone like Leslie Howard who had the British accent for it. The sorts of movies that Gilbert featured in would be going on their way out.

TCM ran a restoration print of His Glorious Night, and the print itself looks and sounds quite good. It's just a shame that it couldn't have been in service of a better story.

Jigokumon

It's been a little while since I've done a post on a foreign film, and as I've been stating I've got a bit of a backlog of foreign films on my DVR, to the point that I've had any number of them expire before even getting around to watching them. As an example, Un carnet de bal was on overnight and I had the previous recording on my DVR, but when I went to watch it in conjunction with the upcoming showing, it had expired. A film that I watched just before it expired showed up during 31 Days of Oscar: Gate of Hell.

The movie is set in medieval Japan during a short period known as the Heiji Rebellion, in which a couple of competing groups of samurai were battling for control of the government. Endo Morito (Kazuo Hasegawa) is loyal to daimyo Kiyomori, whose family is under threat from another group of samurai. To get the rest of the family to safety, Kiyomore comes up with a ruse: his sister's official carriage will be ridden not by his high-ranking sister, but a lady-in-waitng, Kesa (Machiko Kyo). Morito is to accompany that carriage while the daimyo's family makes it to safety. Morito gets Kesa to safety, although not without some difficulty, and falls in love with her along the way.

After the war is over, Kiyomori wants to reward Morito for his loyalty, willing to grant Morito one favor. Morito's wish is to have a marriage arranged between him and Kesa. Normally, their social classes wouldn't have resulted in them ever meeting each other, but Kiyomori could make it happen with his stature. There's only one catch: in the meantime, Kesa got married to someone who is of her social stature, Imperial Guard member Wataru (Isao Yamagata). Kiyomori could have tried to arrange a marriage between Morito and Kesa had she not been married, but he can't really force Kesa and Wataru to get a divorce.

Morito, for his part, isn't about to take no for an answer. If this were Hollywood, it would be the basis for some sort of noir on the theme of obsession, but this is medieval Japan so the movie takes a completely different tone. There's a slow buildup as first Morito tries to win Kesa's affection by winning the big horse race. When that doesn't work, Morito tries more direct means. But Kesa and Wataru aren't so willing to see Morito, since he's already shown himself to have a violent temper. Kesa's maidservant lies about Kesa's whereabouts, leading Morito to threaten to kill Kesa's aunt if Kesa won't talk to him.

It leads up to a climax in which Morito plans to kill Wataru, which would leave him free to marry Kesa if she's a widow. But the plan doesn't necessarily, well, go according to plan....

Gate of Hell won an honorary Oscar for the Best Foreign Film, having been released before that was an official competitive category. It also won a competitive Oscar, for color costume design. Those costumes, along with the color cinematography and production design, are all quite good. On the negative side, however, Gate of Hell is an extremely slow burn as a movie, being the dramatic equivalent of a one-joke comedy. That slowness doesn't always work in the movie's favor, so some people may find it a bit of a slog even though it clocks in under 90 minutes.

Double Dynamite

Tomorrow, December 10, is not the birth anniversary of writer/diretor Melville Shavelson. However, TCM is spending the morning and afternoon with his work, starting with Double Dynamite at 6:30 AM.

Frank Sinatra plays Johnny Dalton, a bank teller at a southern California bank in an era when bank tellers were supposedly more prestigious than they are today. I say "supposedly" because in this case Johnny isn't paid as though the job had any prestige. He's got a co-worker Mildred (Jane Russell) who's also his girlfriend, and whom he'd like to marry. The problem is that neither of them earns very much, with a secondary problem of Johnny being too timid. The best he can do is take Mildred to lunch at the Italian restaurant next to the bank. Working at the restaurant as a waiter is Emile Keck (Groucho Marx). When Emile hears about Johnny's problems, he suggests that Johnny needs to live dangerously and do something daring.

And wouldn't you know it, but on the way back from lunch, Johnny has just that opportunity. There's a mugging going on, and Johnny saves the victim from the two assailants. It turns out that the victim is Hot Horse Harris (Nestor Paiva), a well-known bookie who repays Johnny's kindness by taking him to the betting parlor in back of a shirt shop and gives Johnny $1,000. But there's a catch. Johnny is supposed to place a bet on one of the horses. With Hot Horse's help, Johnny has multiple bets pay off, winning something like $60,000. In theory, Johnny can use this money to buy Mildred some of the finer things she's want in life, and even marry her, since this amounts to several years' income.

At this point, the natural question from Mildred would be to inquire about the source of the income, since gambling by the tellers is something that's frowned upon. They're supposed to have probity. Worse is that when Johnny returns to the bank, it's to the news that something has gone wrong and the bank is short $75,000. The bank manager and president understandably assume somebody is embezzling, which would make Johnny's story about suddenly having saved a professional gambler and making money on hot horse tips something nobody's going to believe. Especially when it turns out that the betting parlor was a pop-up place that's moved locations to evade the police.

How is Johnny going to get out of this? Well, he enlists the help of Emile, who sees this in part as a chance to live high on the hog for a while. But Emile's schemes don't seem to work at all and only implicate Johnny further. Things go from bad to worse, and even Mildred is caught in the web of suspicion: Johnny had bought her a fur for a Christmas present, and the bankers see the tag. But of course both Johnny and Mildred are innocent, and with the Production Code, that innocence is going to have to be borne out in the end.

Double Dynamite was made at RKO in 1948, but held up for release until 1951. Having finally seen it, I can understand why. Sadly, it's not particularly good, being more madcap than anything else and a plot that's just too darn far-fetched for its own good. It's hard to understand why Johnny would go back to Emile for advice, or how somebody like Emile wound up as a waiter in a hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant in the first place. However, I can also understand better now just why Frank Sinatra was so desperate to get the role of Maggio in From Here to Eternity. Movies like Double Dynamite were a sign of his flagging movie career, which he seriously wanted to revive. Of course, we know now that he did get the part and would go on to win an Oscar for it. But Double Dynamite had nothing to do with that.

Appointment With Death

It's not too long ago from the point of when I wrote this post that I did a post on a Lauren Bacall movie. It's even slightly more recent that I did a post on a movie based on an Agatha Christie novel. Today brings a post on another of those all-star Agatha Christie movies, this one a book I didn't know much about before seeing the move show up on TCM during Lauren Bacall's term as TCM's Star of the Month: Appointment With Death.

The movie opens in 1937 in New Jersey. Emily Boynton (Piper Laurie) is the widow of a wealthy businessman who has one daughter of her own by her late husband, Ginevra, and three step-children from her late husband's first marriage. The Boynton lawyer, Jefferson Cope (David Soul) is discussing the will with Emily. Well, actually, two wills. Apparently it was Dad's original intention that Mom be the head of the trust, judiciously using that money to keep the four children taken care of until Emily dies. This, even though the three step-children are adults by now, one with a wife of his own. Two days before Mr. Boynton died, he wrote out a new will that split the estate among the four children and the widow equally. Emily for fairly obvious reasons doesn't like this, and blackmails Cope into destroying the updated will in the fireplace.

The kids are, for equally obvious reasons, not happy about this and suspect that there was in fact a second will out there but cannot yet provie it. Lennox (Nicholas Guest) is married to a nurse, Nadine (Carrie Fisher); Raymond (John Terlesky) is the youngest; seemingly afraid to do anything to cross his stepmother; and daughter Carol rounds out the family. As a way of getting over the grief of the passing of the family patriarch, Emily suggests that a transatlantic cruise to England followed by a Mediterranean trip to the Holy Land would be just what the doctor ordered. It's also a good way to get away from Cope, since Emily knows what secret he holds over her head.

On the way to Europe, they meet some intersting characters. Lady Westholme (Lauren Bacall) is one of those beautiful Americans looking for a man with class and finding one in the late Lord Westholme who was looking for money which his wife's family had. Miss Quinton (Hayley Mills) is an archaeologist looking to do some digging in Mandatory Palestine, and Dr. King (Jenny Seagrove) is fresh out of medica school. Finally, when the boat docks in Trieste, the lot meet Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov), who claims to be on vacation.

Now, we know that Poirot isn't going to get that nice vacation he was hoping for. Everybody makes their way to Jerusalem and then to Qumran, which was one of the big archaeologic sited back in the late 1930s. And it's there that Emily finally gets what's coming to her. But who did it? If you've been watching the movie carefully -- or even not so carefully since this is an Agatha Christie story and you know the formula -- you'll know that most of the other main characters in the piece minus of course Poirot are suspects. Col. Carbury (John Gielgud) is part of the British administration, and he lets Poirot do an investigation as an official investigation might cause some problems since Lady Westholme is a sitting member of Parliament. In the end, Poirot will solve the case....

Appointment With Death follows a formula, but it looks like one of those movies where everybody was getting up there in years and the steam was running out of the formula. As a result, there are some nice locations, although the story and the acting aren't the greatest of the series. (From what I've read, Agatha Christie fans don't consider this one of her best books, never mind the changes made for the screen.) Still, it's an Agatha Christie movie with an all-star -- or mostly-star -- cast, so it will wind up being entertaining enough even if not up to the standard of some of the earlier movies.