Another movie that feels like a 1930s exile

A couple of weeks back, I did a post on The Main Event, mentioning how it came across to me as the sort of movie that, with a bit of script doctoring, could have fit right in in the late 1930s. Recently, I watched another movie that has the feel of something that could have been done in the 1930s, although this one came out in the late 1950s. This time, the movie is Count Your Blessings.

The credits are done over a backdrop of the Houses of Parliament in London, with those old air raid searchlights you'd see in films set in either of the World Wars, along with explosions. It's a sign that the movie is set in London and during World War II. Or, at least, it opens up then. After the credits, Grace Allingham (Deborah Kerr) is returning home from her job as the sort of secretary at military headquarters that had her wearing a uniform. Not long after getting home, a visitor comes who is a friend of her kinda-sorta boyfriend Hugh. That man is Charles de Valhubert (Rossano Brazzi), who is working with the Free French.

Charles sees Grace and immediately falls in love with her and says he's going to marry her, which seems like nonsense except that this is a movie so you know that the two are eventually going to get married. The two go on a honeymoon somewhere in the picturesque English countryside, but it's a brief honeymoon in that Charles gets called back to London to be part of some sort of military operation. The honeymoon, however, was enough time for Charles to get Grace pregnant.

Some time later Grace gets news that Charles has been taken POW, which means that he's at least not dead. But somehow the war ends, and Charles never gets demobbed, instead getting sent on one tour of duty after another until it's around early 1954, since Charles is in Indochina at Dien Bien Phu. But finally he makes it out of Indochina and is able to return home, or at least to his wife and the son who's now about nine years old but whom he's never actually seen.

Needless to say, the reunion isn't going to be an easy one, not only for husband and wife but also for the son who now has a father in the flesh. Charles decides he's going to make things so much worse for all of them by packing everybody up -- after all, Grace has been living with her father at his fashionable London house -- and moving the whole family to France just because he says so!

Grace isn't particularly happy with this, especially when she learns that Charles has been seeing other women the entire time he's been in the military! Charles' uncle the Duc de St. Cloud (Maurice Chevalier) explains to Grace that this is the way French men are, except that since they're French, they all clearly care most about their wife and not all those other women. As if all of this should somehow mollify Grace. Grace thinks about taking the boy back with her to England, and eventually the boy gets his own ideas about how to resolve the conflict.

It's the boy's resolution of things at the end that made me think of one of those 1930s movies where the adolescent children figure out some crazy scheme to bring their divorced/widowed parent together with the right person. Most of those are wacky comedies, while Count Your Blessings feels like it's supposed to be more of a light drama, at least until the finale. But up until that finale, it's both extremely slow going and frankly maddening to anybody with common sense that the main characters have any logical motivation to act the way they do. After having watched it I looked it up, and noted both that it was a money loser and that the IMDb reviews are fairly negative. I'd have to agree.

I'd make the joke that you should Count Your Blessings that I watched the movie for you, but as always I have to say that you should watch for yourself and make your own conclusions.

Not the horrendous Fox game show

Tubi, and to an extent the other FAST services, have a wealth of obscure stuff that I'd assume fell into the public domain available to stream on demand. I've got several early talkies in my watch list, and recently saw one starring Edward G. Robinson even before Little Caesar. The movie in question is The Hole in the Wall.

Robinson is technically not given star billing here -- he's billed fourth -- but he's the male star here, playing a character called "The Fox". The Fox is the leader of a gang that fleeces the rich under the guise of using a medium going by "Madame Mystera" (an actress named Nellie Savage who astonishingly gets third billing despite only being in the movie for one or two scenes at the beginning. The reason she's in only a small number of scenes is because after finishing work one day, she gets on an el train to go home. That train derails in a spectacularly amateurish bit of special effects model work, killing any number of passengers, including Mamade Mystera.

The Fox realizes he shouldn't identify Mystera at the morgue since the gig would be up, so in a humorous sequence he suggests partner-in-crime Goofy (Donald Meek, looking as bald as he did his entire a career) put on Mystera's robes! That sure isn't going to do, but the gang is in luck as somebody comes in the door looking for a job with Mystera. That young woman is Jean Oliver, played by Claudette Colbert at the very beginning of her career. She's recently gotten out of prison, and is looking for a job, and was given Mystera's name by a mutual acquaintance.

The Fox has the sad duty of informing Jean that Mystera died, but then has a flash of inspiration, which is to use Jean as Mystera. She proves adept at learning the tricks of the trade and how to cheat the people who are going to be her clients, so the Fox hires her, going down to the morgue and identifying Mystera's body as Jean Oliver so that nobody has to worry about Jean's past coming back to haunt them. Of course, Jean has reasons of her own for wanting to work for the Fox's gang.

Some time back, Jean was working as a maid for wealthy Mrs. Ramsay (Louise Closser Hale) when she fell in love with Ramsay's son. Mrs. Ramsay doesn't approve of the relationship for class reasons, so she has Jean framed for robbing her and sent to prison, which is why Jean was just getting out of prison when she shows up at the Fox's place looking for Mystera. Jean's plan is even more sinister than anything the Fox has ever thought of. She wants to kidnap Ramsay's granddaughter and raise the little girl to hate people like the Ramsays, which is a fairly wild plot even for a pre-Code.

As you can guess, things get complicated from there, especially when the Fox finds himself having reason to believe that perhaps Jean does have real clairvoyant powers, leading to a reasonably exciting finale. There's also the obligatory-for-the-era plot device of the intrepid reporter who in this case thinks he recognizes Mystera as someone he knew from childhood; of course that chldhood friend was one Jean Oliver.

The Hole in the Wall was released in early 1929, and it has all the hallmarks of a talking picture released that early in the sound era. The pacing and the elocution feel ancient compared to what we would see even in pictures from two or three years later. On the other hand, the plot is fun, and the art direction for Mystera's apartment is excellent. Fans of early sound music will probably enjoy The Hole in the Wall.

No Girl Scouts Here

Jerry Lewis was honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August, which gave me the opportunity to record several movies I haven't seen before; to be honest, I don't know that I'm going to get around to all of them before they expire from my DVR. Next up is a movie in which Jerry only has a supporting role: Cookie.

Cookie is a teenaged girl played by Emily Lloyd, but we don't see her at first. Instead, we get an introductory scene of one of those limousines that clearly looks like it's taken from a 1970s or 1980s mobster movie, which is appropriate since this is indeed a Mob-themed movie. The limo stops in an isolated part of New York one night, presumably for a meeting between the passenger there and somebody else, or perhaps to dump a dead body in the bay. But that's pre-empted by an explosion, killing the passenger in the limo. Fast forward a few days to the funeral of mobster Dino Capisco. And then....

The next scene informs us that it's a few months earlier. Cookie, together with her friend Pia (Ricki Lake in a small role) are out in Manhattan cruising the gray-market stalls with a modicum of money; running out of cash, they jump the turnstiles in the subway which gets them caught and sent to court. Poor Cookie seems to be about to go to jail since she can't pay bail, but at the last moment a strange man comes in and gets her released without bail pending a later appearance. That man then trundles Cookie into a limo and takes Cookie... to Sing Sing.

There, Cookie meets Dino Capisco (Peter Falk), who is her biological father. Except that he never married Cookie's mom Lenore (Dianne Wiest) because Dino has been married to Bunny (Brenda Vaccaro) who runs a doggy day care and won't grant Dino a divorce even though he's been in prison for the past 13 years. Dino is up for parole now, and doesn't want Cookie's legal problems to derail that parole even though apparently nobody really knows about Dino's illegitimate daughter. But with him about to get out of jail, he wants to do the right thing by her, or at least not have her screw up his post-prison life. He uses his influence with the other mobsters to get Cookie a job in New York's garment district at a sweatshop run by Dino's old partner Carmine, who is definitely the one preferred by the big boss Enzo (Lionel Stander). Likely they conspired to get Dino sent up to Sing Sing.

Before going to prison, Dino was involved in a construction deal in Atlantic City with the decidedly non-Italian mob-affiliated Arnold Ross (Jerry Lewis with the big 80s glasses, if you couldn't tell). Ross was supposed to hold a bunch of money in escrow, and Dino was hoping to use that to start a new life. But that money has ended up with Carmine and Enzo, and Dino wants it back.

Now, everything Dino is doing is decidedly a violation of his parole, and likely outright illegal. But then, this is the only life he knows. And in trying to get closer to his daughter Cookie, he's also getting her into the mob life, although she both doesn't quite want that and is also utterly naïve as to what being related to the Mob entails. She turns out to have a method to her madness, although there's that opening scene and the funeral of Dino on the horizon....

Cookie is a little movie, and although it's never going to be considered a masterpiece, it turns out to be a lot of fun. It was directed by Susan Seidelman, who did Desperately Seeking Susan a few years earlier, and it's easy to see the same influence in both movies. The movie has a bunch of twists and turns leading to a satifying conclusion, although I don't know if that conclusion is quite realistic.

Cookie slipped through the cracks for some reason, and that's a bit of a shame because of how entertaining it is.

Ed ecco a voi

TCM's lineup for tomorrow, May 29 is a morning and afternoon of films about bringing people back for television. One of the movies that I hadn't seen before and that was on my DVR is a foreign film, Ginger and Fred, which will be on at 11:15 AM.

The title, as you can guess, refers to Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, although the movie isn't about the two of them. Instead, as the movie opens, an older woman gets off a train in Rome, where she is met by a production coordinator from a television program called We Are Proud to Present. The producer calls the woman Ginger (Giulietta Masina), which was actually her stage name as her real name is Amelia. Amelia, back in the 1940s, was part of a double act in which she did the sort of dance routines that Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire did in their movies; naturally her partner in the act took the stage name Fred although his real name is Pippo (Marcello Mastroianni).

We Are Proud to Present is a television variety show, and with it being Christmas, the program is planning an extra-large show for the holidays with all sorts of human interest stories, including the reuniting of an old dance partnership like Ginger and Fred who haven't worked together for at least 25 years, with each of them having their own families in the intervening years. On the way to the hotel where everybody is being put up, the producer is picking up an "Admiral" who went into a burning building and saved people's lives, which is the first indication that the show isn't as genteel as Amelia might think. (One plot hole is that, considering how popular the show claims to be, you'd think Amalia would know what it's about.)

Amelia gets to the hotel and finds that the show is even more of a circus than you'd might think, and that Pippo hasn't shown up yet, although in his defense he's really supposed to be on a later train that is supposedly only arriving in Rome late that evening. Among the other people being profiled on the show are a monk who can allegedly levitate; a dance troupe of people with dwarfism; male bodybuilders; and, getting a special escort to the TV studio, a young and telegenic mafioso serving a long sentence of house arrest.

Things take another turn for the worse when Amelia can't sleep because of the snoring coming from the next room. She goes to the room to wake the guy up, only to find that it's Pippo, looking every bit of his age and leaving Amelia and the viewers to wonder whether she's made the right move in deciding to do this TV special. Events carry her on through a backstage rehearsal and all the other preparations, until the cameras are about to roll....

In addition to being a sort of small, human-interest piece about two older characters, Ginger and Fred is also a biting satire on the state of television, at least as it was in the eyes of director Federico Fellini back in the 1980s. As I understand it, Italian TV has had a reputation for being even more lowbrow than American TV, even though they have the sort of public service broadcaster along the lines of the BBC garnering large ratings shares. The constant shots of TV screens showing continuity annoucers telling us what's coming up don't give us much confidence in the quality of the TV shows being produced.

For what feels like a little movie, however, Ginger and Fred runs a bit too long at a shade over two hours. Masina and Mastroianni both give fine performances, but the movie gave me the impression of the sort of film that's not going to be to everybody's taste. It is, however, one that I mostly liked.

Her, not me

Having blogged for 17 years now, I've obviously seen quite a few old movies. But it's still not uncommon for TCM to show an older movie that I haven't even heard of, let alone seen. One such example showed up several months back: Kiss Her Goodbye. Since I hadn't heard of it before and the synopsis sounded reasonably interesting, I recorded it and recently sat down to watch it.

Steven Hill, later of Law and Order, is one of the stars here. He plays a man named Ed Wilson, and ss the movie opens, he's in Florida driving down the coast with his young and clearly nubile sister Emily (Sharon Farrell, credited here as Sharon Forsmo). The car breaks down and, since this is the late 1950s and the relative middle of nowhere, it's out of the car and walk to civilization. They're rescued, such as it is, by farmer driving a horse-drawn cart, Kenny Grimes (Andrew Prine), who takes them into town.

In town they're taken to the sort of cabin-motel like the one in Niagara, run by Marge Carson (Elaine Stritch) and her father-in-law; they put the pair up. Ed meets with the owner of the local garage, Corey (Gene Lyons), and offers to do extra mechanic work on the side if he can use Corey's tools to fix his cars himself. In any case, Ed and Emily are going to have to stay here for a little problem, and that presents problems.

Those problems are largely down to Emily. She's growing into a woman, but she doesn't seem to realize it, and still seems to have the mind of a child. Worse, the pair's parents died in a car accident some years back, so there's nobody to take care of Emily and institutionalization is clearly not what Ed wants, considering that the institutions of the day were like. But because of Emily's sex appeal, all the young men in the area are basically into her, while she doesn't get this or even want the attention.

But this isn't the only issue Emily has, as she tries to take Marge's baby when the baby is crying while Marge is working and the baby's grandfather who is supposed to be looking after the kid is nowhere to be found. Now, you'd think that taking this baby all the way to the coast would be something that gets her on the radar of the local police and Ed and Emily getting politely asked to leave town, but no. That's largely because Marge is a widow herself and finding herself falling in love with Ed. The men keep coming after Emily, and that's going to lead to the climax of the movie, which isn't all that difficult to guess.

Kiss Her Goodbye is the sort of movie where I liked the idea behind it, but didn't particularly care for the execution. I think that's because the movie seems to be gong for a lurid vibe, almost like an exploitation movie, and that's not what the material needs. If Emily were an open temptress who knew what she's doing, then lurid might work. But Emily as presented is a tragic victim.

As a result, Kiss Her Goodbye as a moderately interesting misfire that's worth one watch although it isn't anything quite great.

The emphasis is definitely on "story"

TCM is running a daytime lineup of biopics about singers tomorrow, and one of the movies happens to be on my DVR from a recent TCM programming feature of "fallen stars". That movie is The Helen Morgan Story, and it shows up tomorrow (May 27) at 2:00 PM. So as is normal practice here, I made the point of watching the movie in time to be able to do a post on it here.

The first thing I noticed was the quality of the print, which seemed a bit fuzzy, like it was a 16mm print for TV or somesuch. In fact, the movie, released in 1957, was shot in Cinemascope, but the print TCM ran fills the 16:9 TV screen, so I'd presume it got panned and scanned and that somewhere up in heaven Sydney Pollack has the heebie-jeebies. (Some of the scenes, however, look like what I'd refer to as the "Cinemascope Diet", in which a print is just squished from the Cinemascope 2.35:1 aspect ratio down to the TV aspect ratio, making everyone look taller and thinner in the process.)

The movie opens up with a bit of a prologue about the 1920s and people thinking they could make it big, before we get to the real story, starting at a carnival in the Chicago area. Larry Maddux (Paul Newman) is one of those carnival huckster types, although this time instead of selling patent medicine or fake entertainment, he's selling swampland in Florida, which was a thing back in the 1920s when Florida hadn't yet experienced its population boom. He's got some grass skirt-wearing dancers to try to draw suckers in, and one of those dancers is Helen Morgan (Ann Blyth), who is naïve enough to think this is the first step on the way to fame in the entertainment world.

Unfortunately for her, Larry's show is closing as he's decided a better way of making money is as a bootlegger, although Larry leaves only after telling Helen he loves her. Helen tries to make her way as a torch singer even though she doesn't have the right sort of voice for it. One day while she's auditioning for a singing job at a speakeasy, who should show up to sell the owner his alcohol but Larry Maddux? He uses his pull to get Helen her job there, before deciding to exploit her in a plot to smuggle booze over the border from Canada. That plot involves having Helen win the Miss Canada beauty pageant. The pageant doesn't work because her real identity is found out, but Helen meets the American judge of the pageant, Russell Wade (Richard Carlson).

One of the prizes of the pageant was the chance of an audition for a Broadway show, and part of Larry's plot to smuggle the liquor was under the cover of bringing the touring cast of a show to New York, which is how Helen ends up in New York. Larry is able to get Helen more singing jobs in speakeasies, at least until one of them is raided. Helen needs a lawyer, so as a long shot she calls the only one she knows, that being Russell Wade. This is the start of an affair between the two, although Russell is in a marriage of convenience to a woman who won't give him a divorce.

Larry keeps scheming to build up Helen's career, although by this point she realizes he's as much after her for the possibility of big money as he's after her to love her. This makes Helen want to get Larry out of her life if possible, but Larry isn't about to let that happen. Florenz Ziegfeld shows up one day at the club, which is how Helen becomes a Broadway star in the musical Show Boat. But Larry gets shot in a bootlegging operation gone bad, and that combined with the rest of Helen's tumultuous personal life, leads her to start drinking to the point that she winds up in the gutter and forgotten.

All of this material is suitable enough for a Hollywood melodrama. The problem, however, is that the writers decided to attach it to the name of a real person in Helen Morgan. Now, the real Helen Morgan was an alcoholic, and she died fairly young in 1941 from cirrhosis as a result of all that drinking. But that seems to be about where the real Helen's story ends in terms of what the movie portrays.

As far as I could discern, Larry and Russell are both made-up characters, while not mentioning that the real-life Helen had a complicated love life with three marriages. A bigger omission is Show Boat and the fact that this led to a minor movie career for Helen (minor in the sense that she didn't make too many movies) with the most famous role being in the 1930s movie version of Show Boat. But Warner Bros., which made The Helen Morgan Story, wouldn't have had the rights to the music in Show Boat.

If Warner Bros. had turned this movie into one about a fictitious performer, it would be a serviceable if not great melodrama. And for that the movie is certainly worth one watch. But it would probably be more worthwhile to look for the small number of films that the real Helen Morgan made, or the recordings she left behind.

Thousands Cheer

Red Skelton was TCM's Star of the Month back in April. One of his movies that I had on my DVR surprisingly enough was not shown as part of the tribute. But since the movie would be kinda-sorta appropriate for Memorial Day weekend (not that TCM is programming it), and because the movie is going to expire from my DVR relatively soon, I figure that now is a good time to blog about it. That movie is Thousands Cheer.

The opening credits of the movie announce that it's introducing José Iturbi, a Brazilian pianist/conductor who would appear in several muscially inclined movies over the next several years, and he's in the opening, leading a philharmonic concert where one of the performers is singer Kathryn Jones (Kathryn Grayson). After her musical number, she informs the audience that she's going to be taking a sabbatical from performing: her father Bill (John Boles) is a US Army colonel, and with the movie being made in 1943, it's smack-dab in the middle of World War II. Col. Jones is about to be assigned to another base, and Kathryn is going to follow him in order to provide morale for the troops stationed there about to go off to war.

One of those troops is Pvt. Eddy Marsh (Gene Kelly), who is on the same train to the base as Col. Boles. He implies to Kathryn that he loves her, not realizing that she too is going to be staying at the base, which is going to make things awkward when the two of them meet again. They do meet again on the base, and Eddy informs Kathryn that he doesn't really like the army. He was drafted, but he came from a family of circus aerialists, with the result that he feels much more comfortable up in the air than on the ground and as a result would really prefer to be transferred to the Air Corps.

Kathryn falls in love with Eddy along the way, although Eddy has a problem with the officer corps which means that by definition he also has a problem with the daughter of an officer. Additionally, Kathryn's mother Hyllary (Mary Astor) doesn't want her daughter marrying a soldier. Hyllary did so and suffered heartbreak thanks to her husband's transfers and basically being married to the military. Besides, Eddy's attitude is so bad that one wonders whether he's going to be court-martialed out of the military.

All of that occurs in the amount of running time that a movie might have if Thousands Cheer were a B movie. But it isn't, being one of MGM's big, morale-boosting films for the war effort. As such, Kathryn has to invite all her friends to help put on that big show for the soldiers about to go off to war. Mickey Rooney (playing himself) is the MC of that show, and he's brought his MGM friends (again playing themselves) to perform skits and musical numbers at the camp for the soldiers. This show-within-a-show takes the final third of the movie, with a coda at the end to resolve the main story. Quite a few of MGM's stars perform, including Skelton.

Thousands Cheer is an odd little -- or should I say big, since it runs a bit over two hours -- movie, since it's really two movies in one. Gene Kelly was fairly early in his career, but already shows his ability. However, he wasn't given a particularly interesting story in which to show that ability. It's not Kelly's fault, of course; the movie has to hit the propaganda notes of a serviceman redeeming himself by doing the right thing for his country, and it has to do that fairly briefly since we've got 45 minutes of MGM cameos to show, thank you very much.

Some of the cameos are better than others, with Frank Morgan being irritating while some of the singers do reasonably well. The aerialists might be the highlight of the camp show. That, and Mickey Rooney doing his impressions of some of his fellow MGM contract players. Not that they're notably good, but they're certainly fun. Interestingly, there's a conceit where one of the soldiers in the crowd, played by Ben Blue, goes googly-eyed over all the female singers. Except when Lena Horne shows up, but then again Horne's segment has obvious points where censors in the South could have cut so those sensitive southern moviegoers wouldn't have to see a black woman singing.

For me, Thousands Cheer comes across 80-plus years on as more of a time capsule than anything else, but it's one you may want to check out.

Take the High Ground!

TCM's annual Memorial Day Weekend marathon of war-themed movies began yesterday evening, and I have to admit to not noticing that there was a movie on today that's currently sitting on my DVR. In any case, I've got a movie airing tomorrow that's on my DVR, so I watched that instead: Take the High Ground!. It shows up tomorrow, May 25, at 5:15 PM.

The opening credits have a scene that could either be combat in Korea, or else training for what new recruits might have faced when they went over to Korea. Except that the movie was made in 1953, by which time the active fighting in Korea had ended. Not that that really matters, since the movie can be judged as a basic training movie regardless of the time in which is was set and made.

After the credits, a train shows up at Ft. Bliss, in west Texas, and a new crop of fresh-fased recruits (most likely draftees since we still had a peacetime draft in those days) gets off the train. They're met by two sergeants: Thorne Ryan (Richard Widmark) and Laverne Holt (Karl Malden). Also there are platoons of soldiers who have finished basic and are showing off how good the training was as they're able to march in formation and other fun stuff like that.

The new soldiers are, of course, a disparate lot, ranging from men who aren't certain they're cut out to be in Uncle Sam's army to sarcastic know-it-alls who need that attitude smacked out of them except that the drill sergeants are for good reason not allowed to smack the soldiers under them as we learned in Patton. Also, as you might guess, the two drill sergeants are opposites in personality, although I wouldn't be surprised if some bright officer higher up figured out that pairing a "good cop" and a "bad cop" would be a good way to handle basic training.

As for those two sergeants, both of them had served over in Korea before being sent stateside to run basic training. Holt is OK with that, but Ryan seems to be the sort of soldier who wants to fight, not train, and is bitter about being here at Fort Bliss. And don't you know he's going to let that show. In addition to this subplot, there's another one about the sergeants meeting a nice girl Julie (Elaine Stewart) at a bar and one of them falling in love with her.

Basic training rumbles on, and the recruits go through pretty much every trope you can think of in a movie about basic training, with even one of them planning to go "over the hill". Among the recruits are Russ Tamblyn, Steve Forrest, and Carleton Carpenter. As you also might guess, the recruits eventuall do seem to become good soldiers, although I don't think they ever wind up going to fight anywhere since the armistice in Korea will have been signed by the time they could get over there.

Take the High Ground! is a competent enough movie, helped out a lot by the location shooting and color photography, but boy if it isn't formulaic with pretty much every issue facing recruits and the sergeants training them showing up. I've also read reviews from people who served in the army well after 1953 saying that their experiences of basic training were not like what's presented on screen here. I'm not a military person so I have no idea what it was really like.

If you have 100 minutes to spend on a rainy day, I suppose you could do worse than Take the High Ground!. But at the same time, you could certainly do better too.

The Fan

Mario Cantone sat down with Ben Mankiewicz last October to do a TCM programming series on, well, I'm not quite certain what it was supposed to be about since the movies don't quite all fit one genre. Anyhow, there was one surprisingly new-to-me movie that once again I recorded because I hadn't heard of it and the plot synopsis sounds interesting. That movie was an early 1980s thriller called The Fan.

Michael Biehn plays the titular fan, whose name is revealed to be Douglas Breen, and as the movie opens we hear him clacking away at a typewriter and voicing over a letter that he's writing to Sally Ross (Lauren Bacall). Sally was a big movie star, and Douglas claims to be Sally's biggest fan. Of course, the letter he writes sounds a lot more creepy than any sort of letter a loving, or even emotionally stable, fan would write.

Sally's personal assistant, Belle (Maureen Stapleton), handles all of Sally's correspondence, as a big star like Sally presumably gets a lot of mail. Sally has left Hollywood for New York, where's she's currently in rehearsals for what she hopes is her big new triumph of an off-Broadway musical, and she doesn't know anything about Douglas. Belle sends Douglas a signed photo of Sally, and disposes of his letter since Sally gets so much mail it's pointless to keep all those letters.

Douglas gets the photo, and he's not particularly happy as he already has a copy of this particular photo, and he being Sally's #1 fan clearly deserves much better fan service. He keeps writing increasingly unhinged letters that Belle deals with without making poor Sally have to deal with this stuff. She's got enough in her regular life what with the new show and a complicated relationship with ex-husband Jake (James Garner).

Douglas eventually starts stalking the apartment building where Sally lives. One evening, as Belle exits the building, Douglas follows her -- and slashes her with a straight razor! She survives, but the incident is troubling for everybody. Sally's in danger, and Belle is badly hurt, although amazingly we see a shot of her later in the movie where she has no scar where those facial bandages had been. The police send detective Raphael Andrews (Héctor Elizondo) to investigate, and as the stabbings begin to pile up, eventually gives Sally round-the-clock protection. But you can see why Raphael is disappointed Belle never saved Breen's correspondence.

As you might guess, The Fan winds its way toward the inevitable climax of Sally and Douglas winding up alone in a darkened space where the final showdown between the two of them takes place, and everybody lives happily ever after. Well, OK, they don't all live happily ever after, but that's another thing you could probably have guessed.

The Fan was a box-office bomb on its release back in 1981, and having seen it, I can see why. It's fairly predictable with wooden actng from Biehn. And the show-within-a-show is terrible despite having songs written by Marvin Hamlisch. On the bright side, The Fan is entertainingly bad, and that makes it worth a watch.

Scene of the Crime

TCM is running a bunch of movies tomorrow (May 23) that are police procedurals or fairly close to that. MGM did a whole series of shorts in the genre with the Crime Does Not Pay shorts of the second half of the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s, but feature-length procedurals weren't so common for the studio, being better known for the polished prestige material. One MGM movie that definitely fits the genre is Scene of the Crime, which TCM is running at noon.

The movie opens up with a murder in cold blood and in public, on the streets of Los Angeles. The murder is witnessed by a married couple who didn't exactly see much since they were in the shadows and wanted to avoid detection, but they heard the getaway driver refer to the killer as a "lobo". That's Spanish for "wolf", although in the context of late 1940s crime it apparently refers to a hired gun. The victim was a cop named Monaghan, and worse, Monaghan had a bunch of cash on him that wasn't taken and which he wouldn't normally have been able to account for.

Given the task of investigating is police detective Mike Conovan (Van Johnson). He's got a new partner in young C.C. Gordon (Tom Drake), since old partner Piper (John McIntire) is at the age where he really should be on desk duty. Conovan also has a long-suffering wife, Gloria (Arlene Dahl). The theory is that one of the national syndicates is trying to muscle its way into the local betting rackets, and that if Monaghan was on the take, as the money might suggest, he got caught up in it. Mike does good old-fashioned legwork, such as finding names and numbers that could be phone numbers or street addresses, as well as talking to police informants who don't want it known they're informants, such as Sleeper (Norman Lloyd).

One lead suggests guys named Turk Kingby and Lafe Douque may be lobos, while another lead suggests that Turk has an ex-girlfriend named Lili (Gloria DeHaven) who works in the burlesque show in one of the local clubs. However, neither Turk nor Douque fit the description of the murder given by the two witnesses. Mike tries to gain the trust of Lili, which makes Gloria really nervous, especially once the bodies start piling up. She sets him up with the possibility of getting a job handling security for a prominent industrialist, but Mike is just too damn honest to quit the force.

That, and there's also the rule that, thanks to the Production Code, the guilty parties will not be allowed to get away with it and the cops will get their man in the end. So you can expect the requisite happy ending in the final reel.

Scene of the Crime isn't exactly a bad movie, although it definitely has the MGM stamp all over it as a movie that's more than competently made but in a genre where they didn't really give the impression of knowing how to make a great film in that genre. The story and production feel by-the-numbers, and lacking the grit necessary to make a movie like this truly memorable. Ultimately, it comes off as the sort of material that would be fodder for well-done episodic TV a decade or two later, but at the MGM of 1949 is just ever so slightly off. It's still worth watching, but you can't help but think someone at another studio could have made a truly great movie.

Out west with Stewart Granger

When you think of stars whom you wouldn't necessarily think of as doing westerns, there are any number that come to mind, although I think more stars from the studio era did at least one western at some point in their careers than you might realize. Stewart Granger, who was good enough in all those British-set costume pieces did a couple of westerns over the course of his career, including The Last Hunt.

The movie is set in the Dakota Territory in the mid-1880s. Opening titles inform us that before Europeans started pushing westward past the Mississippi, there were millions of buffalo roaming the Great Plains, although by the 1880s, hunting by both the Indians and the whites had pushed that number down to the four-figure range. Stewart Granger plays Sandy McKenzie, a former buffalo hunter who turned rancher after the hunting ceased being good and he tired of the killing. Unfortunately, there are still just enough buffalo left to stampede his cattle, leaving him in need of a way to make money.

Enter Charles Gilson, played by Robert Taylor. He served in the Civil War and decided to go west and hunt buffalo after the War because he discovered he had a taste for shooting things dead and was good at it. Charles needs a crew for the next buffalo hunt, and Sandy reluctantly joins because he needs the money. In town, they're able to find two more men to round out the crew. Woodfoot (Lloyd Nolan) is a good mule hand, while Jimmy (Russ Tamblyn) is mixed race but for whatever reason has decided he's going to thrown in his lot with the white man instead of his Sioux half.

It's not going to be an easy hunt, and not only because of the dwindling number of buffalo out there in the wild. The Sioux aren't happy that the white man has been killing off the buffalo, in part because the Sioux need the buffalo to survive just as much, if not more, as the white man does. The Sioux also have religious beliefs surrounding albino buffaloes, so when Charley kills one of those, the Sioux are really displeased. In trying to gain revenge on the Indians, Charley enters the reservation and takes a young Indian woman (Debra Paget) hostage.

The bigger issue, however, is the way that Charley likes killing and Sandy no longer does. This personality clash is going to grow bigger as Sandy gets the distinct impression that Charley is getting too violent for his own good. To that end, Sandy gets the idea that perhaps he should try to save the Indian woman by taking her away from Charley and the buffalo hunting party, but that's only going to make Charley more jealous and lead to the ultimate climax.

The Last Hunt is a competently-made movie, helped out in no small part by the location shooting as well as the assistance of the Department of the Interior who allowed MGM to shoot real footage of a buffalo cull since the herds rebounded by the time the movie was made to a number where the herds had to be managed. The color and widescreen photography really help the location shooting. Unfortunately, the story is only serviceable. It's not a bad story by any means, but there have been a lot of better western stories put to screen.

Schedule warning: Night Must Fall (1964)

Tomorrow, May 21, is the birth anniversary of actor Robert Montgomery, and as such, TCM is running several of his films during the morning and afternoon. However, it looks as though there's an error on the schedule, as the movie at 2:30 PM, both in YouTube TV's listings as well as TCM's own listings, is the 1964 remake of Night Must Fall. Montgomery earned his first Oscar nomination for the 1937 version, so presumably that's what's actually going to air. (It's also a pretty darn good movie, and definitely worth a watch.) But since I've got the 1964 version on my DVR, I decided to watch it and do a post on it here.

Now, having seen the original movie (technically, the real original is a stage play) many years ago, as well as having seen the remake at some point in the past, I knew what was coming watching the remake a second time, so I was payint more attention to things that, as I remember it, are different between the two movie versions. The first big difference is that it's made explicit almost in the opening that the Danny character (played in the remake by Albert Finney) is guilty of murder. He kills a woman who has a reputation for being loose, chops off her head, and then disposes of the body and the axe in a pond. This remake also opens up the action more than a stage play could or the 1937 movie does, that being a Hollywood version of England.

For those who haven't seen either version of the movie, Danny works at a bar attached to a hotel in a small British town, and is the boyfriend of Dora (Sheila Hancock), who works for wheelchair-bound Mrs. Bramson (Mona Washbourne). Also living in the house is Bramson's niece Olivia (Susan Hampshire). Danny has gotten Dora pregnant, so Mrs. Bramson, who is a bit of a controlling figure which would explain why Olivia doesn't really like her, wants to see Danny to try to convince him to marry Dora. Instead, Danny is such a charmer that Bramson takes him on to do odd jobs around the house.

Meanwhile, Danny is a massive jerk to Dora, trying to put off any marriage, as well as intimating that he might be willing to get into a relationship with Olivia despite the fact that she's got a guy pursuing her. The only reason she doesn't go off with that guy is that it would require her to leave Bramson which she feels she can't do morally. Olivia starts to suspect Danny isn't everything he seems to be, while Dora eventually figures out what's going on between Danny and Olivia, which really ticks her off.

In another change from the earlier movie, this 1964 version, being able to get off the sound stage more, shows a fair bit of the police looking for the dead body and finding the body and axe leading them to talk to Danny. Danny opens up the hat box earlier in the movie, but Olivia doesn't take much notice of the box the way she does in a key scene in the earlier movie.

In reading up on this 1964 remake, apparently cinematographer Freddie Francis said that if they had made this movie but not let on that it was a remake of Night Must Fall, eg. by giving it a different title, it would probably have a better reputation than it does. I think I'd have to agree with him, as the story still works but doesn't center the suspense around the hat box, which is what the 1930s movie is known for. Robert Montgomery may be a bit more charming, but I think Finney is actually better at playing troubled than Montgomery was.

So, if you tune in to TCM tomorrow you're probably going to get the Robert Montgomery Night Must Fall. But the Albert Finney Night Must Fall is pretty good, too.

Caged Heat

I'm getting close to the end of the movies that TCM ran during their programming salute to Roger Corman last July. By now they've expired from my DVR, but I made a point of watching them before they expired and scheduling the posts well ahead of time. I think the last of the movies that I recorded and haven't yet writte a post on is Caged Heat, which was part of a night of movies Corman produced and gave young directors (who would go on to become famous) a chance to start their career with.

The movie starts with an establishing sequence of a couple of undercover cops driving up to one of those crappy motels that you wouldn't want to spend a night in if you can avoid it. In this case, the reason to avoid it is because there are drug deals going down in some of the hotel rooms, and that's also why the cops show up. Jacqueline Wilson (Erica Gavin) is a low-level member of the organization producing and selling the drugs. Unfortunately for her, during the operation, one of the cops gets shot. Jacqueline won't name names, so she's given a particularly harsh sentence at one of the women's prisons.

Cut to a prison and a scene where one of the lady prisoners is experiencing some nasty depredations involving violence and nudity. This turns out to be a dream sequence and clearly just there to show some female flesh. Jacqueline gets transferred to that prison, where Maggie (Juanita Brown) strikes up a conversation with her and shows her the ropes, which includes mentioning a prisoner who had claustrophobia and screamed and screamed, at least until she was taken to the "clinic". Now, she appears to be much more docile.

McQueen (Barbara Steele) is the warden of the prison, and needless to say she's fully aware of the prison clinic, euphemistically called "behavioral therapy". It's manned, pun intended by Dr. Randolph (Warren Miller), who seems as sadistic as McQueen. Jacqueline and Maggie have to figure out a way to escape, with their life as fugitives from justice taking up the second half of the film.

To be honest, you don't watch a movie like Caged Heat for the plot. Unsurprisingly, it's somthing you watch for the titillation and shock value. Needless to say, Jonathan Demme, directing his first film, succeeds in providing that shock value along with providing a good deal of mindless entertainment. Nobody will ever mistake Caged Heat for a masterpiece, but if you're going into a movie like this expecting a masterpiece, you're watching the wrong sort of movie.

No need of Harry Anderson or Markie Post

I'm always up for an interesting pre-Code movie, so I was happy to see last year's Summer Under the Stars on TCM include a day of the films of Anita Page. One that I hadn't seen before is Night Court.

Anita Page plays the good girl, although we don't see her for a while. Instead we first see Walter Huston, who is the judge of the titular court, Judge Moffett. As the movie opens, he's in the judge's chambers, where he's visited by Lil (Noel Baker), who is his mistress. He's not happy about her visiting at court, especially when some reporters show up to ask him about the anti-corruption committee being chaired by one of his fellow judges, Osgood (Lewis Stone). One of the reporters figures that Moffett has a visitor in his office, when when Moffett realizes the committe is being formed, he realizes that he's in trouble.

Moffett goes to Park Avenue to see Lil. He's been paying for Lil to have that nice apartment, which also has a wall safe, from which he pulls a bunch of large-denomination bills. He's obviously one of the judges on the take that Osgood is going to be investigating, and he's smart enough to know that Lil could put the finger on him, especially if she's forced to testify under oath. So he tells Lil that she's going to have to vacate the Park Avenue apartment and find some place that's cheap and where the authorities won't be able to find her.

This is where we're finally about to meet Anita Page, although we're only about 15 minutes into the movie. Lil goes to one of the less fashionable parts of town and picks a place to rent that just happens to be in the same building where Page's character lives. Page plays Mary Thomas, a young housewife and mother of an infant child married to Mike (Phillips Holmes), a taxi driver who works the night shift.

Moffett goes to visit Lil, only to find out that Osgood's detectives are smart and seem to be following Lil already. Lil isn't stupid either, and goes to see Mary to give her a sob story about a detective who is working for some sort of abusive partner with whom Lil no longer wants to be partnered. During the visit, Mary's kid pulls something out of Lil's pocketbook, which turns out to be a bank book (remember those) with a large set of figures, and Judge Moffett's name, in it. When Mary returns it to Lil, Judge Moffett realizes that he's in trouble, thinking that Mary actively knows what's going wrong when she doesn't.

At the point the movie gets really fun, if unrealistic, as Moffett has Mary framed to be the worst sort of criminal possible, resulting in her winding up in prison and Mike losing custody of the baby. How the rest of this plays out is something you're just going to have to watch Night Court to find out.

Night Court is another of those pre-Codes that has a fun if not quite plausible premise that turns into something that's more fun than it has any right to be. Poor Mike and Mary seem to have one burden after another heaped upon the in the second half of the movie. Unsurprisingly, Walter Huston is quite good as the corrupt judge. Lewis Stone doesn't have a whole lot to do, and frankly neither does Anita Page. Phillips Holmes is one of those early sound era actors whose careers didn't go quite as far as it should have, although in his case it was partly his own doing thanks to a car crash. Holmes, however, is quite good here.

Night Court is definitely worth watching, especially if you have an interest in pre-Codes.

Briefs for May 18-19, 2025

Tonight's post-Mae West lineup on TCM is an interesting one: the original monthly schedule had Yasujiro Ozu's I Graduated, But.... at 12:45 AM. However, apparently only a fragment of that movie survives. TCM's online schedule now lists an Ozu movie called A Straightforward Boy kicking off Silent Sunday Nights at 12:30 AM, followed by the excerpt from I Graduated, But.... (on the TCM schedule with the Japanese title) at 12:45 which isn't the right time if the 17-minute running time TCM gives for A Straightforward Boy is correct. IMDb lists it as 38 minutes for some reason. I haven't seen either of these, so I can't comment. After the two Ozu works, TCM lists a bunch of two-reel sound movies about putting sound to film.

To have a pair of Japanese films in the Imports block is more normal. I've recommended both of tonight's films before, but one of them shows up rather rarely, which is why I'm mentioning tonight's lineup. The two films are Cruel Story of Youth at 2:30 AM, followed by Boy at 4:15 AM. I think Boy last aired when TCM was doing Mark Cousins' The Story of Film series ages ago. At least a decade, since it was before my mom died.

Monday morning and afternoon on TCM gives us a day full of movies about things that can go wrong while flying, such as the excellent Five Came Back at 10:15 AM. Not excellent at all, but a heck of a lot of fun to watch because of how bad it is, is The Crowded Sky which concludes the afternoon at 6:00 PM.

There are a couple of passings worth mentioning since the last briefs post I did. One is a name I wouldn't have recognized, Greg Cannom, a multiple Oscar-winning makeup artist. A lot of the people who work behind the camera don't get as much recognition as they deserve. Cannom's death was announced May 9; he was 73.

Directors are among the people behind the camera who absolutely do get mentioned more prominently when they die, and last week Oscar-winning director Robert Benton died aged 92. Benton won an Oscar for Kramer vs. Kramer, and also directed the terribly underrated Nobody's Fool late in the careers of Paul Newman and Jessica Tandy.

What's Up, Kid Natural; or, For Kid Natural's Sake

Another of the movies that had been sitting on my DVR for a while that I only recently got around to watching is one that brought back together the leads from one of the brighter comedies of the earlier 1970s. The movie in question is The Main Event. It's got another airing on TCM, tomorrow (May 18) at 7:45 AM.

Barbra Streisand stars as Hillary Kramer. Although the movie was released in 1979, Kramer seems more in keeping with with yuppie business types you'd see in 1980s movies. Hillary is the owner of a perfume company and has a great nose for what makes a good perfume to the point that she's become quite successful and lives a high-flying life full-up on business appointments as well as things like an aerobics class in what seems like a studio right next to her office.

One day, Hillary gets a call from her lawyer, David (Paul Sand), who also happens to be her ex-husband. He says it's important, although he keeps getting pushed off by Hillary since she's got so much business to transact. But his news is indeed important. It seems as though, unbeknownst to Hillary, her accountant has been embezzling money and has now absconded with that money to South America to evade extradition. Hillary, despite being successful at making perfume, doesn't seem so good at accountancy, and doesn't understand until David puts together piles of assets and liabilities, with the liability pile outweighing the assets.

Hillary is going to be forced to sell the company, and for some odd reason considering her great nose, she's also forced into signing a non-compete clause that not only means the end of her employment with the company she owned, but also keeps her out of the perfume business for two years. The only "asset" she has, if you will, involves a contract owning the rights to a boxer. But that contract was more for the purpose of being a tax write-off. Said boxer hasn't fought in years.

Hillary goes to the gym to find the boxer in question, Eddie "Kid Natural" Scanlon (Ryan O'Neal). Eddie has seen the money from Hillary as a way to make a modest living, and has even been able to use it to open a driving school. But his part of the contract requires fighting at least twice a year, and he hasn't done that since getting disqualified from the Pan Am Games for getting in a scuffle outside the ring with opponent Hector Mantilla. Hillary needs the money that Kid Natural would bring in from fighting, so she calls in the contract. Either fight, or she'll be able to take over the driving school.

Not that Kid Natural is the greatest of fighters; worse is that with nothing else to do, and needing to keep an eye on her contract, Hillary decides to take a rather more active role in managing Kid. It's the sort of relationship that's going to have the two at each other's throats, at least until it suddenly doesn't, which you know is going to happen in this sort of a movie since it's not a drama. Eventually, promoter Gough (James Gregory) is able to complete negotiations for the big fight everybody's been waiting for: the fight between Kid Natural and Mantilla that never happened at the Pan Am Games.

As you can see from the title of this post, I compared The Main Event to For Pete's Sake, one of Streisand's comedies from a few years earlier. That's not the one that co-starred Ryan O'Neal; instead, I found myself thinking of some genre similarities between the two movies. The Main Event really gave me vibes of the sort of thing that Hollywood could have churned out in the years before World War II as a fun little B movie, either from the rom-com angle or the boxing angle.

Fast forward almost 40 years however, and The Main Event comes up as something that doesn't quite sparkle the way those old B movies do. A large part of it is that it's material that works better as a B movie and not designed for someone like Streisand who was by this time a huge star. More specifically regarding Streisand, a little bit of her goes a long way, and there's a lot of Streisand here. Not that The Main Event is a bad movie; it's more that it would have worked better conceived as something smaller.

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid

Once again, we've got a movie that TCM ran not too long back that, having not seen it before, I decided to record so that I could watch it for the next TCM airing. That movie is Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, airing tonight at 8:00 PM on TCM.

Steve Martin stars as Rigby Reardon, a parody of one of those struggling private eyes you'd see in movies of the noir era. He's reading a newspaper story about a famous scientist named John Forrest who, in a scene we see at the beginning of the movie, is run off the road and killed, although at the end of the movie you'll see that this is one of many plot holes in the movie. Walking into Reardon's office is a woman who sees the newspaper and faints.

That woman turns out to be Juliet Forrest, who fainted because of the newspaper headline about her father; meanwhile, Rigby, having come to Juliet's aid, immediately falls head over heels in love with her. Juliet showed up because she wants to know who killed her father and why; she's got good reason to believe that there's something sinister going on. And, of course, she's going to be proved right since we wouldn't have much of a movie here if there weren't anything sinister going on.

Juliet gives Rigby the key to her father's lab, in a run-down part of Los Angeles because Dr. Forrest's hobby was cheesemaking and this is where he could experiment with moldy cheeses and not bother any neighbors. What Rigby finds is two lists, one called "Friends of Carlotta" and the other "Enemies of Carlotta". Rigby is interrupted by a knock at the door from a man saying that he's the exterminator.

That man turns out to be Alan Ladd straight out of This Gun for Hire, and our "exterminator" shoots Rigby in the shoulder. Now, if you didn't know going into the movie, the whole point behind Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid was to serve as both a parody of the noir and detective genres of the 1940s as well as an homage to them. The homage involves taking scenes from various movies of the era and splicing them into the movie in such away that they fit relatively coherently into the plot. That, and photographing Steve Martin in such a way that it looks like he really is interacting with the classic-era stars. (Having him on the phone with some of them, like Barbara Stanwyck from Sorry, Wrong Number or Humphrey Bogart, is quite convenient.)

The plot, such as it is, results in Rigby learning all of the "enemies of Carlotta" were on a cruise ship down to South America called the Immer Essen and these passengers are being bumped off one by one. The reason why is only revealed when Rigby goes down to South America himself.

The plot of Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid is understandably a mess, since it's stuff to weave in all those clips from disparately-plotted movies and have the plot remain tight. So the movie is as much if not more about the parody, as well as trying to identify all those old stars and movies. The stars are mostly easy, although I kept thinking one of them would be Ida Lupino. The movies are a bit more difficult especially since a few people have clips taken from multiple movies while some movies also in the original had multiple people who show up Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, although not necessarily in all of the movies excerpted. As an example, I mentioned Barbara Stanwyck above; although Double Indemnity is also used, it's not for her scenes. Thankfully, however, all of the stars and the movies used are shown with clips in the closing credits.

I think whether Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid will work for the viewer depends on how much viewers like those old movies. Naturally, I'm a fan of the old stuff so I really enjoyed Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. But I could understand viewers who don't know that much about the classics finding the plot not working and these old clips a distraction.

Gunfight at Comanche Creek

I recorded a series of westerns to my cloud DVR several months back, and they're getting close to the point of expiring, so I have to watch them all and write up posts on them. Next up is one that I mentioned briefly a few weeks back, Gunfight at Comanche Creek.

The movie starts off intriguingly, with the dulcet tones of Reed Hadley informing us it's summer, 1875 in Comanche Creek, CO. A bunch of strangers ride into town, and first thing in the morning, as someone from the hotel brings a hot meal over to the town jail, he's ambushed by a gang. They then take the meal to the jail themselves in order to be able to free the prisoner being held there, Jack Mason.

However, Jack Mason doesn't know the people who are freeing him! A reward is put on Mason's head, and that reward is increased as the gang commits more hold-ups, with only Mason being recognized. Eventually, the reward gets to $3500, at which point the gang kills Mason, with the intention of getting the reward money since Mason is wanted "dead or alive". It's a pretty nifty little scheme, and the authorities have no way of proving that whoever brought Mason in would have been involved with breaking him out of jail and using him in those robberies.

Mason wasn't the guy's real name, although that's not important since he gets bumped off in the first ten minutes or so of the movie. What is important is the fact that he was working for the National Detective Agency, based in Wichita, KS. The agency bosses understand this isn't the first time this has happened, and want to catch the gang leaders responsible for this. With that in mind, they come up with the idea of putting yet another of their detectives in the same situation Mason was in: get a guy arrested on some bogus charge and then have the gang break him out. To that end, they select Bob Gifford (Audie Murphy) to pass gold certificates allegedly stolen in a train robbery. This time, however, they'll send a second guy along, Nielson, to spy on the whole operation to try to keep Gifford from getting killed.

Gifford, taking the name Judd Tanner, goes to Comanche Creek to start the operation. Soon enough, he winds up in jail, and on the first night he's in jail, a sheriff named Simms shows up. Except that Simms isn't his name; it's Amos Troop (DeForest Kelley), and this is the plot to break Tanner out of jail and do to him what the Troop gang did to Mason previously.

Gifford tries to figure out exactly what's going on at the gang compound, without being revealed as an employee of the National Detective Agency. Things get complicated when there's another criminal who's not part of the gang and the gang discovers they might have a mole in their midst.

Gunfight at Comanche Creek is an effective little second-tier western, although it's apparently also a remake of a movie from the mid-1950s. Audie Murphy does well enough, and it's a lot of fun to see Bones from Star Trek as the bad guy in a western. It's nothing spectacular, but it certainly entertains.

Not pairing Ginger Rogers with Pam Grier

Robert Shaw was another of the people honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August. This gave the chance to record a few movies I hadn't seen before, along with one I had never even heard of. That latter movie is The Luck of Ginger Coffey.

Robert Shaw plays Coffey, nicknmed Ginger for his red hair, although the movie is in black and white. Ginger was born in Ireland, but seeing no economic opportunity for himself there, has decided to emigrate to Canada with his wife Vera (Mary Ure) and adolescent daughter Paulie. As the movie opens the family has already been in Canada for some time, long enough for Ginger to be at the unemployment office in a Montreal where you could still get by as a monolingual anglophone: the movie was released in 1964, several years before the Parti québecois gained power and began to transform Quebec.

Ginger thinks he's well-suited to a bunch of better white-collar type jobs. Perhaps he is, although he comes across as the sort of chancer who will come up with all sorts of get-rich-quick schemes that to any sane person are never going to pan out. The bigger problem, however, is that Ginger went into the military back in Ireland, meaning that he wasn't able to get the sort of academic or professional qualifications that are necessary for the sort of job he wants.

So Ginger winds up getting two jobs to try to show Vera he can still make it in Canada. One is as a proofreader for the local English-language newspaper. Ginger has this belief that this job is eventually going to lead to work as a reporter, which is something he just knows he can be good at. The editor, however, is likely just trying to fob him off in saying maybe a reporter's job will open up in a few weeks' time. Ginger's other job is working for a diaper delivery service. This job is getting a bit more precarious in that it's early in the era when disposable diapers were coming into being. Here, Ginger has something that might actually be a good idea: why not rent out things like cribs that parents are only going to need for a year or two at most? Since the company would be able to reuse the stuff and obtain it at a volume discount, this might be a good new revenue stream for the company. And the boss actually likes it and wants to promote Ginger. But he's insistent on becoming a reporter.

All of this indecision is putting Vera off, and when she finds out that Ginger has spent the money the couple had saved for the possibility that they might have to go home to Ireland not having succeeded in Canada, that's enough for her. And she's already met another guy. It's all enough to sent Ginger's life spiraling out of control....

The idea of The Luck of Ginger Coffey is a good one, but the movie was hard for me to get into for a couple of reasons. One is that the print TCM ran didn't seem very good, looking more like a TV movie. The bigger issue is that the Ginger Coffey character isn't all that sympathetic. He seems to have unrealistic expectations, and is also the sort of smooth operator character that has never really appeared to me. So even though Shaw and Ure both give good performances -- and, from what I've read from Canadians, the movie is a nice time capsule of early 1960s Montreal -- it still wasn't the most appealing movie to me.

Romance, not melodrama

Ginger Rogers started her screen pairing with Fred Astaire back in 1933 with a supporting performance in Flying Down to Rio. But sometimes it feels like RKO didn't know what to do with Rogers when they had to put her in a movie without Astaire. A good example of this is the 1935 film Romance in Manhattan.

We don't see Rogers first; that honor goes to her co-star, Francis Lederer. Lederer plays Karel Novak, a Czech who at the start of the movie is at Ellis Island on his way into the country. He's followed all the rules for becoming an immigrant, or at least he thinks he has. Apparently at some point after he booked passage to America, the law changed from requiring an immigrant to have $50 with him to having $200. Since Karel only has about $60, he's not legal so it's straight back on the boat for him. Come back when you've got $200.

So Karel does what anybody would do in that situation, which is to squeeze through a porthole and literally jump ship, swimming back to a harbor where he's more or less fished out of the water because he's about to drown. In another shame for Karel, he loses his wallet which has his money and ID, so now he's in Manhattan without any money, not even the $60 or so he had had.

While roaming Manhattan, he passes a stage door where, just outside, a young chorus girl is having lunch. The show has apparently put on sandwiches, donuts, and the like, so this young lady gives Karel some food figuring he's one of the army of the unemployed since there's still a depression on. This young woman is of course the Ginger Rogers character, named Sylvia Dennis. Even better for Karel is that Sylvia says she's got a brother who might be able to help Karel get a job.

If this were a Warner Bros. movie or a woman not played by Ginger Rogers, you might think that Karel is going to be sucked into a life of crime, but her offer is more or less legitimate, or at least well-intentioned. Said brother is actually her kid brother Frank (Jimmy Butler), who makes extra money as a paperboy, the two living together since their parents are dead; Frank might be able to get Karel a job selling newspapers. However, Frank is continally skipping school to earn that extra money, and now the social worker types want to put Frank in an orphanage.

Karel is willing to do any work, and does, although things keep conspiring to make life more difficult for him. Along the way, Karel and Sylvia fall in love, which means that the rest of the story is basically the journey to the requisite happy ending.

I don't know exactly what immigration law was like back in the 1930s, but there's no doubt about the fact that Karel has violated federal laws. Not that the movie is trying to make any of the sort of commentary that a movie in 2025 would be making about immigration, of course. But that's one of what felt to me like a plot hole. Never mind Karel being incredibly naive, or the owner of the building where Sylvia lives never noticing that she put Karel up on the roof to sleep since you couldn't have an unmarried couple shacking up together. The movie also feels like it didn't know how to write a gritty character for Rogers.

Then again, I don't think that Romance in Manhattan would have been conceived of by the studio as anything other than a programmer at most. Looking back 90 years at it, I'd say that it's interesting as a time capsule, but nothing particularly noteworthy otherwise.

Missing

There are any number of films that came out when I was growing up in the late 1970s and 1980s that I had of course heard about when they came out, but never got to see in the theater because I would have been too young for them at the time. Another such film is Missing. So the last time it showed up on TCM I made a point to record it for the next time it showed up. That next time is tomorrow, May 13, at 3:00 PM.

The movie starts off on September 15, 1973. Charles Horman (John Shea) is riding in a car with his friend and presumptive co-worker Terry Simon (Melanie Mayron) being driven by a US diplomat with diplomatic plates. They're in Chile, riding back from the coastal resort of Viña Del Mar to Santiago, where Charles and Terry live and where Charles' wife Beth (Sissy Spacek) is waiting for them. They're stopped at a police checkpoint because four days earlier, there had been a coup in the country. Terry is somewhat thinking about leaving, but the airport is still closed, while Charles and Beth seem to show no desire to get out of what is clearly becoming a dangerous country.

Charles' job isn't fully made clear; he does some work translating articles for a local newspaper that one can guess opposes the new administration, and claims to be working on a novel. But they're also of the political persuasion that knows the wrong sort of people, as Charles is taking notes on what he's seen the past several days and is clearly worried about the new authorities finding those notes. Charles returns home the following morning, having had to spend the night in a hotel because of the curfew, and the next night when the couple is separated again, Beth returns home to find the house ransacked. And then Charles goes missing.

Beth tries to get help from the US Embassy, but feels like she's getting stonewalled. Back in the US, Charles' father Ed (Jack Lemmon) is a businessman with much more influence than the wife of a writer living thousands of miles away. Ed talks to a senator, a US Representative, and various people at the State Department, and feels like he too is getting the run-around. So he decided to fly to Chile to go look for his son himself.

At this point, we learn that father and son had some differences of opinion, with Dad thinking that perhaps his son should have been more careful; this obviously leads to all sorts of issues with his daughter-in-law too. But as Ed investigates, and in a series of flashbacks, we learn that Charles met some Americans in Viña Del Mar who claim to be involved with the US Navy and claim to have some involvement in helping to oust the previous president, something that would certainly explain why embassy staff are trying to give the Hormans the brushoff.

Missing is based on a true story, and is quite well-made as far as it goes, thanks to pretty good characterizations from Lemmon and Spacek. However, Missing also suffers a bit from omissions because of its basis on a true story. There's this impression that Chile just suddenly, magically had a US-engineered coup on September 11, 1973. Regarless of the extent to which the US was involved (the Nixon administration certainly would have hated a president like Allende who flirted with Marxism), the country had been unstable for some time at least since anti-Allende forces gained majorities in both houses of parliament in elections earlier that year. Certainly, things would have been deteriorating long enough that you'd expect normal people in the capital city to have an exit strategy. Also, a couple of Charles and Beth's American ex-pat friends are portrayed as being even more of the sort of people to wind up getting disappeared, except that they don't. Director Costa-Gavras had, a dozen years earlier, made Z, which was clearly about the military junta in his native Greece although he wisely doesn't mention Greece there. It makes for a better movie, I think, not that Missing is bad by any means. It just feels more unsubtle in its political views.

The bigger irony is that, in the intervening years -- I think I'd pin the shift to the start of the Barack Obama presidency -- there's been a sea-change in the perception of the US left and right to state power and the use of that power. Nowadays, it's those on the right who go on about "color revolutions" and how the western establishment attempts coups in other countries (eg. Ukraine in 2014) and goes after its political opponents (see the canceled presidential election in Romania last year for an example), while the left seems just fine with using state power against "populism". Not that anybody would have seen that coming when Missing was made. It's just an interesting point to ponder while watching the movie.

TCM's Gene Hackman Tribute

Gene Hackman (r.) with Roy Scheider in the film that won him his first Oscar, The French Connection (1971), 10:00 PM

Actor Gene Hackman died in February under sad circumstance we all heard about after his and his wife's bodies were found. Thanks to TCM's scheduling, it takes a little while for them to get around to a programming tribute. That tribute comes tonight, and includes five of Hackman's films:

8:00 PM Bonnie and Clyde
10:00 PM The French Connection

Midnight Hoosiers
2:00 AM Mississippi Burning
4:00 AM Night Moves

La Paura

Another of the foreign-language movies that was getting close to the point of expiring from my DVR, forcing me to watch it and do a post on it now, is another one that I have to admit to not knowing anything about before it showed up on TCM: Fear.

The movie has a bit of an interesting provenance. It stars Ingrid Bergman, and was made during the period when she was married to Roberto Rossellini and as such was not exactly sought after in Hollywood. Rossellini, of course, was Italian, and so the version of Fear that TCM ran was in Italian. But, it's based on a story by Austrian author Stefan Zweig, and was a co-production between Italy and West Germany. So Ingrid Bergman is as far as I can tell dubbed her, although more knowledgable viewers may be able to recognize if it's actually her voice.

Bergman plays Irene Wagner, who helps manage the bioengineering plant her husband Albert (Mathias Wiemann) founded in Munich. The movie was released in 1954, which means it's not too long after World War II. Albert having been a scientist, would have been working for the Nazis, and wound up in an internment camp after the war, eventually to be released because West Germany needed a lot of those industrial types who didn't have the best of choices regarding not working for the Nazis. Albert, after having been released from the camp, spent some time in a sanitarium to recover from the stress.

All of that is the back-story, although it's necessary here to establish that Irene was separated from Albert for a substantial period of time. Long enough for her to need some sort of intimate friendship, which she sought out in the form of Erich (Kurt Kreuger). However, with her husband now having been out of the sanitarium for long enough to resume his work, Irene has decided she's going to break off her relationship with Erich.

The only thing is, on the night she's about to do so, she's approached by a woman calling herself Miss Schultze (Renate Mannhardt). Schutze says that she was the former girlfriend of Erich, and as such knows all about the relationship Irene had with Erich. Schultze was recently evicted from her apartment hotel as a result, so she says she needs a bunch of money in order to go way. If Irene doesn't give Schultze that money, she'll have no qualms about seeing Albert and telling him the whole truth.

So Irene gives Schultze some money. This is something that's very bad to do to a blackmailer, since you know the blackmailer isn't going to stop here, especially since all of this has happened in the first ten minutes or so of the movie. Indeed, Miss Schultze keeps showing up and asking for more money. Worse, she shows up unannounced when Irene and Albert go to the philharmonic, which it would seem there's no way Schultze could have known about. The movie has one more big twist from there....

The idea behind Fear is an interesting one, but unfortunately the movie is only 75 minutes long. I say unfortunately because the short running time decidedly gives the impression that Rossellini didn't have a good idea how to resolve everything. (I haven't read the original story, so I don't know how Zweig resolved the conflict in the original.) The movie feels like it ends rather abruptly. Apparently multiple endings were filmed and as a result multiple versions of the film were released in different markets. That, and the film got edited more for a later re-relase.

Fear is a very good idea that just needed an extra 15 to 20 minutes to come up with a more satisfying conclusion.

Mother's Day weekend briefs

Mother's Day is tomorrow, which means that it's once again time for TCM to trot out Mildred Pierce and any number of other movies related to motherhood. This time around the tribute is a bit shorter thanks to the presence of Mae West as TCM's Star of the Month on Sundays in prime time. So, there are only six movies in the tribute:

6:00 AM The Magnificent Ambersons, the Orson Welles movie with the reputation of having been butchered by the studio;
7:30 AM Gypsy, telling the story of Gypsy Rose Lee (Natalie Wood) and her pushy stage mother (Rosalind Russell);
Noon Bachelor Mother, in which Ginger Rogers winds up taking care of a foundling;
1:30 PM Sounder, set in 1930s Louisiana with Cicely Tyson as the mother taking care of her son while her husband is in prison;
3:30 PM I Remember Mama, with Irene Dunne as a Norwegian immigrant mother in turn-of-the-century San Francisco; and
6:00 PM Mildred Pierce, which sees Joan Crawford smack Ann Blyth.

FXM doesn't seem to be doing anything for Mother's Day, which kind of surprised me. I haven't really checked any of the other channels out there, since I don't get any of the premium cable channels, and the FAST channels don't really put up their schedules anywhere that I can find.

It has nothing to do with Mother's Day, but I suppose I should mention the passing of director James Foley, at the age of 71. I have to admit I didn't recognize the name at first, but when I saw the list of films that he directed, several of them are quite recognizable, notably Glengarry Glen Ross, At Close Range, and Who's That Girl?.

How did this end up on TCM

I was watching another movie on my DVR recently, one of those movies that's a little over 90 minutes but that TCM put in a two-hour time slot, leaving ample time for a short to round out the schedule before the next feature. That short was Champagne for Two.

The plot, such as it is since this is only a two-reeler, involves Jerry Malone (played by George Reeves). He owns a nightclub and one of the star attractions is his wife Lita (actress Lita Baron, credited as Isabelita). They've been married for just about a year, but didn't get to have a honeymoon, so they're just about to go off to Havana where they met (the short was made in 1947, so long before Communism came to Cuba) to have a sort of honeymoon.

Except that Mrs. Cowdy, the cleaning woman, shows up to claim that she heard a couple of men talking about making a big bundle in such a way that clearly implies that the men are planning a heist of the nightclub. Jerry is going to have to put off his trip for a day to make certain nothing happens, while Mrs. Cowdy and her husband are invited to the club to go undercover in the hopes that she can recognize the would-be criminals.

I won't mention how the story ends, but the framing story is really just a device to go around the musical numbers that include Lita as well as a humorous number with two guys wearing the front and back halves of a bull. It's not a bad short, and it's in Technicolor, although the print looks like some places could use some restoration in bringing back the eye-popping colors.

The big reason I bring up this short, however, is because it was produced... at Paramount. Now, I know that Paramount's pre-1950 features wound up with Universal, although there's no modern-day Universal logo on this one, and I'm not certain if the deal (with MCA, if memory serves) that wound up with Universal getting the rights to the Paramount library even included the shorts. But I couldn't come up with any good reason for this particular short to have made its way to any of the entities that became part of the Turner library that Ted Turner built before launching TCM. The only thing I can think is that Billy Rose, who wrote the original story might have wound up with the rights to this one at some point. But that's just a guess.

Bachelor in Paradise

Next up in the series of movies that I've got sitting on my DVR and are coming up on TCM is the Bob Hope comedy Bachelor in Paradise. It comes on early tomorrow morning (or overnight tonight, if you prefer to look at it that way) at 4:00 AM.

Hope plays A.J. Niles, and as the movie opens he's on the French Riviera. Niles is an author who has written a series of books purporting to be on the lives of various European countries, but are really an excuse to scandalize people with the steamy look at Europeans; think Peyton Place levels of scandal. Niles hasn't lived in America for a decade or so, which would imply not lot after the end of World War II since the movie was released in 1961. That being an expatriate turns out to be a big problem.

Even in those days Americans had to pay income tax on their worldwide earnings even if they didn't actually live in America (technically, you only have to file a tax return; there's a good chance an expat will fall below the tax threshold or else have paid enough tax abroad to avoid a US tax liability). Niles earns enough that he definitely would have to pay tax to the US, especially since the earnings are royalties from book sales in the US. But the plot point of the story is that Niles' accountant failed to pay those taxes for years. Even so, Niles is still liable, and owes some $600,000 in taxes. And this also means the IRS won't let the State Department renew Niles' passport. So Niles is going to have to return to America and pay off his tax debt somehow.

Fortunately, Niles' editor Austin Palfrey (John McGiver) has a brilliant idea: write a book called How the Americans Live similar to the books he's written about various European countries. Since Niles' photo hasn't been printed on the dust jackets of his books, people don't know what Niles looks like; also, he can work under an assumed name. To that end, Palfrey is going to rent Niles a house in one of those new-build suburban developments that sprung up like mushrooms in the years Niles was in Europe, this one in a Los Angeles suburb called Paradise.

The only thing is, this particular development caters to families, and Niles is a bachelor. Indeed, he's going to have to rent the house of one Rosemary Howard (Lana Turner), the assistant to the builder. Niles, taking the name Jack Adams, immediately tries putting the moves on Rosemary, who isn't having any of it. There's also humor in the idea that Niles has no idea how to keep house, especially in a suburb like this, as we see when he makes a mess of things with next-door neighbor Linda Delavane (Paula Prentiss).

To do his research, Niles starts offering lectures to the assembled housewives, although this winds up having the effect of changing the dynamic between various husbands and wives in the development, not always for the better. Additionally, Niles the writer has a bad reputation because of how "scandalous" those books are. It all winds up in a big court case where everything is revealed and we get to the requisite happy ending.

Bachelor in Paradise isn't the world's greatest movie, but it's better than some of the films Hope made later in the 1960s, some of which were terrible. A lot of people say, and I think I'd agree, that another really nice thing about the movie is how it looks at then-contemporary suburbia closer to how it actually was (there was location shooting in Woodland Hills, CA), and not that revisionist view of the 1960s that media wants to push today. People who like mid-century modern design will probably love the production values of Bachelor in Paradise.

Los otros

Last year, Nicole Kidman was given one of those lifetime achievement awards, I think from the AFI -- I have to admit to not following the lifetime achievement awards very closely. Anyway, it was an opportunity for TCM to run a couple of nights of her movies, which allowed me the chance to record some I hadn't seen before. Previously I blogged about The Hours; now it's time to blog about The Others.

The action is set in 1945 on Jersey, one of the Channel Islands which are a British dependancy. But the Channel Islands had been occupied by the Nazis during the war, and also subject to bombing. Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) lives there with her two young children, Nicholas and Anne, who have special needs because they have a disease that leaves them extremely sensitive to light in general and sunlight in particular. Grace's husband escaped Jersey and went off to fight in the war, with Grace thinking he was killed in action.

As the movie, three people show up at the house, presumably answering an ad Grace had placed looking for servants. They look like they could be a family but aren't; consisting of Mrs. Mills (Fionnula Flanagan) a maid/governess, Mr. Tuttle (Eric Sykes) the governor, and mute cook Lydia (Elaine Cassidy). The three showed up surprisingly quickly and unannounced, which leaves Grace wondering. All sorts of visual cues also leave the viewer to suspect that these three may not be who or what they're claiming to be, and as the movie goes on animosity between the three of them and Grace grows.

Worse for Grace is that other things begin to occur. Little Anne claims to see people who should have long since been dead, which of course Grace knows Anne can't possibly have seen. But then there start to be various voices and sounds that Grace hears which can't possibly be real, culminating in a piano playing itself in a locked room. Perhaps the house has ghosts. But do ghosts actually exist?

Things get stranger when Grace finds a photo album which contains a bunch of photos of dead people (photographing the deceased lying in repose was apparently relatively common in the late 19th century), and then her husband returns from the war. Perhaps he wasn't really killed in the war; getting information to occupied Jersey wouldn't have been so easy. Matters come to a head one morning when Grace finds all the curtains have been removed, putting her children in jeopardy once the sunlight comes in. Or perhaps the children don't really have a sensitivity to sunlight?

The Others is an intriguing little horror movie that doesn't always go where you might expect it to be going, and one that's definitely worth watching thanks to Kidman's acting as well as atmospheric cinematography, not on location but done in Spain.

The Newport Story

TCM is running a mini-feature of programming for Louis Armstrong tomorrow afternoon, starting off with one of those movies that I've seen show up on TCM a bunch of times but have never before gotten around to watching, until the last time it showed up so that I could record it. That movie is High Society, tomorrow (May 8) at 2:30 PM.

If for some reason you don't know what High Society is about, it's a remake, with several songs added, of The Philadelphia Story. Grace Kelly takes on the Katharine Hepburn role of Tracy Lord. She's a society daughter, but one who's extremely high maintenance. She was married to C.K. Dexter-Haven, played here by Bing Crosby. That marriage ended some time in the past, and as the movie opens it's the day before Tracy is about to get remarried, to George Kittredge (John Lund, appropriately wooden in the role).

One way in which High Society diverges from The Philadelphia Story is that C.K. is a dilettante musician, living next door to the Lords in another big mansion in Newport, RI. Newport was and I think still is home to a big jazz festival, which is what enables C.K. to put up Louis Armstrong and have Armstrong be a part of the cast. Armstrong serves no real plot purpose, other than to sing a sort of prologue and epilogue, as well as his band to do a musical number at a party the Lords have the night before the wedding.

Tracy's father Seth (Sidney Blackmer) is having an affair with a chorus girl, and one of the gossip mags not only knows about it but is planning on doing a story on it. So Tracy's unvle Willie (Louis Calhern) imposes on the magazine not to run that story, in exchange for getting an exclusive about Tracy's upcoming wedding. To that end, the magazine sends a writer, Mike Connor (Frank Sinatra) and a photographer who's in love with him although he doesn't realize it, Elizabeth Imbrie (Celeste Holm).

C.K., living right next door to the Lords, is able to crash the place, much to the consternation of Tracy although not to her kid sister, who has always loved C.K. and is the one person who really understands that C.K. is the one man who really is right for Tracy. Tracy also gets tipsy the night before the wedding and goes off to the pool with Mike, but theirs is a relationship that could never last.

For fairly obvious reasons High Society is always going to be compared to The Philadelphia Story. Unfortunately, High Society never quite hits the heights of The Philadelphia Story, which I think is largely due to the casting. Katharine Hepburn's reputation as box office poision, which was shattered by The Philadelphia Story, imbues her Tracy Lord with something that makes you want to see her get her comeuppance; Grace Kelly never had that sort of screen persona. Likewise, Bing Crosby feels too old for the Dexter-Haven part; he was born before Cary Grant in real life but essaying the asame role 16 years later. Sinatra isn't bad but doesn't really sparkle; the only one who does is Celeste Holm who looks like she's having the time of her life getting to do comedy.

High Society isn't exactly bad; it's more that it's burdened by being a remake of an all-time classic.

Not just beatniks

I mentioned in my review of Flower Drum Song how Hollywood didn't seem to have a handle on how to portray beatniks when they were the perceived counterculture of the late 1950s. Fast-forward to the end of the following decade, and the counterculture were now hippies. The old guard of Hollywood certainly didn't know how to deal with them, either, leading to all sorts of disasters, such as I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!.

Peter Sellers is the star here, playing Harold Fine, a Los Angeles lawyer who drives a Lincoln Continental and who lives a very upper-middle-class lifestyle, with the one major exception being that he's 35 and still hasn't gotten married. Oh, he's got a long-term girlfriend in the form of his secretary Joyce (Joyce Van Patten), and she's been pushing him to set a date for the wedding. But it takes getting in a fender-bender and having to drive a courtesy car -- a station wagon painted by the garage owner's hippie son who then decamped for San Francisco -- to get Harold to change his mine.

Harold has good news for his mom (Jo Van Fleet), but she springs a surprise on him first. She barges into his office talking about dying at 61 being much too young, so Harold immediately thinks Dad has died. No; it's just Mrs. Fine's butcher. (Apparently not a kosher butcher, which is weird since the Fines are Jewish and there's a joke about the butcher being Catholic.) And Mom wants Harold to go find his kid brother Herbie (David Arkin, no relation to Alan) to bring him to the funeral. Herbie has also "dropped out" to become a hippie somewhere in the Venice Beach area. Herbie introduces Harold to his girlfriend Nancy (Leigh Taylor-Young), and the two become friends, as Nancy doesn't seem as far out there as some of the other hippies.

One day, Nancy finds some brownie mix in Harold's apartment, and makes some edibles by putting pot into the brownies, not that they used the term edibles in the day as far as I'm aware. Harold doesn't know what's in the brownies and serves them to his parents and Joyce, who immediately begin to find everything terribly funny, although at least they don't start violently playing the piano. For Harold, however, it continues to make him think about making changes to his life.

So on the day of his wedding, while he's standing under the chuppah, Harold has a change of heart and walks out on Joyce and all the guests in attendance, and goes off to live with Nancy and the rest of the hippies. Or, to bring Nancy to him and have all of her hippie friends start crashing Harold's apartment to the point that you wonder how they can all afford to live this lifestyle and how nobody at the law firm noticed Harold's change. Especially his ex-fiancée Joyce, who after all still works as his secretary. And then after a while Harold suddenly figures out the hippie life isn't all it's cracked up to be....

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! is one of those movies that was panned at the time, and I think with good reason. I suppose there's a good idea here of a man having a midlife crisis, but that kernel of an idea is simply a hook for all of Hollywood's stereotypes about countrcultures which quickly become grating and unfunny. A lot of Hollywood movies tried to take a humorous look at the rapidly shifting culture of the 1960s, something I've referred to as the "generation gap movie" for lack of a better term. Most of them wound up badly dated, and in that regard I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! is no different.